Those Red Octobers were a good lesson that even for the NBA’s most famous players, the athletic shoe trade can be harsh. Once, another famous NBA superstar sent McLeod on a wild goose chase in search of some new Kanye shoes for him. She connected at Barneys said he has several pairs. “I thought, ‘Oh, this will be easy,'” she said. “It’s not going to be easy.” The shoes at Barneys were out of stock by the time she got there. She was asked to try on. The retail store is now closed Atrium, and then the Nike Store and it continues that way until the end of the day and she still doesn’t wear shoes.She swore from that point on to avoid the trouble of facing the Rare sneakers.
And so when Tucker asked her in 2018 to help track a pair Serena Williams x Virgil Abloh Nikes, she passed — and then passed an Off-White store in downtown New York that was hosting a surprise sneaker sale. She bought them with no problems; he wear them in the tunnel a few months later. This is the first tenet of PJ Tucker’s sneaker collection strategy: sometimes luck is better than luck. You know the old saying about luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity? Tucker is a collector of never-endingly prepared sneakers.
Because then it’s not just luck but hard work. Even though he’s an ad subscriber for the NBA’s rare shoes, Tucker explained that he still doesn’t get all the latest and hottest releases. He is not Drills such as a Nike x Ben & Jerry’s “Chunky Dunky – one of the biggest releases of 2020. “It was a release that I didn’t get,” he said, still a bit shocked. However, persistence won out. He checked resale sites like eBay daily for Chunky Dunkys until he found a pair that fit his size. (Tucker appears to use his real name as a handle when buying shoes through eBay, a fact that has led to humorous interactions with fanboy resellers.)
Most Tucker sneakers, however, claim to be sleeker. “Don’t think of this as being as basic as, ‘Let me keep using StockX and buy this,'” McLeod said. But while McLeod says she came here to see how Tucker got his shoes, she won’t divulge his secret.
Fortunately, someone else will. A sneakers retailer who has helped find sneakers for Tucker in the past (and who requested anonymity) outlined how these more advanced transactions take place. Take the Jordan 5 PRFC for example. If Tucker had come to him looking for these shoes, the dealer explained, he would have immediately gone to pick up his Rolodex. In the case of the PRFC, he would reach out to “basically anyone with access to [Anthony’s] individual camps,” he said. He worked on the assumption that the shoes were issued to those in Anthony’s inner circle, as well as players and the manager of the Puerto Rican team. (The fact that these shoes can leak from Anthony’s inner ring is why Melo tells Tucker, “It’s not about you having them, it’s about where you got them from. [that’s a problem]. “)
