Marlene Wagman-Geller

     Urban legend holds that Adidas is an acronym for “All Day I Dream About Sports,” or “All Day I Dream About Soccer,” or “All Day I Dream About Sex.” The assumptions are incorrect. The shoe emporium’s name originated with Adolf Dassler.  

     Little do people imagine as they lace up their Adidas that they are wearing footwear that encompassed two world wars and a historic Olympic game. The story began in Herzogenaurach, a German village divided by the Aurach River. Christopher Dassler worked as a cobbler; his wife, Paulina, took in laundry. Her sons, Rudolph (Rudi) and Adolf, (Adi), delivered the clean clothes that led to their neighbors referring to them as “the laundry boys.” 

       When the brothers returned from the trenches of Flanders, the Treaty of Versailles placed an economic noose on the Fatherland, thereby making Paulina’s services obsolete. In the vacated laundry room, Adolf fashioned sporting shoes made from discarded army helmets and parachutes. He also invented the first spiked shoes with nails forged by a blacksmith. In 1924 they established the Gebrüder Dassler Sportschuhfabrik, the first athletic shoe company. 

       In 1933, the Dassler brothers joined the Nazi party. Although sponsoring non-Aryans flew in the face of the Third Reich’s ideology, Adolf persuaded Hitler’s nemesis, African American Jesse Owens, to wear Adidas for the Berlin Olympics. After the American sprinter won four gold medals, sport enthusiasts beat a path to the Dasslers’ door. 

     World War II served as a spike in the heart of Gebrüder Dassler Sportschuhfabrik. Adolf remained in Germany to run the factory that produced Wehrmacht weapons while Rudolph took a position in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland. With Germany’s defeat, the Allies prosecuted Rudolph for his Nazi ties and imprisoned him for a year in an in Hammelburg. Upon discovering that Adolf was selling shoes to the occupying American forces stationed in nearby Nuremberg, Rudolph was convinced his sibling was attempting his ouster. Herzogenaurach became the West Side Story version of “the Sharks” and “the Jets,” just in Lederhosen.

      The brothers closed their factory, and Adolf established his own that he christened after his nickname, Adi, and the first three letters of Dassler: Adidas. On the other side of town, Rudi founded Ruda, which he derived from the first two letters of his first and last name. Feeling it lacked panache, he changed it to Puma after its association with the fleet footed animal. The Aurach River became a liquid Berlin Wall; the villagers’ sided with one of the two rival fiefdoms and only socialized with those who wore the Adidas stripes or the Puma feline logo. In 1974, a priest asked Adi to visit his dying brother; he refused to cross the river. The Dasslers’ graves are located at the opposite ends of the town cemetery. 

     The enterprise launched in a laundry room went on to capture markets in 150 countries and generate billion-dollar annual incomes. The shoes were also part of iconic moments: a photograph from the 1968 Mexican Olympics shows Tommie Smith, fist upraised, wearing socks, while his black suede Puma rests on the podium. The fist and the bare feet were symbolic of the injustice and poverty of black Americans.  In 1970, during the World Cup, Pelé tied the laces of his Adidas.  

    On display in the Adidas Museum in Herzogenaurach are iconic photographs: Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Muhammad Ali at a 1976 boxing match, Nadia Comaneci at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Perhaps the most poignant is the black and white photograph of children Adi and Rudi playuing ice hockey on the frozen Aurach River, the time before they transformed into the Bavarian Cain and Abel.