Converse, the NBA’s official shoe brand at the time, already had other stars on its payroll and did not seem to want to give preferential treatment to a rookie who had not yet stepped on an NBA court. As Falk says in the documentary, Adidas was not in a position to meet that demand.
Jordan was so sure of his potential that he demanded that his suitors give him his own exclusive model of sneakers back then, few players had that privilege.
At that time, the player and his agent, David Falk, began to hear proposals from sports companies. In the documentary The Last Dance, when asked which brand he wanted to sign his first shoe deal with as a professional athlete, Michael Jordan bluntly answers “ Adidas.” In 1984, Jordan made the leap from the University of North Carolina to the NBA. But that historic alliance almost didn’t happen, and Michael Jordan’s mother played a key role in ensuring that it did. A recent study by the Sportico website, which specializes in sports business, ranks him as the highest-income athlete in history he’s worth $3 billion (more than €2.671 billion). Last year, the Air Jordan brand brought in $5 billion (about €4.6 billion at current exchange rates), 11.5% of Nike’s annual earnings, while Michael Jordan regularly appears on lists of the highest paid athletes each year, despite having retired in 2003. The movie tells the story of Nike’s negotiations to form a partnership with Michael Jordan, a collaboration that nearly 40 years later remains one of the most lucrative in sports apparel. Thus begins Air, the latest film directed by Ben Affleck. The company found its solution in a 21-year-old basketball star who had yet to play a single professional game. Nike needed something bold to shake itself out of the doldrums and a face that would give it a recognizable personality. For its part, Converse dominated the shoe business within the NBA, and two of the league’s biggest stars, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, were the faces of the brand.
Adidas was setting trends in the emerging urban fashion scene, as rap group Run-D.M.C.’s hit song “My Adidas” soon demonstrated.
Meanwhile, Nike’s competitors had moved ahead of it by adapting to the times. Founded in 1964 by athletic trainer Bill Bowerman and one of his students, Phil Knight, in the 1980s the company was failing to increase its sales and its image was that of a technical apparel brand that lacked a presence beyond sporting arenas.
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