Jazz is to band as streetball is to basketball.

In both cases, black culture took something rigid, and turned it into something more fluid and expressive—a hybrid of personal flair and fundamentals. Putting the ball in the hole was only half the story —you had to look good doing it. Many NBA legends got their starts on grimy, crumbling, blacktop courts, but for years, streetball was given little mainstream respect.

Then, in 1993, Seth Berger, Jay Gilbert, and Tom Austin founded AND1, and middle America rethought its perspective.