Original subtitles

♪♪

♪♪

Reagan: America is back, standing tall,

looking to the eighties with courage, confidence, and hope.

Jackson: We are not going to be put back into slavery

by our own people, who are selling dope to destroy us.

Announcer: On September 15th, Nike created

a revolutionary new basketball shoe.

On October 18th, the NBA threw them out of the game.

Man: Government is not the solution to our problem.

Government is the problem.

Man #2: Air Jordan, Air Jordan.

Man #3: Air Jordan, Air Jordan, Air Jordan.

This is something you can buy.

♪♪

Man #4: Michael! Michael, you stuck it baby!

Bush: Read my lips. No new taxes.

♪♪

Woman: People waited in line all night long

to get the new Air Jordan basketball shoes.

They literally broke a door off the hinges.

Several people were trampled,

while others crawled over them to get inside.

The shoes cost about $180.

Man: That's a lot of money to spend on shoes though, isn't it?

Yeah.

You know it's Michael Jordan, that's what he do.

All they want is that shoe.

My son, he just got to have them.

Man: Thank you, God bless you,

and God bless the United States of America.

Letterman: This last season, my next guest led his team,

the Chicago Bulls, into the NBA playoffs,

scoring a record of an amazing 63 points in a single game.

He is only 23 years of age.

Please welcome Michael Jordan, folks.

[ Cheers and applause ]

Hi, Michael.

Nice to see you. How are you?

Come on over.

My, oh my.

I got one thing to say.

Yeah? What's that?

I see Adidas shoes.

Yeah.

Why?

Well, now we can't talk about this, because the last time

we started talking about shoes, there was a huge deal,

and they had to run up to the legal department

and wake up the attorneys.

Now, I know you've got a huge contract with the company.

Put your feet down.

[ Laughter ]

Now, how much do you -- no stop that.

Or they won't let any of this on.

Okay.

Now, how much do you get paid just to wear these shoes?

A lot.

♪♪

♪♪

Well, Nike started as a running company.

They started in the running business.

And they were successful in the running business.

They wanted to grow, and branch out.

They got into other sports.

Then, in 1984, they weren't doing very well.

Dixon: In the early eighties, that was when they slipped

to number two in America, to Reebok.

And at that time, Knight asked the group

"Do you think we should sell now?"

And they all said "No. we can figure a way out of it."

Nike was considered to be kind of like a stepchild

in the shoe game, at that point.

It was Converse. It was Adidas.

Other brands were much more solidly entrenched than Nike.

Nike was just this little company that could,

that was trying to fight for a piece of the market share.

Everybody in the business knew that the main consumer

for athletic shoes is 16-year-old boys.

So, the biggest sport to get to the masses is basketball.

Man: So, Nike knew that they needed to be in basketball,

but nobody really thought of Nike as a basketball brand,

particularly the kid.

The kid, as they called him, was the customer

who would buy basketball shoes.

And a lot of them were inner city kids.

So, Rob Strasser decided what we needed was an icon.

We needed to find ourselves a basketball player

that kids wanted to be.

♪ Like Michael. Fight to be like Michael. ♪

♪ I want to be, I want to be like Michael. ♪

♪ Like Michael. If I could be like Mike ♪

You know the reality is that black people,

since the beginning of time, have always made things cool.

Jazz, rock 'n' roll.

I mean, you pick literally anything,

from a cultural standpoint,

and we have always been the arbitrators of cool.

And it was really no different with sneakers.

Williams: Marketing the Jordan brand

to the African American community

has been the core of the success of the Jordan brand.

And so, in order for Jordan to be as successful

as they have been, they had to start with

the African American market.

And they had to take that, and grow it to this massive brand

that it is today.

Telander: In the 1980s, the African American community

was struggling to try to find a leader,

try to find something to believe in.

You could say it was about race, or skin color, or ethnicity,

but it was mostly, as always, about poverty.

About economic disparity, and about hope,

and about a chance to move ahead,

to actually become part of the alleged great American ladder,

where you can start anywhere, and you can make it to the top.

That great myth that we believe in, here in this country.

Hill: The 1980s was a volatile time in this country.

