From the book All the colors came out by Kate Fagan. Copyright © 2021 by Kate Fagan. Reproduced with permission from Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY All rights reserved.
Courtesy of Kate Fagan; Photo illustration by Dan Larkin
There is a pair of red suede Puma sneakers in my closet. They’re low-cut, the signature shoe of Walter “Clyde” Frazier, who starred in the Knicks in the 1960s and 1970s. Growing up in Schenectady, New York, in the 1990s, Frazier was the Knicks’ color commentator. His voice became the soundtrack to my youth and he spoke as if he were playing basketball: soft, with exciting flourishes. He wore eccentric suits (“When I go to a tailor, I say, ‘Show me something you think no one would ever wear'”) and peppered the broadcasts with Clydisms: diving and diving, juking and jiving, hearty and amazing.
Since my family watched every game (all 82 for the season) over a number of years, we got used to Frazier’s signature flavor, and most of his colloquialisms went unnoticed. But at least once per game, my father, Chris, would be delighted with Frazier …whistles and plates!And he imitated the announcer, producing as many clidings as he could chain without pause until they became more and more absurd: praying and lying down, shopping and lying, sighing and frying. I would add one or two; my older sister Ryan was smiling. Then we would continue watching the game.
My father’s appreciation for Walt Frazier has always been curious to me. The two men couldn’t have been more different. My dad avoided ostentation. In his mind, the ostentation was desperation, which revealed insecurity. He believed, and told me many times, that a goal in life should be for me to quietly go about my business and let people realize, for themselves, how amazing I am. “Don’t tell them you’re cool. Show them, ”he would tell me over and over again.
Also, my dad hated suits and he definitely never went to a tailor. His uniform consisted of basketball shorts and a hoodie. Even at work, a family business he ran with his brother, he wore a coat and tie only on days when he had client meetings. At 6’5, his physique was quite striking, and he contented himself with ducking his head and sliding to the back.
Make an order All colors emerged: a father, a daughter and a lifetime of lessons
But he loved Frazier. The guy had “put his money where his mouth is,” another thing my dad loved to say about the people he looked up to. Walt Frazier had won an NBA title; he had done the job. In that way, my father’s love for Frazier made sense. I respected passion, people who did everything possible. With them, he felt a kinship.
The red suede Pumas now in my closet arrived on my doorstep about three years ago. I was surprised. I wasn’t expecting a package, but I also knew what it was right away, because shoe boxes are shaped differently. When I opened it and recognized the Puma logo, I thought, Dad. Most of the time I wore Nike, and the only person (other than me) who would buy me sneakers was my dad.
After I graduated from college, an annual tradition began: I had to select what I thought were the coolest sneakers on the market and buy a pair in his size 13. He would give me his credit card information, and in exchange for my “Fashion sense” would tell me to buy a pair too.
Somehow, he framed this ritual as that I was doing him a favor, and not the other way around. He was good at it. For example, when leaving a restaurant: “Thank you for letting me invite you to dinner, Katie.”
As he got older, I began to notice that he sometimes resorted to our sneaker habit to bridge the gap between us, if he felt like I was pulling away, or was too busy for him, or if he just missed me and wanted to pretend. He was a boy again. I was trying to hang up the phone, eager to get back to my life, and he was pulling the lifeline: “Hey, I was thinking, why don’t you find us some slippers?”
I hated, even when I let it happen, how once I started making more money and a free pair of sneakers weren’t moving the needle like they used to, I forgot that he had asked me to find us, always. U.S-a pair. A couple of weeks later, he was checking out the sneakers, and I could almost hear him wondering if he would ever need it again, not just for the sneakers, but for anything.
The rule was that I send him a pair. But that day, three years ago, he broke protocol. He had come across a shoe that he thought was cool, one that also represented a bond we shared …Walt frazier“So he bought us a pair each.” I lifted the lid and peeled off the white wrapping paper, took a sneaker out of the box, held it in front of me, and turned it front to back.
Before the Air Jordans: the Clydes.
Hated them. Yuck. Damn. I put them back in the box, called to thank my dad, and put them in my closet. About five or six months later, when I was visiting my parents and wearing sneakers that weren’t our red Pumas, my dad said, “You don’t wear the ones I have, do you?”
“What? Yes, of course. I mean, I do. I love them!”
Every time she searched the closet for a pair of slippers, she considered the red Pumas. A civil war would break out in my mind:
Me: You will regret not using them.
Me too: but I don’t like them very much.
Me: Stop hurting daddy’s feelings; Shouldn’t nostalgia and love outweigh fashion?
Me too: Yes, of course should, and maybe next time they will.
Later, when I knew that my father was going to die, and even after, those slippers became my kryptonite. When I opened my closet, my head exploded with thoughts like small landmines, detonating in my mind. I just wanted to keep sharing things with you: boom. I just wanted to feel needed by you: boom boom. How can you miss that moment, seeing his eyes light up when he realized the sneakers you were wearing? Boom boom boom.
The last week of his life, I wore them every day to the hospital. But between steps, he looked down and thought that it was too little, that it was too late. I made my decision, I set my priorities.
I don’t think my dad cared about sneakers. But this is not how this works. The sneakers had come to symbolize our history, almost as if the icon of a desktop computer was just the representation, the interface, of the complicated program it launches.
Father and daughter were connected by shoes, and a pair of Puma Clydes would capture the complexities of their relationship.
Courtesy of Kate Fagan
The shoes represented so much of what we had built our relationship with: he shared his love of basketball, taught me the game, imparted wisdom to me, and shared all five of us, sweating and smiling together. And my inability to use them represented the darker side of that connection: that I had let him down by not loving the game as much as he did; for being gay; And that our shared stubbornness, the belief that each of us possessed that our ideas were always superior, had driven a wedge between us ever since I chose a university across the country.
When I later told my wife, Kathryn, she said, “Oh, I have something like that. When I was little, all I wanted was a cuddly teddy bear. My grandmother heard that I wanted one and decided to make me one, handmade. And when she presented the toy to me, I told her I didn’t want the one she made, I wanted her to buy me one at the store. “
About a year after the arrival of the Red Pumas, when my dad was still alive, my mom and I went for a walk and I explained my feelings about the sneakers to him. She said: “When you and your sister were young, my parents built a dollhouse for you by hand, even painting the little figurines inside the rooms. I know they wanted to connect with you because we had moved, and they felt like they weren’t seeing as much and they wanted to do something special. They were very excited to give it to us, but they didn’t know that you and your sister were interested in other things, so you hardly ever played with that dollhouse. “
These stories did not make the Red Pumas any less radioactive. They just made me realize that most people have their own pair of slippers, or a handmade Care Bear, or a dollhouse, an item that has come to represent, for them, a complicated relationship dynamic.
I still see these sneakers every day, on the second shelf in my closet. And every morning my chest tightens, and I usually reach out and touch the soft suede along the heel. But I never use them. The idea of using them haunts me. Not that you want to keep them spotless; it’s that I don’t want to be reminded, all day long, of the ways I failed to keep the promise of our relationship.
From the book All the colors came out by Kate Fagan. Copyright © 2021 by Kate Fagan. Reproduced with permission from Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY All rights reserved.
Courtesy of Kate Fagan
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.