The Air Jordan Shock — One Young Man Turns Everything Upside Down

In 1984, in the state of Oregon, a heavy mood hung over Nike’s headquarters. The company had grown rapidly riding the running boom of the 1970s, but as that boom settled down it lost momentum, piled up inventory, and was driven to its first-ever round of layoffs. The firm that had climbed to the top as a king of track shoes was now floundering, searching for its next move.

In the midst of that stagnation, a handful of people inside the company became gripped by an outrageous plan. Rather than scattering the firm’s limited budget across several athletes, they would bet it all on a single rookie. For Nike, which lagged far behind adidas and Converse in the basketball market, this was less a gamble than a choice close to recklessness. The name of that ‘single’ player was Michael Jordan. The sponsorship war that had been waged outside the stadium up to now began, here, to roll in an unexpected direction, with one young man at its center.

The Recklessness of Betting on One Man

At the time, Jordan was nothing more than a draft pick out of college who had not yet played in the NBA. His own heart, it is said, leaned toward adidas instead. The honest wish of the young Jordan was to keep wearing the adidas shoes he had grown used to.

Bringing Jordan to Nike’s negotiating table took the determination of several people inside the company. Sonny Vaccaro, a scout with an eye for finding talent, is said to have overturned the original plan of investing in multiple athletes and persuaded the company to concentrate the budget on Jordan alone. Jordan himself, on the other hand, later stated that the person who truly led him to Nike was someone else — and the accounts of who deserves the credit remain divided to this day. What is certain is that Nike entrusted the rise or fall of the company to the feet of one young man.

The shoe made exclusively for Jordan was given the name Air Jordan. It was a naming that layered the name of a new hero onto ‘Air,’ the cushioning technology that sealed air inside and which Nike had been quietly holding in reserve. Inside the company, it was reckoned that selling around 3 million dollars’ worth over three years would count as a success. It was a modest, realistic target. Yet reality would blow that humble forecast away on a scale no one had imagined.

A Small Incident Over the Color of a Shoe

What set the story racing forward was, ironically, the ‘color’ of a single shoe.

The first-generation Air Jordan that Jordan wore came in a colorway that boldly combined black and red. In the NBA of that era, there was an unspoken rule that shoes should be based on white and matched in color across a team. The flashy black-and-red shoe departed sharply from that custom. The league treated this deviation as a problem and put a stop to its use on the court.

However the facts may sway, Nike did not let this episode slip by. On the contrary, it exploited the moment with everything it had, as the finest of opportunities. It turned the very picture of ‘the league trying to shut out this shoe’ into advertising, pushing the rebellious image of a forbidden shoe to the fore. A shoe for young people who defy the rules. It is not hard to imagine how irresistible that looked in the eyes of children.

The result was dramatic. The Air Jordan is said to have racked up sales in its very first year that far exceeded the original modest target. The estimate of 3 million dollars over three years was replaced, within the first year, by figures of an entirely different order. Nike had grasped the foothold to climb in one leap up from the plateau of stagnation.

When the Shoe Stepped Off the Court

What made the Air Jordan truly special lay, more than in its sales figures, in the question of ‘where the shoe spread.’

Until then, the basketball shoe had been, above all, a tool for the sport — a shoe that met the functions needed to play on the court. Yet the Air Jordan walked off, beyond the court. Young people who did not watch the games began to wear the shoe in the streets. Not in order to play basketball, but simply because ‘wearing that shoe’ became a means of expressing who they were.

This phenomenon caught fire above all within the youth culture of America’s cities — what is called street culture. Music, fashion, ways of speaking — into the very center of these forms of young people’s self-expression, a single sneaker slipped its way. The shoe changed shape from a tool to protect the feet into a sign that showed ‘who I am.’

What was happening here was a change no one could have imagined back when the brothers of Herzogenaurach first set out as shoemakers. The Dassler brothers had been trying to make better shoes for running faster — shoes as tools that decided the outcome of sport. After half a century and more, the shoe had become, in a place apart from victory and defeat, something that carried people’s longing and identity.

And Nike understood the meaning of this change earlier and more deeply than its rivals. Speaking of the performance of the shoe itself was no longer enough. Selling the story and the emotion that surrounded the shoe — that, it realized, was where the next battlefield lay.

The success of the Air Jordan was the beginning of a tectonic shift that shook the balance of power among the three companies. But it did not stop at the hit of a single product. From this point on, the sneaker business itself stepped into a new stage. From an age of competing over the function of a product, to an age of speaking to people’s hearts. The brand was about to become something that sold not the shoe as a ‘thing’ but the ‘story’ that lay beyond it. Three words, symbolizing that new age, were about to be cast out into the world.