New Documentary Tells Story Of Nike Air Jordans, Warts And All

There’s a scene in the new Vice documentary, “One Man and His Shoes,” in which Peter Moore, the creative guru who designed the first edition of Nike NKE ’s Air Jordan sneakers, discusses the negotiation for Michael Jordan’s shoe contract. Nike badly wanted Jordan—he, famously now, wanted to sign with Adidas or elsewhere—but with little background in basketball shoes, the company was gun-shy about giving Jordan too much money up front.

Finally, a five-year deal was reached in which Jordan would get a $1 million annuity after he retired, plus royalties on shoe sales. The expectation on Nike’s end was that the Jordan shoes would have about $3 million in sales by the end of Year 3. Instead, they sold $126 million worth—in the first year.

“Where I think we made a mistake is we didn’t put a cap on it,” Moore said. “We didn’t say, ‘OK, after so many thousands of pairs the royalty rate goes down.’ The thinking was, look, if he sold that many shoes, great.”

Moore smiled and stated the obvious: “Michael made a lot of money.”

The anecdote is enlightening and, taken into context with material from ESPN’s recent 10-part documentary, “The Last Dance,” in which it was revealed that Jordan’s parents had to nearly force him to get on a plane to visit Nike before he signed, shows just how tenuous the early days of the Air Jordan brand were, how much had to go just right to bring the shoes into existence.

“That’s what fascinated me about it,” said Yemi Bamiro, the documentary’s director. “If you think about the collaboration between Michael Jordan and Nike, it pretty much is the blueprint for everything that came after—David Beckham, Tiger Woods. Star athletes signing these massive endorsement deals, that started with this. I was fascinated by the timing, I was fascinated with the mechanics of how it happened, the charm and the luck.”

Indeed, Jordan could easily have done what other stars of the era had done—signed with Converse for $100,000 and worn the same shoes as Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Julius Erving. In fact, if he had his way, according to Moore, Jordan would have been wearing shoes that were Carolina blue. He didn’t want the red, black and white scheme because, he said, they were, “the devil’s colors.”

And there was some luck brought on by the hard line taken by the late David Stern, the league’s commissioner at the time. Because the original Air Jordans did not comply with league-approved color schemes, Stern banned the shoes after Jordan wore them at Madison Square Garden in September 1984. That only built up the hype around the shoes, though, and Nike ran an ad about the ban that gave Air Jordan an added layer of cool ahead of their release in March 1985.

“It became the shoe that was banned by the NBA,” Stern said, “with the implication that it was because it made Michael such a good player.”

When Bamiro set out to make the movie, though, the story was not supposed to be about the origins of the Air Jordan—he wanted, at first, to profile the obsessive collectors of the shoes and tell their stories. But as he proceeded, he said, he was continually drawn to the mid-1980s and how seminal the deal Nike gave to Jordan proved to be.

But Bamiro’s movie does not stop there. He explores, too, the dark side of the Air Jordan obsession, looking at the lives of young men who were killed or subjected to violence while having their sneakers stolen. There is criticism of Nike, which only put out a limited number of shoes and, thus, creates a superheated demand. It is a jarring reminder of the reality of the shoe obsession, something that has been glossed over in the re-examination and celebration of Jordan’s career, brought on by the attention, “The Last Dance” was given.

While the perception remains that violence around Air Jordans was a story for 25 years ago, Bamiro points out that it is ongoing. The film profiles one 22-year-old, Joshua Woods, who was killed in Texas in 2012. Woods’ mother, Dazie Williams, says in the movie that she does not blame Nike for her son’s death but that, “Nike could say something.”

That is something of a deflating coda for the story, for all the Jordan nostalgia we’ve seen over the past month. For most of the movie, it’s easy to root for Nike, the underdog company that changed sports marketing forever. But by the end viewers likely will be left wondering why they would not say anything, why Jordan would not say anything, to address the violence that has too often surrounded the shoes over the years. They have chosen to ignore it.

Bamiro, in telling the Air Jordan story, does not.

“I just wanted to tell the story of the sneaker but be honest about it,” Bamiro said. “That is part of the story.”