Nike and Me

Somehow Nike has decided to sponsor this newsletter. But don’t get too excited! I don’t think anyone at Nike knows their ad is appearing here. As a test, however, I’ve decided to make today’s entire email about Nike, to see if anyone is watching. Maybe if you click the ad enough, all those $1.60 payouts will grab their attention? Just do it!

I hate Nike and I love Nike. I love Nike and I hate Nike. I have strong feelings about Nike, and I have no feelings about Nike. Nike rules everything around me and has nothing whatsoever to do with my life.

Nike is inescapable. Okay, that’s correct, I can’t counter it. Nike is inescapable. Here are the facts:

Nike exploded into my consciousness when I was 10 years old. That was in 1985, when they released the Air Jordan, as perfect a sneaker as anyone has ever designed, or ever will. Red, white, and black in perfectly proportioned leather, united by the iconic swoosh. The first time I saw them, they were on the feet of my friend Jimi, who was definitely cooler than me, and I knew instantly that they were revolutionary. Up till then, I doubt I could have named a single shoe company. My mom bought my shoes at a shop in town called Mathew’s Shoes (yes, with one t—barbarians!), and I divided all sneakers into two categories: those that looked fast, and those that looked faster. I preferred the latter.

But with the Nike Air, something new had come into existence: a brand. And not just any brand but I brand that a weird little fifth-grader could wrap his head around. I didn’t follow sports, I barely knew who Michael Jordan was, but these shoes sparked an awareness in me of a world that had been growing, building, and was now ready to dominate and control the culture I myself was entering into. Very metaphorically speaking, it was as if my testicles descended right then and there, and they turned out to be tiny basketballs emblazoned with a catchy corporate logo.

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I don’t think I owned a pair of Nikes until I was an adult. Nikes, I felt through my teenage years, were both too cool for me and nowhere near cool enough. Nikes were what the popular kids wore: Those Air Jordans and that swoosh signified an attention to style and status I could never muster—and that I didn’t want to bother trying to fake. Let them have their Nikes! As a skateboarder, I wore Airwalks, Etnies, Simple, Vision Streetwear—known only to my culture, reinforced for hard landings, and inevitably chewed up by the sandpaper grit of my board’s grip tape. In my world, you wanted your shoes either pristine and sparkling or worn to shreds, held together by duct tape and Shoe Goo.

In a way, this was a sign of respect for Nikes. They were cool enough that you just wouldn’t do that to a pair of Jordans—it was almost sacrilege. (Not to mention that moms would freak out if you wrecked those expensive kicks.) Nike would eventually introduce its SB line of skate shoes, inviting that kind of ritual abuse, but back in the 1980s and ‘90s, they felt off-limits unless you had money to burn.

And maybe because Nikes were so indelibly branded, I stayed away from them even as I moved away from skateboarding. Which is not to say I did not keep paying attention to Nike. The corporate marketing theory around branding tends to read as fancy bullshit, but my god, branding works. And the Nike people were geniuses at it. It wasn’t just sponsoring famous athletes—Nike and their ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy of Portland, Oregon, made the funniest, most beautiful commercials anyone could imagine. The ad I remember best is “Shade Running,” from 2002, in which a lone runner chugs through a city, keeping herself out of the sun by utilizing the shadows of everything from a monument to a passing airplane. Its music alone, that downbeat remix of “You Are My Sunshine,” is playlist-worthy.

At some point in my late 20s, when I was getting into running, I must have bought a pair or two of Nikes. It’s basically required for runners, a rite of passage as common as losing a couple of toenails. And maybe it was there that I began to feel a disconnect: These were just… shoes. Decent shoes, but I didn’t feel special running in them. I didn’t want to chase the shade, sprint to the finish, or live any kind of heroic life just because I owned a pair. The branding was just what I’d always suspected it was: a manufactured image. I moved on¹.

