words, photography & design // Nick DePaula
When you ask anyone to pick their favorite cover of SLAM, it’s the 15th issue featuring a fold-out cover of rising rookies from the 1996 NBA Draft “set to blow up” that quickly comes to mind for many. One of the deepest classes ever posed in front of a brick wall, and SLAM was right there to stamp the collection of future Hall of Famers as next up.
Standing amongst the seasoned collegians was an 18 year-old straight out of high school, confidently holding the official Spalding game ball on the cover shot. It would be the first of 19 SLAM covers that Kobe Bryant would grace.
As SLAM celebrates its 30th anniversary throughout 2024, we’ve teamed up with brands around the industry to celebrate the most iconic covers, athletes and sneakers from throughout the magazine’s three decades through a series of new collaboration designs.
It was in those early days that Kobe Bryant and Adidas created some game changing sneakers in the late 90s heading towards the turn of the millennium. His signature series went to another level in 2000, when Adidas took design inspiration from Audi coupes and brought a new look to the game entirely.
As we highlight that Issue #15 cover and Bryant’s start with Adidas, we’re also looking back on Kobe’s final signature model with The Three Stripes.
SLAM is bringing to life one of Adidas’ most forward-thinking and polarizing designs in company history — the Crazy Two — which is getting the full retro treatment for the very first time.
“Really, it was all about just doing a new look,” original designer Eirik Nielsen had told me a few years back.
With the brand looking ahead to the 2000s, design legend and Adidas executive Peter Moore put together a team that aimed to define the futuristic design language that was expected for the new millennium. Bryant would be the vehicle to push Adidas forward into new territory.
Of the fourteen voters from SLAM’s staff that each named their rookies “Most likely to…” in fifteen different topics, Kobe Bryant was only mentioned three times in that 15th issue of the magazine. Once as an ambitious Rookie of the Year pick — twice as most likely to “piss off Jordan.”
By 2000 though, he had become a global icon.
Bryant was on the cusp of helping lead the Lakers to a three-peat, and he was the face of Adidas Basketball around the world. To try and level up, the brand teamed up with Audi designers at the car company’s creative studio in Malibu to concept his next signature sneakers.
Drafting off of the Audi TT roadster for inspiration, it was an entirely different way of designing a shoe. Shoes were first modeled in clay and sculpted, like a car. The results were proportions and sharp lines that gave the silhouette a stance unlike anything before it.
“They were very, very different,” joked Nielsen.
Inspired by the vivid shades of teal and yellow on Kobe’s first-ever cover, this new SLAM edition of the Crazy Two comes in two separate base color pairs, all wrapped in suede.
SLAM’s signature Three Stars are embroidered along the tongue of each shoe — with brick graphic insoles highlighted by SLAM’s 30th Anniversary crest on the heel, tying back to the cover backdrop.
The sneaker was every bit as boundary pushing as it was polarizing when it originally launched in 2001, and still looks just as futuristic and unique today as it did more than twenty years ago. Adidas is expected to also re-release some of the original colorways as we get into 2025.
As SLAM closes the chapter on its 30th Anniversary series of sneaker collabs to cap off 2024, we’ve looked to celebrate the eras, players and covers that helped to shape the magazine into the Hall Of Fame-awarded definition of basketball culture all these years later. This friends and family retro edition of the Adidas Crazy Two honors one of the most impactful players in SLAM history and one of the most storied magazine covers, all through the lens of an equally forward-thinking and defining sneaker.
