2002 Nike SB Dunk

by Justin Tejada

Nike SB may have started in 2002, but it wasn’t Nike’s first foray into skateboarding. In 1996, the brand came out with a collection of skate shoes that’s remembered most for an infamous model named, wait for it, the Choad. We’ll leave it to you to look up the definition on Urban Dictionary. Let’s just say the name probably wouldn’t pass muster in Beaverton today.

That mid-’90s collection of Nike skate shoes included other groaners such as the Snak, the Trog, and the Schimp. Nike did enlist Bam Margera—pre-Jackass fame—to ride for the brand. But Margera found the shoes so awful to skate in that he would wear éS Accels and affix a Nike sticker to them with Shoe Goo so it looked like he was still repping his sponsor’s product.

It wasn’t all bad. Nike produced some clever campaigns during this time. With the tagline “What if we treated all athletes the way we treat skateboarders?” the ads showed tennis players and golfers getting kicked off the court and the links by police and security guards in the way that skaters are booted from skate spots.

But even those ads had a tone-deaf quality to them. When Margera filmed a kickflip for the closing sequence of the campaign, the producers made him wear new shoes (at least he was wearing real Nikes) that had makeup applied to them so they looked worn-in. He wasn’t permitted to wear actual broken-in shoes that would have allowed him to land the trick much faster.

While Nike’s first attempt to break into skating was brief, the effects were long-lasting. In the insular world of skateboarding, where the worst thing you can call someone is a “poser,” Nike earned a reputation of not getting it. It was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla that loudly came into the room trying to earn some cool points without actually paying any dues. All take, no give.

So when Nike tried to re-enter the skate market at the turn of the millennium with the SB line, there was a fair amount of trepidation and skepticism. “I had concerns, and I was somewhat vocal about them,” said Reese Forbes, one of the original skaters on the SB team. “I was nervous about a couple of things. One is how Nike could come back into skating and screw it up again. Then I was nervous about everybody’s reputation. What would it mean to Richard [Mulder] and myself and Gino [Iannucci] if we went and rode for Nike and it was a flop?”

But Nike had a few things going for it this time around. For starters, the brand paid heed to the maxim “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” More important, Nike had a basketball shoe ripe for reinvention that would change sneaker culture forever: the Dunk.

The Dunk was not even the most famous shoe that Peter Moore helped design in 1985. That honor went to the debut signature shoe for a 6'6" guard from the University of North Carolina who was drafted behind Sam Bowie. But the Dunk still made an impression.

Originally named the College Color High, the Dunk was a mash-up of other Nike basketball styles at the time, borrowing the outsole pattern from Moore’s “other” creation, the Air Jordan 1, and featuring an upper inspired by the first Jordan and the Nike Terminator.

From the outset, one of the distinguishing features of the Dunk was how well it lent itself to storytelling. “You can do a lot with those panels,” said Forbes. “The shoe itself is somewhat easy to manipulate with different textures and colors.”

Nike’s “Be True to Your School” campaign accompanied the release of the Dunk in the mid-’80s and showed styles designed for top college basketball programs, including Syracuse, Iowa, and Kentucky. It was the first time Nike used a bold array of color ways on a basketball shoe and foreshadowed how much bolder the Dunk silhouette could become.

Skaters gravitated to those early Nike basketball shoes because they had a relatively slim profile and the high-top styling offered good ankle support. Powell-Peralta’s iconic skate video The Search for Animal Chin came out in 1987, and, in one of the most famous scenes, four members of the Bones Brigade do handplants on the spine of a ramp. Three are wearing Air Jordan 1s.

Though less documented, the Dunk was also worn by skaters in the 1980s. In the ’90s, though, as skate footwear grew more specialized, the model was all but forgotten.

This was the era of “bigger is better” skate shoes (think the Osiris D3), when skate companies, in a misguided attempt to ape athletic brands, added as many layers as possible to a) show that they could and b) ensure the shoes could stand up to the rigorous demands of skaters. The downside of that approach was that skate shoes of the time looked clunky and barely had any board feel.

The Dunk was not that, and that was part of its appeal. For skaters who were used to wearing one pair of shoes for skating and packing another pair for after the session, it could do double duty. “They were the exact opposite of the bread loaf skate shoe,” said Richard Mulder, the first skater on the Nike SB roster.

They also looked right for skaters when they looked down at their feet on a board, which may sound trivial but is incredibly important.

“Back then, it was like, if I don’t like what I’m wearing or riding, then I’d probably go home,” said Forbes.

“Everything needs to be right,” Mulder added. “You have to feel it from your sneakers to the shirt you’re wearing. Everything needs to be aligned for you to have this good energy when you’re skating.”

