Shoe wars - SPORTING CHANCE by Joaquin M. Henson

Clearly, the biggest beneficiary of the burgeoning global interest in sports is the apparel and footwear industry which has become a multi-billion dollar enterprise. Today, there is a shoe that specializes in whatever sport you play and matches the clothes you wear.

Nike, Adidas, Asics, Fila, Converse, Puma, And-One, New Balance, and Reebok are among the most popular brands in the market. Some fashionable dress shoes cost half as much as a pair of sneakers endorsed by Kobe Bryant or Vince Carter and they’re being outsold.

The stars who wear the shoes make a difference. In the National Basketball Association (NBA), Nike has a clear advantage as the Swoosh is worn by about 70 percent of the player. Credit Michael Jordan for the breakthrough. Now that he’s retired, Jordan has his own personal Nike brand and stable of endorsers. But the competition isn’t giving up. Adidas, long known as the king of soccer, is making inroads in hoops through Bryant. The other pitchmen are credible endorsers, too. Fila is leaning on Grant Hill, Converse on Karl Malone, Reebok on Allen Iverson, And-One on Latrell Sprewell, and so on.

Because it takes a truckload of bucks to compete with the big spenders in basketball, some brands would rather use up their budgets to niche. New Balance, for instance, is popular among runners. Asics is a favorite among runners, too, and athletes in indoor sports like volleyball, squash, racquetball and badminton.

The competition is particularly fierce in the battle to gain "official" status as sponsors of major sports events such as the Olympics.

In the book The New Lord of the Rings by investigative journalist Andrew Jennings, Adidas was identified as the ringleader of the "sports politics group manipulating elections in the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and the Olympic sports federations, promoting presidents who would give contracts back to the company."

Backroom negotiations are nothing new in business. As the saying goes, all’s fair in love and war. The important thing is ethics must never be compromised.

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Today, Adidas marks the 100th birthday of its German founder Adolf (Adi) Dassler, a former baker who made his first pair out of canvas for runners in a modest workshop near Nuremberg in 1920. Dassler, a man of incredible vision, gathered whatever materials he could find from the ruins of World War I and began a craft that he transformed into an art.

Dassler died in 1978 at the age of 78. By then, Adidas had become a byword in sports.

Curiously, it wasn’t until 1948 that Adidas – as a brand – was born. Dassler took the first two syllables of his first and last name and came up with Adidas. He also thought of a symbol to set his shoes apart from the others – the Three Stripes.

Dassler’s shoes were launched on a global basis at the 1928 Olympics. In the mid-1930s, he and 100 employes created 30 different shoes for 11 sports. So when Adidas surfaced in 1948, Dassler simply introduced his stamp in the market.

Adidas Philippines Marketing Director Sonny Nebres pointed out that Dassler was the first entrepreneur to use product endorsers. He tapped well-known athletes to promote Adidas shoes, like Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali, Max Schmeling, and Franz Beckenbauer. In 1971, for instance, Ali and Joe Frazier wore special boxing shoes developed by Dassler when they faced each other in the "Fight of the Century."

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Eventually, Adidas metamorphosed into an international company. Dassler’s son Horst turned Adidas into a world leader in sports marketing and was involved in bidding for Olympic rights. In 1987, Horst died of cancer at the age of 51 and two years later, Adidas became a corporation. In 1995, Adidas went public. Last year, Adidas celebrated its 50th anniversary and solidified its claim as one of the world’s leading sports footwear and apparel companies with a workforce of close to 13,000.

At the Sydney Olympics, Adidas was represented in 26 of 28 sports and more than 3,000 athletes wore the Three Stripes. Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe, 17, won three gold medals and set four world records in an Adidas Full-Body Swimsuit.

Dassler would’ve turned 100 today. In 1946 – two years before the birth of Adidas, he emerged from the catastrophe of World War II to assemble a pair of shoes made of canvas and rubber scrounged from scrap in American fuel tanks. Who would’ve imagined then that Adidas would evolve into the giant it is in the new millennium? Perhaps, only Dassler himself.