2005 Nike Zoom LeBron 3
by John Gotty
In 2005, LeBron James symbolized the future of basketball, and Nike knew he could carry its basketball footwear into the future with him. The company bet heavily on the Chosen One with a reported $90 million endorsement deal before he ever set foot on an NBA court. By his third season in the league, James’s impact on the game continued to grow, as many predicted it would when he was a high school player in Akron, Ohio. And as his game developed, so did his signature sneaker line when he laced up a new model, the Zoom LeBron 3.
The 2005–06 season represented a pivotal one for Nike Basketball. As James came into his own and his sneaker line expanded right in step, the company also relaunched its business with Kobe Bryant by releasing the Zoom Kobe 1. Both players filled the stat sheet and dominated highlight reels on any given night. The tandem created a formidable one-two punch on the marketing side for Nike, setting the stage for a remarkable run that extended for several years and across multiple models for each star.
James averaged 31.4 points per game, which made him the youngest player in league history to average over 30 points. He led his team to the playoffs for the first time in seven years. He was also selected for his first All-Star Game, in which he won MVP honors. He finished second in MVP honors for the season.
By round three, James, then only twenty-one, possessed more awareness of what he wanted out of his signature model, following his involvement with his two previous sneakers. “The 3 was when I really started to open up, knowing more about the shoe game and how they were created and things like that. I wanted them to be light, I wanted them to look good, and I also wanted them to feel good,” he explained in an interview for Laced, Nike’s 2007 self-produced shoe documentary.
Designer Ken Link was tasked with finding a way to build a shoe strong and agile enough to support a 6'8", 240-pound force like James, whose explosive first step and powerful dunks made him unique in the league. His physique and style of play required a shoe that would keep him cinched down while also allowing a range of movement. The Zoom LeBron 3 built off the success of its well-received predecessor. James liked the LeBron 2, so Link was able to retain certain elements of its design. But the designer wanted James’s signature line to continue to grow as the player progressed. In 2007, in Laced, Link shared that “The [LeBron] 2 was more raw. [The LeBron 3] is a little more dialed up and [predicated on] the idea of dressing him and getting him ready for the game.”
The shoe resembled a boot, with its leather upper, high ankle cut, and metal eyelets. Where the LeBron 2 used a velcro ankle strap, the LeBron 3 worked with a series of thin, unstitched straps, connected only at the base of each strap and at the eyestays, which created a better lockdown fit without compromising movement.
The double Air Zoom unit came in a Pebax casing slightly thinner than that of the LeBron 2 to help reduce weight. The Pebax shell supported the Zoom Air against all the quick, lateral shifts and hard landings to which James might subject the cushioning system. A carbon-fiber shank plate further boosted the responsiveness. The foot bucket shell stretched from the midfoot to high up the ankle and heel to stabilize the foot. “The [LeBron] 3 actually encompasses a whole new way of looking at this whole heel chassis,” Link explained in Laced. “It locks the heel back into the footbed and still allows the forefoot to move and make that first quick step.”
The initial “Home” colorway released on November 12, 2005. The pair sported a majority-black leather upper, while the toebox, heel, and midsole were dressed in white. Crimson red accented the Swoosh, the full-length Zoom Air unit, and a portion of the outsole. It was the first in a slew of in-line releases that followed—black and gold, navy and white, black and red—in what seemed like an endless array of options.
In fact, colorways make up a major reason why the LeBron 3 has been beloved by footwear fans over the years. Throughout the 2005–06 season, James donned countless looks, each as uniquely colorful as the next. The shoe appeared in close to twenty colorways, which was more than the Air Zoom Generation and Zoom LeBron 2 had seen combined. The number sounds normal by current standards, when player sigs pop up in new iterations regularly. But in 2005, such a vast number of makeups represented a shift for Nike.
Most signature shoes released in “Home” and “Away” editions to match team uniforms. An additional playoff colorway might be thrown in if the namesake player were on a contending team. Ramping up the number of LeBron 3 colorways made every game must-see TV to witness what he wore on his feet just as much as what feat he might perform. And when he did wear a new colorway, it instantly dominated the comments sections of sneaker blogs and forums.
