THE LEGEND GOES LIKE THIS: In 1985, Nike made a pair of red-and-black
sneakers for Michael Jordan that it called the Air Jordan 1. Then Jordan
tried to wear them during a game, but the NBA said no—uniform vio-
lation. So Nike promoted the sneakers as “banned,” Jordan wore them
during that year’s NBA Slam Dunk Contest, and the combined cool fac-
tor blew the shoes off retail shelves so fast, they made skid marks.
Is it true? Online sleuths wonder if the whole “banned” thing was a
marketing gimmick from the start. But it doesn’t really matter. These
shoes would effectively become Sneaker Zero, the birth of special lim-
ited shoe releases, conceived by brands from the get-go not to sell mil-
lions of pairs but to create that invaluable, flammable fuel known as
hype. And for a generation of sneakerheads, the Air Jordan 1 lodged
in their brains. They needed it. And they needed the next version, too.
Chad Jones was like that. He was a kid in a rough Brooklyn neigh-
borhood when the Jordan 1 came out, and by the time he was a teen he
understood the captivating potential of sneakers. He knew they had
value, that they were art, and that they could literally and figuratively
take you places. So when the lines started forming for sneakers in the
early aughts, he stood in them—huddling in the rain, sleet, and sub-
zero temperatures, sometimes for as long as five days, all in order to
grab the next cool release from Nike or Adidas or Reebok. “I had a
friend,” he says. “We pitched actual tents, brought little portable heat-
ers, whatever we had to do to fight to get these shoes.” He began calling
himself Sneaker Galactus. His collection grew past 1,000 shoes.
And that’s why, at 4:30 a.m. on a frigid New York morning in 2012,
he was out in line waiting for the new Kobe 7s. Sneakers seemed like44 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / September 2019
→ LOOKING FOR FAKES
Experts at a StockX
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shoes are real.