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  • [sea birds calling]

  • [Tinker] I probably think about feet

  • a lot more than the average person.

  • As a shoe designer, I have to.

  • Our feet were made to walk, and run and climb once in a while.

  • Bare feet can be great at all of that.

  • But what the modern athlete asks of their feet

  • is far beyond what they were originally designed to do.

  • My job is to think about how to make these very capable natural instruments

  • perform even better.

  • [upbeat harmonica music playing]

  • That's Tinker Hatfield!

  • Y'all serious? That's Tink.

  • Tinker Hatfield?

  • He's a legend!

  • [young man] Is that the dude that created Jordans?

  • [funky electric piano playing]

  • [Parker] In the '80s, Tinker Hatfield started to define

  • what working with an athlete was all about.

  • It was a relationship with the athlete,

  • really digging in, getting to know them as athletes.

  • Ultimately, it's about performance.

  • But there's so many more layers on top of that.

  • [Jordan] Tinker is a mad scientist.

  • He came from pole vaulting.

  • When I played the game, it was about jumping,

  • so, I mean, it was easy to find that synergy

  • and a great complement between the two of us.

  • What we did as a team was we were able to build a product that sustained time.

  • It catered to the athlete at the highest level

  • to the point where they still can play in that same shoe,

  • thirty years later.

  • [funky electric piano continues playing]

  • [song ends abruptly]

  • Well, that was crappy.

  • I never used to think about design.

  • I was always focused on being an athlete.

  • In high school, I won some state championships,

  • and I even received a full athletic scholarship

  • to the University of Oregon,

  • where I met an enormously influential man by the name of Bill Bowerman.

  • Coach, I'd be interested in your reaction

  • in participating in the coaching of these world-class athletes.

  • First, Hal, call me Bill.

  • Remember, I don't like to be called coach. I am sensitive about that.

  • [chuckles] Okay.

  • [Tinker] His real title that he liked was Teacher of Competitive Response.

  • He was trying to help people learn how to win.

  • He is also one of the two founders of Nike.

  • So when I came here, he was designing Nike running shoes and track spikes.

  • He was liable to do and try anything to make his athletes better.

  • He used to have a little cobbler shop right underneath the grandstands.

  • If you weren't careful,

  • he might just pop out of that cobbler shop and grab you by the scruff of the shirt

  • and tell you to try on these shoes and run around the track.

  • Sometimes they would be great,

  • and sometimes you would come back bleeding.

  • One of my events was the pole vault,

  • and Bill believed that I had the potential to be a national champion,

  • and even become an Olympian.

  • [slow-paced music playing]

  • Pole-vaulting is fraught with all kinds of danger.

  • If you don't have a real strong sense of

  • "I'm committing to doing this, and I'm doing it,"

  • you can get really hurt.

  • In order to deal with that, you have to kind of just go for it.

  • You have to have this mentality,

  • like you're going to just blow through a wall.

  • You can't back off.

  • Your goal is to somehow get upside down and fly through the air and go over.

  • There is a moment where you are flying.

  • You sort of wake up, and you go, "Wow."

  • My sophomore year, I fell from about 17 feet on an uneven surface

  • and tore my ankle in half.

  • Required five surgeries and two years of rehabilitation.

  • [piano music playing]

  • I was pretty depressed,

  • laying in the hospital that night

  • overhearing the doctors talking about "This kid's career is over."

  • There was no way

  • that most of the coaching staff felt like I was ever gonna contribute

  • to the track team again.

  • What was really great though, for me,

  • wasn't anything that Bill Bowerman said, it was what he did.

  • Bill would build me special track spikes that had a heel lift on one side

  • because I was limping.

  • That all added to my ability to be a problem solver for other people,

  • because I understand the consequences of injury.

  • He protected me from being just dismissed from the team and losing my scholarship.

  • I had no idea how much work a discipline like Architecture would be.

  • The good news was that I found out that I could draw

  • and it was almost by accident.

