White Shoe Diaries: The History of the Oakland Athletics’ Iconic White Cleats One of the most distinctive parts of the Oakland Athletics’ image is the white, cleated athletic shoes that they have worn for nearly 50 years. No other Major League Baseball team has donned white cleats on such a continuous basis as part of their standard uniform, and this has set the A’s apart from their dark-cleated peers in a way that their fans have grown to love. It may be hard for some to fathom why a shoe color could be such an important and lasting part of an athletic uniform and team persona, but the A’s have stuck with this formative decision for the long haul, and it’s morphed into a life of its own. So, how did all of this start? For the answer, we have to go back to the beginning – in fact, before the beginning. Former team owner Charles O. Finley was a showman by nature. Having made millions in the insurance business, he commanded the resources to indulge his passion for being different. He bought the flailing Kansas City Athletics in 1960 and quickly began his metamorphosis of the team. His first big move was to change the colors of the team’s uniforms in 1963 from red, white and blue to green, gold and white (what?). Upon seeing these new uniforms for the first time (they were sleeveless, no less!), Mickey Mantle was heard to say, “They should have come out of the dugout on tippytoes, holding hands and singing.” So, although this may have been unique and bold for the time (if you ignored the unfavorable comparisons to “ladies’ softball teams” being bandied about), most of the baseball establishment turned up their noses at this apparent affront to the tradition of more muted colors, with a focus on basic white uniforms for home-field play and grays for road trips. Finley was constantly looking for ways to garner attention for his team, especially since the club had a history of dismal play and near-thebottom finishes. During the course of his 20-year reign over the franchise, whether it was having a mule for a team mascot, arranging for one his players to be the first to play all nine defensive positions in one game, paying his players to grow mustaches or experimenting with orange baseballs, Finley tried just about everything – most being met with nearly universal derision from folks outside of his home cities – and many inside! One of his ideas, however, stuck – and stuck big. The white shoe. In Finley’s continual quest for ideas, he kept a close eye out for innovators from whom to “borrow” ideas. Soon after his introduction of the green, gold and white uniforms, he began to take notice of a young man making a name for himself playing football for the University of Alabama – Joe Willie Namath. This is really where it all began. Joe Namath was cast from a similar mold as Finley – a fierce individualist. Looking at the team picture of Namath’s Beaver Falls (Pennsylvania) High School team that won the 1960 state championship, seven of the eight players have black shoelaces – Namath is sporting white laces. In a similar photo of the baseball team, he is the only member wearing sunglasses. Later, during his college playing days at Alabama from 1962 to 1964, Namath engaged in a fairly common practice of wrapping tape around his football shoes (which,

at the time, came in only one color – black). This gave the shoes added support, especially as they began to wear out (remember, this was before today’s Transformer-like footwear that can be made to just about any specifications). However, he had a penchant for using light-colored tape – and a lot of it. In fact, he would wrap so much white tape around his black shoes that they began to look like white shoes (gasp!), with just thin strips of black showing near the tops where he couldn’t get full coverage. Some of Namath’s Alabama teammates feared that curmudgeonly coach Bear Bryant would order Namath to peel off the tape and forget such nonsense, but the legendary field general never said a word to him. Not as long as Namath led the Crimson Tide to victories, which is what he did – often. However, during the fourth game of his senior year in 1964, Namath didn’t tape his shoes, and, in the first quarter, running around right end, he planted, cut left and tore ligaments in his right knee – an injury that dogged him for the rest of his career. Says Namath, “When I was playing at Alabama, our [black] football shoes felt too light on my feet, flimsy; and when I ran, they would turn out on me. So before every game, I taped them up for support, which made them heavier, until they felt like they were kind of part of me. Well, the one game I didn't tape them up was in my senior year against North Carolina State, when my knee collapsed. I wasn't hit on the play; my knee just went. Well, I’m not superstitious,” he said, “but after that, I taped my shoes every day.” Apparently, this worked out just fine, as he rebounded to lead the Tide to the national championship that same year. After his Alabama playing days were done, Namath burst onto the pro scene in 1965, as the New York Jets selected him with the upstart American Football League’s first overall pick. Upon arriving at the Jet’s training camp to play for legendary coach Weeb Eubank, Namath resumed his practice of generously taping his shoes to transform them into his preferred white-looking Frankenshoes. However, he soon received a gift that would change the world of sports footwear for years to come. “After being with the Jets about three weeks, I walked into the training camp locker room, and there was a brand-new pair of white, leather shoes,” Namath said. When asked about the origin of this mysteriously colored, custom-made footwear, Namath answered, “Weeb ordered ‘em. He thought it would save tape.” Another, more plausible explanation was Eubank’s ability to cultivate a phenomenon when he saw one – and almost certainly with the Jet’s rainmaking owner Sonny Werblin’s full backing. Since no shoe company was manufacturing white cleats in those days, Eubank arranged to have these shoes specially made, white-dyed leather and all. According to Namath at the time, “Coach Bryant was always thinking about winning. Weeb is mainly concerned over what type of publicity you get.” Eubank saw the potential in setting his young superstar-in-the-making apart,

