Brooks Sports, Inc. was founded in 1914 by Morris Goldenberg and is a company that produces high performance shoes, soccer and running apparel. Brooks originally produced bathing shoes in 1917 before moving into sports in the 1930s by producing baseball cleats in 1920 and football cleats in the 1930s. In 1979 the world champion Pittsburgh Pirates endorsed Brooks shoes. In 1984 quarterback Dan Marino endorsed Brooks athletic footwear.
The name Brooks was selected by Morris Goldenberg as an Anglicized substitute for his wife's maiden name of Bruchs.
Brooks Sports, Inc. headquarters are located in Bothell, Washington, USA. Brooks was acquired by Russell Corporation in late 2004. On August 2, 2006 Russell officially announced its sale to Berkshire Hathaway.
Brooks is the main sponsor of the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project and was also the exclusive uniforms provider of the Chile national football team. This relationship ended in 2010 when Puma signed a deal with the Chilean Football Federation until 2015.
Famous quotes containing the words brooks and/or sports:
“Since [Rousseau’s] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)