One Man and His Shoes director Yemi Bamiro on the good, the bad and the ugly of Air Jordan

Giant steps: Filmmaker Yemi Bamiro was "hell-bent" on tracking down the people behind the rise of Air Jordan
Natasha Pszenicki
Jochan Embley16 October 2020

Growing up as a teenager in the Nineties, Yemi Bamiro knew two things: “The Bulls were amazing and Michael Jordan was God.”

He wore a Chicago Bulls jacket, despite living in Deptford, some 4,000 miles from the NBA team’s home arena. And even though he “wasn’t a massive basketball fan” he still deified the Bulls’ talisman, widely considered the greatest player of all time. But there was something else about Jordan: his shoes. In the 35 years since they launched, the sneakers have changed the face of popular culture, marketing and sport. They’ve got a dark side, too — these shoes have sparked violence and, at worst, murder.

Bamiro’s new documentary, One Man and His Shoes, which is screening at the London Film Festival via BFI Player next week, explores the good, the bad and the ugly of Air Jordan, the multi-billion-dollar sneaker brand built by Nike, with the basketball player at the centre of it all. The film, which has been seven years in the making, initially started as a project on Air Jordan collectors (one is featured in the film, speaking from his dedicated room of floor-to-ceiling shoeboxes) but after a year or so, Bamiro began to wonder whether the topic would sustain a feature-length documentary.

“I started thinking, ‘How did this brand get to the point where, 35 years later, nothing has ever eclipsed it and we’re still talking about it?’” he says. Bamiro became “hell-bent” on tracking down the people behind the shoes. The film’s high-profile interviewees range from Jordan’s long-time agent to a former NBA commissioner. After years of “prodding”, he also got Sonny Vaccaro, a former Nike executive and visionary basketball scout who, while Jordan was still in college, convinced the brand to put its entire marketing heft behind this unproven youngster. Jordan signed his Nike contract on the same day he made his NBA debut.

One notable absence in the film (except visually: his face is all over it) is the man himself. Did Bamiro ever try to get Jordan on camera? “I never imagined that we would ever get Jordan and part of me didn’t necessarily feel that it was appropriate,” he says. “It’s not necessarily a film about him. It’s a film about his sneakers and everything that surrounds that — the political and socioeconomic considerations, what it did for popular culture, what it did for race. In one way, he’s directly involved in all those things, but in another way, he’s not. It’s kind of like the shoe took on a life of itself.”

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For Bamiro, the shoe’s surge to prominence was “a case of lightning striking at the right time”. There was some luck: for one, Jordan just happened to be incredible at basketball. What’s more, the first shoe, Air Jordan 1, was launched in 1984 and banned by the NBA shortly after as the colour scheme didn’t match league regulations. This, as the film explains, played right into Nike’s hands, giving them an unbuyable, anti-establishment cool. But Nike’s marketing genius was also an undeniable force. The shoes were deliberately kept in low supply, generating huge demand. They tapped into the cultural zeitgeist, too: by running commercials featuring Jordan and Spike Lee, playing the character from the actor-director’s film She’s Gotta Have It, Jordan’s celebrity rocketed.

“You’ve got to understand, no company had ever had an African-American pitchman as good as Michael Jordan,” Bamiro says. “No company had ever had an African-American pitchman that was unapologetically black and didn’t dumb himself down or compromise — and did the things he did on a basketball court. The average human can’t do those things. The companies were savvy enough to understand that. It’s like, ‘If I can’t do what Michael Jordan is doing, then maybe I can have a piece of what he represents’.” And so the shoes became a must-have commodity. The film explains how everything — the scarcity, status and symbolism — was ramped up to such a degree that violence started to break out when the shoes were released. By the end of the Eighties, murders were being directly linked to Jordans.

In one case, covered in 1990 by journalist Rick Telander, who features in the film, a 15-year-old boy was choked to death for his two-week-old sneakers. And the killings continued. Bamiro travelled to the US to speak to the family of Joshua Woods, who was shot dead in 2012 for his Jordans. The interviews are heartbreaking and at times make you gasp, particularly when Joshua’s sister, Jocelyn, says Jordan sent his condolences to the family in the form of a new pair of shoes.

Bamiro doubts whether Jordan personally sent the shoes and thinks it was a “faux pas” by someone in the Nike’s PR department. “I found that obviously shocking, but what I found most shocking is that Joshua was buried in a pair of Jordans. I could never get my head around that. Jocelyn talks [in the film] about [how] that’s the only thing he wore and that he loved Air Jordans. That’s the level to which these shoes are worshipped in some communities across the States. They really mean something to people. To this day, that blows my mind.”

In 1990 Jordan told Sports Illustrated that he had hoped to help others with his endorsement, and he had “never thought” it would result in people harming each other. “Everyone likes to be admired, but when it comes to kids actually killing each other... then you have to re-evaluate things,” he said.

Was it enough? The film presents a carefully balanced view. “You could argue that maybe he felt being the best basketball player on the planet was enough,” Bamiro says. “Maybe that was enough to inspire and motivate people, and almost be this beacon of hope that an African-American man from the place he was from was able to achieve all these things. Why should he be marching down the street and actively seen in terms of visibility?”

As Bamiro says, the rise of Brand Jordan is “almost the perfect story of capitalism, consumerism and marketing”. The film’s audience can decide whether or not that tale has a happy ending.

On BFI player from October 13-16 as part of the BFI London Film Festival, bfi.org.uk/london-film-festival; in cinemas October 23 and on VOD on October 26. onemanandhisshoes.com

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