Give Devin Booker His Flowers

There’s a joke among skateboarding basketball fans that Devin Booker is a skater trapped in a hooper’s body. More than just his past shutting down the bar with Atiba Jefferson, Eric Koston, and crews of pro skaters before heading home on a bright green rental bike and popping out to skate contests in Santa Monica, Booker has ingratiated himself with the skate scene because he has style.

Long removed from the days of NBA stars living regular high school and college lives before transitioning to the league, today’s NBA players (and plenty of failed wannabes) have been specialized since they were barely out of pull-ups. From shooting coaches and travel teams to workout tools and restrictive diets, all between school, video games, and keeping up with streamers, elite basketball players have always worn the hot shoes, but largely existed outside of sneaker culture’s strange corner of the industry, no matter how many fresh pairs they have.

Devin Booker is the exception. Book is a true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool, teen-to-the-league sneakerhead who realized the dream that every Eastbay obsessive and NikeTalk addict slept through. From designs to colorways, collabs to marketing campaigns, Booker is likely the first (and maybe only) sneakerhead hooper with his own signature shoe line.

The NBA’s First Signature Sneakerhead

Fresh off introducing his new Chevy x Nike Book 2 collab pack based on his personal car collection, and taking a look back at Booker’s sneaker past, it’s hard to imagine any other signature sneaker athlete putting out a multi-shoe run of fragment design collabs. Ja Morant’s shoe line is probably more beloved by sneakerheads than Book’s, but his Jaws Ja 4 doesn’t exactly feel like it came from Ja’s journal. Same goes for the new pairs from Ant’s AE 3, the Giannis Freak 8, and the KD 19 Candy Pack.

A Grand Rapids native, Booker’s love for Detroit and Detroit sports teams has led to Lions, Tigers, and even Pistons-themed colorways. Devin Booker made a colorway for an NBA team he doesn’t play for because he's a fan.

Last month, Booker debuted his new Chevy collab while driving his matching Impala at Detroit’s Woodward Dream Cruise, where he drove right by the iconic Joe Louis statue that influenced the Iron Fist Book 2 colorway that dropped earlier this week. A Lions colorway arrives for football season on Friday, with another Impala pair dropping next week. Adding even more to Booker’s sneakerhead bucket list, he’s got a new coffee table book on the way detailing his lifelong love for sneakers and the design process behind his first signature model, the Book 1.

A New Generation Stuck in Old Ways

There is typically a separation between the players with their names on the shoes and the sneakerheads obsessed with them, but as the culture became mainstream, that’s started to shift. While players in past generations set the standard for what sneakerheads and the sneaker industry would become, we are now watching a generation of NBA players who grew up after Grinches and SB Dunks. And yet, Booker feels like the only pro who actually cares what his shoes look like, what his colorways say about him, and what an archive of signature pairs might look like after he’s hung up his jersey.

Booker has plenty of Suns colorways and Nike-led collab initiatives like the turquoise McDonald’s friends-and-family colorway earlier this summer that don’t exactly scream personality, but more often than not, new Book 2 colorways have come with the same kind of stories usually reserved for Nike SB Dunk colorways and collabs. Booker has talked openly about taking influence from the Nike SB line for design details in his signature pairs, and it shows, not only on the select skaters who’ve ripped through pairs of the Book 1, but in the creativity, collabs, and out-of-the-box thinking.

A Star Crafted By Sneaker Culture

After a down era where brands like Nike focused mainly on their biggest stars like Kobe and LeBron, the signature game followed league salaries, expanding faster than ever made sense, to the point where Austin Reaves, Nikola Jokic, Steph Curry, Jaylen Brown, and more value the concept of a signature shoe more than contributing anything meaningful to the sneaker market, never mind sneaker culture.

I may be biased because the Book 1 and Book 2 are the only basketball shoes in recent memory that credibly double as skate shoes, but whether you like Booker’s shoes or not, you can’t deny that it feels good to finally have one of our own in the exclusive signature sneaker ranks.

Zach Harris

Zach Harris is a writer based in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vice, Complex, High Times, and more. He is obsessed with skateboarding and bowling. He is still looking for his first 300. For tips, reviews, and anything in size 10.5 - zach.h@soleretriever.com