Seattle never really got over losing the Sonics, and neither did a lot of us. So there is something a little bittersweet and a lot right about a Sole Collector shoe built to honor The Glove in the colors of the team that should still be there.
Gary Payton earned that nickname the hard way, locking up the best guards of his era and talking the whole time. The Air Zoom Flight The Glove was his shoe, one of those mid 90s Nike basketball designs that still looks like the future. Bringing it back was the easy part. Dressing it right was the point.
This one came in Legion Pine and Tour Yellow, which is just a more poetic way of saying Sonics green and gold. The release landed on December 7, 2013, and it ran with a companion colorway called Sonic Wave, the two of them together feeling like a small tribute to a team and a player the league walked away from. If you grew up watching GP guard the inbounds pass like it owed him money, the colors do the work without anyone having to explain them.
What makes this one matter in the SC story is timing. By 2013 the events and the magazine had built up enough trust that getting to work on a Payton classic in full Sonics colors was a real swing, not a safe one. The Glove is not the most obvious silhouette to revive. You do it because you love the player and the city, not because the spreadsheet says it will move.
It is also a shoe that means more in Seattle than anywhere else, which is exactly the kind of regional, personal pull the best SC projects always had. A color can be a memorial if you let it.
Were you a Sonics kid, and what is the Gary Payton moment you still bring up like it happened last week?
Photos by Nick DePaula
Part of The Complete Guide to Sole Collector Collaborations
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