  • That was a pretty big surprise.

  • This took a long time to draw, I'll tell you that.

  • Look at all that little-- that was with a Rapidograph...

  • And those little tiny marks...

  • During my college years in Architecture school here,

  • I also was doing some work for Bill Bowerman.

  • We came across an actual drawing that I did

  • of an early design for one of the very early Nike track spikes.

  • I just wouldn't just, like, tell him what I thought,

  • I would also draw and write down

  • some of my, I guess you could say, interpretations of his design.

  • In this case, he asked me to try out some track spikes he was working with...

  • and they didn't work.

  • They actually unscrewed themselves every time I would go and train in them.

  • Unbeknownst to all of us, I was learning, I guess,

  • how to design shoes and solve problems for athletes right off the bat.

  • Go look at the feet of a pro-athlete who's played basketball for ten years.

  • They're trashed, because their shoes are too tight.

  • They tie their shoes so tight because they need them tight,

  • but they stay that way throughout all their practices and all their games,

  • and their feet become deformed and damaged and sometimes it incapacitates them.

  • Our studies tell us that if you take better care of your feet

  • and get better blood flow, a better fit and better comfort,

  • you actually play better.

  • If you're standing around for a free throw,

  • wouldn't it be great if your shoes loosened up and let your--

  • let the blood flow back into your feet

  • and gave your feet a little bit of a rest?

  • And as soon as the person shoots the free throw, the shoes know it?

  • They know you're going to start moving quickly

  • and they "zzzim" back up again.

  • You go sit on the bench. Why would you leave your shoes tight?

  • They would just go "zzzz..." They would relax.

  • That's when I started E.A.R.L.

  • E. A. R. L. Electro Adaptive Reactive Lacing.

  • [upbeat music playing]

  • The first person I talked to about it was really developer Tiffany Beers,

  • to see if we could even entertain the idea of starting a project like this.

  • What did you say?

  • Well, I said I wasn't sure

  • -[Tinker chuckles] -because I didn't report to him.

  • And so I went and talked to my managers.

  • They said, "You don't say no to Tinker. Yeah, you just took the project.

  • If he asked you, you're taking it."

  • [both laugh]

  • [Beers] We started to focus primarily on the mechanism.

  • Like, how do we tighten the laces?

  • How do we get it small enough that it's performance and it still looks good?

  • [Tinker] I think this is a whole new product design

  • that will be part of the future.

  • I think there's art involved in design.

  • But to me, I don't think of it as art.

  • My perception of art is that it's really

  • the ultimate self-expression from a creative individual.

  • For me as a designer,

  • it is not the ultimate goal to become self-expressive.

  • The end goal is to solve a problem for someone else,

  • and hopefully it looks great to someone else

  • and it's cool to someone else.

  • [upbeat music playing]

  • This is how design works for me.

  • I started drawing space.

  • I was really just trying to reflect my mood at the time.

  • I started to have a little bit of fun with the actual planets

  • and put faces on them and...

  • I put George Jetsen.

  • You know, I have a Volkswagen Bus,

  • Porsche Speedster, peace symbols and fingers.

  • I don't even know why I am doing this, I'm just doing it.

  • I drew a cheetah foot that's actually embedded inside of a sneaker.

  • And I'm kind of moving through from that first page of space.

  • Now I'm getting more specific about innovation in general.

  • I remember somebody telling me it'd be great

  • if Nike could do shoes that were invisible and I drew the Invisible Man.

  • This is just all stuff that's coming to my head

  • and I'm just sketching.

  • All of this stuff ended up in a drawing of a shoe.

  • A stream of consciousness can lead you some place.

  • You may not even know where you're headed,

  • but somehow you end up somewhere, and here I ended up with a shoe.

  • [TV commercial announcer] Today at Nike, we know even more.

  • We developed one of the most sophisticated sport research labs in the world.

  • [Parker] Nike had grown up very fast.