While he wasn’t a skater, Sandy Bodecker—who passed away in 2018—understood concerns like those. Bodecker was a runner who started off as a wear-tester for Nike. Even though his feet were a size and a half too big for the samples he was wearing, he would write incredibly detailed reports, which landed on the desk of eventual Nike CEO Mark Parker. Bodecker joined the company officially in 1982 and made his name at Nike by growing the company’s soccer business into a juggernaut, starting in the mid-’90s.

The artist C. R. Stecyk III, who designed numerous iconic skate graphics, including the “Skate and Destroy” motto and typography, described Bodecker in a Nike SB video as “always ahead of the curve” and “always over it by the time everyone else got there.”

So perhaps it should have come as no surprise when, for his next act at Nike, Bodecker went from the world’s most popular sports to one of its most niche, and became general manager of Nike SB in 2001.

While Bodecker didn’t have a background in skateboarding, he understood athletes and did everything he could to get up to speed quickly. “He became a skate fan first, and then built from there,” said Paul Rodriguez, the first skateboarder to have a Nike signature shoe.

“He read every skate magazine cover to cover,” said Forbes.

What Bodecker gleaned from those magazines went beyond an academic understanding of the difference between a Smith grind and a feeble grind. He developed a nuanced understanding of skate culture.

“[Nike] brought a lot of firepower to a relatively small industry. And he was sensitive to that,” said Forbes. “Everyone knows everyone here. [Skateboarding] is a really small place. I think he had a really good understanding of what he was doing and how Nike could help. It was really about how he could serve the community.”

Bodecker saw that skateboarding wasn’t like other sports and, therefore, Nike couldn’t approach it like other sports. Rather than going mainstream, Nike SB went grassroots. Rather than signing household names, Nike SB signed lesser-known but highly respected skaters. Rather than selling in big-box stores, Nike SB sold at core skate shops. Rather than releasing the most innovative, teched-out shoe, Nike SB brought back the Dunk.

“It only makes sense to bring back a shoe that is classic and timeless and reintroduce yourself into the culture with something that was already there in the first place,” Mulder said.

The first Nike SB Dunk had no lenticular panels, no faux bear fur, no Supreme cosigns. Before the official launch of Nike SB, Bodecker and Forbes went on a trip from Washington, DC, to New York City, visiting skate shops along the way in an attempt to drum up interest in the new iteration of the Dunk.

The shoe they had in hand was relatively simple. It had a navy base with gray overlays. The silhouette had been modified for skating with a Zoom-cushioned insole, to protect against dreaded heel bruises, and a padded tongue.

The trip itself was a signal of Nike SB’s unorthodox approach.

The skate industry has historically been centered around Southern California. But many cultural trends begin in cities on the East Coast, particularly New York, and East Coast skaters have a style that’s shaped by their urban environment and is unmistakably cool. This is where Bodecker wanted to do a temperature check on his new shoe.

“We visited a variety of core shops in every city—we wanted to hit shops that were open to Nike, ones that were on the fence, and ones that were anti-Nike,” Bodecker told Nike News in 2017. “It was important to get a complete read on how the core shops and the core community were really reacting and feeling on the ground face-to-face.”

“In general, we got some support from most of the shops at some level,” he said. “But many of them were up front and said they wanted to see if we would come proper or just jump in and jump out again.”

Even Forbes, who had already signed on with Nike, had reservations. But the trip helped assuage them. “I knew that this was not, like, fly by night. They were invested in this for the long haul. I didn’t have any doubts once I saw the intent and the purpose of what the mission was.”

Today the original SB Dunks are prized and revered. When they were created, it was a different scenario.

Each of the original Nike SB skaters—Mulder, Forbes, Gino Iannucci, and Danny Supa—was given the opportunity to design his own Dunk as part of the “Colors By” series. “It wasn’t a big deal back then. They’re like, ‘Hey, we’re all going to do a Dunk colorway.’ And we’re like, ‘Cool,’” Mulder remembered. “It wasn’t serious. I didn’t even spend more than ten minutes on [it] because I didn’t know it was going to be this historic thing.”

While Mulder may not have spent a long time on his colorway, his shoe accomplished the most important goal for any Nike SB model. It told a story. In 1994, Mulder had been in Chicago on a tour with his board sponsor, Chocolate Skateboards, and the crew stopped into a Nike outlet.

“I got these Tennis Classics. They were exactly what my [Dunk] colorway was,” he recalled. “They were all white and had an Orion blue Swoosh. I remember when I got home from tour, I put them on and skated them. So when the time came to do a shoe, I was like, ‘Oh, I want to do that one shoe.’ It was seriously a no-brainer.”

