“Cut the 1 Off the Back”: Penny Hardaway Was Blown Away by Michael Jordan Wearing His Shoes in the Playoffs

Michael Jordan is the most famous basketball player to ever live, but some might say what earned him global fame were his Air Jordans. It seems unfathomable to think that there was ever a time that Jordan didn’t wear his signature shoe on the court. Penny Hardaway spoke on the Knuckleheads podcast about how Jordan chose to wear Hardaway’s shoes when he returned for the 1995 NBA playoffs.

The reason was simple: Jordan had been away playing baseball, so they hadn’t made a new version of the Air Jordan. As Hardaway tells it, Jordan said, “Gimme Kid’s shoes,” referring to his nickname for the Orlando Magic guard. A fellow Nike athlete, Hardaway had his signature shoes, the Nike Air Penny 1 debut in 1995. The Air Pennys were one of the best-selling shoes of that year.

It was a great honor for Hardaway, who like so many players looked up to Jordan as the best player in the game. Hardaway said, “I thought it was crazy, because he’s never worn a shoe outside of Air Jordan.”

Hardaway mentioned that although Jordan cut the number 1 off the back, he still looked good in them. “He rocked them joints!” Hardaway said.

MJ was known for his unbeatable aura, but Hardaway felt like once he saw Jordan wearing someone else’s sneakers, it was like seeing Superman without his cape. “I’m trippin’, I saw that and I was like, ‘We’re gonna beat him.'” When asked if he said that to Jordan, Hardaway laughed and said, “Hell naw, I just let him be. I’m gonna let a sleeping dog lie,” which is probably a good idea given what MJ did to anyone that dared trash-talk him during his career.

Sure enough, Hardaway and the Magic did beat Jordan and the Bulls in the Eastern Conference semifinals, handing MJ the only playoff defeat in his run of six NBA titles. The Magic ultimately reached the NBA Finals before losing to Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets, but that was the peak of the Penny and Shaq era.

Penny Hardaway believes that Michael Jordan was the GOAT, but that he was more skilled

Even though Hardaway has paid the proper respect by calling Jordan the greatest player of all time, he agreed with a controversial statement that Trevor Ariza made earlier in the year when he claimed that from a skill level standpoint, Hardaway was just as good if not better than MJ.

“I’ll say this because everybody can say, ‘You know, MJ is the GOAT, right?’ But when you got guys that understand what they like in somebody’s game—playmaking, passing, shooting—my skill set was higher than MJ’s, so that’s probably what he’s like, ‘Man, he’s better than MJ from a skill set point of view.'”

It’s unfortunate that these two only overlapped for a short time period, and that Hardaway’s career was ultimately limited by injury because he really was one of the best and most exciting players of his era. Before there was Kobe and Shaq, there was Penny and Shaq, and though NBA fans never got to see all that they could have accomplished, they were still two of the players who went on to carry the torch after Jordan left the Bulls.