The Dolphins Samba Man

But the country was in understandable chaos, with incredible destruction across its major cities and more than four million homes and factories destroyed. Cologne, Würzburg, Kassel and Hamburg were almost uninhabitable. In 1946, it was estimated that clearing the rubble in Berlin alone would take six to eight years.

A year later, that estimate had risen to 25 years.

Elsewhere, there were no working transport or communication services, industry and agriculture were at a standstill, and the risk of starvation and epidemics of disease hung like the Sword of Damocles over the shattered country. The population became so hungry that even the Archbishop of Cologne actively encouraged people to steal to survive.

Yet, despite years of misery and the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, West Germany recovered more quickly than anyone had expected. The economic upswing during the late 1940s and early ’50s became commonly known as the Wirtschaftswunder, or ‘Economic Miracle’, during which GDP grew by an average of 8.2% per annum. Fuelled by market and trade reforms, the country experienced rapid structural change, transforming from a collapsed war economy back into a heavily industrialized one.

One of the components of that economic miracle was an old German sportswear company operating under a new name. After the Great War, brothers Adolf and Rudi Dassler returned from the front line to their small Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach and began making shoes in their mother’s laundry room. Despite electricity supplies being so unreliable that the pair had to use pedal power from a stationary bicycle to run their equipment, they built the Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik, or Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory, which made high-performance sports footwear. Their designs were so popular that, when they visited the Olympic Village before the Berlin Olympics of 1936 with suitcases full of prototypes, a number of athletes chose to wear them in competition. Among them was an American by the name of James Cleveland Owens, who decided to wear their spikes. Jesse, as he was known, would famously win four gold medals in front of Hitler in his Dassler shoes – still arguably the greatest feat in the history of the Games.

After the Second World War, the brothers fell out for reasons that have never become entirely clear. Rudi, the true salesman of the duo, set up his own company – Puma – whilst Adolf, the designer, whose house had been commandeered by American officers at the end of the war, used his new military contacts to gain access to surplus war materials for production, as leather was almost impossible to find. Using requisitioned rubber from fuel tanks and rafts, and canvas from tents, he launched a new company: Adolf Dassler adidas Schuhfabrik.

Or Adidas.

One of his earliest creations was for his local soccer team, ASV Herzogenaurach, who couldn’t train when the harsh Bavarian winters set in. Using the surplus materials, Dassler designed a shoe with an outsole featuring three cut-out rubber suction cups, providing players with enhanced traction and stability and allowing them to practice all year round. He called his new shoe the Samba, with some historians believing the name reflected how it allowed players to dance away from opponents because of its superior grip on icy ground. What is absolutely certain is that it allowed the team to get one up on their local rivals, FC Herzogenaurach, who were backed by Rudi’s company, Puma.

At the time, Herzogenaurach was perhaps the most soccer-obsessed town in the country. The sport divided it firmly into two warring tribes: Adidas and ASV versus Puma and FC. There were, as one report in the German newspaper Die Zeit stated, “times when it would have been unthinkable for a ‘Puma man’ to walk around wearing an Adidas T-shirt; if someone happened to win such a shirt in a raffle, they wore it only in bed. There was an Adidas school bus and a separate one for the Puma children, and because the local taxi operator was also a manager at ASV, he could forget about ever having Puma employees as passengers, such was the rivalry.”

However, the success of the Samba helped push ASV – and Adidas – well beyond the reach of Puma. By the 1980s, the shoe had become a pop culture phenomenon: Eddie Murphy wore the Samba in the 1984 hit Beverly Hills Cop, and the very first shot of Danny Boyle’s classic Trainspotting is of Mark Renton’s brown Sambas hanging over the edge of the bed. They’re now worn by everyone from Jennifer Lawrence and A$AP Rocky to Pharrell Williams, Nicole Kidman and, in rare cleat form, by our own Jacob Rodriguez.

Today, Adidas is the second-biggest sports brand on the planet, trailing only Nike, with an annual turnover of almost $25 billion. Its fashion arm has rocketed it into the stratosphere, and its collaborations with high-end labels have turned it into an icon, especially in Europe, where it far outsells Nike. The Samba is its second-best-selling shoe, behind only the Stan Smith, and in an era where players are eschewing traditional brands for designer cleats – who can forget Marvin Harrison Jr. in a pair of Louis Vuittons against Wisconsin, or Cowboys rookie Jaydon Blue and his blisters after practicing in some LV footwear? – it’s nice to see a traditional linebacker going old school.

“They’re super comfortable,” Rodriguez said after practice on Sunday afternoon when asked about his footwear choice. “Adidas got me right.”

There’s a long way to go, but if he continues to progress in the manner in which he’s started, the old German sports brand with the three stripes might just be powering J-Rod into the Defensive Rookie of the Year conversation when the real bullets start flying.

As the late, great Adi Dassler might have said: Fantastisch!