Was it ironic to see the big push of the 360’s total exposed air bubble become a huge campaign almost twenty years later?

Tinker Hatfield: Well, no. I think it was just a logical process. As the original Air Max ultimately became this successful product that people now look back on, it continues to incrementally push the envelope. I think even back in the mid 1980s when some of these first things were designed, these first avant-garde athletic products, I think we were already thinking that someday, maybe we can do a shoe that has no foam and is just all airbag. It just took a long time to engineer it. It took a long time for people to become internally comfortable with it. And ultimately these people are now seeing the 360 AIR the marketplace.

Bill Bowerman, the co-founder of Nike, was your track coach at Oregon. Was he your “in” with the company?

Tinker Hatfield: Yeah, I think so because when I showed up at the University of Oregon as a freshman on the track team, I was also in the school of architecture - which is actually unusual. Usually when you go to architecture school you don’t do anything else, it’s fulltime. You don’t really see a lot of athletes in the school of architecture, and I was trying to buck that trend. Bill Bowerman noticed that and he liked that. He was using all of his track guys as guinea pigs for some of his early designs. I came in as a freshman and became one of his favorite test pilots because I could draw. I could draw and make notes and give him maybe better feedback than he was getting from some other folks regarding the performance of the shoe.

Who put more pressure on you to be successful, Bill Bowerman or Michael Jordan?

Tinker Hatfield: You know what? I’d like to add a third name to your question, and that would be Phil Knight. Knight was more demanding than anyone else. Bill Bowerman was more of a teacher. He was more about preparing people to be successful. Phil Knight and Michael Jordan were more about expecting excellence, and maybe weren’t quite so overt in the nature of classic mentoring. Phil Knight is the one that always had very high expectations. He had a very high level of trust. Those things kind of have to go together because he doesn’t always understand how we come up with these designs, or advertising campaigns. He doesn’t always maybe understand the process, but he has a very high level of trust. And if you deliver he just gives you even more room to do that. I give him  props.

You get inspiration from all over the place, what was the most complex to incorporate into a sneaker?

Tinker Hatfield: A lawn mower.

Really?

Tinker Hatfield: It was a push mower but it was designed beautifully and it really provided some of the inspiration for the Jordan XI because the lawn mower has to be really rugged. You have to push it through the grass. You’re bumping into the house. You’re bumping into the fence. And it’s got to be real tough around the edge. Maybe the top of it doesn’t take so much abuse, so you can have a little more fun with color, and that’s exactly what this lawn mower design did. Then I finally came across this higher quality patent leather that actually was not only shiny, but was also tough, scratch resistant and it would flex without cracking. It reminded me of that lawn mower, how the bottom edge of that lawn mower was really tough and designed to work in the conditions of mowing the lawn. I located [the patent leather] around the whole bottom third of the shoe for all those same reasons. It was actually an appropriate material to use on the shoe for basketball. So I was then able to justify bringing shininess into a basketball shoe, because this particular material made it all work. I brought this design back to Michael, and the first thing he said out of his mouth was “Yeah, now we’re talking. Now you got it.” Home // CELEBRITIES // WEB EXCLUSIVE // Tinker Hatfield