At a certain point, you start to wonder how much of it is true. The Jordan Legend, I mean. There are few living athletes as aggressively mythologized as Michael Jordan. It’s different when they’re no longer with us—long after the passing of larger-than-life stars like Babe Ruth and Wilt Chamberlain, it only feels right to inflate their stories into proper tall tales to match the bombast with which they ran roughshod over their respective sports. MJ, though…MJ is still here. Jordan actively participates in the mythmaking himself, shaping and maintaining the narrative of his greatness (sometimes to the chagrin of those closest to him).
This week, the Air Jordan 1 ‘Shattered Backboard’ is coming back. It’s one of the most popular non-OG colorways of the most important sneaker of all time, a simple orange-and-black beauty first released in 2015 that went on to inspire a whole series of further Jordan colorways. The same way that ‘Bred’ is shorthand among sneakerheads for black and red, ‘Shattered Backboard’ is synonymous with orange and black.
Nike
The name ‘Shattered Backboard’ seems self-explanatory. Mike must’ve dunked so hard that he shattered a backboard, right? And yet, it’s a feat that admittedly seems unlikely even as I type it now. It’s not that it’s impossible, just…unlikely. Jordan was certainly a powerhouse, but he wasn’t a Shaq-sized monster. Plus, as I alluded to earlier, Jordan has a habit of allowing the occasional story to be slightly inflated or misremembered for his own benefit. Take the immortal “Flu Game,” for instance: Jordan maintains his illness that day was the result of food poisoning masterminded by a gang of rogue Utahns; the more likely reality is that he was just hungover. In any case, the legend continues to pay off. Those “Flu Game” Jordan 12s? They still sell out whenever they drop.
So again, a shattered backboard. The story goes that the summer after his rookie season, Jordan participated in an exhibition game in Italy for the basketball club Stefaniel Trieste (whose uniforms were, you guessed it, black and orange). In that game, legend has it, he hit a dunk so powerful, so explosive, so intense that the backboard shattered into a million pieces. You hear that and you think: Damn, this is no mere athlete. And then you think: But wait, did that really happen?
Maybe it wasn’t a million pieces. Maybe the backboard cracked or the hoop came out of the screws. Maybe a piece of plexiglass or two shook loose. Surely this man did not literally shatter a backboard. You think, I’m gonna Google this. I’m gonna see for myself what really happened. You pull up the video.
