It’s been nearly 20 years since Darius Miles and Quinten Richardson came into the league together as member of the Los Angeles Clippers, so you’d be excused if you forgot they were once the faces of Jordan Brand when the company was still in its infancy. But after being spotted by Michael Jordan himself rocking all AND1 gear (the brand was initially courting the two Clippers), the GOAT made a call, and suddenly Miles and Richardson found themselves flush with Jordan gear.
“We started getting flooded with the most gear you could imagine,” Richardson told The Undefeated. “Today they don’t give the same amount of gear they used to give. We got everything they made … Stuff that you wouldn’t wear, stuff that you have to give away because it was so much. We were literally in heaven.”
Miles and Richardson were also flooded with Air Jordans, done up in colorways you can’t find in stores, or player’s exclusives. When Miles was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers, he received exclusive colorways of kicks like the Air Jordan 8’s and 9’s in orange and white colorways, the rarest of the rare.
Miles eventually left Jordan Brand for Reebok, though, and though he held on to some of his Jordan PEs, the story of what he did with the majority of them is cooler than the shoes themselves.
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“I left and went to Reebok, and I was under Allen Iverson’s line. Most of the Jordans I had, I gave them to these two kids,” Miles said. “One was from Texas, and the other was from Memphis. My momma kinda built a rapport with they moms, and they was like me — young kids wearing a size 18 … So they didn’t have no options for shoes. So me and my mom shipped them out, I wanna say 40-50 pairs of shoes apiece. When my mom did it, all three moms were on the phone boo-hoo crying.”
Someone, somewhere, has a collection of size 18 Air Jordans that you won’t find anywhere else in the world. Kudos to Miles for doing something so generous with what he suddenly couldn’t use.
