Snake America Eighty Four
Snake is a biannual magazine ... covering after-market goods on eBay. This week: completed items, and a fitness thing at the bottom (Leg Day Observer). Subscribe for emails!
eBay: Fake Jordan IIs! ($35, not sold, but not available). The market for fake Nikes has always been brisk and without the peculiarities that plague the sanctioned product. Bootleggers don't waste effort -- only the god tier gets knocked off. The popularity of Nikes you can buy in stores runs off whim and kids. Shoes like Nike Air Bakins and Flightposites, both teardrop high-tops and ignored and specialized, respectively, show up in high school. These were dollar-bin stranges! These were weird shoes! If you wore them you attended gallery openings or hiked! Most of this says something about the quality of kids these days ... the teens are swagged tf out ... but tight and fixed economic priorities drive the fake Nike market. You see Air Forces and Air Jordan 1s. You sometimes see Air Maxes; you don't see Bakins. The abovementioned are a knock-off of the least popular original Air Jordan model. Who greenlit that? Word is the same factories which produced real Nikes during the day would make fake sneakers for the bad man at night. Like, the factory would finish its Jordans run at 4, or midnight, and then the third shift snuck in, paid cash and pushed out fake Jordans or Air Force Is, always those, with looser stitching and at bad quality. (The lore also goes that fake Nikes were consistently made lousier than real Nikes, which at first contradicts the factory storyline ... but really creates a picture of rushed bootleggers chasing cheap cash but with a benevolent respect for the genuine artifact.)
It's a story too good to check. Nike ... I would think ... had round-the-clock shifts in 1987, when the above-mentioned Jordans ripped off above came out. The Jordan II didn't do well -- it did worse than the 1, which hit dollar racks. Nike went public in 1980. I wonder, if at a board meeting, or at a stockholders meeting, bootleg sneakers came up when they went into the line items ... Phil Knight or his kid, muttered aloud, "I know the scheme these fake Nikes guys have is pretty creative, but -- and I hate spoiling the party for anyone -- we should use our factory at night."
None of this is addressed in the 1981 annual report to shareholders, a copy of which is on this French website as a PDF. I'm not sure if they were bootlegging Nikes back then. I don't know who most of these Directors or Officers (last page) are ... I googled Gary Kurtz and found some stuff about Star Wars and a review of Phil Knight's biography, Shoe Dog, on Amazon, criticizing a lack of Kurtz, among other things:
First financial affairs were run by Gary Kurtz not even mentioned that I could find. He managed the $150 million +- line of credit with 5 banks. There were rough times, especially when the company was struggling to figure out what it was and got into the "underwear" business. During this same period Nike ended up with 14 million outdated shoes. They were near losing their line of credit. Extremely fortunately the man who invented the air concept came along. This combined with Michael Jordon saved this company in the 1990's. All of this never mentioned in this soupy rendition of history.
Kurtz invented Nike Air? Lots of questions here. But these are the latest-model fake Nikes from the 1980s I've seen. If you don't count Air Maxes, the illegal fun only returned with Spongebob SquarePants.
eBay: Nike Blazers, 1980, $10: What a country this is when a pair of these sneakers goes for $10. These are from 1980 and have the fat-belly swoosh that they discontinued around that year. This is a mis-listed auction and eBay changed up their categories sometime this summer and you can't find anything anymore on hard searches. Another pair of later-dated shoes in a different size had a better description and went for a hundred more. I think these are a pair of All-Court Highs. You can't throw a rock without finding the lows. Somewhat related is a colony of various era LL Bean boat and tote bags in rare colorways which ended at different price points. A half dozen sold over the past year and change and then that many over six weeks. Two red and blues have ended at $102 (Sept. 22) and $175 (Oct. 7), respectively. They are the brightest ones. Blue and red, which I think I like the most? at $68, (Sept. 7) under the reserve, then relisted and sold for $52, (Oct. 13) and another at $90 (Oct. 22). They are really American looking. Blue and green at $99 with no bids (Oct. 21). And green and blue at $185 (Oct. 21). If you don't like bright colors, there's a white and purple one from the 1960s that wasn't produced in large quantities, and looks like all the other bags until you're up close. I have to assume the same person bought every model to open a museum.
Leg Day Observer -- Issue 1: Check out this Instagram post from under-105 kilogram (231 lb.) Uzbeki weightlifter and Rio gold medalist Ruslan Nurudinov. He's promoting a restaurant called Al Pacino. Nurudinov is the strongest non-obese man in the world. Translated and paraphrased, he thanks City Card, which is some sort of discount card used in Tashkent (the capital), and Al Pacino restaurant, which doesn't serve Italian food but looks pretty good, for the environment and atmosphere. I wonder if he's in there all the time or if they have to pay him to eat at Al Pacino Restaurant. Dmitri Klokov, the moderately well-known weightlifter who competed in that class, is holding a "Power Weekend"(1) in Moscow. Nurudinov hasn't been announced as a guest, but so far only Russians have been invited.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: Ended items, Jordans and Navy jeans (Ended).
Snake Before That: Ended items, including the Kools Penguin (Ended.)
(1) his second.