Kobe's New Shoes

CEBU - In the not too distant past, it was kind of a fad among men and boys to match their denims with a pair of basketball shoes. My generation was witness to military pants and Adidas or Puma sneakers. With all the makes of sneakers and loafers around, the basketball shoe business is somewhat on the downside. The market peaked when Nike signed then NBA rookie LeBron James to a 7-year, $90 million endorsement deal, but the basketball shoe market today is just half of what it was five years ago.

Here comes Kobe Bryant. After Adidas dropped him, Nike took Kobe in their fold, joining Steve Nash, Vince Carter and Amare Stoudemire. Using him as product endorser, they introduced for the Olympics their Hyperdunk shoe. Their marketing pitch for that product is that the shoe is lighter than any other basketball shoe available at 13 ounces per sneaker. It promptly turned out to be Nike’s fastest selling basketball shoe, not counting the Jordan brand.

Last Thursday, together with their endorser, Nike unveiled the Zoom Kobe IV, according to them, the lightest shoe ever at 11.6 ounces. It’s in a low-cut design and they’re telling us that since going lighter is the name of the game, we don’t need anything bulky around our ankles anymore. This shoe would be lighter than an empty bottle of our favorite golden brew from Mandaue.

Nike hopes to make some splash in this market segment with the new low-cuts as most buyers get them for looks, not function. Accordingly, four out of five people buying basketball shoes don’t use them to drive and make a lay-up. Going to specifics, analyst Matt Powell of SportsOneSource says that fashion basketball is a $2 billion business, while performance basketball is just a $500 million business. I say amen to this as I have seen guys wearing sneakers costing P10,000 or more who think Michael Jordan is related to a vice mayor of a northern town here in Cebu.

Putting fashion into perspective, we seldom see hi-cuts on the ramps so it is in this regard that Nike produced a shoe that would look good in denims while at the same time function well on the basketball court. The reality is that the basketball shoe business has shifted into fashion.

SportsOneSource also says that Nike owns 98% of that fashion basketball space. Converse, a part of Nike’s empire, owns 1%. Of the 98%, the Jordan brand occupies 87%.

So what does Kobe say of his fourth signature shoe? He said the idea came from watching a soccer match and observing players how much they change directions often, put much torque on their angles and how constantly they’re running. The strain football players put on their ankles is much more than basketball players so he thought if he could cut the weight of the shoes and have his foot move in its natural state, it would be better. “When I first asked for the lightest basketball shoe Nike has ever created, particularly low-top, you could have heard a pin drop in the room,” Kobe said. “Everybody kind of looked at me and thought I had three heads or something.”

Performance Footwear Creative Director Eric Avar created the shoe according to Kobe’s specifications. “The idea to create a low-cut performance shoe came from Kobe, but the evidence we needed to move forward came from working with the Nike Sports Research Lab,” says Avar. At the lab, they reviewed Kobe making high-speed cuts at slow-motion capture video, with each frame showing the subject with the low-cut shoe allowing for more sharper cuts and increasing responsiveness.

With the Hyperdunk as the foundation, Flywire performance architecture using thin but very strong nylon fibers supports the upper foot. LunarLite foam cushions the forefoot, which is more innovative than Nike Air, and a Nike Zoom unit at the heel, plus a full-length Phylon midsole. With all this techno mumbo-jumbo, the shoe will retail at $120. It will be on our stores by middle of January or early February of 2009. Sneak freaks, prepare at least P6,000 for the KB IV’s. By the way, this coming Saturday, Kobe will start wearing his new shoe in a game versus the Miami Heat. Will the new shoe improve his game? Abangan.

E-mail me at [email protected]   (THE FREEMAN)