F-Word Friday: It's Gotta Be the Shoes!!!*

Michael Jordan wore a new pair of Air Jordan sneakers every time he played a game as a pro. When a reporter asked him why (assuming it was a way to get more "game-worn" shoes out on the market to auction for charities or give to the underprivileged), Jordan said the philanthropy was a nice by-product, but that the real reason was more selfish. He said the universal truth was that everyone feels special when they're wearing new shoes, and he wanted that feeling every time he stepped on the court. And he's right.

Maggie, as has been well-documented, has a new pair of dangerously sexy red Valentinos for the wedding. They're outrageously, unfairly hot. On a scale of 1-10, they're at least a 14. And the bridesmaids, even the super-preggo Best Woman, are wearing fun new shoes too. I, admittedly, fretted over which shoes I'd wear. The choices are limited when wearing a seersucker suit, and I thought I wanted a pair of shoes that didn't feel out of the ordinary for me (I wanted to be comfortable wearing them, not just having them on, if that makes sense). But eventually I caved, and we found a pair of white bucks with navy saddles, which are really comfortable and very cool (thanks in no small part to the seersucker lining in the shoe).

But the groomsmen, well, they were on their own. With a new suit, shirt, tie, belt, and pocket square already in place, we decided early on that basic brown shoes would suffice. What's more, knowing that they all owned brown shoes of varying styles, and that no one cares what shoes the groomsmen wear anyway, we just gave them general guidelines to help pick from their own shoe collection. Never mind that two of them probably only own one pair of brown dress shoes anyway.

So that was that. Until Wednesday, when my father, the Best Man/King of the High-End Outlet Mall/World's Most Interesting Man, rescued the groomsmen from the woefully shallow depths of their own closets. He managed to find above average off-white bucks on sale for next to nothing, and called immediately for permission to buy new shoes for himself and his fellow groomsmen. I was, shall we say, skeptical, but that night he sent me a phone pic of himself in full groomsman attire (complete with a large-brimmed hat that made him look like a stunt double for Elliot Ness), and damned if he didn't look even more like The World's Most Interesting Man than he already did! So now, even the groomsmen get new kicks for the big day.


What can I say? Our wedding party clearly understands the importance of rockin' footwear.

* Back in the late '80's, Nike launched a series of ads with Michael Jordan and Spike Lee. Jordan played himself, and Lee played his own alter-ego, Mars Blackmon, taken from his character in 1986's She's Gotta Have It. The commercials quickly entered the pop-culture lexicon, mostly for Spike Lee delivering now-classic lines (like the one in the title of the post). Jordan was certainly the best pitch-man of his day and maybe of all time, and this ad started it all, igniting the Air Jordan sneaker craze in the late 80's that got so out of hand people were actually killed for their sneakers. Jordan made more iconic commercials, like this one for Gatorade in 1992 (maybe my favorite commercial ever), but it was the shoes that put him on the map as a spokesman.