Abstract: The Art of Design (2017–…): Season 1, Episode 2 - Tinker Hatfield: Footwear Design - full transcript

[sea birds calling]
[Tinker] I probably think about feet
a lot more than the average person.
As a shoe designer, I have to.
Our feet were made to walk, and run
and climb once in a while.
Bare feet can be great at all of that.
But what the modern athlete asks
of their feet
is far beyond
what they were originally designed to do.
My job is to think about how to make
these very capable natural instruments
perform even better.
[upbeat harmonica music playing]
That's Tinker Hatfield!
Y'all serious? That's Tink.
Tinker Hatfield?
He's a legend!
[young man]
Is that the dude that created Jordans?
[funky electric piano playing]
[Parker] In the '80s,
Tinker Hatfield started to define
what working with an athlete
was all about.
It was a relationship with the athlete,
really digging in,
getting to know them as athletes.
Ultimately, it's about performance.
But there's so many more layers
on top of that.
[Jordan] Tinker is a mad scientist.
He came from pole vaulting.
When I played the game,
it was about jumping,
so, I mean,
it was easy to find that synergy
and a great complement
between the two of us.
What we did as a team was we were able
to build a product that sustained time.
It catered to the athlete
at the highest level
to the point where they still can play
in that same shoe,
thirty years later.
[funky electric piano continues playing]
[song ends abruptly]
Well, that was crappy.
I never used to think about design.
I was always focused on being an athlete.
In high school,
I won some state championships,
and I even received
a full athletic scholarship
to the University of Oregon,
where I met an enormously influential man
by the name of Bill Bowerman.
Coach, I'd be interested in your reaction
in participating in the coaching
of these world-class athletes.
First, Hal, call me Bill.
Remember, I don't like to be called coach.
I am sensitive about that.
[chuckles] Okay.
[Tinker] His real title that he liked
was Teacher of Competitive Response.
He was trying to help people
learn how to win.
He is also one
of the two founders of Nike.
So when I came here, he was designing
Nike running shoes and track spikes.
He was liable to do and try anything
to make his athletes better.
He used to have a little cobbler shop
right underneath the grandstands.
If you weren't careful,
he might just pop out of that cobbler shop
and grab you by the scruff of the shirt
and tell you to try on these shoes
and run around the track.
Sometimes they would be great,
and sometimes
you would come back bleeding.
One of my events was the pole vault,
and Bill believed that I had
the potential to be a national champion,
and even become an Olympian.
[slow-paced music playing]
Pole-vaulting is fraught
with all kinds of danger.
If you don't have a real strong sense of
"I'm committing to doing this,
and I'm doing it,"
you can get really hurt.
In order to deal with that,
you have to kind of just go for it.
You have to have this mentality,
like you're going to just blow
through a wall.
You can't back off.
Your goal is to somehow get upside down
and fly through the air and go over.
There is a moment where you are flying.
You sort of wake up, and you go, "Wow."
My sophomore year, I fell
from about 17 feet on an uneven surface
and tore my ankle in half.
Required five surgeries
and two years of rehabilitation.
[piano music playing]
I was pretty depressed,
laying in the hospital that night
overhearing the doctors talking about
"This kid's career is over."
There was no way
that most of the coaching staff
felt like I was ever gonna contribute
to the track team again.
What was really great though, for me,
wasn't anything that Bill Bowerman said,
it was what he did.
Bill would build me special track spikes
that had a heel lift on one side
because I was limping.
That all added to my ability to be
a problem solver for other people,
because I understand
the consequences of injury.
He protected me from being just dismissed
from the team and losing my scholarship.
I had no idea how much work
a discipline like Architecture would be.
The good news was
that I found out that I could draw
and it was almost by accident.
That was a pretty big surprise.
This took a long time to draw,
I'll tell you that.
Look at all that little--
that was with a Rapidograph...
And those little tiny marks...
During my college years
in Architecture school here,
I also was doing some work
for Bill Bowerman.
We came across
an actual drawing that I did
of an early design for one
of the very early Nike track spikes.
I just wouldn't just, like,
tell him what I thought,
I would also draw and write down
some of my, I guess you could say,
interpretations of his design.