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and these shoes were the beginning of that process. Adds Namath, “I never asked for 'em, but there they were, so I started wearing them.” Soon after Namath began scampering across the gridiron in his customized white kicks, shoe company Riddell saw the potential for new revenue and added name recognition, and decided to actually start manufacturing their own version of the white cleats, featuring their patented “Snug-Tie” bands for added support. The company struck a deal with the Jets to provide their wunderkind with white cleats starting with the 1966-67 season. Before Namath’s arrival in professional football, most quarterbacks of the era were cut from the same personalappearance cloth. Johnny Unitas sported a crew cut, Y.A. Tittle was an upstanding insurance salesman in the off-season and Bart Starr was clean-cut and straight-laced. And they all wore black cleats. Namath was a non-conformist who would later grow shaggy hair and smile behind a Fu Manchu mustache. He wore mink coats with a girl on each arm while prowling the New York City night life, showing a side of pro athletes the public had seldom seen. Not surprisingly, standard footwear would simply not do for him. This brings us back to the subject at hand (or foot), “For my first four years, at least, they were the only white shoes running around football fields. Maybe subconsciously, I might have been reaching for something in recognition,” Namath said. “Was I reaching, or did I want to be different? I don’t know. It’s a part of my Gemini side … whenever anybody mentions white shoes to me, my first response to them is, ‘Aren’t they lighter than black ones?’ They just feel lighter. And, I’ve got to admit,” he added, “I liked the white look.” The man who would soon be known as Broadway Joe became an anti-hero to the establishment and the savior of the rebellious AFL to others, especially after backing up his guarantee that the Jets would beat the heavily favored NFL Baltimore Colts and their old-school quarterbacks, Unitas and flat-topped Earl Morrall, in Super Bowl III in January 1969. “It was the timing of my arrival in New York,” said Namath, now 70. It’s interesting to note that, as Namath’s star was being minted in his now-infamous Super Bowl coronation in 1969 (clad in his white Riddell cleats for all the world to see, of course), in a little town called Boothwyn, about 330 miles east across the state of Pennsylvania from Beaver Falls, where Namath had flaunted his unique high-school shoelaces just a few years earlier, a slightly built, but lightning fast, teenage football player named William Arthur Johnson at Chichester High School, who apparently appreciated the footwear choice of Namath, dyed his own football shoes white as part of a dare and in his belief that it would help him run even faster. That young man would go on to electrify NFL crowds as Billy “White Shoes” Johnson.

