Growing up in the 80s as a sports-mad/girl-crazy child of the hip-hop generation, on the cusp of the city/suburban style divide, I have always been rather finely-tuned-in to fashion. I owe much of it to my older brother, who has always had an eye for clothes and sneakers, if not the confidence I had, born of having had my path through the wilds of adolescence having been cut broadly and cleanly by the very same brother, to step to anything too left of center. Or, more accurately, too early – I make a mental note of shit I’m rocking and over the next 2 years whittle it down to its core components for his annual Christmas gifts…and he still waits another 6 months before feeling comfortable that he won’t look too soft in whatever garments I hit him with.
Regardless, from a very early age, I insisted on dressing myself, often to mixed-at-best results. And I remember walking through school, through the mall, or anywhere in public aggressively peeping everyone’s gear.
This compunction was manifest most acutely, as it remains today, via footwear. As early as 2nd grade, I remember being very much aware of how clean and crispy my back to school sneakers remained, breaking out the old toothbrush every so often, knowing they would need to last me until winter before I could score another pair. The following year, I insisted on wearing my basketball sneakers only indoors, handling them with batting gloves (another example of my obsession with the accoutrements of sport). And I also remember with distinct pleasure and whimsy, before the arrival of the Air Jordan in the country’s collective sneaker conscience, and largely before Nike’s ascendency, having my neck snapped back by a specific pair of sneakers: the adidas Forum.
Raising two young dudes, the elder of whom (my brother) was as much of a handful as the younger (I) was a bit of pussy, my dad took us to as many high school sporting events as he and we could bear. Which was a lot. And not just the local high school – we often traveled to far flung gyms, rinks, and diamonds to watch the best area talent on offer. We saw eventual NBAer Dana Barros, then a lightning quick Point God plying his trade a half hour away at Xaverian Brothers High School, drop 56 points on his opponents. Before the arrival of the 3-pointer. All 5’ 8” of him.
The following year we witnessed Bryan Edwards silkily tear up hapless South Shore suburban defenses en route to re-writing the state high school basketball scoring record books. We sat on freezing cold bleachers, mouths agape, witnessing Brockton’s legendary high school football team, with its double barrel backfield of Rudy Harris (later of Clemson) and Darnell Campbell (who stayed home to attend Boston College), massacre an otherwise impressive BC High team as though they were a Pop Warner outfit.
Luckily for us, or for my father’s gas mileage, our town was, aside from football, a sports powerhouse in its own right – and being just under a mile from our house, easily accessible for many soccer, basketball, hockey, and baseball games. My favorite was always hoops: sitting 2 rows behind the home bench, close enough to see the sweat, retrieving wayward water bottles and dodging the occasional flying clipboard from its legendary hothead of a coach, we were right on top of the action. For us, as much as we loved watching those dudes ball, the real action was what they were rocking on their feet.
My brother sweated the PONY MVPs, worn by both the star small forward, who went on to play at Brown, and the scrappy point guard, who several weeks ago was busted for selling pills. The center wore gray on white Spot-Bilt X Force, the metalhead power forward beautiful red/white Etonic Dreams. One opposing team was all decked out in Be True to Your School Nike Dunks (Kentucky royal on white).
But for me, it was as it still is: all day I dream about sneakers. adidas.
The Top Ten was, even then, a unique-looking shoe: so balanced, so clean, that poofy nerf tongue. And a hit of red against the navy ankle padding. But ever the aesthete, the Top Ten didn’t quite sit well with me because our team’s colors were royal, white, and red, and the navy just didn’t jive. The Concord, whose Velcro strap added a bit of tech to the otherwise clean Top Ten silhouette, looked dope, especially in its patent leather variations, despite the somewhat awkward wavyness of the ankle line.
But all that over-analysis stopped dead in its tracks however, once I saw the Forum.
I think more than anything, this one shoe is what started my love affair with adidas – before I ever laid eyes on the huge satin trefoils on the Run DMC collection, or the blown out allover prints of the vintage Olympic line. Before the candy store shades of Torsion ZX runners and the badass on-court presence of the Artillery and the Euro-dopeness of Equipment. Before Bobby Hurley became the only Duke player I actually liked and respected because he wore high top double white Shelltoes on court in the NCAA tournament his freshman year. Before all that, and to this day, no sneaker, save maybe the Jordan III, moved me like the Forum.
Dynamic, diagonal Velcro stabilization straps, a peek of mesh netting in the interior midsole, the purpose of which still eludes me, but still looks dope. An asymmetric heel contour cup that wrapped 2/3 of the way around the anterior and 1/3 of the medial. It had all the visual bells and whistles, and yet looked clean, sharp, almost stately. And in the era before visual technology became the bellwether of the industry, and the genesis of the astronomical pricepoint increases that followed, it oozed performance, and class, and wealth, but in a suitably subtle way – a Mercedes to the eventual Ferraris that were Air Jordans. It was through those shoes that I recognized that basketball was not only a place to showcase ones athletic acumen to enclosed, captive audiences of local gym rats (and more importantly, their sisters), but another opportunity to floss.
