Former NBA stars-turned-broadcasters like Charles Barkley, Steve Kerr, Reggie Miller, Shaquille O’Neal, Kenny Smith, Steve Smith, and Chris Webber came together to talk kicks on a NBA TV Open Court segment titled Sole Searching.
In this 10-minute segment, these men discuss the impact sneakers have had not only in basketball, but throughout their lives by swapping personal sneaker stories. A wide spectrum of conversation topics were discussed ranging from their favorite silhouettes growing up and steps they took to get the most out of their kicks to who in the public eye wore what pair and the fact that basketball sneakers today do not come with posters anymore.
Charles Barkley mentioned the classic Chuck Taylor All-Star by Converse being ‘the bomb’ but it would make sense for Chuck to have been rocking them in the early 1980s while still in high school. The 11-time All-Star pushed the conversation to take its inevitable turn to the Air Jordan lineage with these words:
“…you talk about the Michael Jordan? That’s probably one of the single greatest things Michael Jordan ever did, he is the shoe generation”.
After a simple mental re-tooling of that sentence and I would be inclined to agree with him.
Pop culture is an ever-changing world shaped by the many different subcultures and one of the fastest growing Shout out to Chris Webber for citing his game sneakers from his Michigan Wolverine days like the Air Force Max and Air Flight Huarache that he, along with the fabled Fab Five, wore while the team was under contract with Nike.
The following that sneakers have is widely known now and this video is one of the first of many, I believe, major pop culture spotlights that will shine on the sneaker world.