In this case, he asked me to try out
some track spikes he was working with...
and they didn't work.
They actually unscrewed themselves
every time I would go and train in them.
Unbeknownst to all of us,
I was learning, I guess,
how to design shoes and solve problems
for athletes right off the bat.
Go look at the feet of a pro-athlete
who's played basketball for ten years.
They're trashed,
because their shoes are too tight.
They tie their shoes so tight
because they need them tight,
but they stay that way throughout
all their practices and all their games,
and their feet become deformed and damaged
and sometimes it incapacitates them.
Our studies tell us
that if you take better care of your feet
and get better blood flow,
a better fit and better comfort,
you actually play better.
If you're standing around
for a free throw,
wouldn't it be great
if your shoes loosened up and let your--
let the blood flow back into your feet
and gave your feet a little bit of a rest?
And as soon as the person shoots
the free throw, the shoes know it?
They know you're going to
start moving quickly
and they "zzzim" back up again.
You go sit on the bench.
Why would you leave your shoes tight?
They would just go "zzzz..."
They would relax.
That's when I started E.A.R.L.
E. A. R. L.
Electro Adaptive Reactive Lacing.
[upbeat music playing]
The first person I talked to about it
was really developer Tiffany Beers,
to see if we could even entertain
the idea of starting a project like this.
What did you say?
Well, I said I wasn't sure
-[Tinker chuckles]
-because I didn't report to him.
And so I went and talked to my managers.
They said, "You don't say no to Tinker.
Yeah, you just took the project.
If he asked you, you're taking it."
[both laugh]
[Beers] We started to focus primarily
on the mechanism.
Like, how do we tighten the laces?
How do we get it small enough that
it's performance and it still looks good?
[Tinker] I think this is
a whole new product design
that will be part of the future.
I think there's art involved in design.
But to me, I don't think of it as art.
My perception of art is that it's really
the ultimate self-expression
from a creative individual.
For me as a designer,
it is not the ultimate goal
to become self-expressive.
The end goal is
to solve a problem for someone else,
and hopefully it looks great
to someone else
and it's cool to someone else.
[upbeat music playing]
This is how design works for me.
I started drawing space.
I was really just trying
to reflect my mood at the time.
I started to have a little bit of fun
with the actual planets
and put faces on them and...
I put George Jetsen.
You know, I have a Volkswagen Bus,
Porsche Speedster,
peace symbols and fingers.
I don't even know why I am doing this,
I'm just doing it.
I drew a cheetah foot that's actually
embedded inside of a sneaker.
And I'm kind of moving through
from that first page of space.
Now I'm getting more specific
about innovation in general.
I remember
somebody telling me it'd be great
if Nike could do shoes that were invisible
and I drew the Invisible Man.
This is just all stuff
that's coming to my head
and I'm just sketching.
All of this stuff ended up
in a drawing of a shoe.
A stream of consciousness
can lead you some place.
You may not even know
where you're headed,
but somehow you end up somewhere,
and here I ended up with a shoe.
[TV commercial announcer]
Today at Nike, we know even more.
We developed one of the most sophisticated
sport research labs in the world.
[Parker] Nike had grown up very fast.
We were leading the industry,
focused on basketball and running.
[upbeat music playing]
Reebok came along,
there was this aerobics craze.
[Tinker] Reebok invented aerobics shoes.
It was a whole new thing.
They had the right product
at the right time,
and they actually passed Nike in size.
So there was a bit of a panic and Nike
was laying people off right and left.
They were also thinking that they needed
to upgrade their design group.
So, I was invited to be a part
of a 24-hour design contest.
[bike revs]
[Parker] Tinker wasn't
a shoe designer at the time.
He was designing trade shows
and displays and retail.
[Tinker] I worked the whole 24 hours.
I didn't go to bed that night.
Most of the other designers,
I think, just tried to work off of
what they were already doing,
and it wasn't really anything very unique
in terms of storytelling.
I came back in with a big presentation,
sort of having fun with the fact
that this was the perfect shoe
to ride a motor scooter in.
[laughs]
And then get out and then jog around
and walk around a little bit.