James and Nike took the storytelling to a new level. The young star’s on-court exploits established everything the brand needed to work its magic in design and marketing. “It’s very easy to design a shoe around an athlete because they bring so much more than just the way they play,” Link explained in Laced. “It’s the way they think, it’s their family, it’s where they’re from, it’s where they’re going. It all just gets blended into the shoe, and you can start to see personality.”
The storytelling expanded beyond the court as Nike sought ways to showcase the multiple sides of James’s personality in an early effort to prove he was more than an athlete. Part of the push birthed the LeBrons, a group of four characters—“Kid,” “Athlete,” “Business,” and “Wise” LeBron—reflecting the different sides of King James. Each character scored a special colorway of the LeBron 3, and, once again, Nike only released an extremely limited number of the shoes, along with an accompanying action figure, to the public for $200 a pair.
James wore a white and red pair bearing his name in gold block lettering for the 2006 NBA All-Star Game. That colorway dropped at retail, but there was another pair that surfaced the same weekend, causing a frenzy. Dipped in light blue, white, and red, an Oilers-inspired version, a nod to the host city of Houston’s former football franchise, was given exclusively to James’s friends and family, along with other celebrities. Sure, no one outside those circles could get it immediately, but the hype made it an instant hit and turned it into a grail for collectors.
The exclusive releases created excitement around the LeBron 3, drawing in a new set of collectors who sought out the player exclusives and special editions attached to James by any means necessary. The demand created skyrocketing prices, which in turn elevated the sneakers.
2019 saw the model return in retro form. Nike dropped six different colorways. Never-before-released exclusives like the “Oilers” and “SuperBron” finally found their way to retail. James wore purple and gold color-ups to match his Los Angeles Lakers uniform and made appearances rocking assorted exclusives, like a cool grey suede, a tonal navy low-top, and more that could only be added to the wish list for collectors.
Even before his first NBA game, James was fated to be a signature-sneaker-level player. What was not predetermined was whether his shoes would have any sort of impact or longevity. The Nike LeBron 3 was one of the first inklings that, in the world of footwear, his star would be one to look up to for years to come.
Honorable Mention
Air Jordan XX
by Ben Felderstein
With an eye toward the future and the past, Tinker Hatfield introduced the world to the Air Jordan XX—a model that reflected the Jordan Brand legacy he’d helped establish—in 2005. Being that this was the twentieth anniversary of the Air Jordan line’s proper debut, Hatfield aimed to include elements of the prior nineteen Jordan sneakers, as well as key moments from Michael Jordan’s career, in its design to mark the milestone.
The Jordan XX is most recognizable for the laser-etched pattern that first appeared on the midfoot shroud on its original colorways. In an effort to communicate Jordan’s long history by way of a single sneaker, Hatfield returned to work on the mainline Jordan model for the first time since the Air Jordan XV. The laser-etched pattern consisted of two hundred symbols that helped tell Jordan’s story, and the shoe had sixty-nine dimples on its side as a nod to his highest-scoring game. Those symbols would become an important part of the Jumpman’s legacy, materializing on icons like the Air Jordan 1, the Air Jordan IV, and the Air Jordan V.
While Hatfield created the symbols, the method by which they arrived on the shoe owed to an unlikely inspiration: custom trumpet designer David Monette. Monette frequently lasered designs onto the instrument, giving Hatfield the idea to work with Nike’s Mark Smith to bring the process to the sneaker world. The XX’s overall shape was inspired by racing boots, a nod to Jordan’s love for motor-sports.
Among the most significant releases of the XX was the three-piece “Regional Pack,” which included different makeups for the East Coast, the West, and the Midwest—with the laser pattern covering the majority of their uppers, rather than just the midfoot shroud. Notable Jumpman athletes from the early 2000s like Ray Allen, Richard Hamilton, and Carmelo Anthony had their own player-exclusive versions, keeping Jordan’s sneaker legacy on the court.
If those eye-catching symbols weren’t enough to distinguish the XX, Hatfield created an ankle support system that was not fully connected to the sneaker, which gave the model a futuristic look.
There’s no question that the Air Jordan line lost a lot of its appeal when its namesake quit basketball for good—the source material of his achievements just wasn’t there anymore. Rather than look forward to new models each year, consumers have since become obsessed with retros. But while the post-Bulls Jordan models will likely never carry the same cultural weight as the originals, the XX proved that, with Hatfield on his side, Jordan could still make magic.