You know, growing up in Detroit, for us,

I mean, we were no different than New York,

Chicago, where the influx of drugs

had, overnight, kind of changed a lot of middle class,

working class neighborhoods.

It was a depressing time,

because a lot of what those baby boomers

that were there and fought through civil rights

in the sixties and seventies, they were kind of seeing

the progress that they made slip away.

[ Crowd chanting "Four more years!" ]

Lazenby: Well, you know, American society

was experiencing the Reagan years.

And it was the early birth of the conservative movement

as we know it today, with neo-conservatives.

Definitely, Ronald Reagan had lit the fires

for conservative thought.

Reagan: The present recession is bottoming out

without resorting to quick fixes.

There won't be a sudden boom, or upsurge,

but slowly and surely,

we'll have a sound and lasting recovery,

and an end to deficit spending.

Garcia: Generally, when you have Republican leadership,

it shifts and leans towards empowering corporate America,

privatization of institutions.

There's less funding for community programs.

You know, there was a big divide,

and a gap in the support for the youth.

Kent: Well, what was going on in the eighties,

it was communities within communities

building upon themselves,

and trying to take care of themselves.

And it kind of started fragmenting because of crack.

And because crack was so devastating,

it devastated the neighborhoods that we lived in.

Man: By the hundreds, Bronx residents made themselves heard today

to call for more action against the crack epidemic --

an epidemic measured in violence,

broken homes, and burnt-out youngsters.

Well, the first thing that you learn about sport

is that sport is a microcosm society.

And because this was happening in society,

it's always gonna seep into sport.

No different than, you know, what's happening

with the killing of unarmed black men

has seeped into the NFL with the Anthem protest.

And when you talk about the tragic deaths of athletes

like Len Bias,

which I think really changed everything.

By all intents and purposes people considered him

the next Michael Jordan.

When he collapsed, and passed away,

I think it really frightened a lot of people.

Len Bias was an all-American basketball star,

the University of Maryland's leading scorer.

And after four years of college, he was drafted this week

by the champion Boston Celtics.

Announcer: The world champion Celtics use their first round draft choice

to pick Bias to play for them after his graduation.

This morning, Len Bias was dead of cardio respiratory arrest.

No one knows why yet.

There are reports that traces of cocaine

were found in Bias' system.

Hill: The death of Len Bias,

it not only was a sports story it was an American story

that wind up having a deep impact

on how people viewed the drug problem in this country.

And so, this was a death that affected policy,

and that led to the mandatory minimums

that wound up being kind of the gateway

to the huge explosion in mass incarceration.

So, it wasn't just about this particular athlete

dying of a drug overdose.

This was about how this death shaped American policy

when it came to criminal justice.

That was coming out of the 1970s.

Cocaine was a big party drug in the NBA itself.

In 1984, David Stern would become commissioner,

and they would begin all of the drug policy

that eventually allowed the NBA to raise its profile.

But it took a while for that to really gain traction.

♪ We're the LA Lakers, and we're here to say ♪

♪ that the drugs are killing everything ♪

♪ Cocaine and crack, it's all got to go ♪

♪ We've got to learn to just say "no" ♪

♪ I'm Kareem, the captain of the team ♪

♪ I don't need drugs, I've got a higher thing ♪

♪ My sky hook makes the team look good. ♪

♪ But there's a hook we got to shape from the neighborhood ♪

Telander: In the eighties, basketball was starting, for the first time,

particularly at the highest levels,

to be dominated by black athletes.

And it hadn't been that way because of racism

and segregation.

You know, there had always been the greats, the Wrens,

and the Harlem Globe Trotters.

But people said "That doesn't really count."

Announcer: The Globe Trotters have made basketball

into something more like a ballet than a sport.

Supremely confident,

their choreography of sparkling precision

that leaves both spectators and opponents mystified.

Telander: The Chicago Bulls were a reflection of this new time.

Many of the players were black, many of the stars were,

and the crowd was still white.

You could sense, maybe, if not a tension,

but not a real kind of community feeling

between the basketball team and the surrounding area.

Lazenby: I remember going to Chicago Stadium,

which was located in blighted neighborhoods,

and there was a real sense of cultural clash there.