  • We were leading the industry,

  • focused on basketball and running.

  • [upbeat music playing]

  • Reebok came along, there was this aerobics craze.

  • [Tinker] Reebok invented aerobics shoes. It was a whole new thing.

  • They had the right product at the right time,

  • and they actually passed Nike in size.

  • So there was a bit of a panic and Nike was laying people off right and left.

  • They were also thinking that they needed to upgrade their design group.

  • So, I was invited to be a part of a 24-hour design contest.

  • [bike revs]

  • [Parker] Tinker wasn't a shoe designer at the time.

  • He was designing trade shows and displays and retail.

  • [Tinker] I worked the whole 24 hours. I didn't go to bed that night.

  • Most of the other designers,

  • I think, just tried to work off of what they were already doing,

  • and it wasn't really anything very unique in terms of storytelling.

  • I came back in with a big presentation,

  • sort of having fun with the fact that this was the perfect shoe

  • to ride a motor scooter in.

  • [laughs]

  • And then get out and then jog around and walk around a little bit.

  • Two days after the competition,

  • I was... I wasn't even asked,

  • I was told that I was now a footwear designer for Nike. [chuckles]

  • In a very short period of time, I pretty much became the lead designer.

  • [guitar music playing]

  • One of my very first projects was the Air Max.

  • I felt like this was an opportunity to think way differently.

  • Nike was encapsulating gas inside a urethane airbag

  • for a cushioning component.

  • I thought, "Let's make the bag a little bit wider, make sure it's stable,

  • but then let's remove part of the midsole, so we actually see it."

  • The closest you'd come to anything before that was, I remember as a kid,

  • seeing Elton John having high-heeled shoes with a goldfish inside of them.

  • Right? I mean, it was simply, like, very... punk even.

  • [Tinker] I had gone to Paris

  • and seen a very controversial and loved or mostly hated building,

  • The Georges Pompidou Center, designed by Renzo Piano.

  • It was a building with all of the inside mechanics on the outside of the building.

  • He painted everything in primary colors just to piss off people even more.

  • I was very much inspired by that building,

  • and that's how I ended up exposing these airbags in the Air Max.

  • After those sketches came out,

  • it was widely discussed that I had pushed it too far.

  • People were trying to get us fired,

  • they were screaming like there was no way in the world

  • that we could ever sell a shoe with an exposed airbag

  • that looked fragile, like it could be punctured.

  • The Air Max One took off.

  • It was an amazing success story

  • for not just Nike, but for all of footwear design.

  • It's built on taking a risk for a good reason,

  • which was to tell a story and to also make a better product.

  • [funky music playing]

  • At the same time that the Air Max came out,

  • I realized that nobody was in the right shoe most of the time.

  • Everybody was trying to play basketball in running shoes

  • or trying to run in basketball shoes,

  • and you would see people getting hurt, rolling their ankles.

  • I thought we needed to design a shoe, and that became their first cross-trainer.

  • It needed some lateral stability.

  • There was a mid-foot strap to strap down that part of your foot,

  • so then you could participate in all sports in the same workout,

  • and not have to change your shoes.

  • We didn't think that it was going to sell all that well,

  • but John McEnroe was having trouble with his tennis.

  • [shouting] This is absurd!

  • I can't believe this!

  • [shouts]

  • He decided to wear 'em, and liked them so much that he wore 'em on television.

  • That sort of solved the problem of people,

  • sort of like, "Whoa, that shoe's so weird. It's so different."

  • Then you had this push from the advertising side,

  • it was all about promoting the Air Max and the Air Trainer.

  • We had broken through some sort of paradigm

  • in how athletic footwear was designed.

  • I remember talking to my wife after that,

  • and I said, "I think I'm gonna like doing this stuff

  • if I can just get some sleep."

  • Now let's see here...

  • In a lot of ways, design is about predicting the needs of the future.