Forbes’s “Wheat” colorway was inspired by Timberland work boots; Supa’s reflected the colors of his hometown New York Knicks. Nike SB also tapped some of its riders’ board sponsors to put their spin on the Dunk. Chocolate, which sponsored Mulder, did a version, as did Zoo York, which sponsored Supa.

Nike SB also worked with a skate shop on Lafayette Street that, at the time, wasn’t really known outside of the skate and downtown New York City community. Supreme took the elephant print detailing from the Air Jordan III and added it to the Dunk in both a black and white version. It was an instant classic. What distinguished these stories of the early SB Dunks is how intimate they were. Not everyone needed to get it. In fact, if everyone did get it, it probably wasn’t that good of an idea. But if you did get it, you felt like you were in on something special. And if you were in on it, then you were all in.

That didn’t mean it was easy to get your hands on a pair. From the start, Nike SB Dunks were released in limited quantities. This, as much as the SB design ethos, helped make the shoes a full-blown cultural phenomenon.

These were not shoes that you could walk into your neighborhood Foot Locker and buy. SB Dunks were sold through skate shops. And not just any skate shops. Slinging trucks and bearings wasn’t enough. It had to be the right skate shop. Nike SB was becoming an arbiter of cool.

So while Forbes recalled that “it wasn’t like applause and confetti coming from the ceiling,” when his “Wheat” colorway came out, the limited supply was creating widespread demand. The effect of these factors—the aesthetics of the silhouette, the distribution strategy, the credibility of the skaters and collaborators—was compounded by the rise of the internet. The age of hype had dawned.

After releasing city editions of the SB Dunk Low Pro in Paris, Tokyo, and London, Nike tapped Jeff Ng, aka Jeff Staple, and his Staple Design to create a Dunk that paid homage to New York City. Thinking about what would best represent New York, Staple landed on the pigeon and designed his Dunk around that. “It’s something very innate to New Yorkers. And something you wouldn’t necessarily relate to the city if you didn’t in fact live here,” Staple told Sneaker Freaker.

The “Pigeon” Dunks released on February 22 at Reed Space, Staple’s gallery and store. But a couple dozen sneakerheads began camping out days in advance. By the morning of release day, those numbers had swollen to triple digits, and Reed Space only had thirty pairs on hand. When late arrivers tried to cut the line, the “ruckus” was sparked. There were police on the scene, and while no arrests were made, one person was put in handcuffs, and a knife and a baseball bat were found afterward.

The headlines on the front page of the New York Post on February 23, 2005, were pretty grim. “Lost Souls,” led a story about the struggle to identify more than one thousand victims of the 9/11 attacks. “Co-ed Dies in Ex-Con’s Drug Lair,” declared another. Atop all of them was a photo of the Nike SB Dunk “Pigeon” alongside the blaring headline “Sneaker Frenzy–Hot Shoe Sparks Ruckus.”

“There were thugs on all four corners waiting to grab kicks from kids who were waiting in the line,” Staple told Sneaker Freaker. “The cops saw this. So they called a fleet of cabs to our back door. Kids would come in through the front, buy their pair, and then be escorted through the back right into a cab and off they went.”

While there had been important moments in sneaker history prior to this, the overwhelming majority of them were tied to sporting events, such as Michael Jordan winning the Slam Dunk Contest in 1988 in the “White/Cement” Air Jordan III. The “Pigeon” Dunk was different. This was a moment that was purely about the sneaker itself, and it represented a major turning point in sneakerhead culture.

It had little to do with the actual aesthetics of the shoe, and a lot to do with that New York Post cover. For years, sneakerheads had their own version of “this thing of ours,” something to be chatted about and obsessed over in tiny corners of the internet, such as the NikeTalk message boards. Now it was literally front-page news in the media capital of the world. The word was out.

In addition, the Post story revealed that there was money to be made from these things people put on their feet. An infographic showed that, while Nike’s suggested retail price was $69, Reed Space sold them for $300, and the highest eBay price was $1,000. This wasn’t just shining a light on sneaker culture but on resale culture, too.

That “Pink Box” era—a name derived from the design of the SB boxes at the time—was a high-water mark for the Dunk. (It’s further testament to the power of Nike SB that even the shoe boxes are a topic of discussion.) In addition to the “Pigeon” Dunk, a number of seminal editions were released between September 2004 and December 2005: the first Dunk with renowned Japanese vinyl toy manufacturer Medicom; the collaboration with the band U.N.K.L.E., using art by Futura 2000; the De La Soul pack; and the “Diamond” Dunk, which propelled a little-known company that made actual nuts and bolts for skateboards into the streetwear stratosphere.