Two days after the competition,
I was... I wasn't even asked,
I was told that I was now
a footwear designer for Nike. [chuckles]
In a very short period of time,
I pretty much became the lead designer.
[guitar music playing]
One of my very first projects
was the Air Max.
I felt like this was an opportunity
to think way differently.
Nike was encapsulating gas
inside a urethane airbag
for a cushioning component.
I thought, "Let's make the bag
a little bit wider, make sure it's stable,
but then let's remove part of the midsole,
so we actually see it."
The closest you'd come to anything
before that was, I remember as a kid,
seeing Elton John having high-heeled shoes
with a goldfish inside of them.
Right? I mean, it was simply, like,
very... punk even.
[Tinker] I had gone to Paris
and seen a very controversial and loved
or mostly hated building,
The Georges Pompidou Center,
designed by Renzo Piano.
It was a building with all of the inside
mechanics on the outside of the building.
He painted everything in primary colors
just to piss off people even more.
I was very much inspired by that building,
and that's how I ended up
exposing these airbags in the Air Max.
After those sketches came out,
it was widely discussed
that I had pushed it too far.
People were trying to get us fired,
they were screaming
like there was no way in the world
that we could ever sell a shoe
with an exposed airbag
that looked fragile,
like it could be punctured.
The Air Max One took off.
It was an amazing success story
for not just Nike,
but for all of footwear design.
It's built on taking a risk
for a good reason,
which was to tell a story
and to also make a better product.
[funky music playing]
At the same time
that the Air Max came out,
I realized that nobody
was in the right shoe most of the time.
Everybody was trying to play basketball
in running shoes
or trying to run in basketball shoes,
and you would see people getting hurt,
rolling their ankles.
I thought we needed to design a shoe,
and that became their first cross-trainer.
It needed some lateral stability.
There was a mid-foot strap
to strap down that part of your foot,
so then you could participate
in all sports in the same workout,
and not have to change your shoes.
We didn't think
that it was going to sell all that well,
but John McEnroe was having trouble
with his tennis.
[shouting] This is absurd!
I can't believe this!
[shouts]
He decided to wear 'em, and liked them
so much that he wore 'em on television.
That sort of solved the problem of people,
sort of like, "Whoa, that shoe's
so weird. It's so different."
Then you had this push
from the advertising side,
it was all about promoting
the Air Max and the Air Trainer.
We had broken through
some sort of paradigm
in how athletic footwear was designed.
I remember talking to my wife after that,
and I said,
"I think I'm gonna like doing this stuff
if I can just get some sleep."
Now let's see here...
In a lot of ways, design is about
predicting the needs of the future.
The E.A.R.L. self-lacing idea
actually came from my work on a movie.
In 1987, I was asked to get involved
in the Back to the Future series.
[futuristic music playing]
They really needed a special shoe design
that would fit into the year 2015,
which was 25 years in the future.
This is the early storyboards
for the Back to the Future II movie.
They were talking about
magnetic levitation.
"He can stand on the ceiling
or walk up a wall."
It's an old joke. It's an old gag.
I felt like
it shouldn't really be a gag at all.
I wanted something that would actually
excite people about the future.
I just felt like maybe something
that would happen in the future...
Shoes would be smart
and could sense who you were
and when you put it on,
it comes alive and shapes to your foot.
It's your shoe. The shoe knows you.
[whirs, beeps]
Power laces! All right!
[whirs, beeps]
[Tinker] We kept getting requests
over the years
to do the Back to the Future shoe.
And finally in 2006,
I went to Mark Parker and I said,
"You know, why don't we go ahead
and try and make one of these things?
You know,
a replica of that old movie shoe."
The shoe that was on the set
was actually a dummy shoe,
in the sense that
it wasn't actually working.
There was a prop person
who pulled the laces down tight on the set
to make it look like
it was a real working shoe.
But we were always intrigued with,
you know,
actually making a sample that worked.
[Beers] This is the very first working
try-on-able Back to the Future shoe
that we made.
This was from 2007, and back then...
[Tinker] The motor was--
stuff wasn't quite
as small as it is today.
[both laugh]
[Beers] We have to plug it into the wall.
