So about the ‘Early 90’s NYC’ post I put up yesterday - I mentioned the Adidas Winterball and how little love the internet is giving it, and how the shoe was one of the factors in meeting my good friend Gerry V - it seems Gerry read the post and he did some digging in the data crates, and found a larger version of the auction image on Google Japan - the tiny thumbnail made it difficult to be sure, but this larger version shows what I suspected - the only picture we can find of the Winterball 1 is of a forest-green accented variant.

The original pair that I fondly remember owning was all black-and-white weirdo/spacy Doc Martin ‘Creeper’ hip-hop style. Below is the cover to a compilation from Wall of Sound, a UK label known in the mid-90s for releasing music in a black-and-white weirdo/spacey hip-hop style, started and maintained by Mark Jones, a really cool guy who I had the good fortune of hanging out with one night many years ago when we went to see Spike Jones’ brother DJing at some dodgy party here in Chinatown, upstairs in some travel agency that was getting away with totally illegal clubs for about a month. We joked about how Coldplay, new at the time, was really just Bruce Hornsby again. Think about that, I still stand by that statement. “Just the way it is.” ANYWAY… Gerry and I talked way back when ‘Bustin Loose’ came out in ‘99, wondering if the baggy-trousered dude in the golden-orange t-shirt (who I think is representing one of the Propellerheads) is wearing Winterballs. The artistic liberties taken by the illustrator make it a little difficult to tell, but the bent piece that extends the length of the lace area, down to either side of the rubber toe-box, is suspiciously close.

I’ve photoshopped the auction photo to make it more accurate of what I remember my pair being like:

…or something like that. Thanks for the digging, Gerry!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 11:13 and is filed under sneakers, hip-hop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.