This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star

and the American people.

Up next, a story that's close to my heart, my favorite sport in the world and one I played

relentlessly as a kid, going to some of the greatest basketball camps in the world with

names like Shoshchewski and Karnasekka and Knight.

And I became a captain of my basketball team, not one year but two, and also the all-time

leading scorer of my high school. It was indeed a deep passion. I slept with my basketball.

So up next a story about the Billy Graham of basketball, the man who helped in the end create the sport, if not invented.

You know his name. You probably owned a pair of sneakers that bear his signature.

I bought my first pair back in grade school. There's a fairly new pair

in my closet today. My 17-year-old daughter, well, she just bought a pair, and not for sport. She just

thinks they look great. So to her friends. What's remarkable about the man whose name we all know

and whose sneaker is still worn today,

a century after it was created, is that he was never a famous athlete, like Michael Jordan.

Chuck Taylor was a basketball player, that's true. But he didn't get his name on the Converse

sneaker because he was a great NBA player. The league wouldn't come into existence until

1949. Baseball at the time had the most famous athletes in the 1920s and 30s. That's when Taylor

was entering adulthood. Stars like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but baseball players don't wear sneakers.

Boxing stars of the day, Jack Dempsey and Joe Lewis,

well, everybody knew them, but try selling that sports footwear to a mass public.

...