"Shattered Backboard"

3 July 2025

2 mins 10s

The Italian job.

Forty years after Michael Jordan after broke a backboard in Trieste, Italy, Nike (the brand that sponsored Jordan’s trail of destruction) celebrates with dinner and a show—a puppet show, that is. In a welcome turn of events, marionettes are used to show how Jordan, perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, turned an exhibition match into an execution of sorts.

The way Nike tells it, Jordan arrived by helicopter then went to town on his opponents ("'Friendly' and 'exhibition' were not in MJ's vocabulary"). Like a string puppet with shell shock, the home team's number eight is at sixes and sevens, unable to cope with Jordan's rampant athleticism. Never has a half-time espresso been needed more.

He gets off lightly, though—instead, pour one out for the backboard. One weapons-grade dunk smashes the panel to smithereens and solidifies Jordan's reputation as a force of nature ("First came the thunder, then the rain"). No wonder Nike has released Air Jordan 1s inspired by the event, complemented by a doozy of a commercial.

USA

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