I think, until Jordan came,

Chicago wasn't really a destination for anybody.

They just didn't have that transcendent sports team

to make things change.

Lazenby: The Chicago Bulls were a relatively young franchise

in the early 1980s.

They'd only really gotten started in 1966/67.

But they were a dismal franchise in deep financial trouble.

On the outside, the Bulls were just a sad franchise.

But at the same time, the city wasn't expecting much from them.

There was always a sense of the Bulls doing decent --

never big, decent.

Bengtson: You just didn't care. Like, they didn't matter.

They were a team that came into town,

and they played, and no one cared.

Announcer: Chicago hasn't scored in the last two minutes.

There was a reason that they got to draft Michael Jordan third.

I mean, Houston took Hakeem.

The Portland Trailblazers took Sam Bowie.

Yeah, he went third.

Bengtson: They were awful.

You obviously don't get the number-three pick in the draft

unless you're terrible.

And they were pretty terrible.

Lazenby: Michael Jordan signing with the Bulls,

the fact that he was the third player taken,

and the Bulls had that third choice, was just amazing.

The Chicago Bulls pick Michael Jordan.

♪♪

Lazenby: People thought, "Well, you know, I saw this guy play

in college for North Carolina.

He was pretty exciting."

♪♪

♪♪

Jackson: He was the two-time Player of the Year

after his freshman year.

But if you really followed the game, he still wasn't --

to a lot of people, wasn't the best player in the ACC.

You know, Len Bias was the best player in the ACC.

That kind of shifted during that summer with USA basketball.

You know, we kind of knew the dude was nice.

But it was after the draft

when we find out how nice he really was.

We didn't know he had the ability to score like that.

Announcer: Jordan gets Sims off his feet, and shoots right over him.

There's Jordan.

14 for Michael Jordan.

Then, Fleming from Georgia,

nice dump pass by Alford to the acrobatic Michael Jordan.

And some people were like, "Oh, my God.

We just got, I think,

a great, great basketball player."

But nobody knew.

The Americans were so much better

than everybody else in 1984 that it was almost absurd

to make any comparisons about anything.

Announcer: Jordan again.

Announcer #2: He's beautiful.

And Nike had identified him.

Sonny Vaccaro, who was an executive at Nike,

not even a high-level executive.

But he managed a lot of Nike's basketball business.

He got the sense, in watching Jordan as freshman

at the Final Four

that Jordan was going to be this cross-over person.

And on Sonny Vaccaro's hunch,

they were already negotiating his contract with Nike.

♪♪

You know, Sonny is the driving force who convinced them.

Like, "Look. Don't spread everything out.

you know, "Trust me, this one guy --

this Michael Jordan coming out of North Carolina --

is gonna be the guy."

Announcer: Michael Jordan.

Everything seems to be

like a highlight film when he plays.

Man: Well, Sonny Vaccaro came to Nike

basically through the college ranks.

And he had a tournament called "The Dapper Dan,"

that was held in Pittsburgh,

that Nike had wanted to get involved with,

because that was where top high school kids went to play.

So, if you really wanted to know who the next basketball player

was gonna be, you went to Sonny Vaccaro.

You know, he was the one who convinced them,

"if you pay a college coach X amount,

they'll wear your shoes.

Give me this budget, and I'll go get you

the best college coaches."

The deal was this coach, you sign the coach,

his team wears Nike shoes.

Sonny really knew how to spot the young basketball stars.

To get them when they're in high school,

to get them in the Nike shoes, to get them used to them,

so when they turned pro, they would go with Nike.

Garcia: It was brilliant.

Sonny Vaccaro at Nike,

like, he knew what he was doing, you know?

It was like "Alright, well, we can't compete with y'all

up there, but we're gonna kill y'all over here.

And all these cats that are here

are gonna be those next Julius Erving,

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Tiny Archibald."

Lazenby: The coaches were stunned.

They didn't think it was legal.

Is this free money?

And sales were rising accordingly

with all this new exposure.

No question that Nike Basketball,

including Air Jordan,

and including the rest of it,

would not be where it is without Sonny Vaccaro.

Phil Knight may not want to admit it.

Sonny Vaccaro built it.

He and Rob Strasser together built what is today

known as Nike Basketball.

