[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]