  • The E.A.R.L. self-lacing idea actually came from my work on a movie.

  • In 1987, I was asked to get involved in the Back to the Future series.

  • [futuristic music playing]

  • They really needed a special shoe design that would fit into the year 2015,

  • which was 25 years in the future.

  • This is the early storyboards for the Back to the Future II movie.

  • They were talking about magnetic levitation.

  • "He can stand on the ceiling or walk up a wall."

  • It's an old joke. It's an old gag.

  • I felt like it shouldn't really be a gag at all.

  • I wanted something that would actually excite people about the future.

  • I just felt like maybe something that would happen in the future...

  • Shoes would be smart and could sense who you were

  • and when you put it on, it comes alive and shapes to your foot.

  • It's your shoe. The shoe knows you.

  • [whirs, beeps]

  • Power laces! All right!

  • [whirs, beeps]

  • [Tinker] We kept getting requests over the years

  • to do the Back to the Future shoe.

  • And finally in 2006, I went to Mark Parker and I said,

  • "You know, why don't we go ahead and try and make one of these things?

  • You know, a replica of that old movie shoe."

  • The shoe that was on the set was actually a dummy shoe,

  • in the sense that it wasn't actually working.

  • There was a prop person who pulled the laces down tight on the set

  • to make it look like it was a real working shoe.

  • But we were always intrigued with, you know,

  • actually making a sample that worked.

  • [Beers] This is the very first working try-on-able Back to the Future shoe

  • that we made.

  • This was from 2007, and back then...

  • [Tinker] The motor was--

  • stuff wasn't quite as small as it is today.

  • [both laugh]

  • [Beers] We have to plug it into the wall.

  • It was either that or the old car battery in the backpack.

  • It took a solid year and a half of just trial and error, trial and error.

  • And so we'll run this.

  • [whirring]

  • I was very proud that we got this far.

  • I thought, "Oh, this is going to be amazing."

  • But we had to wait for some technology to advance.

  • So motors had to get a little smaller, faster, stronger.

  • We actually put it on pause for a little while there.

  • [Tinker] It was great to see

  • that Tiffany and her team could get a shoe to do just that,

  • but clearly it was a long way away from looking exactly like the movie shoe.

  • [calming electric guitar music playing]

  • People struggle with stuff they don't understand,

  • design that's different than what they're used to.

  • Yet what creates excitement and gets people to pay attention,

  • and may actually lead to some breakthroughs in performance...

  • is to kind of force the disruptive nature of like, "Whoa, that's a big idea."

  • That's what I do. That's my job.

  • -[Tinker exclaims] -[thudding]

  • -[indistinct chatter] -[man] Are you all right?

  • [Tinker] A basic design is always functional,

  • but a great one will say something.

  • [rock music playing]

  • In 1988, Andre Agassi is gonna be the next big American tennis star.

  • I think he was 19 maybe, and I hadn't heard of him.

  • I went to Las Vegas, and I spent some time with him.

  • He had long hair, kind of, basically like a long mullet.

  • He was just very youthful and young

  • and just not like any tennis player I'd ever worked with.

  • Everything in tennis at that time was kind of the same and boring.

  • [Tinker] It was a new kind of style of tennis, which was basically

  • just get at the baseline and just hit the ball hard as you can.

  • I really started to explore the fact that this young tennis player

  • did not grow up going to country clubs. He did not grow up wearing white.

  • So I'm like, "Man, this is so unlike tennis."

  • He not only designed the shoes,

  • which were quite outrageous, they were kind of hot pink,

  • and the outfit was wild.

  • [Tinker] So we drew Andre wearing that denim short with a Lycra under-short.

  • Absolutely meant to be anti-tennis.

  • I coined the phrase "anti-country club,"

  • because it's not always just about the shoe design.

  • If you have an athlete with the right personality,

  • you can challenge the perception of the entire sport.

