Rob Parker doesn't understand the shoe game
- Thread starter Ethnic Vagina Finder
- Start date
I only remember 2-3 pairs of his shoes selling like hot cakes but ok.You just one nikka.
All of those shoes sold like hot cakes.
ISO
Pass me the rock nikka
LA nikkas are swaggerless"I cant wear LeBrons to the club, them shyts ugly" - Dom Kennedy
ISO
Pass me the rock nikka
I’ll give you the first pair. The rest are reaches as classic sneakers with retroability.Stop it 5
It's a reason why Iverson is second behind Jordan when it comes to shoes sales.
The Questions are undisputed.
Preach Jackson
All Star
Not too many lebrons are designed for causal shyt
rob parker on national tv everyday with a edge up is od
rob parker on national tv everyday with a edge up is od
Flex Luger
Job Is Finished
YoungMoneyCashMoneyBoy
Superstar
lol so now jordan's werent as popular in the 90s?
bron stans yall. Kids were literally getting choked to death for their Jordan's.
https://www.si.com
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SENSELESS
MAY 14, 1990
IN AMERICA'S CITIES, KIDS ARE KILLING KIDS OVER SNEAKERS AND OTHER SPORTS APPAREL FAVORED BY DRUG DEALERS. WHO'S TO BLAME?
BY RICK TELANDER
“Is it the shoes? ...Money, it's gotta be the shoes!”
—MARS BLACKMON, TO MICHAEL JORDAN, IN A NIKE COMMERCIAL
For
15-year-old Michael Eugene Thomas, it definitely was the shoes. A ninth-grader at Meade Senior High School in Anne Arundel County, Md., Thomas was found strangled on May 2, 1989. Charged with first-degree murder was James David Martin, 17, a basketball buddy who allegedly took Thomas's two-week-old Air Jordan basketball shoes and left Thomas's barefoot body in the woods near school.
Thomas loved Michael Jordan, as well as the shoes Jordan endorses, and he cleaned his own pair each evening. He kept the cardboard shoe box with Jordan's silhouette on it in a place of honor in his room. Inside the box was the sales ticket for the shoes. It showed he paid $115.50, the price of a product touched by deity.
ORIGINAL LAYOUT
“We told him not to wear the shoes to school,” said Michael's grandmother, Birdie Thomas. “We said somebody might like them, and he said, ‘Granny, before I let anyone take those shoes, they'll have to kill me.’”
Michael Jordan sits in the locked press room before a workout at the Chicago Bulls' practice facility in suburban Deerfield, Ill. He is wearing his practice uniform and a pair of black Air Jordans similar to the ones young Thomas wore, except that these have Jordan's number, 23, stitched on the sides. On the shoelaces Jordan wears plastic toggles to prevent the shoes from loosening if the laces should come untied. Two toggles come in each box of Air Jordans, and if kids knew that Jordan actually wears them, they would never step out the door without their own toggles securely in place. The door is locked to keep out the horde of fans, journalists and favor seekers who dog Jordan wherever he goes. Jordan needs a quiet moment. He is reading an account of Thomas's death that a reporter has shown him.
For just an instant it looks as though Jordan might cry. He has so carefully nurtured his image as the all-American role model that he refuses to go anywhere, get into any situation, that might detract from that image. He moves swiftly and smoothly from the court to home to charity events to the golf course, all in an aura of untarnished integrity. “I can't believe it,” Jordan says in a low voice. “Choked to death. By his friend.” He sighs deeply. Sweat trickles down one temple.
He asks if there have been other such crimes. Yes, he is told. Plenty, unfortunately. Not only for Air Jordans, but also for other brands of athletic shoes, as well as for jackets and caps bearing sports insignia—apparel that Jordan and other athlete endorsers have encouraged American youth to buy.
I thought people would try to emulate the good things I do, they'd try to achieve, to be better. Nothing bad. I never thought because of my endorsement of a shoe, or any product, that people would harm each other.
Michael Jordan
In April 1989, 16-year-old Johnny Bates was shot to death in Houston by 17-year-old Demetrick Walker after Johnny refused to turn over his Air Jordan hightops. In March, Demetrick was sentenced to life in prison. Said prosecutor Mark Vinson, “It's bad when we create an image of luxury about athletic gear that it forces people to kill over it.”
Jordan shakes his head.
“I thought I'd be helping out others and everything would be positive,” he says. “I thought people would try to emulate the good things I do, they'd try to achieve, to be better. Nothing bad. I never thought because of my endorsement of a shoe, or any product, that people would harm each other. Everyone likes to be admired, but when it comes to kids actually killing each other”—he pauses—“then you have to reevaluate things.”
