This List? It Was a Shoe-In

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.

Nikita Khrushchev
Until the al-Zeidi affair, the Russian premier's shoe-banging speech at the United Nations that punctuated Khrushchev's tumultuous New York City visit in the fall of 1960 had been the most infamous footwear incident in world history.

Michael Johnson
"The Man with the Golden Shoes" blazed the track at the 1996 Summer Olympics to win both the 200- and 400-meter gold, the only runner to complete that double.

Annika Sorenstam
Sorenstam had to do more than click the heels of her red slip-on shoes during the final round to win the the 2002 Kraft Nabisco Championship. The staid Sorenstam broke form with the flashy footwear, but she played her usually flawless game to shoot 68 and win her fourth major.

Imelda Marcos
When Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, fled Malacanang Palace, she left behind more than thousands of pairs of shoes, a symbol of the Marcos' excesses. Hundreds of the pairs now reside at the Marikina Shoe Museum.

Sidd Finch
George Plimpton's fictional phenom showed up at the New York Mets' spring training camp with a 168-MPH fastball and just one shoe—a boot on his right foot—as part of Sports Illustrated's elaborate April Fool's Day joke in 1985.

Dorothy
There's no place like the Smithsonian National Museum of American History for the most famous pair of slippers in cinema history and a lasting icon of American culture. They were worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, which celebrates its 70th anniversary in 2009.

Michael Jordan
When the Chicago Bulls rookie put his name on a pair of sneakers from Nike in 1984, Air Jordan helped spawned the current multi-billion-dollar sports marketing industry. From then on, millions wanted to "be like Mike"—or Tiger.

Cinderella
Who has the best Cinderella story? Why, that of Carl Spackler in Caddyshack, of course. But in the archetypal rags-to-riches fairy tale, the vehicle that transforms Cinderella's life is the glass slipper that she leaves behind for the prince to find.

Doug Sanders
The Imelda Marcos of golf, Sanders was known as the "Peacock of the Fairways." His colorful outfits were always bottomed with matching golf shoes, like his head-to-toe violet ensemble he was wearing during his iconic moment—unfortunately, a missed 30-inch putt at St. Andrews in the final round of the 1970 British Open.

 

Comments

[CH]

How about the lack of shoes -- Shoeless Joe Jackson. Or if you expand the definition of shoes to include those with attachments then you have the infamous Tanya Harding and her broken lace incident.

[Greg Pinelli]

Or how about the journalistic equivalent of putting one's foot in one's mouth..Like the pathetic article above. It really must be the golf silly season.