  • [crowd cheering]

  • [upbeat music playing]

  • [Semmelhack] In the late '70s and '80s,

  • you begin to see superstar basketball players,

  • such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Walt Frazier,

  • get signature sneakers that then become central to urban fashion.

  • That allowed Nike to create the Air Jordan brand.

  • Going into the Michael Jordan Building, I used to work in here.

  • Michael's honor. I think they have all the shoes in white.

  • It's pretty cool. [clicks tongue]

  • [string music playing]

  • Michael Jordan was Nike's big star.

  • He was unhappy with some of his early shoes

  • and was getting close to leaving.

  • Nike leadership and Phil Knight, Nike's CEO,

  • told me I was designing the next Air Jordans.

  • I don't think I understood the gravity of the situation.

  • You know, how important Michael Jordan was to Nike.

  • It was six months behind schedule by the time that it was given to me.

  • So it had to be another hurry up, no sleep for weeks and months...

  • traveling back and forth to Asia with all the developers

  • and getting a prototype in.

  • We were going to have a big meeting with Michael Jordan...

  • Phil Knight, myself,

  • head of Sports Marketing, both of Michael's parents.

  • Michael didn't show up for four hours.

  • He was actually on the golf course with some other people.

  • And they had convinced him he should just jump ship.

  • But ultimately Michael shows up,

  • and he was kind of in a bad mood,

  • came in and just said, "Well, what do you got?"

  • Phil Knight took over from that point and just said, "Well, thanks for coming.

  • I mean, we've been waiting a while, but we hope it's worth it.

  • [inhales sharply]

  • Take it away, Tinker."

  • I'm more of a... You've got to actually show me the shoe, you know?

  • He storytells and then he draws

  • and then, you know, he shows me all the pictures of it,

  • and I still can't visualize it until you put it in my hand.

  • I pulled the shroud off the shoe, and there it was right in front of him.

  • Phil Knight's sitting on pins and needles, his parents are over there.

  • He looks at the shoe, looks at me and he goes, "Tell me more."

  • I said, "Remember we talked about how you wanted a midcut,

  • and no one had ever done a midcut height for a basketball shoe?

  • It's just what you wanted.

  • Remember we talked about how the shoe should already feel

  • like they're broken-in and perfect to wear

  • when they're brand-new, right out of the box?

  • This shoe is made out of really soft leather,

  • so it's reinforced in the right places, but when you put this on,

  • it's gonna be like glove leather, and it's just gonna fit great.

  • And then remember picking some new materials

  • that no one had ever seen on a basketball shoe before?

  • And so that elephant print."

  • When he told me about the leather itself and the elephant print,

  • things of that nature,

  • you know, he kind of won me over.

  • I said, "But wait! There's more!"

  • [laughs]

  • And I had, without him even knowing it,

  • I had designed an entire collection of apparel to go with that shoe.

  • And the models were ready to come in.

  • It was like the exclamation point at the end of the sentence.

  • [upbeat music playing]

  • He started off this next season in this Air Jordan 3. That was the year--

  • [TV commentator] Ready for launch...

  • [Tinker] that he won the slam dunk contest.

  • [crowd cheers]

  • There's that famous shot of him taking off from the free throw line

  • wearing those Air Jordan 3s.

  • That was a rush.

  • I think, to this day, Phil Knight actually really thinks I helped save Nike.

  • We had to wait several years

  • for technology to catch up to our Back to the Future shoe.

  • In that time, my ultimate goal shifted to applying it to athletic footwear.

  • So we dual-purposed the auto-lacing technology,

  • and that became E.A.R.L..

  • There are many drawings.

  • Some of them look a bit like hiking boots, some look like basketball shoes.

  • [Beers] Once we started getting the sketches from Tinker,

  • we knew what the direction and the focus was.

  • We literally took the Jordan 28, and it had a carved-out area underfoot

  • and we hid the motor under there.

  • Some of these shoes failed, some came apart, some broke.