And what about all those good guys advertising the shoes? What about Nike's Jordan and Spike Lee, the gifted filmmaker and actor who portrays Mars Blackmon, the hero-worshipping nerd in the company's Air Jordan ads? Are they and other pitchmen at fault, too?
“Maybe the problem is those guys don't know what's going on,” says Grigo. “There are stores doing $5,000 to $10,000 a week in drug money, all over. Drug money is part of the economic landscape these days. Even if the companies don't consciously go after the money, they're still getting it. Hey, all inner-city kids aren't drug dealers. Most of them are good, honest kids. Drug dealers are a very small percent. But the drug dealers, man, they set the fashion trends.”
Liz Dolan, director of public relations for Nike, hits the ceiling when she hears such talk. “Our commercials are about sport, they're not about fashion,” she says.
But the industry's own figures make that assertion extremely questionable. At least 80% of the athletic shoes sold in the U.S. are not used for their avowed purpose—that is, playing sports.
I want to work with Nike to address the special problems of inner-city black youths, but the problem is not shoes.
Spike Lee
Dolan sighs. She says that all of Nike's athlete-endorsers are quality citizens as well as superjocks. “We're not putting Leon Spinks in the commercials,” she says. Then she says that the people who raise the alarm that Nike, as well as other sports apparel companies, is exploiting the poor and creating crime just to make money are bizarre and openly racist. “What's baffling to us is how easily people accept the assumption that black youth is an unruly mob that will do anything to get its hands on what it wants,” she says, excitedly. “They'll say, ‘Show a black kid something he wants, and he'll kill for it.’ I think it's racist hysteria, just like the Charles Stuart case in Boston or the way the Bush campaign used Willie Horton.”
Lee also says he has heard such panic before. “Everybody said last summer that my movie Do the Right Thing was going to cause 30 million black people to riot,” he says angrily. “But I haven't heard of one garbage can being thrown through a pizzeria window, have you? I want to work with Nike to address the special problems of inner-city black youths, but the problem is not shoes.”
Lee is particularly irate because he has been singled out by New York Post sports columnist Phil Mushnick as being untrue to the very people Lee champions in his films. In Mushnick's April 6 column headlined, SHADDUP, I'M SELLIN' OUT...SHADDUP, he sharply criticized Lee for leading the hype. The caption under four photos—one of Lee; the others of soaring pairs of Air Jordans—said, “While Spike Lee watches Michael Jordan (or at least his shoes) dunk all over the world, parents around the country are watching their kids get mugged, or even killed, over the same sneakers Lee and Jordan are promoting.” In his column Mushnick said, “It's murder, gentlemen. No rhyme, no reason, just murder. For sneakers. For jackets. Get it, Spike? Murder.”
Lee wrote a response in The National, the daily sports newspaper, in which he angrily accused Mushnick of “thinly veiled racism” for going after him and other high-profile black endorsers and not white endorsers like Larry Bird or Joe Montana. Lee also questioned Mushnick's sudden “great outpouring of concern for Afro-American youths.” Lee wrote, “The Nike commercials Michael Jordan and I do have never gotten anyone killed.... The deal is this: Let's try to effectively deal with the conditions that make a kid put so much importance on a pair of sneakers, a jacket and gold. These kids feel they have no options, no opportunities.”
Certainly Lee is right about that. Elijah Anderson, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist who specializes in ethnography, the study of individual cultures, links the scourge of apparel-related crimes among young black males to “inequality in race and class. The uneducated, inner-city kids don't have a sense of opportunity. They feel the system is closed off to them. And yet they're bombarded with the same cultural apparatus that the white middle class is. They don't have the means to attain the things offered, and yet they have the same desire. So they value these 'emblems,' these symbols of supposed success. The gold, the shoes, the drug dealer's outfit—those things all belie the real situation, but it's a symbolic display that seems to say that things are all right.
"Advertising fans this whole process by presenting the images that appeal to the kids, and the shoe companies capitalize on the situation, because it exists. Are the companies abdicating responsibility by doing this? That's a hard one to speak to. This is, after all, a free market."
But what about social responsibility? One particularly important issue is the high price of the shoes—many companies have models retailing for considerably more than $100, with the Reebok Pump leading the parade at $170. There is also the specific targeting of young black males as buyers, through the use of seductive, macho-loaded sales pitches presented by black stars.
