Baxter HolmesFeb 25, 2026, 07:00 AM ETCloseBaxter Holmes (@Baxter) is a senior writer for ESPN Digital and Print, focusing on the NBA. He has covered the Lakers, the Celtics and previously worked for The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times.Follow on XMultiple Authors
How the ‘Black Mamba’ brand connects two NBA legends (2:29)ESPN’s Baxter Holmes shares the untold story of how Kobe Bryant’s “Black Mamba” nickname started with Michael Jordan. (2:29)
NIKE STAFFERS SAT around a conference room table inside the company’s Oregon headquarters in late 2002 examining a space-age material.
Black and tubelike, Tech Flex had commonly been found inside cars and airplanes. Its grip expanded and contracted whatever was placed inside it.
Staffers saw it as a possible foundation for the next frontier of a basketball sneaker, one that wouldn’t feature laces.
Gentry Humphrey, a Nike executive tasked with marketing the shoe, looked at its braided sleeving. “It kind of looks like a snake,” he thought to himself. Others thought the same.
The snake was described as lightning fast, agile and feared — the same qualities of the star NBA guard for whom they were designing the shoe.
Humphrey, who had worked at Nike since 1994, quickly prepared a presentation that featured the snake as the centerpiece of a new sneaker campaign. Alongside photos of the snake were videos of the NBA star attacking the basket.
Soon after, Humphrey showed the presentation to his colleagues. The synergy between the material, the black mamba and the NBA star felt natural, alluring.
From there, it was time to create a global campaign featuring the black mamba, and present it to the player who would ultimately represent it.
Countless posters, murals and commercials champion the intensity of his “Mamba Mentality.” Bryant founded an academy that bore its name. Mamba Day is Aug. 24 — 8/24 — a nod to the two jersey numbers he wore during his 20-year career with the Lakers.
Nearly 10 years ago, after scoring 60 points in his final game on April 13, 2016, Bryant addressed the crowd at Staples Center, declaring “Mamba out!” — his final words as a Laker before placing the microphone on the court.
As part of his signature sneaker line, Nike has released several shoes featuring Mamba-related elements, including textured snakeskin patterns.
How a shoe and persona designed for Jordan became Bryant’s instead reveals an alternate reality — one of the most remarkable untold stories in the history of sports marketing, advertising and apparel.
The first Air Jordans were released in 1985. The 40-year-old signature shoe line netted nearly $7.3 billion in sales for the fiscal year ending in May 2025, and the annual launch of each one involves an army of staff — and, most importantly, input from Jordan himself.
It wasn’t unusual for ideas outside of sports to influence the shoes. The Jordan 5 took inspiration from an American WWII fighter plane, the 6 from a German sports car, the 7 from West African tribal art, the 12 from the Japanese flag, the 14 from a Ferrari sports car, the 15 from a X-15 fighter plane, the 17 from jazz and an Aston Martin.
For the 18s, which were released in 2003, Jordan told Tate Kuerbis, the shoe’s designer, that he saw a beautiful, Italian-crafted leather driving shoe, one typically used in Formula 1 races. “And he was like, ‘Hey, can you make a basketball shoe look like one piece of leather that is inspired by this driving shoe?'”
“When he puts it on, that’s really when it becomes the Air Jordan,” Kuerbis said. “And he’s signing off like, this is good to go to market.”
For years, among players, Jordan had carried the nickname “The Black Cat.” Humphrey and others at Nike believed, however, that the way Jordan attacked on the court better mirrored the speed and agility of a snake — and now they had a material to represent it.
That concept was something of a “white whale” for the industry: the laceless shoe. There had never been a performance basketball shoe without laces, but the Tech Flex material now made that possible, Humphrey and Kuerbis said.
He recalled bringing them to see Jordan during an off-day when the Wizards were in Miami to play the Heat.
In the locker room, Jordan, who was then wearing the just-launched 18s, examined the shoe. Those who worked with him say he was always careful, inquisitive, protective of the brand — and, most of all, competitive. He wanted his shoes to be the best.
He asked if the Tech Flex material stretched over time. Would it still provide the necessary support during a game? He suggested that it might be good to have some laces under the braided sleeving. In all, Kuerbis said, Jordan was “excited and curious and onboard.”
Humphrey and Kuerbis pushed forward. They recalled a meeting with Jordan in the spring of 2003, as his NBA career was winding down, in an office in downtown Chicago, with a handful of Nike officials in attendance.
By then, Humphrey said the idea had already been shared internally with advertising and marketing officials at Jordan Brand, and they had launched on how to present it to a global audience.