  • And so we explained all of our problems to Tinker, and he redesigned it for us.

  • [Tinker] While we're trying to solve

  • these problems that Tiffany is finding out through our wear testing,

  • I'm now trying to help refine that process.

  • [Beers] After we got the mechanism into here,

  • we found out that our mechanism was pretty robust.

  • Then Mark asked, "Let's put it in the Back to the Future shoe."

  • And that's how we get around to auto-lacing in the MAG.

  • [Tinker] What was really cool was that

  • on the same day he put on the shoe in the movie,

  • we delivered to Michael J. Fox the first-ever real-life self-lacing shoe.

  • 2015?

  • You mean we're in the future!

  • [high-pitched whirring]

  • -[Fox] That's insane. -[Tinker] Isn't that crazy?

  • That's really great!

  • Design is-- it just never really stops.

  • It just sort of keeps on going

  • and you keep thinking about things and you keep trying to refine.

  • I think it's going to change

  • the way all shoes and all wearables are going to operate in the future.

  • -[basketball bouncing] -[indistinct chatter]

  • [Garcia] Here in New York, where I was raised,

  • this is the Mecca for sneaker culture.

  • There were a lot of people in New York who wore sneakers,

  • but they basically wanted to wear what everyone was wearing.

  • Me and my crew, we wanted to wear what no one else was wearing.

  • We were like this early group of tastemakers determining what was cool.

  • When the Jordan 1 came out, we thought it was whack.

  • Initially, like, corny people wore them.

  • And the 2 came out. The 2 was, like, okay, it's an improvement.

  • Really, like, Tinker Hatfield saved that whole... scheme,

  • 'cause when he came in and brought his design to it,

  • and then Jordan kept on becoming a better ballplayer,

  • Jordan had the ability to draw people's attention beyond the nucleus

  • of the ballplayer community.

  • Tinker had a way of somehow grasping that ethos...

  • and combining it with the greatness of Jordan...

  • and fusing that into a sneaker,

  • so that by the Jordan 3, 4, 5 and beyond,

  • the Jordan brand becomes larger than life.

  • [upbeat music playing]

  • Practically every time we built a shoe, it was an improvement.

  • I felt like it was time to sort of zig a little bit,

  • and Michael was like, "Yeah, baby. Let's do it."

  • I never wanted heavy shoes. I always wanted to feel light on my feet.

  • [Tinker] Michael wants it to be breathable. I do too.

  • It was just reinventing mesh.

  • Along the way, I keep talking to Michael

  • and trying to riff off of his personality.

  • I was watching him play one day.

  • He was kind of floating around the edges of the game

  • like a fighter pilot in a World War II movie.

  • [gunfire]

  • They used to put nose art on World War II fighter planes.

  • So I put flames on the side of this shoe.

  • I drew them backwards because we were always fighting convention.

  • [Jordan] I want to be different,

  • but there have been times when he's been way different.

  • And I'd say, "Nah, that's not me. You got to come back a bit."

  • [Tinker] In '91, he won the first of six championships.

  • [TV commentator] Michael Jordan is the unanimous MVP.

  • [Tinker] We're always trying to solve problems

  • for the best athletes in the world.

  • But one of the problems that you run into in design

  • is how you're going to make it newer and different from year to year.

  • People kept lining up for the shoes.

  • [TV reporter] They're already proving popular.

  • [Tinker] And Michael kept winning championships.

  • [TV commentator] The Bulls win!

  • [Jordan] I wear out the right forefoot or the left forefoot

  • because of my turning, because of my agility.

  • [Tinker] He's 6'6", 210 pounds.

  • You have to really make sure that these shoes don't roll over.

  • I came up with these fingers that help hold his foot on the platform.

  • [Jordan] The 10 was one of the shoes when I retired the first time.

  • I was playing baseball.

  • It's time to ride something else.

  • I was bound and determined to keep the line going.

  • I commemorated his ten years as a pro with these ten stripes.

