![]() ![]() “We got down to the monument grounds, and we parked, and we’re walking around, and we ran into a gentleman,” he told CBS News in 2013. King, made the trek to the march the night before with a friend as a last-minute decision. The Scariest Thing in the Exorcist Movies Has Always Been the Body of a Pubescent Girl How the Host of One of the Most Popular Podcasts Made America’s Favorite Hairstylist Cry Over Trans RightsĪfter Watching Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Will You Sleep Nevermore? gave him a copy of the famous address given on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the climax of the historic 1963 March on Washington.ĭoes the Pioneer Woman Really Own All the Land from Killers of the Flower Moon? The Real Story Is Stranger. However, at the same time, he was as determined to have Black track-and-field sensation Jesse Owens wear Adidas footwear in the 1936 Berlin Olympics as Vaccaro was to put Jordan in Nikes, and he was similarly vindicated when Owens’ victories-which infuriated Hitler because they undermined the Nazis’ message of Aryan supremacy-had a similarly electric effect on Adidas’ sales.ĭuring the same conversation where Sonny asks George to put in a word for him with Jordan, George tells Sonny that Martin Luther King Jr. It was Adolf Dassler’s idea to enhance the company’s economic prospects by coaching and supplying shoes to the Hitler Youth. He and his brother Rudolf, the founder of Puma, joined the actual Nazi Party in 1933 shortly after Hitler became the German chancellor. However, Vaccaro ends up not using it, relying instead on introducing doubts about company management arising from the Dassler heirs’ power struggle following the founder’s recent death.ĭassler was not a young member of the Hitler Youth, not least because he was already in his 30s when the Nazis came to power, but the truth is arguably worse. (If you want to get technical about it, Gilmore’s actual last words were “ Dominus vobiscum,” Latin for “God be with you,” but these were simply uttered in response to the Catholic priest as part of his last rites.) According to Wieden, Nike was at first less than thrilled with the slogan, with CEO Phil Knight responding “ We don’t need that shit,” but Wieden won them over, and the brand’s sales soared after the tagline debuted in a 1988 commercial about an 80-year-old runner named Walt Stack.Īs part of his campaign to get Jordan’s mother Deloris (Viola Davis), the power behind the throne, to urge the basketball star to sign with Nike, as opposed to Adidas, the bigger German company who made what was at the time Jordan’s preferred shoe, Vaccaro comes armed with the story that the company’s founder, Adolf “Adi” Dassler, was in the Hitler Youth. ![]() Dan Wieden, an advertising executive assigned to the Nike account, was up against a deadline before a big marketing meeting with his client when he decided to suggest a slightly changed version of Gilmore’s last words, “Let’s do it,” as a tagline to link five unrelated 30-second ads together. The criminal in question was double-murderer Gary Gilmore, whose execution by Utah firing squad in 1977, as the first person to be executed under the United States’ recently reinstituted death penalty, was a mid-’70s cause célebrè, even becoming the subject of Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer-winning nonfiction novel The Executioner’s Song. ![]() ![]() This is mostly true, though Nike didn’t debut the slogan until a few years after the 1984 events of the film. In the film, Howard White (Chris Tucker), Nike’s field rep for basketball-related marketing, tells Sonny the company’s inspirational “Just Do It” slogan was in fact taken from the last words of a criminal facing a firing squad. One scene early in the film establishes the character of basketball talent scout Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon, in everyman mode): Stopping off in Las Vegas on the way back from a scouting trip, he’s amassed a healthy-looking pile of chips at the roulette table, but rather than walk away with his winnings, he puts them all on one final spin of the wheel, with predictable results. Like Moneyball, another sports story where the action takes place more in back offices than on the field or court, it’s the story of a mid-level underdog who champions an innovative idea that puts not only his own career but the fortunes of the whole company at risk. Nevertheless, thanks to a charming script by first-time screenwriter Alex Convery and some intelligent, actor-friendly direction from Ben Affleck, Air- now on Amazon Prime -makes the story of Nike’s efforts to sign a young Michael Jordan into popcorn-friendly entertainment. The pursuit of a star athlete’s endorsement by a sports footwear company may not sound like the most fertile ground for a movie. ![]()
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