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“I wore a new pair of shoes every game, I felt like I could go out and showcase my best self in them”: Michael Jordan speaks about his superstition of wearing a new pair of kicks to each game

Arun Sharma
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"I wore a new pair of shoes every game, I felt like I could go out and showcase my best self in them": Michael Jordan speaks about his superstition of wearing a new pair of kicks to each game

All Basketball players have their superstitions – The traditions did not spare Michael Jordan either.

Each player is superstitious – even the Black Jesus is not exempt from the tradition. They are varied in nature – from listening to the same songs before a game to showering 5 times a day at different intervals. Michael was not eclectic that way – he was normal in fact. He had a routine of wearing a pair of new shoes every game.

He felt like wearing a new pair of shoes every game made him feel like he had something to prove – he felt like a new person wanting to prove a point. This meant that he had to go through about 150 pairs each season. It wasn’t a problem since he was Nike’s star man.

The man loved his Concord 11s, and it is probably the greatest player exclusive of all time.  Hype beasts hate that choice because it doesn’t justify their logic of oversaturating the market with Jordan 1s.

Also Read: “Put my shoes next to the Jordans, I like to give people options”: Shaquille O’Neal talks about sneakers, buying Reebok, and more on Sneaker Shopping with Complex

Michael Jordan loved being a part of the design process – he wanted his inputs in the sneakers he wore daily

Without his input, MJ would not love his sneakers the way he loves them currently. He and Tinker Hatfield racked their brains to come up with multiple iterations of different models, each one a major hit. The story of the Air Jordan 3 is the most heard, about Hatfield coming on board to specifically design a pair of shoes so that Jordan did not move to Adidas.

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His favorite models are the ones he won the championships in. The 11’s in particular because those were the shoes he wore in Space Jam as well. He was not supposed to wear them, going directly to the 12s but he wore them on the court, and they were the stuff of legends.

Also Read: “Crypto Currency is taking over the NBA!”: From stadium names to NFT sneakers, crypto and its various forms are making their way into the league

About the author

Arun Sharma

Arun Sharma

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Arun Sharma is an NBA Editor at The SportsRush. A double degree holder and a digital marketer by trade, Arun has always been a sports buff. He fell in love with the sport of basketball at a young age and has been a Lakers fan since 2006. What started as a Kobe Bryant obsession slowly turned into a lifelong connection with the purple and gold. Arun has been an ardent subscriber to the Mamba mentality and has shed tears for a celebrity death only once in his life. He believes January 26, 2020, was the turning point in the passage of time because Kobe was the glue holding things together. From just a Lakers bandwagoner to a basketball fanatic, Arun has spent 16 long years growing up along with the league. He thinks Stephen Curry has ruined basketball forever, and the mid-range game is a sight to behold. Sharma also has many opinions about football (not the American kind), F1, MotoGP, tennis, and cricket.

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