For Love of the Game

I wasn’t planning on copping the Jordan XI Concords, but then my boy Ciege told me his idea of having  his groomsmen sport Concords and tuxes at his wedding. Ciege he was going to do us one better by rocking Space Jams down the aisle.  I knew I couldn’t let Ciege down and not get a pair.  One rule I have is this, if a friend thinks enough of you to make you a groomsman, you do everything in your power to make his wedding a success, and if it means staying up past midnight to fight virtual people on the internet for a pair of Concords, so that the fellas can get some nice group shots in tuxedoes and Jordan XIs, then you do it.

So Ciege made it official the morning before the midnight release of the Concords by sending the request to all his groomsmen to get a pair.  It was great to see everyone was down for Ciege’s cause. We probably had around 100 bromantic e-mails going back and forth during the day, about how we were going to make Ciege’s wedding epic and laying down our midnight release strategy.

When I got out of work I went home and immediately setup my Macbook. I made sure I was logged into Nikestore.com & Footlocker.com and made sure all my payment info was locked and loaded.  You can’t afford to waste time during the checkout process.  Anything that can be prepped before midnight should be.

I spent the night with a few friends celebrating Christmas a few days early at Japas 38, enjoying a fun night of karaoke & elephant grab bag. I broke out around 11pm to make sure I got home well before midnight.  Once I made it home I setup my newly received heated foot massager. I might as well lounge in style while I try my luck at getting a pair of Concords.

As I waited for the minutes to countdown to midnight I hopped onto the group chat that we setup to centralize our Concord efforts.  Once midnight rolled around it was as if the internet had stopped.  Pages that were refreshing in seconds were now timing out after a few minutes.  In these moments there is a tendency to want to keep hitting refresh in hopes that the internet speeds itself up, but you just have to show some patience and wait for a time out to occur instead of risking your place in the virtual line.

After a half hour of persistent effort I was able to finally secure my pair of Concords. Getting the shoes into the shopping cart was the easy part. The hard part was getting through the checkout process before the inventory was depleted.  There are so many points through the ordering process that you want to celebrate but until you see that order  confirmation page come up, put down that kool-aid.

The groomsmen reconvened around 2am to share our war stories. We were still 2 pairs short after a very eventful night.  We then made it a group effort to try to secure the last 2 pairs. I lasted about half an hour more before I passed out, while the rest of the fellas went till about 4am. We all also agreed, same time next year for the next Jordan XI release, because in the end we do it for the love of the shoe game.

My minimalistic approach to the sneaker game

Lately I’ve felt more of a desire to adopt a more minimalistic approach to life. Call it the Apple Effect. Or maybe it’s a fear of developing a hoarder mentality.

What I’ve come to learn with age is that just because something is cheap, doesn’t mean I have to buy it. I just end up amassing a bunch of kicks I didn’t really want in the 1st place that I’ll never end up wearing. Gotta ditch that Black Friday mentality.

I don’t buy kicks because they’re cheap. I buy kicks because they appeal to me and if they’re cheap that’s a double bonus. But the rule is buy only the kicks I know I’ll wear because otherwise I just paid someone a lot of money to watch a pair of kicks dissolve into dust.

That’s my way of reducing my carbon footprint while also achieving minimalistic bliss.

NYCC 2011

My love for sneakers is equaled only by my love of comic books. So it was a must for me to hit up New York Comic Con 2011 last month. I stuck to a Batman theme rocking my black Nightwing tee and my Zoom Kobe V “Dark Knights” for 3 days straight. That was my way of representing my 2 greatest interests in life. I’m pretty sure none of the attendants realized how fresh my kicks were, considering that some of them were literally wearing garbage cans on their feet to match their Cosplay outfits. I’m not ready to dive into cosplay, but if I do, rest assured I will be rocking some heat on my feet and not some fucking trash receptacle.

Air Force 1: Anatomy of a Legend

Last summer,  my boy Ciege and I went to The Apollo Theater to watch the documentary Air Force 1: Anatomy of a Legend. The documentary was screened as  part of the festivities to celebrate the World Basketball Festival held in NYC during the summer of 2010. More than a year later I still consider this the best documentary I’ve seen.

Since the world premiere of the documentary at The World Basketball Festival I’ve waited and waited for Nike to release this onto DVD to no avail. I’ve checked Netflix & iTunes regularly and more than a year later it’s nowhere to be found.   I’ve tweeted Nike and DJ Clark Kent who was featured in the documentary and have been ignored like a cheap hooker. I was even forced to  scour the deep dark places of the internet where pirates run free and no one has the booty that is this movie.