♪♪

Vaccaro: You know, I'm gonna give you a surprise.

I'm gonna show you the one priceless thing

that Michael Jordan gave to me.

He was playing the Los Angeles Lakers

the year that they won the championship.

And Howard White called me, and says,

"Michael left you a pair of shoes."

And what do I get?

This is the famous shoe when he hurt his toe

against the Lakers, playing for the world championship,

that he wore that night.

And he gave them to me.

In my opinion, the most priceless Jordan shoes,

because we know there's only one pair of the ones

he wore in that game.

Announcer: And the Bulls do not have any timeouts remaining.

Craig Hodges, a three point specialist, has checked in.

Here's Jordan on the pull up.

Yes!

And the game is tied at 92 with 3:04 seconds remaining.

Alright, Marv, one thing is gonna bother the Bulls.

Just during that last play, Michael Jordan hurt

the tip of his big toe.

They've taken it out, and taken a look at it,

and it's gonna be painful, but he'll try to go with it.

Vaccaro: In the mid 1980s -- 82, 83 I guess,

Nike was gonna finally sign a pro player

that was gonna be a signature shoe --

which was the new term at that time.

And it was a very good draft class at 1984,

very good draft class.

And it came down to selecting somebody.

So, they asked me, "What do I do?"

And I just said, "Give it to the kid."

If you're gonna name a shoe after a high flier,

how in the hell can you give it two or three?

There's only one chief.

The famous phrase was, "Will you bet your job?"

I said, "Give it all to Jordan.

He has what you want."

Announcer: Gordie to Jordan. Breaks out on him.

Good coverage, defensively. He still hit it.

Oh, what presence of mind.

Announcer #2: It's amazing what the freshman can do.

Lazenby: Nike's executives decided to plow their entire budget

into this young Michael Jordan,

who had never played an NBA game.

Knight: And we didn't even know who Jordan was.

He played for North Carolina, which was a Dean Smith school.

Dean Smith was a Converse guy.

So, we assumed all his guys were gonna go to Converse.

Well, Sonny convinced us that we could get this guy.

And so, he set about to go get him.

At one point, they wanted to bring Michael out to Beaverton,

sort of like college recruit.

They wanted to have a campus visit -- except for one thing.

Michael didn't want to go.

He said, "David, I have no interest in Nike.

I don't know anything about Nike.

If you want to go see Nike, like you go."

I said, "Well, I don't need to see Nike.

But you can't make an intelligent informed decision

until you see the campus, and see what they have to offer,

and see what the people are like,

and what the product is like."

He turned me down. So, I went to his parents.

I said, "Look, it's the very first thing ever

I'm asking him to do

since he picked me to work with him.

You've got to help me.

We can't work together if he's not gonna at least visit."

They said, "David, don't worry. He'll be on the plane."

Knight: The brand that he really wanted to sign with was Adidas.

He had worn Adidas all through college, except in the games,

'cause he had to wear Converse in the games.

The problem was, Adidas never asked him to come to Germany

for a presentation, or anything.

Years later, when I went to Adidas, I asked them,

I said, "Why on earth didn't you sign Michael Jordan?"

They said they had no idea

who he was, or what they'd do with him.

If he wanted shoes, they'd be more than happy

to give him shoes.

But they weren't gonna pay him any money.

We went to all the companies,

and instead of making a proposal,

I basically said to them,

"We're going to let you meet with Michael, and explain,

if he picked you, what can you do for him?"

Which is a really different kind of a concept.

Instead of asking what the player can do

for the company, you know,

we ask what the company can do for the player.

And truthfully, most of the companies

weren't prepared for that.

Converse, at the time, they were the official shoe of the NBA.

And their pitch to him was "We're going to treat you

just like everybody else."

Which they thought was a great pitch

because they had so many great players.

I was looking for something more creative, and unique.

So, in terms of Nike,

Sonny said to me, like, "What's important to you?"

And I said to him, "I know this is gonna sound really crazy,

but I want you to treat him like he's a tennis player.

I want him to have his own line of shoes and clothes.

I want to have commercials.

I want you to market him like he's playing

an individual sport."

People thought that wouldn't work in team sports.