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When asked about the origin of his nickname years later, Johnson said, “Back in high school. I was wearing white shoes and I had a good game. I scored six touchdowns, and the newspaper made a big deal of it. The headline said ‘Blazing Billy Scores Six Touchdowns,’ and the rest is history. They started calling me "White Shoes" after that.” As with Namath, Johnson was able to back up his bold choice in shoe color by delivering in the talent department. “Our coach didn't like the thrills and hot dogs, so I had to make sure I had a pretty good game, so he didn't bother me anymore after that. I had two or three pairs of white shoes and they were dyed,” he said. So, back to Finley. Charlie O. was fascinated with Namath’s ascent to the New York sports throne in the mid-1960s, and he saw the marketing value in his unique wardrobe choices – most prominently the white shoes. He wanted part of that action. He got the idea that these new-fangled white cleats would be a perfect complement to the unique green, gold and white uniforms of his Kansas City Athletics. So, in early 1967, Finley approached the very same Riddell company that had delivered Namath’s white kangaroo leather cleats only a few months earlier, and struck a deal with them to outfit his entire team with white baseball cleats, complete with matching Kelly-green Snug-Tie bands. Riddell was a company started by its namesake, John Tate Riddell, a former high school math teacher and football coach, in 1929. He first invented the removable cleat and went on to invent the first-ever plastic suspension helmet in 1939. So, if the apparently garish uniforms of the Kansas City Athletics weren’t enough to upset the entire baseball world, they would now be matched with white(!) shoes. Taking a cue from Namath’s bag of fashion tricks, Finley even ordered his equipment staff to outfit these new creations with green shoelaces instead of the standard white – blasphemy! Could America take this? It didn’t take long to find out. In the opening game of the Athletics’ 1967 season with the Cleveland Indians at home in Kansas City on April 11 – just before game time – Cleveland manager Joe Adcock vehemently objected, contending that a white-shod pitcher on the mound could distract his batters as they attempt to pick out the pitched ball. He vowed to formally protest the game if Athletic starting pitcher Jim Nash showed up on the mound wearing these white monstrosities to face his team. Well, Nash did, indeed, report to the mound in all of his white-footed glory, as did the rest of his A’s teammates to their respective positions. Unfazed by the hoopla, Nash proceeded to pitch seven innings of five-hit ball, picking up the win in the A’s 4-3 victory. (Only a month before, Nash had graced the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine via a unique three-photo superimposed image as the official coming-out party to the sports world for the

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white cleats, next to the cover story’s headline, “Colorful Kansas City.”) After the game, Adcock kept to his word and filed his protest with the league office. A few days later, however, American League president Joe Cronin rejected the protest, citing the sole (forgive the pun) official playing rule on shoes, “No player shall attach anything to the heel or toe of his shoe other than an ordinary heel plate or toe plate.” As such, it was determined, even if by omission, that from then on there was no rule against white shoes, gold shoes, purple shoes, etc. And the A’s have never looked back. However, this didn’t deter other teams from staging their own forms of protest, as evidenced when, only the very next month, the A’s traveled to Washington, D.C. to face the Senators for a three-game set. In an effort to combat the contended advantage that the white cleats provided the A’s, the Senators took the unusual step of wearing white caps and socks as their own form of white-weapon sabotage. Although the A’s lost two of the three games, their resolve to continue wearing their new white shoes was even more fortified. Unfortunately, the new shoes didn’t do much for their play, as the team finished the year at 6299, 12 ½ games worse than the previous, black-booted season. However, all of the pieces had been assembled for their next exciting chapter – the big move out West. In January 1968, Finley moved the franchise to Oakland, bringing along the outlandish uniforms and white leather cleats. In fact, the new white Riddell cleats were even incorporated into the team’s new logo, with the tagline, “The Swingin’ A’s”! The change of scenery seemed to take hold as the team began to improve and the players started to jell. The white Riddells would be the white shoe of choice for the entire team until 1971, when the Adidas brand was brought on board for most players during the season. The Riddells were starting to look a bit dated by then, and they were primarily known as football cleats at the time anyway. The only Riddell “holdout” was Vida Blue who rose to stardom in 1971 wearing the Riddells, and his very popular public image was of him sporting the Snug-Ties, as evidenced by a seemingly endless string of magazine covers from that year, in which he took both MVP and Cy Young honors (except for the August Time magazine cover, on which he was wearing Adidas, oddly enough). As such, it’s hard to blame him for wanting to further burnish his mark in the image that the public had come to know him in. Most of the other A’s, however, began to favor the softer leathers and more modern look of the Adidas cleat brand, which had come to be adopted by other teams, most prominently the defending World Champion Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles had also introduced rather cutting-edge uniforms in 1971 with their loudfor-them orange and black threads (including an all-orange version that was a harbinger of hard-to-look-away-from uniforms that were to come later in the decade). They had the Adidas company custom make matching black