So if someone at Nike happens upon this one day, please for the good of all sneakerheads, release this movie into the consumer market so that all sneakerheads might be able to enjoy this great film.

*In case anyone is wondering what my second favorite documentary is, it’s Cocaine Cowboys.  Go watch it on Netflix.

Throwback Thursday: Blowing It Up

Back when I grew up in the 90s the cool thing to do with your Nikes once they reached beater status was to completely mutilate the Nike air bubble. One would grab a standard ball point pen in hand and strike the air bubble with the force of a medieval guillotine. Most of the time you’d completely miss and just end up drawing a maze of lines along the outsole of your Nikes. Once you did hit paydirt and let out all 25 psi of compressed air, your reaction was almost like the awe of the caveman discovering fire.

I can still remember vividly the first time I popped my Nike Air cherry. Once they reached beater status, I did the unthinkable and completely mutilated the air bubble on my first pair of Nikes, my Air Force V lows. It was the cool thing to do, could you blame me? I wore them for a few months longer almost expecting my feet to collapse with every step. The sound of the air bubble hissing as I walked through rain splattered streets soon became music to my ears. Once I was ready to officially retire the kicks I eventually stuffed one of those small firecrackers, you bought in Chinatown, into the open puncture wound in my shoes and set it off, if you will. Part of me did wonder if the outsole of the kicks would separate from the uppers due to the force of the explosion. They didn’t but it was all about the money shot of watching the smoke billow out of the air bubble like an erupting volcano.

I wish I had a pic here of a mutilated air bubble, but unfortunately the interweb didn’t have one and I was too lazy to create an image on my own.

Sometimes It’s About The Journey

From the instant I first saw the early previews of the Jordan 3 DB’s I knew I had to get a pair. It was an all red shoe that was the truly the visual representation of hot fire, not to mention the ice outsoles, and the 3M material (aka the sneakerhead’s bling bling) used on the uppers. I suspected that copping a pair might be a challenge, but I didn’t quite understand how challenging it would be.

Nike changed the release date of this shoe several times. Clearly they were trying to create some buzz on this shoe, and clearly they know what they are doing when it comes marketing sneakers. They finally settled on a release date of December 4th, 2010 at midnight. This is always confusing to people but when Nike says a shoe will release at midnight they mean midnight that kicks off the date not the midnight that ends the date. Suffice it to say I knew I wouldn’t be able to line up or be near a computer to even attempt a purchase of these limited kicks. I told myself I would just stop by Nike Sportswear, 21 Mercer sometime on December 4th to get a pair.

I slept in on the morning of December 4th, and rolled into 21 Mercer sometime in the early afternoon. Walking in I was surprised to see my corporate Footlocker working friend there. The following was our conversation.

Him: “Yo homie, what are you up to?”
Me: “Trying to cop a pair of DBs.”
Him: laughing hysterically “Then you should have been here at midnight cause that’s when they sold out.”
Me: “What are you doing here?”
Him: “You’ll see when all the people [customers] leave.”

Eventually everyone in the store leaves and one of the store employees goes in the back and brings out a pair of Jordan 3 DBs for my friend. This is obviously one of the perks of working in the sneaker industry, being able to show up your friends.

A few days passed and on the following Tuesday (12/7 for those counting) 21 Mercer tweeted that they had restocked on AJ3 DBs. 21 Mercer is a quick train ride from my work so I was able to get myself there in 15 minutes. Unfortunately this was still 2 hours after they tweeted about the restock. All sold out again. As I was walking back to the train, I saw some kids outside checking out their new AJ3 DB purchases. Must be nice to be a kid and not have to be held back by a job. You can be on Twitter all day long and you can wait in line for days for a sneaker release. Sure, I had an American Psycho daydream about jacking these kids for their AJ3 DBs, but no sneaker is worth breaking the law to obtain. Besides my friend deserved to be jacked more than these kids for the mere fact that he felt the need to gloat in front of me.

When I got back to work I was talking to one of my co-workers, who just happened to be the girlfriend of the sneaker celebrity Mayor, about my adventures in copping a pair of AJ3 DBs. She recently started working in my office and we struck up an office friendship when she found out I was into sneakers. Coincidentally, she discovered I was into sneakers after she saw my AJ3 DB desktop wallpaper.