And we set out to prove that it would work.

Prior to Jordan, the endorsement business --

particularly the basketball endorsement business --

was pretty much team-orientated.

Converse had Julius Erving, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird.

All three of those guys wore the same shoe.

They wore Converse shoes.

Basketball shoes in America were sort of a closed business.

Converse, which had the Chuck Taylors,

the canvas and rubber shoes,

they'd had the business for so long.

There were no great endorsement deals.

Converse simply gave the Celtics and other NBA teams --

a lot of NBA teams had to pay for their shoes,

but they simply gave them,

so that they would have shoes to wear,

and fans would see them, and magazines

would take their photographs.

And it was a nice little business,

but it wasn't a big-money business.

Stern: Converse had all of our players,

but they were not too keen on marketing.

And then, when Michael came along,

Nike understood that this was

an opportunity to use his connection

to the league, and his prowess as a basketball player,

as a stepping stone to grow the industry.

♪♪

There are obviously NBA players who had shoe contracts.

But that was all relatively restrained.

You know, a lot of them were for $9,000 or $10,000.

Kareem was probably getting in the neighborhood

of $100,000 a year.

Hill: It wasn't seen as something where athletes were necessarily

shaping culture the way shoes shape culture now.

And so, this idea that there was gonna be

this whole marketplace of athletes pedaling shoes

was just kind of unheard of,

and to some degree, considered to be ridiculous.

Pre-Jordan it was, you know, "Here's our shoe.

You're endorsing it. We'll pay you to do that."

And that's basically where it ends.

They would be in commercials.

They would maybe get a shoe in their color.

But it was nothing special.

It's reinforced for me.

And me.

Hey, maybe it was made for both of us.

Must be magic.

Now that's who this shoe was made for.

[ All laugh ]

Announcer: The Converse Star Tech, with the unique uni-saddle design.

You had Larry Bird and Magic Johnson with Converse.

You had Dr. J with Converse.

I mean, Dr. J was the first superstar.

♪ Hey, hey, Dr. J ♪

He was the first elevation of the sneaker game,

wearing Dr. J Converses.

♪ Are you a member of the human race ♪

♪ Hey, Dr. J, are you wearing magic shoes? ♪

Announcer: He's wearing Converse, the shoes of the stars.

Kent: But if you really want to look at it,

the guy who changed the game was Clyde,

because he was the first coolest basketball player.

He was the guy you wanted to be like.

He was the guy you wanted to dress like.

♪♪

When you saw him you saw the mink coats,

you saw the Rolls-Royces,

he looked like the hustlers.

He looked like a superhero.

And then, he has his name in gold on the side of a sneaker.

So, everything else after that was a byproduct of him

being the coolest first.

But it's like the player had to be cool, as well.

Like, was Magic Johnson cool?

Not really.

Was Larry Bird cool?

Was Abdul-Jabbar cool?

Not really.

But then, Michael Jordan is semi-cool.

But then, his sneaker becomes a character, and then that's cool.

So, he reluctantly agreed.

Knight: He comes to Oregon.

And then, we started showing him the things

that we wanted to do with him,

including making a red, white, and black shoe.

And he said, "So, you want me to play in this?"

We said "Yeah. That's the idea. You play in the game,

because they see you playing the game, they buy the shoe."

We played a tape using the Pointer Sisters song "Jump."

with a highlight reel of him,

And at the end, we showed the wings

and the Jordan trademark.

But mostly, what we had was, we had a program.

We were gonna make Michael Jordan

a marketing superstar.

♪♪

He was impressed with the boldness of the idea.

And we went to dinner that night with his parents.

And at the end of the dinner, his mother leaned over and said,

"Don't worry about it Michael will be wearing Nike."

So, the deal was a five-year deal.

Michael got a certain amount of guaranteed money

over a five-year period.

On top of that, he got a very large annuity

that would start paying him

after he retired from basketball --

over $1 million a year.

And he obviously got royalties on the shoe.

And it was a deal that, actually,

I believe, that we proposed to Michael,

that they didn't propose to us.

We proposed to Michael to sort of take the price down,

how much cash we'd actually have to put out.

Falk: I asked Nike what their expectations were.

