Finally, I thought, hoop shoes that look good enough for me to wear in everyday life. Performance basketball shoes in recent years skew ugly and are increasingly looking the same across the board - which is why I was so stoked to get my hands on Nike’s new Cosmic Unity.
I lament basketball’s decreased relevance in the space it ultimately created, but I’m not surprised either. The space has been in decline for more than five years, as NPD senior advisor Matt Powell routinely reports, accounting for just 3 percent of athletic footwear sold in the U.S. Outside of Michael’s line, few people are wearing basketball shoes anymore - especially for anything other than playing the sport. Air Jordans may still be the cream of the crop, but fewer of the people acquiring them share the same love of basketball as those that did 10 to 15 years ago. Today, basketball is nowhere near as essential to sneaker culture. Among my favorite non-Jordans from middle school through college were, in chronological order, Kevin Garnett’s Adidas KG Bounce, the Converse Wade 1, and the Nike LeBron 8 “South Beach.” And even though my sneaker craze would eventually expand outside of basketball, nothing was more important than hoops in the end. Knowing, for example, that the Air Jordan 3 was the sneaker that kept Michael from leaving Nike or that the Air Jordan 6 was the shoe in which he won his first championship was the key to the appeal of each shoe.
The encyclopedia of Air Jordans and the significance of each model and variant became ingrained in my brain. The drafting of Carmelo Anthony to my hometown Denver Nuggets got me into the sport for the very first time, and it was his first signature shoe, the Air Jordan 1.5, that would be my first of many Jordans.īall became life, and I eventually learned about a much wider world of Jordan than what Carmelo wore on court through nascent sneaker blogs and forums. Like many sneakerheads who claimed the title before it became a thing, it was basketball that got me into this silly little world of ours.