It was either that
or the old car battery in the backpack.
It took a solid year and a half
of just trial and error, trial and error.
And so we'll run this.
[whirring]
I was very proud that we got this far.
I thought, "Oh,
this is going to be amazing."
But we had to wait
for some technology to advance.
So motors had to get a little smaller,
faster, stronger.
We actually put it on pause
for a little while there.
[Tinker] It was great to see
that Tiffany and her team
could get a shoe to do just that,
but clearly it was a long way away
from looking exactly like the movie shoe.
[calming electric guitar music playing]
People struggle
with stuff they don't understand,
design that's different
than what they're used to.
Yet what creates excitement
and gets people to pay attention,
and may actually lead
to some breakthroughs in performance...
is to kind of force the disruptive nature
of like, "Whoa, that's a big idea."
That's what I do. That's my job.
-[Tinker exclaims]
-[thudding]
-[indistinct chatter]
-[man] Are you all right?
[Tinker] A basic design
is always functional,
but a great one will say something.
[rock music playing]
In 1988, Andre Agassi is gonna be
the next big American tennis star.
I think he was 19 maybe,
and I hadn't heard of him.
I went to Las Vegas,
and I spent some time with him.
He had long hair, kind of,
basically like a long mullet.
He was just very youthful and young
and just not like any tennis player
I'd ever worked with.
Everything in tennis at that time
was kind of the same and boring.
[Tinker] It was a new kind of
style of tennis, which was basically
just get at the baseline
and just hit the ball hard as you can.
I really started to explore
the fact that this young tennis player
did not grow up going to country clubs.
He did not grow up wearing white.
So I'm like,
"Man, this is so unlike tennis."
He not only designed the shoes,
which were quite outrageous,
they were kind of hot pink,
and the outfit was wild.
[Tinker] So we drew Andre wearing
that denim short with a Lycra under-short.
Absolutely meant to be anti-tennis.
I coined the phrase "anti-country club,"
because it's not always
just about the shoe design.
If you have an athlete
with the right personality,
you can challenge
the perception of the entire sport.
[crowd cheering]
[upbeat music playing]
[Semmelhack] In the late '70s and '80s,
you begin to see superstar
basketball players,
such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
or Walt Frazier,
get signature sneakers that then
become central to urban fashion.
That allowed Nike
to create the Air Jordan brand.
Going into the Michael Jordan Building,
I used to work in here.
Michael's honor.
I think they have all the shoes in white.
It's pretty cool. [clicks tongue]
[string music playing]
Michael Jordan was Nike's big star.
He was unhappy
with some of his early shoes
and was getting close to leaving.
Nike leadership
and Phil Knight, Nike's CEO,
told me I was designing
the next Air Jordans.
I don't think I understood
the gravity of the situation.
You know,
how important Michael Jordan was to Nike.
It was six months behind schedule
by the time that it was given to me.
So it had to be another hurry up,
no sleep for weeks and months...
traveling back and forth to Asia
with all the developers
and getting a prototype in.
We were going to have a big meeting
with Michael Jordan...
Phil Knight, myself,
head of Sports Marketing,
both of Michael's parents.
Michael didn't show up for four hours.
He was actually on the golf course
with some other people.
And they had convinced him
he should just jump ship.
But ultimately Michael shows up,
and he was kind of in a bad mood,
came in and just said,
"Well, what do you got?"
Phil Knight took over from that point
and just said, "Well, thanks for coming.
I mean, we've been waiting a while,
but we hope it's worth it.
[inhales sharply]
Take it away, Tinker."
I'm more of a... You've got to actually
show me the shoe, you know?
He storytells and then he draws
and then, you know, he shows me
all the pictures of it,
and I still can't visualize it
until you put it in my hand.
I pulled the shroud off the shoe,
and there it was right in front of him.
Phil Knight's sitting on pins and needles,
his parents are over there.
He looks at the shoe, looks at me
and he goes, "Tell me more."
I said, "Remember we talked
about how you wanted a midcut,
and no one had ever done a midcut height
for a basketball shoe?
It's just what you wanted.
Remember we talked about
how the shoe should already feel
like they're broken-in and perfect to wear
when they're brand-new,
right out of the box?