“You can quibble about our tactics, but we don't stand for the drug trade,” says Dolan. She points out that Nike's fall promotion campaign will include $5 million worth of “strictly pro-education, stay-in-school” public service commercials that will “not run late at night, but on the same major sporting events as the prime-time ads.” Nike is not alone in playing the good corporate citizen. Reebok recently gave $750,000 to fund Project Teamwork, a program designed to combat racism that is administered by the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University.
Nevertheless, certain products wind up having dubious associations—some products more than others. John Hazard, the head buyer for the chain of City Sports stores in Boston, says, “We used to have brawls in here, robberies, a tremendous amount of stealing. But we cut back on 90% of it by getting rid of certain products. We don't carry Adidas, Fila, British Knights. Those things bring in the gangs.
“There's a store not far away that carries all that stuff. They have after-hours sales to show the new lines to big drug dealers. They even have guys on beepers, to let them know when the latest shoes have come in. It would be nothing for those guys to buy 20, 30 pair of shoes to give to all their 12-year-old runners.”
He thinks for a moment. “I don't know if you can really blame the shoe companies for what happens. Not long ago there was a murder, a gang deal, here in Boston. The cops had the murderer, and they were walking him somewhere. It was on TV. The murderer was bent over at first, and then the cops stood him up, and—I couldn't believe it—all of a sudden you could see he was wearing a City Sports T-shirt. There's no way you can control what people wear.”
John Donahoe, manager of a Foot Locker store in Chicago's Loop, agrees. “Right now, this is the hottest thing we've got,” he says, holding up a simple, ugly, blue nylon running shoe. Behind him are shelves filled with more than 100 different model or color variations. “Nike Cortez: $39,” he says. “Been around for 20 years. Why is it hot now?” He shrugs. “I don't know.”
Assistant manager James Crowder chimes in helpfully, “It's not the price, or who's endorsing it. It's just...what's happening.”
Keeping up with what's happening has shoe manufacturers scrambling these days. “It used to be you could have a product out and fiddle with it for years, to get it just right,” says Roger Morningstar, the assistant vice-president of promotions at Converse. “Now, if you don't come out with two or three new models every month, you're dead.”
A part of the Sports Illustrated Network Copyright © 2018 Time Inc. Sports Illustrated Group. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy (Your California Privacy Rights). Ad Choices | EU Data Subject Requests
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bron stans yall. Kids were literally getting choked to death for their Jordan's.https://www.si.com
SECTIONS
SUBSCRIBE
ADVERTISE WITH US
STAY CONNECTED
SENSELESS
MAY 14, 1990
IN AMERICA'S CITIES, KIDS ARE KILLING KIDS OVER SNEAKERS AND OTHER SPORTS APPAREL FAVORED BY DRUG DEALERS. WHO'S TO BLAME?
BY RICK TELANDER
“Is it the shoes? ...Money, it's gotta be the shoes!”
—MARS BLACKMON, TO MICHAEL JORDAN, IN A NIKE COMMERCIAL
For
15-year-old Michael Eugene Thomas, it definitely was the shoes. A ninth-grader at Meade Senior High School in Anne Arundel County, Md., Thomas was found strangled on May 2, 1989. Charged with first-degree murder was James David Martin, 17, a basketball buddy who allegedly took Thomas's two-week-old Air Jordan basketball shoes and left Thomas's barefoot body in the woods near school.
Thomas loved Michael Jordan, as well as the shoes Jordan endorses, and he cleaned his own pair each evening. He kept the cardboard shoe box with Jordan's silhouette on it in a place of honor in his room. Inside the box was the sales ticket for the shoes. It showed he paid $115.50, the price of a product touched by deity.
ORIGINAL LAYOUT
“We told him not to wear the shoes to school,” said Michael's grandmother, Birdie Thomas. “We said somebody might like them, and he said, ‘Granny, before I let anyone take those shoes, they'll have to kill me.’”
Michael Jordan sits in the locked press room before a workout at the Chicago Bulls' practice facility in suburban Deerfield, Ill. He is wearing his practice uniform and a pair of black Air Jordans similar to the ones young Thomas wore, except that these have Jordan's number, 23, stitched on the sides. On the shoelaces Jordan wears plastic toggles to prevent the shoes from loosening if the laces should come untied. Two toggles come in each box of Air Jordans, and if kids knew that Jordan actually wears them, they would never step out the door without their own toggles securely in place. The door is locked to keep out the horde of fans, journalists and favor seekers who dog Jordan wherever he goes. Jordan needs a quiet moment. He is reading an account of Thomas's death that a reporter has shown him.
