The Hard Way on Purpose (6 page)

In 1989, with the last second ticking off the clock and the best Cleveland Cavaliers team we'd ever known leading by 1 point and about to advance in the NBA play-offs, Michael Jordan rose above a double-team to hit a shot now known as The Shot to win the game. It is considered one of the greatest clutch plays in the history of all American sports. All we remember is the physical despair of Craig Ehlo, the Cavs' player over whose desperate up-stretched arms Jordan had just made history, Jordan leaping euphorically, Ehlo collapsing to the floor, hands clenching for something that wasn't there.

And so we have come to understand this bipolar choice we are offered: we could embrace impossible hope, or impossible hopelessness. But each of us had to choose. You can't stand in a frozen, zero-sum concrete ring and be in the middle.

Through all this, we have become known as a place that always loses.

But that's not how I see it.

I'm from a place that always almost wins.

ALL STARS

If you had to pick a single visual icon to represent the past century of Americana, I doubt you could do better than the Converse Chuck Taylor. The main trait of this seemingly uncomplicated canvas sneaker is not just how succinctly it represents the scope of American culture, but also how broadly. Iconic since its introduction in 1917, the shoe originally called the Converse All Star has offered street credibility to the entire range of American situations: a little boy in a Norman Rockwell painting; Larry Bird as the Hick from French Lick; a teenager in a mosh pit; a grunt on a Parris Island obstacle course; a Catholic schoolgirl; an aging rock star with a new album and an updated haircut; Whoopi Goldberg in an Oscar-night pantsuit; a new arrival at clown school. Like English ivy, the All Star arrived pure and then began to adapt.

For a long time, the shoes came only in two colors, white and black, like Hollywood cowboy hats. America became more colorful, and Converse followed, offering hues that eventually transcended color and would be better described as flavors: Cinnamon, Cantaloupe, Lilac, Amaranth, and Mud. Much like Jimi Hendrix, the All Star has dabbled in leather, hemp, and flames. It has reshaped itself to every new purpose without changing shape at all, tracing an inscrutable line from the ABA to CBGB. As much as anything in our culture, the Converse All Star is
itself
. And this is both despite and because it is entirely unsuitable for its original purpose.

The Chuck Taylor was one of the first shoes specifically designed for basketball. In nearly a century since, it has proven itself apt to everything
except
basketball. This is a shoe with the arch support of an emery board, the shock absorption of a Post-it note, and the breathability of a wet suit. That it endures despite itself suggests it has something to prove, something to overcome, which might be its most American quality.

There is one thing, however, that's even more American than the Chuck Taylor: the art of marketing. And there may be no better fable of that art than the fable of Chuck Taylor himself.

Chuck Taylor (it seems unthinkable to refer to him by anything other than his full name) is the second-most-famous basketball player ever to come from Akron, Ohio. Most people don't know he even played basketball. That's understandable. He didn't play much. A lot of people probably assume he's not even a real person, but rather a marketing phantom, like Mrs. Butterworth or Chef Boyardee.

That's understandable too, because his identity is confined to that signature inside the circle of the All Star logo.
Chuck Taylor
is an enigma akin to the 33 on the back of a Rolling Rock bottle and the arm and hammer on the baking-soda box. This may be the only athletic shoe in existence whose celebrity namesake is someone nobody knows anything about—or even whether it's a real person at all. (Rod Laver is the exception that proves this point.) Air Jordans and Shaqs exist only because the athletes are famous. Conversely (so to speak), the real man named Chuck Taylor only exists in American memory because his shoes are famous.

In that sense then, he is both: a real person, and a marketing phantom.

*  *  *

Here is a peculiar identity trait: the fear that you have no identity at all. Places in the American Midwest seem to carry this as a genetic presumption. In fact, most places referred to as Midwestern shy away from the term, afraid such a broad, amorphous definition will counteract its purpose, leading to a misinterpretation, a stereotype, or an insult. We are so used to being misunderstood that we react preemptively. Our personalities are delicate and complex. My city is particularly stricken—a place known for most of the twentieth century as the Rubber Capital of the World was stunningly, completely stripped of that identity by virtue of a swift and profound industrial collapse. We were something, we were Known, like Firestone, and then, in a few years, we found ourselves with no idea of who we were or what was to become of us. As a result, we have tended toward a pathological compulsion to seize homegrown cultural coattails. To associate ourselves with something that would help us to explain ourselves to the wider world. To call out collectively like the Whos down in Whoville, “We are here! We are here!”

Therefore, part of the local neurosis is a habit of identifying celebrities (no matter how minor) with ties (no matter how tenuous) to Akron, and at every opportunity making mention of this. Hugh Downs lived in Akron briefly as an infant, yet we claim him as a native son. Here's a conversation I've heard too many times to dismiss.

“Oh, I see Hugh Downs is coming back for another season on
20
/
20
.”

“He's from Akron, you know. . . .”

I've observed this in other places too, the way people from Buffalo will perk up when someone mentions Frank Lloyd Wright and impulsively interject, “He's from Buffalo.”

Liberace is from Milwaukee. Mario Andretti is from Allentown. Bob Eubanks is from Flint. You have no idea how important this is.