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cleats with orange stripes, creating a unique look for the time. Seeing this and other teams onboarding the brand, the A’s began the shift toward Adidas cleats, featuring their three diagonal stripes, which slanted upward, forming an image of a “mountain … pointing out towards the challenges that are seen ahead and goals that can be achieved,” or so said the company’s marketing folk. Through most of the ’71 season, the A’s Adidas’ were maintained in their original all-white color, with no distinction between the three white stripes and the white leather of the rest of the shoe. Blue, however, apparently liking the Orioles’ use of differentcolored stripes on their shoes, began to hand draw similar green stripes on his Riddells, mimicking the Adidas stripes, giving him a decidedly unique – if homemade looking – shoe. A few other players began to color in the three stripes in their Adidas’, as well. The rest of the team obviously liked this look, because, beginning with the 1972 season, the team ordered their white Adidas cleats with matching green stripes and back pads, featuring the blue Adidas nameplate on the tongue flap, which created the look that would become a mainstay for several seasons. 1972 was a watershed year for the A’s. With their new polyester uniforms featuring pullover jerseys, elastic waistbands and even brighter versions of their Kelly green, Fort Knox gold and wedding gown white colors, they were at the forefront of baseball fashion for the time, and their beautiful new green-striped Adidas white cleats (except for Blue’s preferred Riddells, which he would wear for several more seasons) formed the perfect complement to this new garb. This is the look in which the A’s were introduced to most of America when they fought their way to the World Series later that year, which started on Saturday, October 14, 1972. Most baseball fans outside of Northern California had not yet seen the A’s play (remember, this was before widespread cable TV, SportsCenter, and the like), so most middle-America fans got their first real glimpses of this unusual cast of characters from the Bay Area during that Fall Classic. Fans everywhere weren’t sure what to make of these seemingly alien players, with their long hair, jacked-out colors, mustaches and – you guessed it – white cleats. Next to their downright militarist-looking opponents, the Cincinnati Reds, with their standard white and gray uniform versions, short hair, clean-shaven faces and conservatively low stirrup socks, the A’s could have been mistaken for baseball’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters.

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After the A’s took the “Hairs vs. Squares” series in a captivating seven games, millions of fans across America suddenly had new heroes. Catfish Hunter, Joe Rudi, Gene Tenace, Rollie Fingers, Vida Blue, Sal Bando, Bert Campaneris and the rest (including Reggie Jackson, of course, although he missed the entire series due to an injury suffered in the league championship series with Detroit). And, instead of white hats à la John Wayne, these heroes wore white shoes. That winter, with visions of Joe Rudi’s Superman-like leap to snag a line drive off of the towering outfield wall in Cincinnati, adorned in glistening white shoes that bore shades of the wing-footed Greek god Hermes, thousands of kids lobbied their parents to buy them white cleats for their upcoming baseball seasons, whether they be Pee-Wee League, Little League or what have you. White cleats were suddenly de rigueur footwear for any mod wannabe baseball players. In fact, if you still sported black cleats in some circles at the time, you weren’t considered cool. (Remember, this was the ‘70s.) Although up until then, the Oakland A’s had still occasionally worn black cleats here and there (e.g., during Spring Training activities, for a few sporadic regular season games for various reasons), they soon realized that the white cleats were becoming part of their identity to fans. And their World Series appearance in 1972 cemented their white-shod image with the public. As such, they made sure that only white shoes were worn by A’s players from then on (with only a handful of exceptions noted since). 1973 saw yet another World Series championship season, and the A’s hustled through the entire campaign in their green-striped Adidas. Except for one player. As was the case in 1971 with Vida Blue, Reggie Jackson now emerged as the A’s biggest star. Having crushed a monumental home run in the 1971 All-Star game in Detroit while wearing his allwhite Adidas, he continued to wear this brand through the 1972 season, complete with the new green striping. However, during the final game of the ’72 league championship series with the Tigers, Jackson tore his left hamstring while sliding in at home with the tying run. The injury caused him to miss the World Series, which started two days later. As part of his rehabilitation, Jackson sought a new shoe that would help him prevent further injury and give him added stability, while still offering the flexibility required of his hard-charging play. He decided on the Puma brand, outfitted in white of course, going as far as signing one of the first individual player shoe endorsement contracts in 1973 with the company. In a sea of Adidas, he would be the sole A’s wearer of the Pumas in 1973, with their signature “Formstrips” emblazoned in green on both sides. He rode these shoes right into an MVP award that year, and the A’s won their second straight title against the New York Mets and their coal-colored clogs.