And their expectations were, in the five-year deal,

by the end of year three, they'd hope to sell $3 million

worth of shoes heading into year four.

That was their expectation.

And they sold $126 million the first year.

Where I think we made a mistake is, we didn't put a cap on it,

and we didn't say "Okay, after so many thousands of pairs,

the royalty rate goes down."

The thinking was, "Look, if he sold that many shoes, great."

As it turned out, that's what happened.

They sold so many shoes they didn't know what to do with it,

and Michael made a lot of money.

Falk: By the end of year three, they'd hope to sell $3 million

worth of shoes heading into year four.

That was their expectation.

And they sold $126 million the first year.

Where I think we made a mistake is, we didn't put a cap on it,

and we didn't say "Okay, after so many thousands of pairs,

the royalty rate goes down."

The thinking was, "Look, if he sold that many shoes, great."

As it turned out, that's what happened.

They sold so many shoes they didn't know what to do with it,

and Michael made a lot of money.

Falk: Now, if I would have known that, I probably would have asked them

to pay him a dollar a year and 50/50 on the royalties.

Now, had we done that,

maybe they wouldn't have pushed the line.

The most important aspect of his deal

wasn't the money or the royalties.

I forced them to spend $1 million.

in the first six months to promote him.

I think we agreed that we would pay him

close to $1 million,

and that we would put close to $1 million into marketing.

And then, the fun stuff started.

And the fun stuff was, "How are we gonna market this guy?"

We all talked about how he used to soar in the air.

David Falk, to his credit, said "I've got a name for this thing.

it should be called 'Air Jordan.'"

Rob immediately wants to use the name.

I said, "Well, why don't we think about it for a little while.

There's an airline that's called "Air Jordan.'"

But no, Rob was going with Air Jordan.

Michael always tells me it's the first

and the last great idea I ever had.

After that, I went and saw him in Washington D.C.

In that conversation, he told me that he didn't want to wear

red, white, and black.

And when I asked him, I said, "Well, what's the reason?"

He said, "They're the devil's colors."

I said, "Well, they're the Chicago Bull's colors,

so you better go talk to the guy that owns the Chicago Bulls.

'cause I can't change them."

I mean he wanted to wear Carolina blue,

which was the color of his school.

And I said, "We'll make you a pair,

you can wear them on Saturdays.

But you're in red, white, and black.

You know, that's just the way it's got to be."

Jackson: The ideology behind doing this came a long time

before the shoe was first launched.

You know, these conversations with Jordan

getting his own shoe came his rookie year.

But they waited before they actually launched it.

And the lead up to that was beautiful,

because what they did is put the shoes on Jordan,

so you could see him playing.

Bengtson: You know, the build-up of that shoe before it released

at retail was five or six months long,

which was fairly unheard of back then.

And I think the idea of a new shoe model

being such a big deal,

and being such a big deal to people other than athletes,

was something really different.

Knight: The first time he wore the shoes,

he wore them in New York

at an exhibition game -- a pre-season game.

They're out doing their warm-up drills,

and all of a sudden, there's a bunch of kids start gathering.

And they're all pointing at his shoes.

David Falk happens to be sitting in the arena,

and he wants to know what all this is about.

"What's going on here?"

And they tell him, "Oh, Jordan's got on these crazy shoes."

And sure enough, the shoes get banned.

At that time, David Stern, who was head of the NBA,

had a rule that only white footwear

was allowed on the court.

Stern saw these shoes, and said, "That's against the rules.

You can't do it."

Bengtson: The original Air Jordan was just a project

that was kind of unprecedented in the way Nike worked.

You know, they signed Jordan that summer, and wanted to get

a signature shoe on his foot in that first season,

which really compressed the amount of time

they had to get this shoe done.

So, in the meantime, he had to wear something else.

and what he ended up wearing was the Nike Air Ship.

And that was the shoe

that originally drew the ire of the NBA,

and basically banning the shoe.

Stern: We told Michael and Nike that, whatever shoe he was wearing

didn't conform, so would they please change it.

And Rob said, "So, what are you gonna do, fine him?"

He goes "Yes. I'm gonna fine him."

And Rob said, "Go ahead and fine him.