  • [Jordan] I wanted that lifestyle basketball shoe,

  • where you still play the game with that shoe,

  • but then at the end of the day, you can wear it, you know, with a tuxedo.

  • [Tinker] We sourced this really high-quality patent leather.

  • A few months later, I pull it out of a bag in a hotel room and show it to him.

  • He basically says "Holy shit, that's amazing."

  • Several months later, he un-retires.

  • I said, "Don't wear 'em in a game,

  • because we don't... They're not ready to go to market or anything."

  • [TV reporter] Today he will sport a brand-new pair of shoes.

  • They're a black patent leather. They are very stylish...

  • I just about fell out my chair, I'm like, "Oh, God. Jeez."

  • He thought one way, I thought another.

  • And lo and behold, I won. [chuckles softly]

  • [Tinker] You can be inspired by all kinds of things,

  • but maybe the most reliable inspiration is just Michael.

  • He reminded me of a powerful predatory cat.

  • I just call it the Black Cat.

  • And he goes, "How did you know that?" And I said, "Know what?"

  • He goes, "How did you know...

  • that only my very best and closest friends have always called me Black Cat."

  • We were becoming close enough over these years

  • that I could communicate with him on a different level.

  • We're going through working on Air Jordans,

  • and you have to, again, top yourself each year.

  • That, to me, is pressure that's healthy. You need it in order to push yourself.

  • But on top of all that was just pure exhaustion.

  • Just working and traveling and the hundred-hour weeks

  • and the missing of children's birthdays and holidays.

  • My kids were getting older

  • and I desperately wanted to spend more time with them, and my wife too,

  • and they were really patient.

  • Right around about the 15th Air Jordan, I was feeling the effects of that.

  • [director] The 15 was really the first Jordan

  • that had negative reviews.

  • Was this shoe somehow a turning point for you?

  • So, I think this was all about maybe, uh, designing a shoe

  • that maybe it wasn't gonna be, uh, loved by everyone,

  • but it certainly made a statement.

  • And there were a lot of things going on in my life at that time.

  • I was very, very saddened by the passing of Bill Bowerman.

  • My father had passed away three years before.

  • And Michael's father had passed away a few years before, and...

  • [sighs] you know, a few years back, and... [stammers]

  • Just a lot. Yeah, it was a lot going on, and I was ready to be done.

  • I was trying to extricate myself from designing any more Air Jordans.

  • I was tired. I was kind of worn out, but also I felt like I'd done enough.

  • And, um... [clicks tongue] Bill Bowerman passing away was huge.

  • [inhales sharply]

  • [sighs]

  • [sniffles]

  • Without the story and the meaning,

  • you can look at performance as a driving force,

  • but these shoes are more than that to me and, I think, to millions of people.

  • They have meaning and it might be different for different people,

  • but this one and all the other ones we've just talked about have...

  • There's a story with each one.

  • So it's not just scribbling on a piece of paper and coming up with a design,

  • it's a lot of effort that goes into trying to be meaningful.

  • I did think it was the end of my shoe designing career.

  • After that shoe, I took myself off the Air Jordan line.

  • Tinker sat in the zone that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

  • And I think that excites him, but it also creates some stress.

  • Because you have to own a new direction,

  • and you have to help people understand that this is a better way to go.

  • And that's a huge task, and it's a big responsibility.

  • But that's what drives him.

  • [upbeat piano music playing]

  • [Tinker] Good job!

  • I think that when you're younger,

  • really you're just trying to, I think, win.

  • Get it! Oh, dude...

  • Reaching for glory.

  • That one wasn't quite as strong of a jump.

  • Be aggressive about it.

  • I like to go and coach young people because I can pass along what I know.

  • On the surface, you're trying to help kids go higher in the pole vault.

  • There you go!

  • But the real purpose is to help them overcome fear

  • and do something they've never done before and to develop confidence in themselves.

  • Take that extra momentum and do something with it.