For just an instant it looks as though Jordan might cry. He has so carefully nurtured his image as the all-American role model that he refuses to go anywhere, get into any situation, that might detract from that image. He moves swiftly and smoothly from the court to home to charity events to the golf course, all in an aura of untarnished integrity. “I can't believe it,” Jordan says in a low voice. “Choked to death. By his friend.” He sighs deeply. Sweat trickles down one temple.
He asks if there have been other such crimes. Yes, he is told. Plenty, unfortunately. Not only for Air Jordans, but also for other brands of athletic shoes, as well as for jackets and caps bearing sports insignia—apparel that Jordan and other athlete endorsers have encouraged American youth to buy.
I thought people would try to emulate the good things I do, they'd try to achieve, to be better. Nothing bad. I never thought because of my endorsement of a shoe, or any product, that people would harm each other.
Michael Jordan
In April 1989, 16-year-old Johnny Bates was shot to death in Houston by 17-year-old Demetrick Walker after Johnny refused to turn over his Air Jordan hightops. In March, Demetrick was sentenced to life in prison. Said prosecutor Mark Vinson, “It's bad when we create an image of luxury about athletic gear that it forces people to kill over it.”
Jordan shakes his head.
“I thought I'd be helping out others and everything would be positive,” he says. “I thought people would try to emulate the good things I do, they'd try to achieve, to be better. Nothing bad. I never thought because of my endorsement of a shoe, or any product, that people would harm each other. Everyone likes to be admired, but when it comes to kids actually killing each other”—he pauses—“then you have to reevaluate things.”
And what about all those good guys advertising the shoes? What about Nike's Jordan and Spike Lee, the gifted filmmaker and actor who portrays Mars Blackmon, the hero-worshipping nerd in the company's Air Jordan ads? Are they and other pitchmen at fault, too?
“Maybe the problem is those guys don't know what's going on,” says Grigo. “There are stores doing $5,000 to $10,000 a week in drug money, all over. Drug money is part of the economic landscape these days. Even if the companies don't consciously go after the money, they're still getting it. Hey, all inner-city kids aren't drug dealers. Most of them are good, honest kids. Drug dealers are a very small percent. But the drug dealers, man, they set the fashion trends.”
Liz Dolan, director of public relations for Nike, hits the ceiling when she hears such talk. “Our commercials are about sport, they're not about fashion,” she says.
But the industry's own figures make that assertion extremely questionable. At least 80% of the athletic shoes sold in the U.S. are not used for their avowed purpose—that is, playing sports.
I want to work with Nike to address the special problems of inner-city black youths, but the problem is not shoes.
Spike Lee
Dolan sighs. She says that all of Nike's athlete-endorsers are quality citizens as well as superjocks. “We're not putting Leon Spinks in the commercials,” she says. Then she says that the people who raise the alarm that Nike, as well as other sports apparel companies, is exploiting the poor and creating crime just to make money are bizarre and openly racist. “What's baffling to us is how easily people accept the assumption that black youth is an unruly mob that will do anything to get its hands on what it wants,” she says, excitedly. “They'll say, ‘Show a black kid something he wants, and he'll kill for it.’ I think it's racist hysteria, just like the Charles Stuart case in Boston or the way the Bush campaign used Willie Horton.”
Lee also says he has heard such panic before. “Everybody said last summer that my movie Do the Right Thing was going to cause 30 million black people to riot,” he says angrily. “But I haven't heard of one garbage can being thrown through a pizzeria window, have you? I want to work with Nike to address the special problems of inner-city black youths, but the problem is not shoes.”
Lee is particularly irate because he has been singled out by New York Post sports columnist Phil Mushnick as being untrue to the very people Lee champions in his films. In Mushnick's April 6 column headlined, SHADDUP, I'M SELLIN' OUT...SHADDUP, he sharply criticized Lee for leading the hype. The caption under four photos—one of Lee; the others of soaring pairs of Air Jordans—said, “While Spike Lee watches Michael Jordan (or at least his shoes) dunk all over the world, parents around the country are watching their kids get mugged, or even killed, over the same sneakers Lee and Jordan are promoting.” In his column Mushnick said, “It's murder, gentlemen. No rhyme, no reason, just murder. For sneakers. For jackets. Get it, Spike? Murder.”
Lee wrote a response in The National, the daily sports newspaper, in which he angrily accused Mushnick of “thinly veiled racism” for going after him and other high-profile black endorsers and not white endorsers like Larry Bird or Joe Montana. Lee also questioned Mushnick's sudden “great outpouring of concern for Afro-American youths.” Lee wrote, “The Nike commercials Michael Jordan and I do have never gotten anyone killed.... The deal is this: Let's try to effectively deal with the conditions that make a kid put so much importance on a pair of sneakers, a jacket and gold. These kids feel they have no options, no opportunities.”