Pittsburgh, Lord. Andy Warhol famously
hated
the place, his hometown. But Andy Warhol became famous and Pittsburgh dutifully named a bridge after him and built his museum.

Is Akron the birthplace of the Chuck Taylor? Hell yes. Let me tell you how.

*  *  *

Chuck Taylor is not from Akron, but his basketball career would be irrelevant were it not for Akron, and his basketball career (a surprisingly brief one) was what led to everything else. Taylor played one season—1920–21—for a team called the Akron Firestone Non-Skids, a thick-thighed young man in striped socks and a tight tank top emblazoned with a stylized
F.
This was an industrial-league professional basketball team that, not surprisingly, was named after an automobile tire. The Firestone product from which the team took its name was itself a stroke of marketing genius. In the early era of the tire industry, competition among the American manufacturers, all based in Akron, was fierce. So in 1908, company founder Harvey S. Firestone, in a meeting with his design engineers, came up with the idea for a new tread pattern, one that would use raised lettering as the actual tread. As the story goes, he reached for a scrap of paper on his desk and, writing in a diagonal descent, showed them the pattern:

FIRESTONE

NON

SKID

An elegant solution: the words described their function, the function derived from the words.

From this signature product came the name of the company basketball team. The Non-Skids thrived in the years between the two World Wars. In 1939, the team (along with its Goodyear counterpart, the Wingfoots) became a charter member of the National Basketball League, which a dozen years later would merge into the NBA.

It appears from his statistics and the historical record that Chuck Taylor was not a significantly impactful basketball player. He made one key shot to win one important game and was celebrated for that moment, but otherwise the accolades are thin. Some sources even question whether he played as much pro basketball as his record asserts. Certainly it's doubtful that he was ever a “famous” basketball player. Such a thing didn't exist in 1921, at least not as we now understand it.

In the 2006 biography
Chuck Taylor, All Star: The True Story of the Man behind the Most Famous Athletic Shoe in History
, author Abraham Aamidor describes the Akron year as “a watershed in Chuck Taylor's playing days.”

Aamidor writes, “What Chuck had learned in Akron, besides some pointers from [coach Paul] Sheeks and skills gained in competitive play, was the art of self promotion.”

It was a watershed in a different way as well. Taylor was off the team and out of town after a single season. The reason is not known; Aamidor speculates he may have been cut.

So Chuck Taylor, with dubious athletic accomplishments, left Akron with a handful of clippings from the local newspaper and a photograph of himself posing with the Non-Skids, documents he produced upon arriving at his next stop—Detroit—where he portrayed himself as a sports celebrity. Detroit was a bigger playing field with its own share of company teams, and Taylor soon picked up with a team called the Rayls, named after the sporting-goods store that was its sponsor. The connection to a retailer that likely carried athletic shoes is presumably what led to the ambitious young man's next move, the following year, to Chicago, where he was hired by Converse. He soon hit the road, selling All Star sneakers through a series of basketball clinics he ran—his purported expertise based on his record as a professional basketball player. With a résumé that bordered on a bait and switch, he thrived.

In 1932, as a show of appreciation for his sales acumen, Converse put Chuck Taylor's neat cursive signature on the All Star logo. His may be the most convoluted endorsement deal in the history of sports merchandise: the shoe named for the star salesman, who became a salesman because of his perceived basketball stardom, which was created out of a sense of salesmanship. A circle of paradoxes. The more that is understood about his name on the round patch, then, the more enigmatic it becomes.

It's worth mentioning that at about the same time Chuck Taylor was beginning his career with Converse, Jack Purcell, a champion badminton player, designed a similar canvas sneaker for Fire­stone's crosstown rival B. F. Goodrich, which had a shoe division. (For the record, yes, in the 1930s, the idea of a “famous” badminton player was even less conceivable than that of a “famous” basketball player.) The Jack Purcell sneaker played out the next thirty-five years as a sort of second cousin to the Chuck Taylor. Eventually, in 1970, Converse bought that brand as well, merging an odd couple of legends.

*  *  *

My favorite image of Converse All Stars as basketball shoes is from the 1961 Disney movie
The Absent-Minded Professor
, a film in which the fictional Medfield College basketball team applied the semi-magical polymer compound “flubber” to the bottom of their Chuck Taylors, allowing them to prodigiously sky. Flubber, which doesn't actually exist, is a discovery by Medfield professor Ned Brainard (Fred MacMurray), who accidentally adds energy, rather than subtracts it, while writing out the formula for enthalpy. The resulting compound bounces like rubber, gaining energy with each successive bounce.

What I love about this story is my absolute certainty that if flubber did exist, it would have been invented in Akron. I once asked one of the world's leading experts on flubber-related chemistry if flubber could exist. Dr. Frank Kelley, who at the time was the dean of the college of polymer science and engineering at the University of Akron and is also literally a rocket scientist, not only entertained the notion, but did some calculating on my behalf.

Eventually, he concluded that, no, the physical law of the conservation of energy would not allow such a substance. Energy can't be created. But the scientific answer was not a disappointment. That Dr. Kelley understood the question, understood the worth of grasping toward the fantastic, even the impossible, of entertaining the most distant possibility of connection—that was the true answer.