MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Erik Martin’s gathering of shoes began out of necessity, at first, when he was 15 years old and an up-and-coming high school basketball player in the suburbs of Los Angeles.
“When I was 15, I was already wearing size 15 shoes,” said Martin, a West Virginia men’s basketball assistant coach. “We didn’t have a lot of money back then and it wasn’t like we could just go to the local shoe store and buy 15s. If we found a pair somewhere, I had to hold onto them and they usually weren’t anything too great.”
Years later, Martin is an admitted shoe junkie, or at least that’s how he used to see himself.
“At one time, I probably had over 400 pairs in my collection,” he said.
Marriage and the birth of his three daughters helped him scale down.
“I don’t have nearly as many now. You get married and start having kids, you have to make room,” Martin said.
Gotta be the shoes
Michael Jordan’s popularity in the 1980s and Nike’s popular commercials with Jordan and Spike Lee’s Mars Blackmon character — “Money, it’s gotta be the shoes,” Blackmon would scream over and over again to Jordan — was the beginning of a shoe explosion that has continued well after Jordan retired for a third time in 2003.
“Michael Jordan is the whole reason shoes are what they are today,” Martin said. “Everybody wanted the Air Jordans when they first came out. Other players came out with their own shoes.
“Look at the business today. People pay attention to which players sign with which companies. Everybody has got their own shoe. That all started because of Jordan.”
According to published reports, shoes sales at Nike surpassed 22 billion in 2018. According to another story in Esquire, on average Nike sells 25 pairs of shoes per second.
Martin and many West Virginia players over the years have made up just a small share of those totals.
To many of today’s athletes, shoe collections have replaced the hoopla that once came with baseball cards in the generations that preceded them.
When the Mountaineers returned to the WVU Coliseum for the first time after playing in the 2010 Final Four, point guard Joe Mazzulla came off the bus armed with six boxes of Nikes.
“I made out pretty well,” he said back then.
Kevin Jones has been building his own collection since his playing days at West Virginia.
“I’m sure some see them as some sort of status symbol or something like that,” Jones said. “I just like having a lot of really good shoes.”
According to Martin, in his 12 seasons with the Mountaineers, no player ever came close to going shoe-for-shoe with former guard Jonnie West, who of course had some pretty good connections through his father Jerry West.
“Jonnie would get shoes no one else could get,” Martin said. “Jonnie would get shoes before they were even out to the public. He got stuff through Jerry, which I guess is a pretty good hook-up to have.”
Martin is the only WVU coach on the staff that is big into shoes.
“Coach Huggins wears the same shoes until the soles start coming off, I think,” Martin said. “The other coaches really don’t get into it as much. They all call me a shoe whore.”
And like baseball cards back in the day, shoe trading is a popular topic behind the scenes with the Mountaineers.
“I’m not sure what all I traded with coach Martin, but it was known if you wanted to make a deal, he was one of the guys to go to,” Jones said. “His collection was pretty tight.”
The value to Martin
Nikes are all that floats in the Martin household, and while his closets are no longer filled with nothing but swoosh boxes, he still has a rack of around 30 pairs on display at his home.
Some he’s worn, some not even one time and maybe never will.
“If you look now, you’ll see people wearing custom suits with black Air Jordans on,” Martin said. “To me, I just like the way they feel on my feet. I can’t really wear anything else but sneakers. I think they fit into fashion now in just about anything.”
Surprisingly, there are few pairs in his collection with sentimental value.
The shoes he wore while playing for Huggins and Cincinnati in the 1992 Final Four are long gone.
“I probably gave those away to old teammates long ago,” he said.
He doesn’t go online at eBay to sell or buy. He’s given more away than he remembers and has traded away many others.
The value of Martin’s collection is more about the look or style of the shoe.
He proudly pulls out his pair of white and black Air Jordan 11 Retro, known as Jordan’s “Space Jam” shoes.
The heel of the shoe displays the number 45 — the number Jordan wore when he came out of his first retirement in 1994 after making the movie.
“Anyone on the team right now would easily pay $250 for these,” he said.
When WVU players move on to professional basketball, Martin puts in a request for a pair, or two, whenever they get a chance to send them.
“Every now and then, I’ll walk into my office and they’ll be some boxes there waiting for me that came from some of the guys,” Martin said. “Those mean something to me, because of who they came from.”
As part of working for a school under contract with Nike, Martin receives a $1,500 stipend from the shoe company.
“Back in the day, I used that all on shoes for myself,” Martin said. “Now, it mostly goes for shoes and clothes for my girls.”
Just how much value does the Nike brand hold with Martin? He put it this way: “I don’t know what I would ever do if I went to work at a school that wasn’t a Nike school,” Martin said. “I guess I’d have to try and get them to change.”
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