John Migdal
Why do you collect?
I don’t have a magic answer; I just know that I
can’t stop. I don’t have the cool Pacific North-
west stories of going into garage sales of
dudes who worked for Nike back in the 1980s.
I don’t have the store in Spain that went bank-
rupt but still had all these sneakers. Ninety-five
percent of the shit I get is on eBay, which to
me, isn’t a great story, but I’m fucking diligent
about looking.
What do you collect?
For the most part, I collect 1979-1987. That’s
my window. I have those Player Exclusives
(PE) from the 1980s, and there are variations.
Sometimes it’s just a colorway, like a purple
Nike Legend, or something that is a player
sample, but it doesn’t say “World B Free” on it.
Then, there are the ones made for a particular
team or player, so there’s a spectrum within
the PE category. I probably only have around
twenty pairs of basketball PEs.
With the t-shirts, it’s orange Swoosh, Blue
Label,and some Pinwheel. I don’t really collect
the old runners that a lot of people do. They’re
great and beautiful, but I never ran or looked
at those early runners and coveted them. I
grew up playing basketball, so my love of Nike
comes with Air Jordan, but also with The Big
East Tournament and seeing the big “Nike” on
the back of Derrick Coleman’s shoes.
What is it about that era of basketball
sneakers that keeps you searching for
them?
The Jordan 1s are just so wearable. That’s the
thing about collecting those early-to-mid 1980s
basketball shoes. You can still wear them. They
don’t have the midsoles that crumble. That
came later on. I think there’s something about
that Air Jordan 1 that’s kind of like the rookie
card in baseball. It’s the first one, so you have
to give it “X” amount of credit and credibility,
but also there are all these crazy colors that
weren’t in catalogs or released, and that doesn’t
happen later on. So, like the metallic blues
-- that was a release. You could get those, but
my understanding is that certain schools with
relationships to Nike were able to get some
of the other colors. I’ve seen pictures of the
Northwestern basketball team wearing the
metallic purple ones, so who knows where the
pairs were going? There’s still some mystery
to Jordan 1s. You have the random colors, the
lows, and tall tales of patent black leather with
gold ones, and the Lakers color ones. That’s
one of the first pictures I ever downloaded on
the Internet. I still have it. Who has that shoe?
Does somebody know? I don’t know.
Can you tell me more about the t-shirts you
collect and the significance of the label
colors that you mentioned?
The label helps define the era. Blue label is late
1983 to late 1986, but there’s some variation
because of leftover supply. That time is right in
my wheelhouse: the mid 1980s. So, that means
all the original Air Jordan 1 “Wings” and over-
the-shoulder shirts are on Blue Label. Orange
Swoosh is the era right before that, which was
from around 1979-1983. It’s not clear exactly.
The beauty of many of these shirts is they
aren’t production stamped.
My t-shirt hunting has really picked up in the
last five to eight years, and that’s three-fold.
Typically, the shirts are more affordable than
vintage sneakers, they take up less space, and
frankly, they’re wearable. I was telling my friend
the other day about collecting vintage Nike
t-shirts and how there really are no catalogs.
Sure, there are pamphlets, but there’s an indefi-
nite number of Nike shirts that exist because
there was so-and-so’s basketball camp or a 10k
commemorative run. There’s those dudes in
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