THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019 33
musicals followed (Lancelot, Beanstalk
Jack, Harold Hill), then theatre at the
University of Rochester and at Brown.
At Pearl Studios, Polec took the el-
evator to the twelfth floor. His audition
room was empty, and he entered, reën-
acting the moment. “I was, like, ‘I’m going
to sing Jet, “Are You Gonna Be My Girl,”
while bangin’ on this drum,’ ” he said. He
got a callback—with drum—for a sup-
porting role, and was cast as the lead.
A few hours before showtime, in his
dressing room at City Center, Polec re-
called meeting Meat Loaf. “I called him
Mr. Loaf,” Polec said. “He said, ‘Call me
Meat.’” Meat gave him some advice:
“Make it your flesh, make it your blood.
Give it as a gift to the audience.” Per-
forming in the show “feels like love,”
Polec said. “Meat Loaf passed the torch
to us. It’s an honor to take that fire from
Mt. Olympus and pass it around.” The
torch isn’t all they share. “Meat said that
when he was in high school, at a track-
and-field event, he was hit in the head
with a shot put,” Polec said. “That’s how
he started singing.”
—Sarah Larson
Miles S. Nadal
1
DEPT.OFHOARDING
RAREPAI R S
O
ne morning in Manhattan: down-
town, a sneaker pop-up selling
ninety-nine-cent AriZona Iced Tea-
branded Adidas turned into a riot, with
a bottle hurled and police summoned.
Seventy blocks uptown: Sotheby’s hosted
a hushed display of a hundred pairs of
what the auction house called the “rarest
sneakers ever produced.” Among the
people in the gallery was Miles S. Nadal,
the Canadian-born executive chairman
of the Peerage Capital Group. He was
dressed like any other sixty-one-year-old
businessman, in a dark suit and a striped
tie, but on his feet he wore a spotless pair
of “varsity blue/varsity red” Sacai x Nike
LDWaffle trainers, which featured dou-
ble Swooshes, two tongues, and midsoles
that jutted out the back like little cliffs.
He had bought them the day before, for
seven hundred and fifty dollars, at the
SoHo sneaker store Stadium Goods.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time,”
Nadal said, of his shoe habit. He paused
for effect: “Since Saturday.” That’s when
he agreed to buy ninety-nine pairs of
the sneakers in the Sotheby’s sale; they
had originally been scheduled to be auc-
tioned online, in partnership with Sta-
dium Goods. He paid eight hundred
and fifty thousand dollars for the lot.
He wanted to buy all hundred pairs, but
one, the only known pair of Nike Moon
Shoes in never-worn condition, designed
in 1972 by the company’s co-founder,
Bill Bowerman, was off limits. (The con-
signor decided to keep them available
for public auction.) Nadal hadn’t paid
attention to sneakers before. “I saw a
piece in the Post about the sale,” he said.
But he’d been collecting cars seriously
since meeting Jay Leno, seven years ago.
(He had purchased a hangout with Leno
at a charity auction.) Now he has a hun-
dred and forty-two rare cars and forty
motorcycles, which are kept in a private
collection, in Toronto, that he calls the
Dare to Dream Automobile Museum.
“I’m going to put the sneakers in as a
permanent installation,” he said.
Nadal seems ready for some new hob-
bies. In 2015, he was the subject of a Se-
curities and Exchange Commission in-
vestigation into his expenses, as C.E.O.
of a company called M.D.C. Partners.
The S.E.C. later fined him five and a half
million dollars and banned him for five
years from serving as an officer or direc-
tor of a public company. (Peerage is pri-
vately owned.) He had failed to disclose
perks, including cosmetic surgery, jew-
elry, pet care, and yacht-related expenses,
totalling more than eleven million dollars.
“I learned that you can never be too
humble,” he said. He was joined in the
exhibition space by Noah Wunsch, So-
theby’s global head of e-commerce. The
two had met earlier this year, after Peer-
age bought Sotheby’s International Re-
alty Canada. Wunsch pointed to a pair
of blue sneakers in a vitrine—the Air
Jordan 11 Derek Jeter shoe, commemo-
rating the New York Yankee’s retirement,
in 2017. Only five pairs were given out,
via a scratch-off lottery.
“My favorite shoe might be the Jeter
shoe,” Nadal said. “A, I love Jeter. And,
B, I just love the aesthetic of it.”
“The navy suède is gorgeous,” Wunsch
said. “It’s got an Yves Klein blue to it.”
“I was thinking if I could find some-
thing like this that wasn’t as dear, that
was wearable, I’d buy three or four pair
of them,” to keep in his homes in New
York, Toronto, the Bahamas, and Florida,
Nadal said. Next, they admired four pairs
of unreleased Travis Scott x Air Jordan
4s, designed by Scott, a rapper, for friends
and family. “My kids know all about him
because he’s Kylie Jenner’s boyfriend,”
Nadal said. They moved on to another
musician-designed shoe, a 2017 collabo-
ration between Pharrell, Adidas, and
Chanel—this one with the word “Karl”
on the upper. Pharrell had given them to
Karl Lagerfeld, who died in February.
In the center of the room was a vit-
rine containing the Nike Moon Shoes,
which were displayed with a vintage
waffle iron. (Bowerman used his wife’s
waffle iron to create the prototype of the
shoe’s sole.) “These are unbelievable,”
Nadal said, peering through the glass.
“First of all, love Nike. Love Phil Knight,”
the other Nike founder. Nadal mentioned
Knight’s best-selling memoir, “Shoe
Dog.” “Actually read the book—cover to
cover! A rarity for me.” He stared at the
Moon Shoes. The presale estimate was
a hundred and sixty thousand dollars.
The next week, Nadal nabbed the
Moon Shoes, for four hundred and thir-
ty-seven thousand five hundred dollars.
The price beat the world auction re-
cord—a hundred and ninety thousand
dollars, for a signed pair of Converse
worn by Michael Jordan. Afterward,
Nadal said that he expected sneaker col-
lecting to become a lifelong passion. “I
