The sports apparel giant Nike is currently worth in the north of $33 billion and far away from its competitors, major thanks to Michael Jordan.
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A couple of 6-foot-9 stars took over the NBA as soon as they made it to the league in 1979. But even throughout the next decade, neither Magic Johnson nor Larry Bird was enough to create a recency bias to the league shifting more towards more skilled players than the tall ones.
It was because bigs like Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar who had ruled many parts of the history of the game, that it was too difficult for the league to get over them.
That is why even the Houston Rockets picked up 7’0 Hakeem Olajuwon and The Portland Trail Blazers selected 7’3 Sam Bowie over a 6’6 Michael Jordan in 1984.
Also read: 23-time Olympic gold medallist approximated Michael Jordan by being a**holes to his teammates
But there was another big organization that did the same mistake. And it must be their biggest regret ever since, as it is for the Portland team.
Adidas didn’t sign Michael Jordan because of his height, and Nike pounced on it
Much like the NBA, the best sports goods manufacturing brand in the business at the time, Adidas, did a bizarre mistake of keeping their focus more towards the 7-footers of the league, than spending millions on a shorter man, be it his name was Michael Jeffrey Jordan or that he wanted to be an Adidas athlete like Kareem.
German executives wanted to stick with bigger players, while those in the United States wanted Jordan. One distributor later retold the battle this way, “We kept saying, ‘no one can relate to those guys. Who can relate with a seven-foot-tall guy?’”
Nonetheless, Nike, just another running shoe brand poached up MJ with just a $25,00,000 multi-year deal that would give His Airness his own brand of sneakers and apparel which would go by the name ‘Air Jordan’.
That single best decision would not only make them a giant with no close competitors in the market for years to come, taking its brand value to $33 billion but would make Jordan a multi-billionaire as well.
“The Nike Swoosh is ubiquitous today, yet that was hardly the case in the mid-1980s. Adidas was 50% larger by revenue. Reebok had just burst on the scene and would surpass Nike in revenue by 1987. Converse was the brand of choice for NBA stars Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Julius Erving,” Kurt Badenhausen of Forbes explained in 2020.
Also read: Michael Jordan, who was on the all-defensive team 9 times, got hit by “A Cadillac”
There can’t be a bigger blunder than this. As this would also let Adidas also miss out on future generational stars like Kobe Bryant, whom they had for the initial 7-years of his career but lost to Nike again in 2003 and also LeBron James who had just come in.
