Can Allen Iverson help make Reebok cool again?
The Sixers legend whose Reebok sneakers defined basketball fashion of the 1990s, is pairing up with Shaquille O’Neal to revive the brand's basketball shoes.
Basketball fans will remember a 21-year-old 76ers rookie, Allen Iverson, crossing over Michael Jordan on March 12, 1997. They will also remember the shoes he wore: the original Reebok Question with its red and white color scheme, the first of many Reebok shoes Iverson would sport through his Hall of Fame NBA career.
Like the instantly iconic move, those shoes stood out. And while they never quite overtook Jordan’s own Nike shoes in either sales or cultural cache, they were an important landmark in sneaker culture. Iverson’s embrace of hip-hop style fashion, “The Iverson Effect” as it was called, helped, as GQ’s Mik Awake wrote in 2023, “create the blueprint” for the fashion style of today’s athletes.
And Iverson’s Reebok shoes were a big part of that legend.
The Reebok Question, the first of Iverson-branded shoes, arrived in 1996, followed by the original Reebok Answer two years later. Both received multiple sequels in the years that followed.
“The Question, the name was cool. It had a visual technology with the hexalite on the side, and it all kind of played into his nickname as the Answer,” said Nick DePaula, former editor-in-chief of Sole Collector magazine, who has covered the sneaker industry for more than 20 years.
For DePaula, it was the perfect debut. “It had the toe cap with the red color, which really stood out on the court and was different than a lot of the Nike and Jordan stuff at the time.”
Iverson, also known as “A.I.,” started off wearing Nikes during his college career at Georgetown, and then signed a deal with Reebok shortly after he was drafted in 1996. Along with Shaquille O’Neal, he helped put Reebok on the map when it came to basketball shoes.
He wore the Answer IV when the Sixers made the NBA Finals in 2001, and when he famously stepped over the Lakers’ Tyronn Lue. In a city that loves its sneakers, it’s hard to think of a Philadelphia athlete more closely associated with one particular shoe brand.
“The Question 1, the first one… that’s the Iverson shoe,” Josh Luber, a sneakerhead and entrepreneur who grew up in Penn Valley during Iverson’s Sixers heyday. It was its association with Iverson, as well as its look, that helped that shoe break through.
After a run in Philly between 1996 and 2006, Iverson played for Denver, Memphis, and briefly returned to the Sixers before playing for a Turkish team, finally retiring in 2013.
His departure from the game prefigured a significant decline in the Reebok brand. But 12 years on, Iverson is back trying to revive the Reebok name for a new generation.
In January, Reebok announced that it was making a move back into the basketball shoe game, fronted by some familiar faces: O’Neal was named the president of Reebok Basketball, with Iverson as vice president.
Adidas and Converse had dominated the basketball shoe market up until Michael Jordan lifted Nike in the mid-1980s. Reebok emerged in the following decade, and while it never overtook Nike, it spent much of the ‘90s and early 2000s as a strong number two.
While Nike, Jordan, and Adidas, resonated with basketball players. Iverson’s sneakers were “the first one that kids actually wanted to wear to play basketball,” said Luber.
One of the Question shoes, the T5DOA, was included in “The Sole of Philadelphia,” a 2018 exhibition at Drexel University’s URBN Center, curated by Sean Williams, that celebrated Philadelphia’s most important shoes.
“Just him even signing [with] Reebok was such a big deal,” DePaula said. “Allen was somebody they bet the whole category on, much more than anybody had in the past.”
But with O’Neal and Iverson nearing the ends of their playing careers, and no major new stars coming up behind them, Reebok began to decline at the turn of the millennium. The company was sold in 2005 to Adidas.
“[Reebok] never embraced the same strategy that Nike and then Adidas [did],” Luber said. “There are only so many people who are gonna wear the shoes on the court to play basketball. The real question is, how many people wear them to walk around, and be cool, and it becomes part of culture.”
Today, the challenge for the Reebok revival process is that they’re pitching young athletes who aren’t old enough to remember the company’s heyday.
But DePaula is optimistic.
“Just because a brand was away for 10, 15 years, doesn’t mean that people won’t have an interest in the heritage and the original stuff. But it can also be to their advantage, because kids don’t really have a context for it,” DePaula said.
“Iverson and Shaq are as marketable and relevant today as ever,” said Luber.
Perhaps a key to that revival lies in capturing the cool factor that Reebok had back in the 1990s.
“Reebok was cool when I was a kid,” noted sneakerhead and journalist Dan McQuade said, noting that while LeBron James has endorsed Nike throughout his career, he wore the Iverson Question Reebok shoes when he was in high school.
The story of the attempt to revive Reebok for basketball, aided by O’Neal and Iverson, is told in the new Netflix docuseries, Power Moves With Shaquille O’Neal.
The six-part series follows O’Neal and Iverson as they court athletes, supervise the design of the shoes, and strategize how to bring Reebok back to relevance. In the fifth episode, titled “The Iverson Effect,” he talks about why he thinks his relationship with Reebok succeeded back in the ‘90s.
“Authenticity,” Iverson says in the documentary. “Taking a chance. It’s something new and different.”
“Power Moves with Shaquille O’Neal” is streaming on Netflix.