This shoe is made out
of really soft leather,
so it's reinforced in the right places,
but when you put this on,
it's gonna be like glove leather,
and it's just gonna fit great.
And then remember picking
some new materials
that no one had ever seen
on a basketball shoe before?
And so that elephant print."
When he told me about the leather itself
and the elephant print,
things of that nature,
you know, he kind of won me over.
I said, "But wait! There's more!"
[laughs]
And I had, without him even knowing it,
I had designed an entire collection
of apparel to go with that shoe.
And the models were ready to come in.
It was like the exclamation point
at the end of the sentence.
[upbeat music playing]
He started off this next season
in this Air Jordan 3. That was the year--
[TV commentator] Ready for launch...
[Tinker] that he won
the slam dunk contest.
[crowd cheers]
There's that famous shot of him
taking off from the free throw line
wearing those Air Jordan 3s.
That was a rush.
I think, to this day, Phil Knight
actually really thinks I helped save Nike.
We had to wait several years
for technology to catch up
to our Back to the Future shoe.
In that time, my ultimate goal shifted
to applying it to athletic footwear.
So we dual-purposed
the auto-lacing technology,
and that became E.A.R.L..
There are many drawings.
Some of them look a bit like hiking boots,
some look like basketball shoes.
[Beers] Once we started getting
the sketches from Tinker,
we knew what the direction
and the focus was.
We literally took the Jordan 28,
and it had a carved-out area underfoot
and we hid the motor under there.
Some of these shoes failed,
some came apart, some broke.
And so we explained all of our problems
to Tinker, and he redesigned it for us.
[Tinker] While we're trying to solve
these problems that Tiffany is finding out
through our wear testing,
I'm now trying to help
refine that process.
[Beers] After we got
the mechanism into here,
we found out that our mechanism
was pretty robust.
Then Mark asked, "Let's put it
in the Back to the Future shoe."
And that's how we get around
to auto-lacing in the MAG.
[Tinker] What was really cool was that
on the same day he put on
the shoe in the movie,
we delivered to Michael J. Fox
the first-ever real-life self-lacing shoe.
2015?
You mean we're in the future!
[high-pitched whirring]
-[Fox] That's insane.
-[Tinker] Isn't that crazy?
That's really great!
Design is-- it just never really stops.
It just sort of keeps on going
and you keep thinking about things
and you keep trying to refine.
I think it's going to change
the way all shoes and all wearables
are going to operate in the future.
-[basketball bouncing]
-[indistinct chatter]
[Garcia] Here in New York,
where I was raised,
this is the Mecca for sneaker culture.
There were a lot of people in New York
who wore sneakers,
but they basically wanted to wear
what everyone was wearing.
Me and my crew, we wanted to wear
what no one else was wearing.
We were like this early group
of tastemakers determining what was cool.
When the Jordan 1 came out,
we thought it was whack.
Initially, like, corny people wore them.
And the 2 came out. The 2 was, like,
okay, it's an improvement.
Really, like, Tinker Hatfield
saved that whole... scheme,
'cause when he came in
and brought his design to it,
and then Jordan kept on
becoming a better ballplayer,
Jordan had the ability to draw
people's attention beyond the nucleus
of the ballplayer community.
Tinker had a way of somehow
grasping that ethos...
and combining it
with the greatness of Jordan...
and fusing that into a sneaker,
so that by the Jordan 3, 4, 5 and beyond,
the Jordan brand becomes larger than life.
[upbeat music playing]
Practically every time we built a shoe,
it was an improvement.
I felt like it was time
to sort of zig a little bit,
and Michael was like,
"Yeah, baby. Let's do it."
I never wanted heavy shoes.
I always wanted to feel light on my feet.
[Tinker] Michael wants it
to be breathable. I do too.
It was just reinventing mesh.
Along the way, I keep talking to Michael
and trying to riff off of his personality.
I was watching him play one day.
He was kind of floating
around the edges of the game
like a fighter pilot
in a World War II movie.
[gunfire]
They used to put nose art
on World War II fighter planes.
So I put flames on the side of this shoe.