Nike will cover him."

It became the shoe that was banned by the NBA,

with the implication that it was

because it made Michael such a good basketball player.

Announcer: On September 15th, Nike created a revolutionary

new basketball shoe.

On October 18th, the NBA threw them out of the game.

Fortunately, the NBA can't stop you from wearing them.

♪♪

Lazenby: Nike officials reacted with glee to this,

because that meant that, if something is outlawed,

it becomes very precious.

Williams: Typically, when you brand a product, you start with

what we call "functional benefits of consumption."

You want to give people a sense that, again,

this somehow solves a problem

or it somehow makes you better at something you're doing.

And that was the first thing we did with the Jordan brand,

was "Hey, we gave you the sense that you would be

a better basketball player if you were to wear these shoes,

and that the NBA band these shoes

because it gave Michael Jordan

some type of competitive advantage."

And then, you look on television,

and you see this man doing things

that you'd never seen an athlete do, ever, you believe in it.

They gave Nike the best publicity ever

when they banned the Air Jordan,

which only made them hotter in the streets.

Knight: There's no question of the fact that the shoes were banned

helped the sale of the shoes.

Kids like that stuff.

Particularly the inner city kid, he loves that stuff.

"I'm wearing something I'm not supposed to be wearing.

Perfect."

[ Laughs ]

Couldn't be better.

And, all of a sudden, overnight,

it was just like everybody wanted them.

They were being sold on the street corners

for hundreds of dollars.

Knight The first time we showed Footlocker, for example --

which is the biggest retailer in America --

they only wanted 5,000 pairs for all their stores.

Within a week, they called, and wanted 150,000 pairs.

-Nike! -Adidas!

Competition is the name of the game at Footlocker,

with the biggest selection of big names ever assembled.

So, whether your game is serious or social,

we'll find the right shoe for you.

You know, you don't tell people not to do something,

because they want to do it -- particularly that age group.

And that just shows you the personality

of the kid who's buying the shoe.

He wanted to break the rules.

Kent: The shoes were anti-establishment,

you know what I'm saying?

So, the hood is anti-establishment.

It's almost like they were made to be for each other.

Knight: The ban helped, no question about it.

I mean Rob Strasser wrote David a thank-you note.

And as Rob was leaving his office,

he said, "I have one thing to ask that you do."

And Rob turns around, and says, "What?"

"Can you send me a pair of the banned shoes?

My son wants them. He thinks I'm a jerk."

[ Laughs ]

Bengtson: The Air Jordan was something that kind of transcended

all these different borders

that hadn't really been transcended before.

The fact that it comes out after he plays in the All-Star game,

after he's in his first dunk contest,

by the time that shoe finally hit the market,

they were just gone.

Knight: I think we sold over a million pairs of shoes in one year,

which is -- in those days was a lot.

It wasn't started slowly and built to a big fire.

It started as a giant fire.

I mean, it just was -- there was a big fire from day one.

Flight Attendant: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to flight 23.

Please make sure your seat belts are securely fashioned,

and extinguish all smoking materials.

Knight: Then, we had done it for the first year.

Then everybody's going, "What are we gonna do now?"

It became so big that we were worried about it --

just the air would just go out of it.

Bengtson: You know, if the Air Jordan 1 was a shoe

that Nike had to get together in a hurry,

and really rush to get to market,

and get on Jordan's feet,

the Air Jordan 2 was kind of the opposite.

The Air Jordan 2 came along, and it was like,

that shoe was pumping, you know?

It was fly. It was sleek.

It was well-built. It was well-designed.

It was the first shoe that didn't have

the Nike swoosh on it.

♪♪

That was a game-changer,

you know, in terms of, like, my community.

You know, for sneaker connoisseurs and ball players,

like, the Jordan 2 was, like,

"Oh, okay. They got it right now."

Announcer: Air Jordan. It's all in the imagination.

♪♪

The Air Jordan 2, when it came out, it was a risk

that most sneaker companies back then didn't take,

or wouldn't take.

It was almost twice as expensive.

It was made in Italy.