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With Reggie leading the way in his Puma-reflected glory, several of his teammates decided to try out this new brand for the 1974 season. And, for a third consecutive year, the white-cleated super team strode to a World Series title, this time against another black-cleated quarry, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Footage from that Series shows some A’s players wearing Adidas; however, many of the core stars opted for the new Pumas. A fifth consecutive A.L. Western Division crown was secured in 1975; however, the A’s dynasty would come to a quick end in the playoffs, courtesy of the Boston Red Sox’ sweep. The mix of the A’s Pumas and Adidas would not work their magic again this time. When Reggie Jackson left the team the following year as a free-agent-in-waiting with the Baltimore Orioles, he took his Puma contract and footwear influence with him. 1976 saw most players revert to the greenstriped Adidas, which would take a foothold for the next five years. In the ensuing years, after the team disbanded its star players through a series of Finleymandated cost-cutting measures, many other shoe brands conjured up their own versions of the white cleat for the A’s. In the late 70s, the Mizuno brand emerged on the shoestrings of Pete Rose’s endorsement contract, signed in October 1978, just before he joined the Philadelphia Phillies. This brand, imported from Japan, was soon adopted by the fleet feet of a young Rickey Henderson, who rocketed them to Hall-of-Fame glory as the game’s premier base-stealer. The first incarnations of this brand’s cleat offering featured a stitched letter “M” on the sides, and could easily be confused with the Adidas brand. As the brand began to gain ground in the majors, however, a new striping design – dubbed “running bird” – was introduced. It was in these newly designed models that Henderson stole his record-breaking 130 bases in 1982. Six years later, a young Jose Canseco would record the majors’ first 40 homer/40 steal season in this same brand during the heart of the team’s 1980s dynasty. Many other shoe nameplates were seen in their A’s white versions in the late 1970s and through the 1980s on various players, including the Brooks brand, Converse, Pony, Nike, etc. The 1990s brought us white incarnations from Reebok and still others.

Brooks

Converse

Pony

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Nike

Reebok

Today’s A’s players have an almost endless array of high-quality vanilla footwear from which to choose. In addition to continued offerings from many of the aforementioned brands, modern-day A’s can be seen hoofing it in logos such as Under Armour, Easton, New Balance, and the list goes on. The days of teams outfitting their entire rosters in one or two cleat brands are long gone. It seems like each player nowadays has his own shoe deal or at least preferred brand, so you’ll see a veritable cornucopia of makes and models on the field at any time. However, the A’s still require that white be the most prominent color in the shoe of choice. As a final thought, Tuesday, April 11, 2017 will mark the white shoe’s 50th anniversary of those first steps on a Major League regular season diamond. It would be fitting if the A’s were to invite back Jim Nash, as well as Bert Campaneris – the first man to step to the plate wearing the new white cleats back on that testy day against the Indians in 1967 – to commemorate one of the game’s most unique fashion statements. And it will be interesting to see how far the A’s take this tradition. What will the team’s white shoes of 2067 look like? Will there be a new brand of choice? Will they have jetpacks attached? Here’s hoping that someone will take up this diary to let us know!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wally Campbell is a long-time Oakland A’s fan, who grew up in the small town of Martin, Tennessee. In the 1970s, fans of the A’s in Northwest Tennessee were few and far between as it was decidedly National League territory – with most fans pulling for the St. Louis Cardinals, Atlanta Braves or Chicago Cubs. However, after being mesmerized by the A’s performance and their stylistic cues in the 1972 World Series as a nine-year-old baseball-crazed kid, he was hooked for life. That following winter, he was one of thousands of kids across America who undoubtedly begged their parents to buy them white cleats for their upcoming baseball seasons. Although too young to grow a mustache, he also tried to convince his parents to let him grow his hair long like his Bay Area heroes, usually with little luck. Over the years, Wally has continued his loyalty for and admiration of the A’s, including an unceasing, hard-to-explain fascination with their signature white shoes, all the while assembling his own collection of the A’s cleats of yesteryear. Now a resident of the Phoenix, Arizona area, he’s able to enjoy seeing the team often during Spring Training, with a few regular-season trips to Oakland peppered in here and there. He’s studied thousands of photos, reviewed film and video footage, flipped through baseball cards, as well as spoken to many of the former A’s players themselves to offer up this history of the revered white shoe of Oakland.

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