A few more days passed and on Thursday (12/9 for those counting) my co-worker sends me an e-mail to call her. She told me that 21 Mercer had restocked the AJ3 DBs and Mayor himself had called them up to hold a pair for me. I was finally the proud owner of a pair of AJ3 DBs and I had Mayor’s GF to thank for it all. She told him about my adventures with trying to get these shoes and he took it upon himself to help a brother out with a call to 21 Mercer. I will forever be grateful to Mayor for his assistance with getting these AJ3 DBs. Mayor had added another dimension of appreciation to these kicks for me.

Since the original release of the AJ3 DBs, I’ve seen the price soar as high as $600 on the secondary market for a pair, well more than 3x’s the amount I paid for them. There have been times that I’ve considered selling these shoes, but i’m reminded of the journey I took to obtain them and that’s something you just can’t put a price on.

i took this pic b/c I thought it’d be cool to show off the fact that the kicks also served as my iphone wallpaper at the time. It was pure coincidence that the time was 10:10 and 10 just happens to be my shoe size

The Air Mag Dilemma

Ever since I first saw the original Hyperdunk “Marty McFly”, I’ve become a huge fan of the Back to the Future inspired kicks that Nike continually puts out. There were the McFly versions of the Zoom Tre AD, the Hyperdunk low, the Hypermax 2010, and the Hyperdunk 2010. Which leads us to the recent release of the Nike Air Mag 2011, the updated & version of the shoes that Marty McFly wore in Back to the Future. With the first pair auctioned off for $37,500 to Tinie Tempah, I thought us regular folk would be priced out of getting a pair. But as I monitored the 1500 pairs being auctioned off on eBay, benefiting the Michael J. Fox Foundation, I soon realized that owning a pair would not be out of the realm of possibility.

I actually contemplated dropping as much as $5000 on a pair of these limited edition kicks. I thought this was a bargain compared to what Tinie Tempah paid. But then fiscal responsibility stepped in and made me realize that this would also be 20 times more than Ive ever spent on a pair of kicks. And when you spend $5000 on a pair of kicks can you really consider or even enjoy wearing them? Maybe if your name is Brian “Fear the Beard” Wilson or Kanye West. Damn you fiscal responsibility.

*Update:10/1/11 – My boy Ciege reminded me that since the auction was for charity it was an easy tax write off. Where was my boy Ciege when I needed this advice?

The day that changed my life

It was September of 1989. I was starting my first day of 6th grade at I.S. 72 in Staten Island. I was a bottom feeder or was I that which the bottom feeds on? In either case I was rocking a new pair of Voit high tops.  They were white with a black outsole and a black velcro strap that  wrapped around the ankle.

I can still remember my dad letting me loose at Kmart and telling me to pick out a new pair of sneakers for school. I was immediately drawn to these high tops because of the courduroy tongue. To me that was just awesome and you couldn’t tell me otherwise. Like with most new shoes, my parents bought me up until that point, I got completely high off that new shoe smell many times before the official start of school.

I wore those shoes proudly on that first day of school. I walked around with a hop in my step as if the Andy Griffith Show theme song was playing the background.  When school let out I was walking home when some 7th grader behind me asked me “Hey where did you get those sneakers from, Kmart?”. My first thought to myself was “How did he know?”, but I soon realized he was laughing at my shoes. I was speechless. My ears started burning with embarrassment. It was a moment in my life that will forever be etched in my memory. I vowed that day that I would get my sneaker game tight, even though i hadn’t realized that the words sneaker, game, and tight could be strung into a term like that just yet.

I’m proud to say that I wore those Voit high tops into the ground. I was in no position to be asking for things from my parents just because what I had wasn’t cool. That’s not how my parents raised me. In the next few years I went through a pair of Stride Rite bball high tops, a pair of Spaulding low top tennis shoes, a pair of Reebok low top CXT trainers, and a pair of Reebok high top CXT trainers.

It wasn’t until the spring of ’91 that my sneaker game got officially tight when my parents bought me my first pair of Nikes. It was a pair of Nike Air Force Vs lows. They were white & black with a hint of infrared and they had an air bubble! At a whopping $55, they were the most expensive kicks my parents had bought for me and for that I will always be grateful. I still wish I kept those shoes as ragged as they became only because I’ve become more sentimental about things as I’ve gotten older. I hope one day Nike re-releases those shoes.