But as soon as Humphrey began to walk Jordan through the black mamba concept, he knew there was a major problem.
IN THE SPRING of 2003, after receiving the black mamba brief from the Jordan Brand team, Tina Davis of the Wieden+Kennedy advertising firm gathered her team in New York.
Nike had used Wieden+Kennedy since 1982, and Dan Wieden — one of its founders — had coined Nike’s famous “Just Do It” slogan. The firm was also behind the Air Jordan commercials that featured Spike Lee as “Mars Blackmon” in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Typically, Wieden+Kennedy would receive a brief, then take the core of an idea and try to express it visually in the most ambitious way across a variety of platforms: commercials, print advertisements, billboards, posters.
Justin Barocas, then a Wieden+Kennedy media director, said they wanted to create visuals for the black mamba campaign that had “stopping power.”
They first tried to find a live black mamba snake, typically found in sub-Saharan Africa, in the hopes of placing it in a cage with the shoe for a photo shoot.
“Then we learned that they’re illegal in the United States,” Davis recalled. “You can’t even bring them into the country.”
They used a different black snake, one that was so large, said Charles Hall, then a Wieden+Kennedy associate creative director, “that you wouldn’t have wanted it loose in the room.”
Inside the New York office, they stitched photos together to digitally re-create a version of the black mamba slithering around the shoe, rearing its head, and the team prepared for the targeted spring 2004 launch of the Air Jordan 19.
“You must be MJ,” she said, extending her hand to the man himself, the namesake of the empire who had his own reserved parking space on the campus.
Thomas was Jordan Brand’s new director of marketing, a position she assumed in August 2003 that tasked her with overseeing marketing for all Jordan products, with a focus on increased innovation.
“We had a very robust retro business,” she told ESPN. “And there was concern — rightfully so — that the brand was leaning very heavily on the retro market, and we did not want to kill the golden goose.”
The goal was to preserve the integrity of a retro product but also move it into the future. The 19, she said, was a key part of that effort, and Wieden+Kennedy had already created the ads for the launch. The entire campaign was in place.
Thomas had spent weeks prepping, planning, researching. Marketing, apparel, footwear and advertising staffers soon packed the room. Thomas’ mission was to describe every aspect of the launch.
“Hey, good job in there yesterday,” Miller said. “MJ really liked the meeting. The product looked great, but you’ve got a problem.
THOMAS WAS PERPLEXED. No one had told her Jordan didn’t like snakes. At no point during the meeting did Jordan convey such an impression.
“Well, I wasn’t involved in product creation,” she told Miller, “and you guys all knew that the snake was a large part of the story around the product design. And I think this campaign is really good.”
No answer. She called again later that day — again, no answer. She called twice the next day. She left voicemails.
Thomas gathered her team and crunched the numbers. On Sunday, she called Jordan again and left a detailed voicemail.
The launch was just months away, and plans were in place, she explained — advertisements, marketing. There was no way they could suddenly tell retailers, for instance, that they had no visuals, no in-store point-of-sale material.
The sales team had already placed ads to be published. There had been countless meetings, countless checkpoints, and they all had the green light. Hitting pause, she said, could translate to millions of dollars in losses.
“I’m OK on this one particular occasion to allow you to run the ad,” he told her, “but you need to reconcept before the next colorway drops.”
On March 14, 2004, the same month the $165 shoe launched, a two-page black mamba Air Jordan 19 advertisement appeared in ESPN The Magazine, part of a print-focused run that Thomas said included other national magazines. It carried the tagline “Only Greatness Equals Greatness.”
Commercials featured additional colorways. One with Carmelo Anthony, another with Gary Payton, another with Jason Kidd. Legendary Georgetown coach John Thompson provided the voiceovers.
LOOKING BACK, THOSE involved on the shoe admit surprise that the black mamba campaign advanced as far as it did, given Jordan’s disdain for snakes. “We couldn’t believe that when we found out,” Hall said.
But Jordan Brand and Wieden+Kennedy officials at that time all point to the same reason: Jordan’s fear of snakes was one of his closest-held secrets.
But author Mark Vancil, who worked with Jordan on the 1993 book “Rare Air,” explained in a 2024 podcast with Jordan’s former teammate Stacey King the depth of Jordan’s phobia.
“He was terrified,” Vancil said. “If you watched TV with him and a snake came on, he’d change the channel. And [Jordan] goes, ‘If you write that, somebody’s going to get killed because somebody’s going to throw a snake one day.'”