As a teenager, I worked at my dad's sneaker store, so by osmosis, I became pretty familiar with shoes. (As well as, unfortunately, dirty socks of all kinds. This was in the days when salespeople actually found the shoes for you and helped you put them on instead of leaving you to forage through piles of boxes. I am just an outsider in the shoe business now, but isn't this current system actually more work for the staff, who now have to tidy up the strewn boxes at the end of the day? On the other hand, they no longer have to be exposed to dirty socks, so I guess it's a push. What I really didn't comprehend was how people couldn't muster the effort to put on clean socks, especially when they knew they were going shoe-shopping. You would imagine this would apply mostly to kids, but a surprising number of adults were also guilty.)
The best part of the job was that I was always the first kid in school with the cool new pair of sneakers like the first Air Jordans. (This status sort of made up for all the Al Bundy jokes I had to endure. My favorite was the Nike Terminators, a pair of which I still have somewhere and used to break out every once in a while. They were always conversation starters, but now that Nike and others picked up on the retro appeal and have reissued the Terminator and other classics, I feel the appeal has been cheapened.
I bring up this backstory because unless you've been Rod Blagojevich's lawyer or have had the misfortune to have entrusted Bernard Madoff with your or your charity's money, footwear has been a major topic of conversation in the past week. In fact, shoes have never been discussed this much unless you were a Sex and the City cultist fan.
I am talking, of course, of Muntader al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his size 10s at President George W. Bush during a press conference.
Continuing this theme of notable footwear, you'll find nine other famous and infamous shoes throughout history in addition to al-Zeidi's after the jump. (Don't worry, there are some golf shoes on the list.) Why did I compile this list? You could say the subject runs through my sole.