  • Get upside down and make it happen.

  • Even though I'm not finished,

  • I'd reached this point where I could continue to be creative

  • and design products,

  • but the next step is to actually be a mentor and a teacher

  • and maybe inspire people as well.

  • Oh, whoa! One went up there.

  • Gotta have two!

  • I just happen to know that.

  • It's just... from experience.

  • In 2005, I came out of Jordan retirement, and designed the Jordan 20.

  • I asked him to come back because 20 was somewhat of a special shoe.

  • [Tinker] I really wanted to, for the first time,

  • talk to Michael Jordan about his life over these past 20 years.

  • He absolutely did not want to do that.

  • I said, "Come on, man.

  • For the first time, let's just look back a little bit

  • and that will help us go forward, too."

  • It became less about me asking questions...

  • and just more about him telling me, like a stream of consciousness,

  • stuff that was coming into his head.

  • And I'm, like, taking notes like crazy.

  • I started to realize that I could start designing a symbol

  • that would represent each and every one of those stories.

  • There are things in here that I don't think he ever told anybody.

  • That became the heart of this shoe.

  • Some of them are emotional.

  • And some of them are just funny.

  • It's really a kind of an avant-garde approach

  • to a basketball shoe design.

  • To me, it's part of what makes it special. It's really, really out there.

  • For him to come up with that concept and then have the consumers connect.

  • If I had to pick the best storytelling product we've ever done,

  • it was probably the 20s.

  • [Tinker] I think it's one of my favorite shoes

  • that I've ever worked on,

  • partly because of that wonderful experience

  • of finally getting Michael to open up and give me stories.

  • [upbeat music playing]

  • [Tinker] What you're about to see

  • is our very first toe in the water toward full adaptability.

  • Just step into the shoe, it automatically closes.

  • [Tinker] Who would like to try it on?

  • When you look at the E.A.R.L., is there a reason that that shoe should exist?

  • No.

  • But like any great thing, you create it, and then people want it.

  • What we saw for the tech audience, two cool things.

  • Number one thing:

  • the first self-lacing shoe for the consumer.

  • [reporter] Nike looks to one-up rivals

  • in an increasingly tech-driven athletic market.

  • I just want to give you guys a quick first look at the shoes.

  • These are definitely gonna be game changers.

  • [Tinker] This is step one.

  • This will become more commonplace in my opinion.

  • Is this an important blip in time in the history of shoes?

  • I'd say unquestionably.

  • [explosion]

  • [heartbeat]

  • [crowd cheers and applauds]

  • [gentle guitar music playing]

  • [Tinker] Before Bill passed away, he wrote me a note.

  • The note went like this:

  • "Tinker Hatfield: architect, shoe designer, track athlete,

  • husband and father.

  • This fulfills the obligations of the University of Oregon.

  • Best regards, Bill Bowerman."

  • I hope someday somebody will take my ashes and just sprinkle them around the track.

  • Maybe a little bit on the pole vault pit, and I'll be happy. [chuckles softly]

  • I think if you just stay in your studio and try and dream up new ideas,

  • there's not a good foundation for your idea.

  • Just get out there and experience life.

  • That just gives you the library in your head...

  • [engine revs]

  • to then translate that into unique, new design work.

  • [gentle guitar music continues]

  • There are many designers out there that are really great

  • at refining and interpreting existing stuff

  • and moving the needle just a little bit.

  • And there's a fine art to that, not overdoing it.

  • For me, though, my job as a provocateur...

  • that's all about thinking further out into the future.

  • You have to look at the landscape of the world

  • and go, "Okay, I'm going to solve some problems.

  • I'm gonna add to some design features, sort of mix it all together,

  • take a few risks, make a few assumptions

  • and just blend it all together."

  • That job does not go without its pitfalls.

  • But, if people don't either love or hate your work,

  • you just haven't done all that much.

  • [upbeat music playing]

[sea birds calling]

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