The Classiest Feet in Tennis

The other day at the U.S. Open, I ran into Stan Smith without my Stan Smiths. This sounds meaningless but you have to understand: This is like bumping into Ralph Lauren while wearing a fanny pack and flip-flops. It's as bad as prowling around a Brooks Brothers in your Spider-Man pajama bottoms. It's a high crime against tennis fashion. Let me backtrack and explain.

I wear Stan Smiths all of the time. You've seen these shoes before: They're made by Adidas, and they're utterly basic—all-leather, with three subtle rows of tiny holes substituting for the brand's famous three stripes. The main characteristic of Stan Smiths is that they're bright white—immaculately so, like the teeth of a morning-TV news anchor. I will fistfight or thumb wrestle or at least mildly scowl at anyone who doesn't agree that the Stan Smith is among the most timeless sneakers ever made, a list that I believe also includes the Rod Laver, the Jack Purcell, the Chuck Taylor and perhaps the Air Force One. The reason they endure is their simple dignity. Sneakers are a hard trick to pull off in fashion—if you're not careful, you will look like Paul Simon on his way to a cookout in 1987. But you can respectably wear Stans with shorts and jeans, with cheap suits and good ones, to meetings, parties, dinners, hospitals, pet hospitals and I believe a wedding, as long as it's during the day and your pants are cotton. I have purchased so many pairs that Stan Smith should cook me dinner. If you are lucky enough to play clay-court tennis in them—and you should, not all the time, but just once, just to say you did—you will notice that the bottoms of their soles leave pretty little ribbons of circles, a recognizable footprint to any advanced sneakerologist.

So the other day, I was walking in through the front gate of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center when through a doorway, there he was: Stan the man himself, who won this NYC tennis clambake in 1971, took Wimbledon in 1972 and played the first Open night match in 1975. He was lean and tan, and at 65, he looked as if he could knock out five sets without a tiebreaker. I couldn't let the opportunity slide. I had to ask him about his sneakers.

As soon as I introduced myself, Smith looked me square in the eye and glanced down to see what I had on my feet.

"A knockoff," he said, unimpressed.

It was mortifying. He was right. I had the Stans on the night before at the Open, but I'd switched to something else for this trip. There's no need to go into what brand it was, but on my feet were a lightweight canvas pair of sneakers made by a different manufacturer, a pair that owed more than a small stylistic debt to Stan Smiths. You may as well have called them Stan Myths.

But Stan was cool about it. His whole partnership with the shoe has been a serendipitous twist—back in the mid-1960s, it was introduced as a partnership with the French player Robert Haillet, but Adidas was eager to move into the U.S. market, and turned to the Southern California-raised Smith. "For three years, both of our names were on the shoe," Smith said. "His name was on the side, my name was on the tongue…the original salesmen selling that shoe in the U.S. referred to it as a 'Haillet shoe.'"

He lifted a foot, revealing an all-black version of the Stan. "It was the high tech shoe of its time," he said. Had it changed much? "Almost exactly the same."

Smith said he seldom saw people play tennis in Stans anymore. Today they are far better known as an off-court shoe, a staple of casual-wear, frequently cited in fashion magazines. "The…Platonic ideal of a leather low-top pair of sneakers," is how GQ senior editor Will Welch described them to me in an email.

Smith, who said he recently signed a new contract with Adidas, was well aware of the shoe's fashion durability.

"The shoe has developed its own aura," he said. "The shoe freaks, it's amazing. They come up to me and tell me what it means to them and all this stuff—it's pretty wild. Then you got guys like Usher and Jay-Z and Marc Jacobs who think it's the greatest shoe ever."

"Most of the kids who wear it now have no idea who I am," Smith said. "It's just become a shoe—people call it the Stan Smith shoe. They have no idea who Stan Smith is."

The former U.S. Open champ said this with no trace of frustration. His strange second life only seemed to amuse him. "It's just one of those fluky things," Smith said. "I happened to be in the right place at the right time, with the right ranking, and the right shoe."