One Man and His Shoes

It is a truth uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged that Black peo­ple love train­ers. This is some­thing so pedes­tri­an that to even exam­ine it seems inane. How­ev­er, Yemi Bamiro’s inge­nious doc­u­men­tary is both a love let­ter and a cau­tion­ary tale about the African-Amer­i­can community’s com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship with Air Jordans.

One Man and His Shoes serves as a sort of com­pan­ion piece to the summer’s phe­nom­e­nal Michael Jor­dan docuseries The Last Dance. And while that series exam­ined Michael Jor­dan the man, this film con­cerns itself with Michael Jor­dan the brand.

With auda­cious­ly cool ​’90s graph­ics the doc­u­men­tary looks at Nike, once con­sid­ered the poor step-child of the sports­wear world and its col­lab­o­ra­tion with the then col­lege bas­ket­ball play­er Jor­dan. Fol­low­ing a peri­od of excru­ci­at­ing­ly uncool endorse­ment deals with Con­verse by the stars of the time (Mag­ic John­son, Lar­ry Bird and Kareem Abdul-Jab­bar) Nike were look­ing for some­thing dif­fer­ent to launch them into the same league.

The real­i­ty that they astute­ly recog­nised was that ​“black peo­ple” as sports writer Janelle Hill puts it, ​“since the begin­ning of time have always made things cool. Jazz, Rock’n’Roll, lit­er­al­ly any­thing from a cul­tur­al stand­point we have always been the arbi­tra­tors of cool”.

There was huge pow­er for the African Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty to see a glob­al brand asso­ci­at­ed with the god­like Jor­dan as opposed to the servile Aunt Jemi­ma and Uncle Ben. By sell­ing Jor­dan as an aspi­ra­tional indi­vid­ual, rather than as part of a team, and by bring­ing on bud­ding auteur Spike Lee to direct the com­mer­cials, we wit­ness a per­fect storm of sports­man­ship, cre­ativ­i­ty and com­merce. It is a tri­umph of David over Goliath if that sto­ry was in fact about amoral sports­wear corporations.

Hav­ing estab­lished the extra­or­di­nary and fas­ci­nat­ing path to the suc­cess of the Air Jor­dan brand, the doc­u­men­tary asks itself, as well as the audi­ence, some all togeth­er more uncom­fort­able ques­tions. Was a 6’6” black man like Jor­dan only mar­ketable to white peo­ple because he nev­er stood up for civ­il rights? How did the use of cocaine by NBA stars con­tribute to the mass incar­cer­a­tion of black men? Why does Nike com­mod­i­fy social jus­tice? And, most impor­tant­ly, is Air Jordan’s mod­el of hyper mar­keti­sa­tion com­bined with a sales strat­e­gy of nev­er meet­ing demand respon­si­ble for the mur­der of dozens of young black men, women and children?

The film is keen­ly aware that these are not sim­ple ques­tions to answer and trusts the view­er to make up their own mind upon being pre­sent­ed with detailed and occa­sion­al­ly con­flict­ing opinions.

This doc­u­men­tary builds on its innocu­ous premise to cre­ate a film that is intel­li­gent, nuanced and fas­ci­nat­ing. Jor­dan acts as both a hero and a Tro­jan horse for ram­pant con­sumerism. Bamiro brings a dynam­ic, insight­ful analy­sis to the impact of Air Jor­dans on the con­sumer mar­ket and, in turn, tells a pro­found sto­ry the African-Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence as seen through the fil­ter of capitalism.