Reebok Pump
Encyclopedia
Reebok
Reebok International Limited, a subsidiary of the German sportswear company Adidas since 2005, is a producer of Athletic shoes, apparel, and accessories. The name comes from the Afrikaans spelling of rhebok, a type of African antelope or gazelle...
Pump is a line of athletic shoe
Athletic shoe
Athletic shoe is a generic name for the footwear primarily designed for sports or other forms of physical exercise but in recent years has come to be used for casual everyday activities....
s that was popular in the early 1990s. It was the first shoe to have an internal inflation mechanism that regulated a unique fitting cushion in two versions: the lower tongue; and also in the upper to provide locking around the ankle.
History
Design Continuum
Continuum is a design and innovation consultancy based in Newton, Massachusetts, with other offices in Los Angeles, Milan, Shanghai and Seoul. The company’s core disciplines include Industrial Design, Design strategy, Service Design, Human Factors, Interaction Design, Sustainable Design,...
. It was released in 1989, as a basketball high-top
High-top
The high-top is a shoe that extends significantly over the wearer's ankle. It is commonly an athletic shoe, particularly for basketball. It is sometimes confused with the slightly shorter mid-top. Examples of basketball shoes that are high-tops are Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars; Nike Air Forces...
shoe. The shoe was quite expensive compared to other retail athletic shoes at the time, often costing as much as 150% more than the next most expensive athletic shoe on the market. It became something of a status symbol on urban basketball courts and eventually in suburban high schools.
After the success of the basketball shoe, Reebok designed pump shoes for association football (soccer), gridiron football
Gridiron football
Gridiron football , sometimes known as North American football, is an umbrella term for related codes of football primarily played in the United States and Canada. The predominant forms of gridiron football are American football and Canadian football...
, tennis
Tennis
Tennis is a sport usually played between two players or between two teams of two players each . Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court. Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played at all levels of society at all...
, and track
Track and field
Track and field is a sport comprising various competitive athletic contests based around the activities of running, jumping and throwing. The name of the sport derives from the venue for the competitions: a stadium which features an oval running track surrounding a grassy area...
. Some models used a standard CO2 cylinder instead of the pump for weight considerations.
Dominique Wilkins
Dominique Wilkins
Jacques Dominique Wilkins is a retired American professional basketball player who primarily played for the Atlanta Hawks of the NBA...
wore the Reebok Pump original from 1989 on. The original Pump is now known as the Pump Bringback.
Dee Brown won the 1991 all star weekend dunk competition while wearing a pair of Pumps.
Michael Chang
Michael Chang
Michael Te-Pei Chang is a former American professional tennis player. He is best remembered for becoming the youngest-ever male player to win a Grand Slam singles title when he won the French Open in 1989 at the age of 17....
wore the Reebok Court Victory Pumps.
CCM
CCM (The Hockey Company)
CCM, formerly an initialism for Canada Cycle & Motor Co. Ltd., is a sporting goods brand. The brand is held by two separate entities both maintaining the CCM trademark, one manufacturing ice hockey equipment and the other, CCM manufacturing bicycles.-History:CCM was founded in 1899 after the...
briefly offered a hockey skate with The Pump in it circa 1995; however, it was derided for its poor durability. The Pump did not make a return to hockey until 2006, when Reebok (now the owner of CCM) brought out the 9K, 7K and 5K ice, goalie, and 8K inline model which used The Pump as a customizable heel-fit mechanism.
World Wrestling Entertainment
World Wrestling Entertainment
World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. is an American publicly traded, privately controlled entertainment company dealing primarily in professional wrestling, with major revenue sources also coming from film, music, product licensing, and direct product sales...
wrestler
Professional wrestling
Professional wrestling is a mode of spectacle, combining athletics and theatrical performance.Roland Barthes, "The World of Wrestling", Mythologies, 1957 It takes the form of events, held by touring companies, which mimic a title match combat sport...
John Cena
John Cena
John Felix Anthony Cena is an American professional wrestler, actor, rapper, and television personality. He is currently signed to WWE as a member of its WWE Raw brand....
wore Reebok Pumps as part of his old-school, hip hop gimmick. He would often stop to "pump up" when he was gaining momentum towards the end of matches.
Rawlings
Rawlings (company)
Rawlings is a sports equipment manufacturing company in the United States. It was founded in 1887. The parent company is Jarden, Inc. Rawlings specializes in baseball equipment, but also manufactures softball, basketball, training equipment and American footballs...
offered a Pump-equipped baseball glove
Baseball glove
A baseball glove or mitt is a large leather glove that baseball players on the defending team are allowed to wear to assist them in catching and fielding balls hit by a batter, or thrown by a teammate.-History:...
. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3070/is_199201/ai_n7735245
The patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
for the pump mechanism is USPTO #5113599.
Competitors
There were two competitors for the Reebok Pumps. One was the LA GearLA Gear
LA Gear is an American shoe company based in Los Angeles, California. It is owned by ACI International.-Early days:L.A. Gear was founded by Boston-born Robert Y. Greenberg in 1979 to market and rent roller skates in Venice Beach. In 1985 after finding that less than 20 percent of athletic shoes...
Regulators and the Nike
Nike, Inc.
Nike, Inc. is a major publicly traded sportswear and equipment supplier based in the United States. The company is headquartered near Beaverton, Oregon, which is part of the Portland metropolitan area...
Air Pressure. Later on, Nike would use a similar inflation mechanism in their "Shox
Nike Shox
Shox is a shoe feature developed by Nike and incorporated in several of their flagship athletic sports shoes. Shox is an array of small hollow columns in the midsoles of the shoe, usually of rubber. There are different formations, but Shox are usually four circular columns in a square formation to...
" models available as basketball or cross-training sneakers.
Current implementations
Pump technology is making a small comeback. For instance, DC Shoe CompanyDC Shoes
DC Shoes is an American company that specializes in footwear for extreme sports, skateboarding, snowboarding as well as snowboards, shirts, jeans, hats, and jackets.The company was founded in 1993 by Ken Block and Damon Way, and is based in Vista, California...
introduced a series of snowboarding boots with Pump-style liners. 2006 / 2007 models include the Judge, Graphix and Ghost boots. Reebok has also brought back this line, with current shoes being the ATR and The Pump 2.0, which automatically pump as the user walks. They also have the original manually operated pump mechanism shoe available. Outside of athletic shoes, Reebok continues to sell the resurrected pump for use in its high-end hockey skates (sold under the "Rbk Hockey" banner) to improve heel lock and fill the negative space inside of the skate. Popular NHL hockey stars Sidney Crosby
Sidney Crosby
Sidney Patrick Crosby ONS is a Canadian professional ice hockey player and captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins of the National Hockey League . Crosby was drafted first overall by the Penguins out of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League...
and Alexei Kovalev
Alexei Kovalev
Alexei Vyacheslavovich "Alex" Kovalev is a Russian professional ice hockey player who currently plays for Atlant Moscow Oblast of the Kontinental Hockey League....
both wear Reebok skates featuring the pump.
External links
- Reebok Pumps it Up a Notch from ESPNESPNEntertainment and Sports Programming Network, commonly known as ESPN, is an American global cable television network focusing on sports-related programming including live and pre-taped event telecasts, sports talk shows, and other original programming....
(November 12, 2004)