As disparate as those collaborators might seem, they all tied back to skateboarding in some way. If you were in the scene, it made sense. Skateboarders who went on tour in Japan would return with Medicom Bearbricks. Mike Carroll skated to De La Soul’s “Oodles of O’s” in the first Girl Skateboards video, Goldfish.

This was an important part of what set Nike SB apart. The brand stayed true to its roots, even as it exploded in popularity. Nike had cracked the code to enter the secret society that is skateboarding, but it wasn’t trying to leave the door open for everyone to flood in.

“They didn’t bend their own rules on what they originally intended for all of these shoes,” Forbes said. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, now that we see the popularity with this, let’s just go ahead and make more of them.’ They stayed true to their word. It’s contributed to the fact that we’re even talking about it [today].”

For folks who remember being able to actually go into Supreme without having to pass by a burly security guard, Nike SB became like the indie band that you saw in the small club that blew up and was now selling out arenas. And the Dunk was the frontman.

The Nike SB team, which had begun with names that wouldn’t ring out if you weren’t a regular Thrasher reader, grew to include some of the most famous faces in skateboarding, like Eric Koston and Paul Rodriguez. The shoes also became more accessible. With that came the criticism that’s inevitable whenever something transitions from subculture to pop culture.

But while the Dunk moved on from being the “it shoe,” the things that made it great in the first place—the stories, the designs, the nods and winks—remained. The Black Box era brought collabs with Dinosaur Jr. and MF Doom. The first Concepts “Lobster” Dunk arrived in the Gold Box. A “Space Jam” Dunk arrived in 2011 in the Blue Box. Supreme celebrated the tenth anniversary of its first Dunk with a “Red Cement” version that came in the Taped Box. The Teal Box has seen more flips on the greatest hits, such as revamped “Diamond” and “Pigeon” collaborations. But it has also breathed new life into the silhouette with projects with Parra and Soulland.

While many moved on from the Dunk in the 2010s, Nike SB stayed true to its original game plan. And when people like Travis Scott began shining a new light on the silhouette at the end of the decade, the core DNA that made Nike SB so special in the first place remained unchanged.

In short, the SB Dunk got big, but it never sold out. In skateboarding, that’s all you can hope for.

Honorable Mention
BAPE Bapesta

by Mike DeStefano

The Nike Air Force 1 is among the most iconic sneakers of all time. Plenty of brands have produced their take on the clean, simple low-top version of the shoe over the years, but none have been nearly as popular and respected as A Bathing Ape’s Bapesta, Nigo’s love letter to the original.

The Bapesta’s design was nearly identical to the AF1’s, but instead of Swooshes, it had star logos, and in place of “Nike Air” branding was a “BAPESTA” tongue tag. It also came in vibrant colorways that used patent leather or exotic materials like snakeskin that Nike—until that point—hadn’t employed. (Interestingly, Nike never sued Bape or Nigo.)

When the first Bapesta dropped in 2002, Bape was still a few years from the height of its popularity in both Japan and the United States. Nigo has famously said that it wasn’t until the US (with help from the cosigns of Pharrell Williams, Clipse, and Kanye West) got behind the brand that Japan did, too. But the Japanese took to the Bapestas—essentially a remake of a familiar shoe from the ’80s in bright, glossy colors—instantly. Launched just as Japan’s sneaker boom went into overdrive, the Bapesta, with its old-school feel, set itself apart from what was happening in sneakers elsewhere and became a local hit.

Stateside, the shoe was initially met with some resistance from sneakerheads who saw it as a knockoff more than an homage to the American culture that Nigo was so obsessed with. Bape fans, though, became enamored of the flashy and extremely limited sneakers. Still almost impossible to get if you lived anywhere but Japan, Bape was becoming a status symbol, a head-to-toe uniform for those in the know, and the Bapesta was part of the equation.

“In a way, Bapesta sneakers happened by accident, so I did not expect them to have such a strong following in and outside Japan,” Nigo said in A Bathing Ape, the book published by Rizzoli. “Let’s just say the line was a product of last resort that made a good turn for the better. We are not a proper sportswear manufacturer but a fashion brand, so the sneakers are merely a component of the seasonal collections, but they definitely set the trend for colorful sneakers.”

Since their initial release, there have been several Bapesta collaborations, including versions by N*E*R*D, Kaws, Marvel, and, perhaps the most coveted, a pair designed by West. Today, Bape (without Nigo, who left the brand in 2013) continues to release Bapestas. While the appetite for them has diminished over the years, they represent a very specific time in streetwear, when all-over-print hoodies dominated people’s closets.