Designed For Basketball
Nike Dunk, a basketball shoe model, has a simple, low-tech design. Nike had marketing success with the shoes at various times since its introduction. The original style for Dunks didn't include air cushion technology. However, the design followed the 1983 introduction of the Air Force 1 model, the first Basketball Shoe with Air Cushion Technology, (Nike Air Tailwind in 1978 was the first shoe with air cushion technology). which was a key model in Nike's successful strategy of surpassing its rival Converse and aided in the rise of its stock. Two years later, Nike was facing a sales crisis, in part due to Adidas' return to popularity.
In response, Nike invited Michael Jordan to be its advertising endorser, a significant investment that affected the global basketball shoe market. Nike used Air Force 1 as the original prototype for the first pair of signature shoes for Jordan, the Air Jordan One. Soon all of the top college teams were strongly urged to have their own team shoe, which led to the Dunk.
The Nike Dunk has a lower profile outer sole than its parent shoes. The intent was a lighter weight and to stay closer to the ground. In addition, the paneling was revised to improve basketball game performance during pivoting and blocking. The Dunk was used to spearhead what Nike called the ’College Colors’ program. They signed some college basketball teams (and their coaches) to an exclusive Dunk sponsorship deal; in simple terms, the deal meant that each colored pair of Dunks matched their uniforms.
Read more about this topic: Dunk (footwear)
Famous quotes containing the words designed for, designed and/or basketball:
“As I walked on the glacis I heard the sound of a bagpipe from the soldiers’ dwellings in the rock, and was further soothed and affected by the sight of a soldier’s cat walking up a cleated plank in a high loophole designed for mus-catry, as serene as Wisdom herself, and with a gracefully waving motion of her tail, as if her ways were ways of pleasantness and all her paths were peace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Haggerty: Girls! Girls! Girls! Be careful of my hats.
Chorus Girl: Well, we gotta get down on the stage.
Haggerty: I don’t care. I won’t allow you to ruin them.
Dressing Room Matron: See, I told you. They were too high and too wide.
Haggerty: Well, Big Woman, I designed the costumes for the show, not the doors for the theater.
Dressing Room Matron: I know that. If you had, they’d have been done in lavender.”
—James Gleason (1886–1959)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)