Well, I moved on—and Nike followed. Because within a few years, my wife, Jean, was working as a designer for Converse, which had been bought by Nike in 2003. And since she was the breadwinner, we were, for all intents and purposes, a Nike family: Nike provided our income, our health insurance, our retirement savings. Thank you, employee stock-purchase plan!

Jean worked for Converse for nearly a decade, and during that time I don’t think I owned a single pair of Nikes. A few running shirts, maybe, and Converse, sure, but that wasn’t quite the same. In fact, I was pulled toward Nike’s rivals, Adidas in particular, whose Stan Smith sneakers (in suede, not leather) were my uniform for many years. Once, on a work visit to Portland, I visited the Nike campus for a run, not realizing that I was wearing Adidas shorts. “Run fast,” the receptionist told me. I did—I didn’t want Jean to get in trouble because of me.

As fast as I ran, Nike kept up with me: One friend went to work running their custom-sneaker system on the web. A bag containing $2,000 worth of Nike gear plunked, unrequested, onto my desk when I got a job at Runner’s World. (I might still have one of the jackets it contained.) There was no escape. The company’s tentacles had infiltrated everything.

Maybe this was around the time that Nike began to lose its cool. For 25 years, the company had been growing and climbing to dominance, and by the mid-2000s, it was there. No one could compete: Adidas? Puma? Reebok? (Seriously?) Nike didn’t need to be cool and innovative anymore—they were the big dog, indisputably.

This is not to say Nike became uncool, or did nothing new. But they stopped surprising us—stopped surprising me—with their ads, their image, their branding. Having grown up on Nike, whether I liked it or not, I no longer noticed or cared.

If you pay attention to such things, you can see this in the company’s stock price, which has tumbled sharply—like, 50%—from its 2021 highs. Nike is lost, adrift, a brand everyone recognizes and knows but no one loves anymore. Every other brand is what Nike once was: daring, stylish, meaningful to some but not all—the uniform of a self-selecting clique. Can Nike get its mojo back? Well, they’ve got a new CEO who came on in September, so maybe! Or maybe not! I care only because of that retirement savings plan, but as far as the culture goes, I can’t say it matters.

Except for one weird, vital thing. Nike has made and continues to make some absolutely beautiful shoes. The profiles, the materials, the color choices—they’re so sharp. I own three pairs: high-top SB Force 58s, deep blue with a yellow swoosh; rugged suede desert boots from their ACG sub-brand; and patchwork-style Blazer Mid high-tops. They fit well, they look good, and they don’t feel like the products of a corporate monolith. They’re… kinda indie? And maybe that’s Nike’s problem now. The company can still produce scrappy, inventive, stylish shoes, but only as sidelines to round out the catalog. No big names are attached. ACG barely exists on YouTube. No one’s lining up at dawn for the Blazer Mid to drop².

Should I speculate on Nike’s future? I’d rather not. Having realized so much of my life has been influenced by a company that makes shoes, clothing, and TV commercials, I’d love to complete my remaining half-dozen decades free of the swoosh’s overweening influence. Alas, that seems unlikely. Nike now has its hooks in this newsletter, and I will never again be able to think about the recurring themes of Trying! without seeing them as variations of the company’s most famous, most iconic slogan, one that scarcely needs me to repeat or reprint it because it is so deeply burned into all our brains, but I will anyway: “Money, it’s gotta be the shoes!”³ 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: The Princess Switch

I’m not a holiday guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I love The Princess Switch, in which Vanessa Hudgens plays both a Chicago baker and the Belgravian duchess with whom she trades identities. They are so silly, so slick, so good-natured that they almost give this old grinch a case of the Christmas spirit. Almost. Check it out, along with its two sequels, on Netflix.

Notes

1. I did retain a fondness for the Nike Mayfly, an ultralight, affordable race shoe designed to be retired and recycled (into tennis-court surfaces) after 100 kilometers. Those were cool!

2. Maybe this says more about my tastes than about Nike’s or the mainstream population’s. Maybe.

3. This is obviously a joke. Nike’s most famous slogan is: “Impossible is nothing.”

Read Yesterday’s Attempt