Certainly Lee is right about that. Elijah Anderson, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist who specializes in ethnography, the study of individual cultures, links the scourge of apparel-related crimes among young black males to “inequality in race and class. The uneducated, inner-city kids don't have a sense of opportunity. They feel the system is closed off to them. And yet they're bombarded with the same cultural apparatus that the white middle class is. They don't have the means to attain the things offered, and yet they have the same desire. So they value these 'emblems,' these symbols of supposed success. The gold, the shoes, the drug dealer's outfit—those things all belie the real situation, but it's a symbolic display that seems to say that things are all right.
"Advertising fans this whole process by presenting the images that appeal to the kids, and the shoe companies capitalize on the situation, because it exists. Are the companies abdicating responsibility by doing this? That's a hard one to speak to. This is, after all, a free market."
But what about social responsibility? One particularly important issue is the high price of the shoes—many companies have models retailing for considerably more than $100, with the Reebok Pump leading the parade at $170. There is also the specific targeting of young black males as buyers, through the use of seductive, macho-loaded sales pitches presented by black stars.
“You can quibble about our tactics, but we don't stand for the drug trade,” says Dolan. She points out that Nike's fall promotion campaign will include $5 million worth of “strictly pro-education, stay-in-school” public service commercials that will “not run late at night, but on the same major sporting events as the prime-time ads.” Nike is not alone in playing the good corporate citizen. Reebok recently gave $750,000 to fund Project Teamwork, a program designed to combat racism that is administered by the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University.
Nevertheless, certain products wind up having dubious associations—some products more than others. John Hazard, the head buyer for the chain of City Sports stores in Boston, says, “We used to have brawls in here, robberies, a tremendous amount of stealing. But we cut back on 90% of it by getting rid of certain products. We don't carry Adidas, Fila, British Knights. Those things bring in the gangs.
“There's a store not far away that carries all that stuff. They have after-hours sales to show the new lines to big drug dealers. They even have guys on beepers, to let them know when the latest shoes have come in. It would be nothing for those guys to buy 20, 30 pair of shoes to give to all their 12-year-old runners.”
He thinks for a moment. “I don't know if you can really blame the shoe companies for what happens. Not long ago there was a murder, a gang deal, here in Boston. The cops had the murderer, and they were walking him somewhere. It was on TV. The murderer was bent over at first, and then the cops stood him up, and—I couldn't believe it—all of a sudden you could see he was wearing a City Sports T-shirt. There's no way you can control what people wear.”
John Donahoe, manager of a Foot Locker store in Chicago's Loop, agrees. “Right now, this is the hottest thing we've got,” he says, holding up a simple, ugly, blue nylon running shoe. Behind him are shelves filled with more than 100 different model or color variations. “Nike Cortez: $39,” he says. “Been around for 20 years. Why is it hot now?” He shrugs. “I don't know.”
Assistant manager James Crowder chimes in helpfully, “It's not the price, or who's endorsing it. It's just...what's happening.”
Keeping up with what's happening has shoe manufacturers scrambling these days. “It used to be you could have a product out and fiddle with it for years, to get it just right,” says Roger Morningstar, the assistant vice-president of promotions at Converse. “Now, if you don't come out with two or three new models every month, you're dead.”
A part of the Sports Illustrated Network Copyright © 2018 Time Inc. Sports Illustrated Group. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy (Your California Privacy Rights). Ad Choices | EU Data Subject Requests
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THE MACHINE
night owl
Rob has jokes for the most part but no way will Bron catch Jordan in kicks. He should have used the Lebrons to do shoe commercials for his kicks. There is no anticipation for Bron kicks like there was/is for Mike's. The LA move will help but a Jordan shoe release is a calendar event.
I need those SB 9s tho 
There was an article where shoe industry insiders were saying the LA move actually won't help his shoe sales because more sneakers are sold in the East coast than the west. Northeast specifically being the biggest market.
NYC Rebel
...on the otherside of the pond
THE MACHINE
night owl
I was thinking the anticipation for the LeBron 16s will be crazy because of the LA move
the cac mamba
Banned
most lebrons are awful, but id buy these again if i could
these were great for stomping around with sweats on, idk how dude actually fukkin played basketball in them tho
these were great for stomping around with sweats on, idk how dude actually fukkin played basketball in them tho