I drew them backwards because
we were always fighting convention.
[Jordan] I want to be different,
but there have been times
when he's been way different.
And I'd say, "Nah, that's not me.
You got to come back a bit."
[Tinker] In '91, he won
the first of six championships.
[TV commentator]
Michael Jordan is the unanimous MVP.
[Tinker] We're always trying
to solve problems
for the best athletes in the world.
But one of the problems
that you run into in design
is how you're going to make it
newer and different from year to year.
People kept lining up for the shoes.
[TV reporter]
They're already proving popular.
[Tinker] And Michael
kept winning championships.
[TV commentator] The Bulls win!
[Jordan] I wear out the right forefoot
or the left forefoot
because of my turning,
because of my agility.
[Tinker] He's 6'6", 210 pounds.
You have to really make sure
that these shoes don't roll over.
I came up with these fingers
that help hold his foot on the platform.
[Jordan] The 10 was one of the shoes
when I retired the first time.
I was playing baseball.
It's time to ride something else.
I was bound and determined
to keep the line going.
I commemorated his ten years as a pro
with these ten stripes.
[Jordan] I wanted
that lifestyle basketball shoe,
where you still play the game
with that shoe,
but then at the end of the day,
you can wear it, you know, with a tuxedo.
[Tinker] We sourced
this really high-quality patent leather.
A few months later, I pull it out of a bag
in a hotel room and show it to him.
He basically says
"Holy shit, that's amazing."
Several months later, he un-retires.
I said, "Don't wear 'em in a game,
because we don't... They're not ready
to go to market or anything."
[TV reporter] Today he will sport
a brand-new pair of shoes.
They're a black patent leather.
They are very stylish...
I just about fell out my chair,
I'm like, "Oh, God. Jeez."
He thought one way, I thought another.
And lo and behold, I won.
[chuckles softly]
[Tinker] You can be inspired
by all kinds of things,
but maybe the most reliable inspiration
is just Michael.
He reminded me
of a powerful predatory cat.
I just call it the Black Cat.
And he goes, "How did you know that?"
And I said, "Know what?"
He goes, "How did you know...
that only my very best and closest friends
have always called me Black Cat."
We were becoming close enough
over these years
that I could communicate with him
on a different level.
We're going through
working on Air Jordans,
and you have to, again,
top yourself each year.
That, to me, is pressure that's healthy.
You need it in order to push yourself.
But on top of all that
was just pure exhaustion.
Just working and traveling
and the hundred-hour weeks
and the missing of children's birthdays
and holidays.
My kids were getting older
and I desperately wanted to spend
more time with them, and my wife too,
and they were really patient.
Right around about the 15th Air Jordan,
I was feeling the effects of that.
[director] The 15 was really
the first Jordan
that had negative reviews.
Was this shoe
somehow a turning point for you?
So, I think this was all about
maybe, uh, designing a shoe
that maybe it wasn't gonna be, uh,
loved by everyone,
but it certainly made a statement.
And there were a lot of things
going on in my life at that time.
I was very, very saddened
by the passing of Bill Bowerman.
My father had passed away
three years before.
And Michael's father had passed away
a few years before, and...
[sighs] you know, a few years back,
and... [stammers]
Just a lot. Yeah, it was a lot going on,
and I was ready to be done.
I was trying to extricate myself
from designing any more Air Jordans.
I was tired. I was kind of worn out,
but also I felt like I'd done enough.
And, um... [clicks tongue]
Bill Bowerman passing away was huge.
[inhales sharply]
[sighs]
[sniffles]
Without the story and the meaning,
you can look at performance
as a driving force,
but these shoes are more than that to me
and, I think, to millions of people.
They have meaning and it might be
different for different people,
but this one and all the other ones
we've just talked about have...
There's a story with each one.
So it's not just scribbling on a piece
of paper and coming up with a design,
it's a lot of effort that goes into trying
to be meaningful.
I did think it was the end
of my shoe designing career.
After that shoe,
I took myself off the Air Jordan line.
Tinker sat in the zone that makes
a lot of people uncomfortable.
And I think that excites him,
but it also creates some stress.
Because you have to own a new direction,
and you have to help people understand
that this is a better way to go.
