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Esta página no está disponible en español. Sports Illustrated Rockin' The Retros By Alexander Wolff December 22, 2003 By definition, a cutting-edge trend can't begin with a mass- marketing campaign. Style dictated from the top down will have no Kid Zero, no Promethean urchin who spilled onto the sidewalk one inspired morning in customized joints or a jersey that no one had ever rocked. In the late '80s, as Nike, Reebok and Adidas turned to multimillion-dollar endorsers and flogged signature lines of basketball shoes, kids on the street could no longer ask, "Ay yo, Money, where'd you get those?" Everyone knew, because everyone wore the same few things. Robert (Bobbito) Garcia, author of Where'd You Get Those? New York City's Sneaker Culture: 1960-1987, is a music consultant, deejay, movie actor and writer but also an over-the-moon basketball Benny, a former pro ballplayer in Puerto Rico who still travels with a trick ball handling troupe, Project Playground, that does halftime shows around the world. Garcia cut off his sneaker survey in '87 because that's when the money and marketers took over--when high school stars began to choose colleges based on whether the team wore Nikes, and basketball shoes became, as Garcia writes, "over-designed and straight-up ugly." Bobbito is a throwback himself, to an era when kids weren't blindly brand-loyal. Coming of age in New York City during the late '70s and the '80s, he cared less about a shoe's provenance than its look, feel, performance and ability to confer distinction. "Envy is one of the seven deadly sins, and the easiest way to avoid it is to always be ahead of everyone in the sneaker game," he writes. While watching NBA games on TV, he confesses, he used to hope players would go down with ankle sprains, so the camera would bore in and he could check out brand, lacing, colors and customizations. Garcia recalls a day in the early '80s when an interloper showed up at Harlem's Goat Park, "a white dude with an old school jump shot like butter, like he'd played with the Fort Wayne Pistons. He had on a pair of One-Stars"--the Converse model that appeared in stores for the 1974-75 season and disappeared, just like that. Was it the guy's game that had Bobbito and his posse fiending for those shoes? Or the shoes that had them bugging over his game? In the retelling, Garcia can't divorce one from the other. In his head, style and substance had long since merged into one. You might think Garcia would welcome the vogue in retro shoes, for it's allowing kids to recapture the foot-fetishism that fired his own youth. But as a connoisseur, not a collector, he rolls his eyes at patrons of Soho boutiques like Classic Kicks, and the Alife Rivington Club, a tiny, signless, buzz-your-way-in space on a half- abandoned, graffiti-festooned block on the Lower East Side, where the door opens onto deep-pile carpet, wood paneling and wall- mounted glass display cases of shoes in hard-to-find colors. "Some of us have been retro for 30 years," Bobbito says, "and now we've got people wearing jerseys who don't even play ball. I mean, they suck at ball. Everything's been taken so far out of context. Now sneakers have become such icons that they're being bought and never worn. Yeah, we used to buy joints, put 'em on ice, then bust 'em out a few years later to be able to say, 'Ha! You're not wearing these!' But to never wear 'em? It's freaky. "A lot of people assume that the NBA influences kids, and that's true. But kids influence the NBA, too, especially with so many players in the league so young and from urban communities heavily influenced by hip-hop culture. Off-season, guys come back around, see the thin sideburns, the Uptowns, the Mitchell & Ness and say, 'Lemme rock that s--- in the league next year!' "But I get a little tight when I see a kid in Nike Dunks or Adidas [Superstar] shell-toes who doesn't know where they come from or who wore them initially. I mean, when I was 13, I knew who the Harlem Rens were. I knew about that dude from Stanford, Hank Luisetti. I do mind if people wear Wes Unseld and don't know who Wes Unseld was. Mitchell & Ness is a status symbol in the ghetto, which is f---ed up--you got nothing in the bank, no vision for owning a home, and buying throwback jerseys is to your detriment unless you have money to burn. But what I hope happens with the retro phenomenon is that people basically look back and say, Wow. That they learn history." Now that we're lousy with retro shoes and retro shirts and retro caps and retro sweats and retro headbands, it's impossible not to wonder if someone will fill the lone niche remaining. We're talking, of course, about true retro shorts. Mention this to Big Rube, and his face registers discomfort, contempt and every emotion in between. (Is it John Stockton he's picturing? Isiah Thomas? Bob Kurland in satin Marilyn Monroes?) "I call 'em coochie cutters," Harley says, shaking his head emphatically. "No. The culture wouldn't accept it." It's the culture, after all, that leaks the gas. Long before a Reuben Harley or Bobbito Garcia or Claude Johnson puts a match to it. Quote: What we're witnessing isn't merely a convergence of sports, fashion and music but a SMOKING, TWISTED THREE-CAR PILEUP. "THIS ISN'T A FAD," Harley says. "These uniforms are the history of sports. Styles come and go, but you can't change the '79 Magic Johnson jersey."
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