Beginning the following year, my debut in recreational hoops, I had to consider how dope my chosen basketball sneakers were to wear casually – to school, to play, etc. – before choosing them. I would then make sure the original laces were taken out right away, so they could be re-deployed as close to box-fresh once the season ended, then wear the sneakers only on-court, cleaning them meticulously after each game: a lifelong obsession taking its first stuttering steps.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was following in the footsteps of many a Boston area kid from that era, in having been bitten by the adi bug. Boston was in fact famously ground zero in its own right for the “My Adidas” set. City kids of every color rocked Shelltoes religiously, even before Run, D, and Jay stepped on stage at Live Aid. Transplanted kids from Dot and Southie, many of whose families shipped out to my hometown of Braintree in the early 80s to escape the smoldering animosity left over from Boston’s clumsily executed and poorly received public school busing program, brought with them the 3-striped, hip-hop-tinged flavor of the inner city, with countless suburban style-philes taking note. By the time my young heart had fallen for the Forum, a wave of adidas obsession had already begun leaving its lasting mark on a generation of consumers. And that was only just the beginning.
The subsequent summer, 1986, our collective heads were still simmering from the paradigm-shattering neutron bomb that was the springtime release of Run DMC’s Raising Hell. In addition to unleashing the blistering manifestation of New York City’s bubbling cultural movement of hip-hop on a large scale audience (many heads of all ages had already taken a shine to hip-hop, but this event blew back the hair of nearly every remaining doubter) that was both hungry and ready for it, this musical magnum opus also pushed hip-hop style, and the sneaker world’s first non-sports endorsement deal, to the fore. What was niche a year earlier was now an inescapable cultural force. And more notably offered proof-positive that our city’s collective obsession with adidas was indeed a shared endeavor farther down the east coast in Hollis, Queens.
Subsequent months saw an even greater explosion in hip-hop fashion influence. The Beastie Boys, having arrived closely on the heels of the Tougher than Leather crew, themselves vocal proponents of rocking adidas over FILA to a degree akin to their preference for sensimilla over coke, pushed the market even further, just in time for the Together Forever tour. In this rising swell of adi-tuned, increasingly suburban hip-hop heads, adidas found a rabid market for all manner of footwear, apparel, and accessories. Everywhere one looked, even up in an unfortunately-situated inner city tree (more on that later) it was THREEs.
Unassuming city clothing stores across Boston, from Jones in Southie, to Deb & George in Dorchester, to the very mecca of inner city fashion, Harry the Greek in the South End, all stocked nearly every adidas model one could imagine, in colorways one could barely conceive. Even the more fashion-forward boutiques, like Crystal in Downtown Crossing, eschewed the rising tide of Nike for The Brand with the Three Stripes.
Back in my world, 5th grade arrived, and with it the arrival of girls as a now steady focus of my sometimes wayward mind. 10 years young, staring longingly at what was tantamount in my mind at the time to pornography – my first Eastbay catalog.
In it, a veritable adidas Gomorrah: the visual explosion of large format vintage graphics in the adidas Olympics apparel collection, the clean elegance of the legendary Lendl line, and the signature shoe of a dude that should have been a Boston cult hero, were we not put off by his choice of Georgetown over BC (coupled with the whole ‘latent racism long inherent in Boston’ thing), the Ewing Attitude. I quickly decided that that had to be my basketball sneaker for the season, regardless of the fact that he played for the Knicks – I even bought it in Knicks colors (due to the royal blue) instead of the safer navy/red route. And once that box was ticked, I turned my attention to the latest obsession to overtake my sartorial world: the Gazelle.
I had wanted other sneaks before. I had a pair of Jordan 1s in red/black in 3rd grade. They made me jump higher, of course. And I loved them. I cleaned the midsole of my Puma Clydes and rotated fat laces prior to the Js. My 5th grade back to school sneakers were even Jordan IIs. I definitely dabbled outside the world of adi. But once I saw Gazelles, and in particular how girls seemed to react toward guys who wore them, they immediately became a different story altogether. The rich suede, the eye-popping colors – they were the first sneakers, even as a 10 year old, since the Forum was by its pricepoint alone out of the question, I actively sweated.
But not the vinyl-tongued version available at US outlets. Those were fine. They were sold at the new local Indoor Soccer center in red/white and royal/white, and even worn by my man JD, a fellow style-obsessive from a young age who has had that playboy flavor since the day I met him and does to this day, to play Indoor Soccer.
But if you were a true sneaker fiend, only the Euro/Canadian version, with the nerf tongue, and available in a slew of colors beyond the red/white and royal/white you could cop at home, would do. Enter local basketball legend, Forum-wearer, and, luckily for me, oldest brother of my best neighborhood bud: Rick Dionisio. And with him the phone number to the lone store at which one could hope to cop these holy grails: Montreal’s Murray Sports.
I still remember the phone number to this day, hastily scrawled on a corner of looseleaf paper – like the code to Tyson on Punch Out – the key to instant local renown.
