FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#679 – Brotherhood of the Traveling Shoes

Posted by Editor | Filed under Uncategorized

I am in the familiar position of being way behind on my writing obligations. I have plenty that I want to share with you in advance of the Heads-Up Championship as well as several Full Tilt news items to share but instead, I am compelled to write about shoes.

I used to celebrate online tournament victories by purchasing Montblanc pens. (This has also had the benefit of keeping me patient late in tournaments because I browse pen websites while waiting for cards.) But I now own nearly 60 Montblanc pens and am running out of things to buy. Then I learned about NikeID.

NikeID is part of Nike’s website in which you can customize shoes and some other athletic accessories. It’s primarily about customizing color combinations, types of materials, and adding a personalized ID on the shoe. While on the way to a recent online tournament win, I got caught up in designing my own shoes as a possible self-gift from a previous victory. That combination got Nike one of its easiest sales ever of 3 pairs of shoes.

It does not cost a lot extra to customize your shoes. The big barrier is time. I, like everyone else, am used to owning a pair of shoes the instant I try them on, like them, and pay for them. On the website, custom orders take 4-6 weeks.

Once I received the email from Nike with the UPS tracking numbers, I was like a little kid getting excited about Christmas – in the middle of October. Every day for a week, I would update UPS’s website every few hours to find out how my shoes were coming along.

These shoes have been on quite a journey. I am surprised at least one pair didn’t wear out in transit. And they managed to travel through nearly every Pacific Rim war zone of the last 60 years, and just about all the countries in which you hear tales of American companies abusing textile workers.

Here is where my shoes have been (they arrived as 2 shipments and took slightly different but zigzagging routes):

• The first package started in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

• The other package started Qingdao, China. To make sure I had the right spelling and country, I looked for Qingdao on Google Maps. Looking down on the area from a satellite photo, the whole town is shrouded in smog.

• The next destination was Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong, China. According to Wikipedia, “the name of the island may be derived from the bareness of the island.” Sounds like another lovely place.

• Incheon, Korea – One of the packages spent just 69 minutes here. Wasn’t there a famous Korean war battle (and less famous movie) that took place here?

• Tao-Wuan, Taiwan – Both packages managed to make it to Taiwan.

• Pampanga, Philippines – What tour of failed U.S. imperialism would be complete without a stop in the Philippines? Some of Apocalypse Now was filmed near here. (The beach scene – “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” – was shot nearby.)

• Chiba, Japan.

• The shoes were finally ready for the United States. They first stepped on U.S. soil in – where else? – Anchorage, Alaska. Wouldn’t you assume between Anchorage and Scottsdale that the shoes would either fly direct or tour the industrial depots of the Pacific Northwest? (For some reason, Oxnard, California, seems like a place where the shoes SHOULD have gone.)

• But no. The route from Alaska to Arizona included a side-trip to Louisville, Kentucky. They spent the weekend in Louisville, no doubt disappointed that they missed the running of the Kentucky Derby by 3 months.

• The shoes finally disembarked in Tempe, Arizona on March 2. I don’t know if this was a coincidence or part of a larger cosmic plan, but at the moment the shoes arrived in Tempe, I discovered that Tempe’s sister city is Timbuktu. Timbuktu is a real place in Mali, but has become a cultural synonym for the “middle of nowhere.”

It’s not enough that I exploited entire village of Vietnamese children to make my flashy shoes. It’s not enough that the shoes visited every US military hotspot in Asia. It’s not even enough that the shoes took a 2,000 detour to Louisville. If I didn’t feel bad enough about all that, each of my 3 pairs of shoes arrived TRIPLE boxed. They literally had to denude acres of Amazonian rain forest so they could build nine large boxes, each stuffed with additional paper to cushion my pampered shoes.

But the shoes are awesome. I can’t wait to win some more tournaments and buy some in every color.

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