words, photography & design // Nick DePaula
Penny Hardaway has never forgotten the first time he saw the Foamposite.
Nike designer Eric Avar was meeting with him to talk sneakers and show him some upcoming samples, as usual, when a sneaker tucked inside of a Nike duffel bag caught his attention.
“I was just like, ‘Oh my god! What is that?’” Hardaway told me years ago.
On the spot, it became his next signature shoe. The molded neon royal shoe was groundbreaking then and ever since, and became an instant classic, stamped by Penny in 1997.
Even all these years later, the Foamposite One, with its subtle Swoosh along the toe and One Cent logo hits along the heel and tongue, has been one of the most beloved sneakers of all time.
“It was just a crazy shoe,” he added. “And I had never seen anything like it in my life.”
As SLAM celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, we’re looking back on some of the most iconic issue covers and most impactful players throughout the Hall of Fame-inducted magazine’s history. We created some fire collabs for the occasion.
The 30th issue of SLAM in late 1998 featured Penny Hardaway, just as he was looking to make his return from a series of repeating knee injuries in Orlando. The feature was graced with a Scoop Jackson-penned cover story that perfectly captured his immediate rise with the Orlando Magic and his mission to stay on top of the game that he poured everything into.
The cover story featured lyric laden bridge paragraphs between the candid Q&A — yet another Scoop masterpiece that broke the mold for formatting.
“Leave you black & blue like a pair of Penny’s / or Foamposites”
Even before that first sample made its way to the meeting with Penny, we must first go back to the fall of 1995, when Avar was sketching away in Beaverton, Oregon. It is completely insane to consider the time and era in which the Foamposite was first conceived, as the shoe not only had a viral-before-there-was-social-media $180 price point, but required an all-new manufacturing process entirely.
The shoe was decades ahead of its time — and still is.
While the “Galaxy” Foams in 2012 instantly shut it down and created an entire era of graphic-printed sneakers, it was years ago in ’95 that Avar actually first imagined a printing process atop the shoe’s Foamposite material. One of his earliest sketches incorporated shaded hues of blue along the upper.
This SLAM collab, for the first time ever, brings that sketch to life.
The Eric Avar sketch, from the fall of 1995.
The SLAM edition’s molded Foamposite upper features a printed graphic inspired by Avar’s concept sketch, with the details dialed in from there. For the first time, there’s a Swoosh along the shank, just as Avar had originally sketched it.
The tongue and heel logos alternate between Hardaway’s sleek 1 Cent logo and the SLAM logo, inspired by Penny’s longtime insistence to keep his logo in place on collaborative designs. To this day, it’s one of the greatest signature logos ever created, that he instantly approved of when he first saw it.
“Right away I knew that they had done an amazing job with this logo,” he told me.
“Back to back 40s. Miami Heat. Unforgettable.”
Along the insoles, the graphics from the Scoop Jackson cover story are recreated throughout, along with SLAM’s 30th Anniversary logo crest. The packaging integrates the original Avar sketch, and lyrics from Jackson’s prolific penmanship.
Three vertical stars found on every cover throughout the magazine’s 30 years are woven into the heel tab, while a number 30 honors Penny’s cover and SLAM’s 30th Issue.
As the magazine turns 30, and the legend of the Foamposite lives on, this Friends & Family limited edition of Penny Hardaway’s most memorable sneaker brings the original design concept full circle.
