If You Haven't Already, Do Yourself A Favor And Watch The New AND1 Documentary On Netflix
Steve Grayson. Getty Images.As I've blogged before, I am a big time sucker for any sort of basketball documentary. I find them fascinating and wildly entertaining, regardless of the topic. Over the years we've seen players come out with their own docs whether it was Boogie or KD or Westbrook or John Wall or AI and every single one is awesome. We've seen docs on the Malace At The Palace, the whole Last Dance series, etc that were also awesome.
Well this weekend I sat down to watch the latest Untold: The Rise and Fall of AND1 and let me tell you this might have been the best basketball doc I've seen this year
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If you're around my age (35), you remember what the AND1 era was like. It was insane. I remember watching their tryout show on ESPN every single day after school. I was around 13-14 right when they started to blow up and I'll never forget begging my parents for some of those trash talk t-shirts. Everyone from Hot Sauce to AO to Main Event to Shane The Dribbling Machine to Half Man Half Amazing to Escalade to Skip 2 My Lou to The Professor, they were all a huge part of my young basketball life. I can almost guarantee you that every single person who is 30+ practiced the Hot Sauce dribbling moves growing up, even though when we did it there's no way it came close to looking like the real thing.
It's maybe a little hard for the younger generation to really understand how massive AND1 was because it's not as influential today, but those Mixtapes were must watch. You almost forget that during Vince Carter's epic dunk contest win he was actually wearing AND1 shoes. Nike obviously realized they were a threat and squashed them, but now that I'm older I found it really interesting to hear about how the brand was created/developed. That's not exactly something you give a shit about when you're 13 years old. Up until watching this doc, I had no idea what their backstory was or how they even came to be, and I'm someone that LOVED the AND1 tour, which is why if you're like me you should definitely watch this thing.
I had no idea that my other favorite thing about that era, this all time Nike commercial
was basically because Nike decided they needed to squash AND1 once and for all. That makes me like it a little less to be honest, and I probably have watched that commercial no fewer than 1,000,000,000 times in my life. Pretty sure I bought the shoes where you got this thing on VHS just because I was that obsessed with it.
There really was nothing like that era of streetball in the early 2000s. If you're like me and love some good old nostalgia, I can't recommend it enough. Seeing all those guys now in 2022 was a bit of a mindfuck, and if you're a 90s kid then you're welcome, I just gave you something to do tonight.