16 January 2009 WINGFOOT

Shortly after the close of WWI, a young man named Adolf “Adi” Dassler began producing soccer and running shoes by hand in the kitchen of his mother’s laundry in the small

Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach, Germany. His homemade shoes proved to be both lighter and more durable than those already on the market, and by 1924 Adi had teamed with his older brother Rudolf (“Rudi”) to form the successful Gebrüder Dassler shoe company. Adi was the research and development man, Rudi the aggressive salesman.

It was the right move at the right time: The nascent Hitler re-gime placed a heavy emphasis on athletic achievement, and any-thing that would gain an edge on the playing field was well rewarded. While paid endorse-ments were some years in their future, the Dasslers saw the value of befriending those influential in the sporting world. By the time of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, most German athletes were wearing Dassler shoes. In a prescient bit of pragmatism, the pair also put their shoes on the feet of a young American athlete who would ultimately vex the Ger-man government profoundly: Jesse Owens.

The brothers’ always-contentious rela-tionship unraveled both personally and professionally, until in 1948 Rudi, believing that his brother betrayed him to the Allies, severed all ties and moved across town to set up his own shoe company, RuDa, later called Puma. (Meanwhile, the Adidas brand name was formed as a contraction of Adi’s full name.) Things deteriorated further when Adi’s son Horst used his chairmanship of Adidas France to form an independent em-pire operating without the knowledge of either his biological or corporate parents. He set up shadow corporations producing unauthorized product lines and set out to influence the top offi-cials in all sports, including the International Olympic Commit-tee (IOC), by any means necessary. The revelations of bribery that broke upon his death in 1987 nearly destroyed Adidas.

The following years were a no-holds-barred fight fueled by both personal enmity and commercial aspirations, and both combatants understood the importance of high-profile athletes serving as a new form of advertising. One unnamed American sprinter who competed in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics recalls en-tering a men’s room to pick up an envelope full of cash left by a sales rep, “like in the James Bond or mystery movies.” Other maneuvers were less morally suspect but equally calculating: during the 1970 FIFA World Cup Finals, soccer superstar Pele

dramatically knelt to slowly tie his Puma shoes on worldwide television.

In her 2008 book, “Sneaker Wars: The Enemy Brothers Who Founded Adidas and Puma and the Family Feud that Forever Changed the Business of Sports,” journalist Barbara Smit theo-rizes that the Dassler feud directly gave birth to the age of celeb-rity athlete endorsements and the undue influence of money on sports. Joe Nocera, writing for the New York Times, disagrees, noting that Adidas’ better products and business model enabled them to overtake Puma relatively quickly. (Even now, although Puma has had some success with NASCAR and Formula One

contracts and as a fashion line, Adidas re-mains more successful in both sales and brand recognition.) Nocera argues that the dealings of Horst Dassler were what indel-ibly stained sports and the Olympics with the color of money.

Nocera also points out that both compa-nies, based in Europe and absorbed with their own concerns, overlooked their true rival until it was essentially too late. By the early ’70s, an upstart company called Nike was making a name for itself beyond its Or-egon birthplace, and unlike its competitors, understood what the running boom, then in its infancy, would become. (Somewhat ironi-cally, Nike’s flagship shoe was, like Adi’s first creations, born in a kitchen. Its trademark sole was forged by Oregon coach Bill Bow-erman in his wife’s waffle iron.) Nike was

a marketer without equal, and their endorsement deal with a young basketball player named Michael Jordan proved to be a masterstroke. With Nike, athletic shoes became casual wear for the masses and the multi-billion dollar business it is today.

In 1989 Adi’s daughters sold Adidas; the company is now owned by Belgian-based Adidas International Holding. Puma was sold by Rudolf’s family that same year and is currently ma-jority-owned by a French conglomerate, the PPR Group. What-ever the names on the ledgers, the marks of the family bitterness remain etched on the town of Herzogenaurach to this day—the two companies’ headquarters remain there, located on opposite sides of the Aurach River. Residents identify themselves as either Adidas or Puma loyalists, associating with and patronizing the businesses of others like themselves. And in mute testimony to the ongoing bitterness within the Dassler family, Adi and Rudi lie forever separate in the town cemetery, their graves situated as far apart as possible.

Shoe Rivalry: Adidas, Puma and the Rise of Modern Sports Marketing

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