And that's a huge task,
and it's a big responsibility.
But that's what drives him.
[upbeat piano music playing]
[Tinker] Good job!
I think that when you're younger,
really you're just trying to,
I think, win.
Get it! Oh, dude...
Reaching for glory.
That one wasn't quite as strong of a jump.
Be aggressive about it.
I like to go and coach young people
because I can pass along what I know.
On the surface, you're trying to help kids
go higher in the pole vault.
There you go!
But the real purpose is
to help them overcome fear
and do something they've never done before
and to develop confidence in themselves.
Take that extra momentum
and do something with it.
Get upside down and make it happen.
Even though I'm not finished,
I'd reached this point
where I could continue to be creative
and design products,
but the next step is to actually be
a mentor and a teacher
and maybe inspire people as well.
Oh, whoa! One went up there.
Gotta have two!
I just happen to know that.
It's just... from experience.
In 2005, I came out of Jordan retirement,
and designed the Jordan 20.
I asked him to come back
because 20 was somewhat of a special shoe.
[Tinker] I really wanted to,
for the first time,
talk to Michael Jordan about his life
over these past 20 years.
He absolutely did not want to do that.
I said, "Come on, man.
For the first time,
let's just look back a little bit
and that will help us go forward, too."
It became less
about me asking questions...
and just more about him telling me,
like a stream of consciousness,
stuff that was coming into his head.
And I'm, like, taking notes like crazy.
I started to realize
that I could start designing a symbol
that would represent each and every one
of those stories.
There are things in here
that I don't think he ever told anybody.
That became the heart of this shoe.
Some of them are emotional.
And some of them are just funny.
It's really a kind of
an avant-garde approach
to a basketball shoe design.
To me, it's part of what makes it special.
It's really, really out there.
For him to come up with that concept
and then have the consumers connect.
If I had to pick the best
storytelling product we've ever done,
it was probably the 20s.
[Tinker] I think it's one
of my favorite shoes
that I've ever worked on,
partly because of
that wonderful experience
of finally getting Michael
to open up and give me stories.
[upbeat music playing]
[Tinker] What you're about to see
is our very first toe in the water
toward full adaptability.
Just step into the shoe,
it automatically closes.
[Tinker] Who would like to try it on?
When you look at the E.A.R.L., is there
a reason that that shoe should exist?
No.
But like any great thing, you create it,
and then people want it.
What we saw for the tech audience,
two cool things.
Number one thing:
the first self-lacing shoe
for the consumer.
[reporter] Nike looks to one-up rivals
in an increasingly tech-driven
athletic market.
I just want to give you guys
a quick first look at the shoes.
These are definitely
gonna be game changers.
[Tinker] This is step one.
This will become more commonplace
in my opinion.
Is this an important blip in time
in the history of shoes?
I'd say unquestionably.
[explosion]
[heartbeat]
[crowd cheers and applauds]
[gentle guitar music playing]
[Tinker] Before Bill passed away,
he wrote me a note.
The note went like this:
"Tinker Hatfield:
architect, shoe designer, track athlete,
husband and father.
This fulfills the obligations
of the University of Oregon.
Best regards, Bill Bowerman."
I hope someday somebody will take my ashes
and just sprinkle them around the track.
Maybe a little bit on the pole vault pit,
and I'll be happy. [chuckles softly]
I think if you just stay in your studio
and try and dream up new ideas,
there's not a good foundation
for your idea.
Just get out there and experience life.
That just gives you
the library in your head...
[engine revs]
to then translate that
into unique, new design work.
[gentle guitar music continues]
There are many designers out there
that are really great
at refining and interpreting
existing stuff
and moving the needle just a little bit.
And there's a fine art to that,
not overdoing it.
For me, though, my job as a provocateur...
that's all about
thinking further out into the future.
You have to look at
the landscape of the world
and go, "Okay,
I'm going to solve some problems.
I'm gonna add to some design features,
sort of mix it all together,
take a few risks, make a few assumptions
and just blend it all together."
That job does not go without its pitfalls.
But, if people don't either
love or hate your work,
you just haven't done all that much.
[upbeat music playing]