514-861-9636
I begged my mom for weeks. My brother and I teamed up to run the “early Christmas present” gambit. I planned and plotted which color I would get, which would hook up most effectively with the guts of my budding wardrobe. I landed, a bit predictably perhaps, on royal – it was the color of my hometown teams, and, as I reasoned vociferously, would stand out via the foam tongue alone. I went the safe route because I didn’t want to screw up something so important. My brother made the more sophisticated, and eminently cooler, due to its rarity, choice of forest green. Victory.
The subsequent years saw sneakers take an even more active role in the hierarchy of my life. I saw dudes rocking mint green Gazelles at an age at which one would presume wild personal insecurity/worry for one’s safety would have prevented it. And that, along with the sneakers themselves, was monumentally dope. Friendships were made based on the sneakers I, and they, wore. Enemies as well. Girlfriends were got and lost based on the same. Even more feverish attention was paid, for both reasons, to chasing down the illest, rarest sneakers I could find, and keeping them as box fresh as I could, for as long as possible. And social situations arose where dope sneakers could not only elevate one’s status, but simultaneously, for the first time in my life, put one’s actual physical safety at risk. This was particularly the case in the adidas-obsessed city of Boston.
Boston was now a weekend destination for me and a few like-minded friends: a subway ride to semi-freedom, a place to partake of my growing obsession with hip-hop and all its trappings. To gawk at the latest sneakers, hats, and clothes, to catalog the graffiti scene blossoming along the train tracks, and to interact, occasionally, with kids with an even more fervent adidas addiction, and a more aggressive desire to acquire more of them, even if they were attached to the feet of some suburban kids at that particular moment.
Despite being a small city, Boston was in the midst of an unmistakable surge of violence, and nearly all of it was among its youth. Neighborhood gangs laid claim to the gear of various sports teams: the Hecla Bulls, Heath Street Heat, Orchard Park Trailblazers, Humboldt Raiders, Vamp Hill Kings. All had a particular taste for adidas, as all Boston heads did at the time, but one crew took that to a rather unnatural extreme. Intervale, later profiled in a seminal 1990 Sports Illustrated article chronicling the spate of crime involving sneakers and athletic gear, decked themselves strictly in adidas. They robbed kids for their adidas regularly, and, in a display of equal parts heartlessness and conspicuous consumption, took to tying the laces together and throwing the ill-gotten sneakers into a large tree on the corner of their block – the adidas tree. Their handshake: three fingers extended.
Shit had, you could say, gotten a bit out of hand, as it were. Still, even as the potential for danger grew over the ensuing years – spending more time socially in the city with AAU basketball teammates, partying in neighboring towns with new and unfamiliar faces, many of whom were of a like and abiding sneaker-focused mindset – so too did my love affair with the trefoil.
Harry the Greek eventually closed, as did Jones, Crystals, et al, all victims of neighborhood gentrification, so gone were the cash only transactions that netted a pair of crispy Forums for about a third off retail, and the subsequent hustle to get your ass back to the train in one piece now that a whole grip of kids who also happened to be in the store when you copped them knew you were a whiteboy who, in their eyes, was just begging to get his new Forums (and what the heck, why not his old one for good measure?!) taken.
As more time passed, and adulthood arrived, for some reason the Forum’s presence wained. Even in Boston. Other than Frank the Butcher’s spot on recreation of the Hustler’s Crest version (in buttery raspberry nubuck in particular) a few years back, it doesn’t seem to capture this generation as fully as it did mine. Perhaps it’s the fact that its pricepoint no longer elicits a drop of the jaw, thus its appeal as an outward harbinger that you have paper, and quite a bit of it, has lost its power. Yeezys, even Common Projects occupy that space now I suppose. But I still rock the 7 different pairs I have, Velcro always undone, with regularity:
Tan mono Snakeskin
Red mono Gruen
Raspberry mono nubuck Hustler’s Crest
Mint Green mono mi adidas custom
Pink mono custom
Gray/White Nom de Guerre
Purple/White suede
Add those to the 11 different variations of Stan Smiths I own, my Pro Model 83s in white/black and black/white, and 5 pairs of adilettes, among others, and safe to say this adi-phile is still putting in his work, and proudly repping his hometown, even as I operate far away in Brooklyn. And that matters to me.
But I miss the days when it seemed to matter more. When I felt like getting those Gazelles FROM CANADA was as close to life and death as I could fathom, and when the Eastbay catalog was as close as I got to both the internet and pornography. When I guess I just didn’t know anything better.
Well now I do know, and I’m still not convinced there is “better”. I still ride the train when I’m home facing out the window lurching to see if there are any remnants of RYZE or ALERT of NERV burners still living on the back walls of track-lining buildings. I have plenty of Nikes, NBs, etc., but for me it will always mean more to rep my hometown’s mantra of Threes & Trees (adidas & Timberlands) to the fullest. And like my mum always told me: “When you get older and your feet are done growing, and you make your own money, you can buy all the sneakers you want!” Like any good momma’s boy, I’m just doing what I was told. And I will continue to do so, in a manner befitting how I Dream About Sneakers: All Day.
flavormost 
