1997-1998, I was a senior in High School. Up until that point, the only high school athletic team I made was the Golf team. Seriously. I played a lot of basketball after school with my friends but we never really played on the school team. The final summer before my senior year, 3 friends and I decided we were going to try to make the basketball team for our senior year…our school hadn’t won a state championship in nearly 20 years and we figured there’d be no better way to graduate than with a school title in hand. I was never much of a jock because I was small and really didn’t have much confidence. But basketball was different. We got a new coach that year…his name was Mr. Flohr and he had spent the last few years playing ball for USC (this was not something we could actually fact check). Anyway, we busted our asses for a good 9 months before the season. We had 3 practices a day during the summer and 3 practices + weight training during the school year. As we were busting our asses on a daily basis, Coach Flohr took us aside one day and said ‘If we are going to play together, we all need to wear the same shoes.’ He gave us an Eastbay catalogue and said ‘the last winning squad I played on we wore Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars – you guys need to pick a pair of Converse to win together in and if you can’t agree on a pair we’re going to get the Chuck Taylor All Stars.’ We were shocked because this was the peak of Jordan dopeness – 11s, 12s, 13s were seen around the school. In any case, we chose some non-offensive Converse model that was entirely forgettable. The shoe above, the ‘Converse Chuck Taylor All Star 2000’ released in 1997 and we HATED this shoe but one of the JV players wore it on a daily basis. We’d all make fun of it (as would he), but he was definitely onto something because he was one of the hardest working players at our school. This shoe was soooooo ugly to us…anyway…I’ll probably go into this in greater detail later but I ended up getting cut from the team and replaced with a dude who ended up playing fullback for BYU or something…it was a good thing I got cut, too, because that fullback ended up sinking two free throws in double OT.