Bengtson: And you could almost look at the Air Jordan 2 --

even though it came out in 1986, a full decade

before Jordan split off into its own brand --

being sort of the first sign

that Air Jordan was a thing in and of itself,

that didn't necessarily need that Nike swoosh.

Knight: Well, here's the first poster we did with Michael Jordan,

which basically was to announce that he is arriving in Chicago.

This is my favorite shoe of his.

And this is the Chicago skyline,

and he's obviously flying over the skyline into the city.

This was one of the interesting things about Michael Jordan.

He gave me my own poster for Christmas.

Maybe that's why he's a billionaire.

Now, the brilliant thing about Nike

is that they are a marketing company,

first and foremost.

Their relationship with Wieden+Kennedy,

and the ideas behind that is what makes them special.

And Wieden+Kennedy really hadn't stepped in

as a marketing group behind pushing Jordan.

But starting with 3, they did.

A lot of the things that made Jordan special

is that the grassroots aspects of how they approached things.

So, Wieden+Kennedy tapped into that.

What's happening at the grassroots level,

as far as, like, you know,

African American society is concerned?

Who's that new cat? Who has that fresh breath?

What's that new visual? What's that new voice?

And their new voice was in a character

that Spike Lee had created.

You know, when he did with his first feature film,

"She's Gotta Have It."

You know, is there anyway to tap into him"

"She's Gotta Have It" was a love story

not only between Mars Blackmon and Nola Darling,

but between Mars Blackmon and his Air Jordans.

And he sort of couldn't decide between the two.

He kind of wanted to have both.

You know, I think a lot of kids in the eighties

could identify with that.

He knew that before a lot of other people,

you know, which I think is why

Spike was able to become as successful as he did.

And -- you know, and I think Nike and Wieden+Kennedy,

and I think it was Jim Riswold at Wieden, who recognized that.

Riswold: It was 1987,

and Bill Davenport and I were down in L.A.

finishing our first spot with Michael Jordan.

And back then, all spots with Nike

seemed to be "show the athlete sweat,

and put a product shot at the end,

and call it a day."

Announcer: Today at Nike, we know even more.

We developed one of the most sophisticated sport

research labs in the world to let us see,

in detail, the peculiarities of style,

the dynamics of foot strike.

And at Nike, we're putting that knowledge to work,

making shoes that actually help athletes to run faster.

Riswold: So, we were down there, doing that commercial.

And we went to a movie.

And there was a trailer at the beginning of the move

with a guy we'd never heard of called "Spike Lee,"

selling tube socks on the sidewalk.

Three for $5.

Hi. I'm Spike Lee.

When I'm not directing, I do this.

It pays the rent, puts food on the table,

butter on my whole wheat bread.

Anyway, I have this new comedy coming out.

It's a very funny film -- "She's Gotta Have It."

Riswold: That was a great trailer.

So, you get back to Portland, and that movie is playing.

And it's about three men pursuing the same woman.

And one of those men is the Mars Blackmon character.

And he finally gets the time to sleep with

the woman of his dreams, Nola Darling.

And while doing so, he won't take off his Air Jordans.

Blackmon: Stop. Stop. No, stop. Stop.

Knight: He's boffing this girl in bed, and he's wearing Air Jordans.

And I went "Great," you know, "nice promo."

And Bill and I look at each other like

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

They said, "We ought to do a TV commercial with him."

We called Spike up.

And that was back when he answered his own phone.

"Would you be interested in playing your role,

and directing Michael Jordan

in a series of Mars Blackmon and Michael Jordan commercials?"

And I think we could hear him pee his pants

on the other end of the line.

"Do I get to direct him, too?"

-Nola? -Yes, Mars.

-Nola? -Yes, Mars.

Is it because he do a vicious high-flying 360 slam dunk?

-No, Mars. -Because he's taller than me?

No, Mars.

Because he's loved, adored, and worshiped by millions?

-No, Mars. -Nola, what is it?

It's because he's got the new Air Jordans, Mars.

Oh sweat, oh sweat, oh sweat.

Nike, you got to hook me up.

Spike Lee and the Mars and Mike campaign

of the 1980s,

playing the character Mars Blackmon, of course,

from "She's Gotta Have It," played an integral part of

making Michael Jordan believable

while still having that sense of integrity.