Selects: Adidas v. Puma: A Sibling Rivalry

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Speaker 2 Hey friends, it's me Josh and for this week's Select I've chosen our 2018 episode on Adidas versus Puma.

Speaker 2 It's the German version of the Hatfield versus the McCoy's except with cool sports apparel rather than overalls.

Speaker 2 And one of the things I noticed at the end of this episode is that sometimes when we're just doing our thing talking back and forth like we do, we'll have some throwaway comment or side conversation or something that takes on much greater significance years on.

Speaker 2 It's one of the interesting things about talking out loud for 17 years. At any rate, Sirokh vodka, anyone?

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
There's Andrew over there, the guest producer. I'm wearing Adidas.
Chuck is wearing Puma. Andrew's wearing Reebok.

Speaker 3 None of us are speaking to one another right now.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's weird. Andrew is wearing white Reebok high tops with bronze pantyhose and orange dolphin running shorts.

Speaker 4 And he claims he doesn't work for Hooters part-time.

Speaker 3 Oh, oh, oh, yes.

Speaker 4 I like that you didn't know that because that means you don't go into Hooters.

Speaker 3 No, no, I've seen pictures on TV.

Speaker 4 I had to go. Actually, I've only been there once, and that was when I worked at that awful job with the chicken killers.

Speaker 4 And it was on a stupid work trip they made me go on, and that was like the only place in town.

Speaker 4 And all these yokels that I worked with were like, yeah, man, let's go to Hooters.

Speaker 4 And I went in there, and I was just like, oh, my Lord, what is

Speaker 4 they were trapped in time.

Speaker 3 I've been there a couple of times, actually, when I was a younger man.

Speaker 4 It's the same, I imagine.

Speaker 3 It is, I'm sure.

Speaker 3 And I was there on my 21st birthday in Jacksonville because it was the only place open it was like a Tuesday night or something and I was like this is this is not the best 21st birthday I'll ever have yeah and hey we don't want to yuck your yum

Speaker 4 if you're if you work at Hooters or if you'd love going there

Speaker 4 more power to you

Speaker 4 sure sure

Speaker 4 why not right that's pretty awesome that you said you don't want to yuck anyone's yum yeah it's funny I was thinking about a couple of weeks ago when it was like the Costanza moment when you thought of a line after the moment when you were talking about how I was crazy for not liking olives and I got onto you.

Speaker 4 I should have said, don't yum my yuck.

Speaker 3 Right. Or

Speaker 3 I was, it's funny you said that because I was thinking about that later on, too.

Speaker 3 I thought that I should have said, well, actually, I'm not yucking your yum. I'm yucking your yuck, which is different.

Speaker 3 You know, think about it.

Speaker 4 Man.

Speaker 3 Are you thinking about it?

Speaker 4 I think it's weird that we both thought about that moment afterward. I think so too.
Because usually we just go back into our hyperbolic chambers and float for the next six days.

Speaker 3 It's a pretty great life we have.

Speaker 4 Pretty nice.

Speaker 3 Just soaking in our own urine.

Speaker 3 Don't you pee in your hyperbaric chamber?

Speaker 4 Well, yeah, but I mean, that's how you're supposed to fill it up, right? Right.

Speaker 3 So, Chuck, obviously, what we're talking about today is athletic gear, sports shoes in particular,

Speaker 3 and two of the most well-known

Speaker 3 sports brands in the entire world, Adidas and Puma.

Speaker 3 And some people might not know this, Chuck, but Adidas and Puma were founded by two brothers who spent many decades of their lives not speaking to one another.

Speaker 3 And some people might even know that, that they are rival brands founded by rival brothers.

Speaker 3 But I guarantee they don't know the full story behind one of the most bitter family rivalries of of all time that gave us Adidas and Puma. And it is extraordinarily fascinating.

Speaker 3 There's Nazis, there's Rundy MC, there's all this stuff all rolled into one. And it turns out that this is, it's one of the better stories I've ever come across.
That's right.

Speaker 4 And before we dive into that awesome story, to head off emails, I know I said hyperbolic inside of hyperbaric.

Speaker 4 There's no such thing as a hyperbolic chamber. I guess it could be.

Speaker 3 It's a chamber that's like, I'm the biggest biggest chamber ever. Probably so.

Speaker 4 All right, so this is a great story. And I had heard bits and pieces of this over the years.

Speaker 4 But it is interesting that Nazis and Run DMC and feuding brothers all come together to, because you know my Pumas. I've been a Puma guy.
Sure.

Speaker 4 for many, many years, even though I did have a pair of Adidas superstars at one point, but they're too

Speaker 4 flashy?

Speaker 4 No, i liked them but they were you know white shoes aren't good on me i get to get them too dirty too quick yeah so now i just vary my pumas between the black and the uh black suede and sort of like the olive green suede usually you know adidas makes non-white shoes you could try yeah but those classic white superstars with the three blue stripes those oh yeah those are the ones the shell toes yeah

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, they have some other cool ones too, like gazelles are pretty cool, like the the flat-bottom soccer shoe.

Speaker 4 Yeah, my brother was into I wore gazelles for a while when I was a soccer poser, but my brother was into Stan Smiths.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, those are cool too. I've got some some Stan Smiths that are like this blue mesh.
Now that I think about it, if I have a loyalty to either one, it would be Adidas, but

Speaker 3 I don't consider myself like Adidas loyal.

Speaker 4 Well, I'm a Puma guy just because they look good on me and they're comfy. But I was also a

Speaker 4 low-top converse all-star guy for a while

Speaker 4 and in high school of course in the preppy days i was all about the tree torns

Speaker 3 i never had tree torns it was a look oh i know for sure um i i

Speaker 4 was right after tree torns when i started getting the shoes case swiss were in oh yeah i never had any of those those are cool uh and then what was the other shoe the the uh uh vans um there's a particular style of vans that i really still enjoy the slip-on ones ones with the black and white checks?

Speaker 4 No, those are cool, but I don't know if I can pull those off at 47.

Speaker 3 You could, but people will laugh at you behind your back.

Speaker 4 That's already happening.

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 I'll remember at some point.

Speaker 3 Okay, well, just shout it out.

Speaker 4 And plus, I just wanted to cover our basis by saying as many name brands as possible.

Speaker 3 Don't forget British Knights.

Speaker 4 Oh, the BKs.

Speaker 3 Yep.

Speaker 3 So, Chuck,

Speaker 3 let's start the story, shall we? We're going to have to get in the Wayback Machine for this one.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 And this is also full of urine.

Speaker 3 So that was you, though. Let's let everybody know.

Speaker 3 We're going to go back to the end of World War I in Germany, and we're going to go to a little town that I'm going to let you pronounce because I've been trying and I cannot do it.

Speaker 4 And I thought it was interesting that we're recording this now because we just acknowledged and recognized the

Speaker 4 100 years removed from World War I.

Speaker 3 The end of World War I. Yeah.
And the beginning of the Spanish flu that killed like three times as many people right after it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's another celebration. Right.

Speaker 2 So we're going back there.

Speaker 3 We're just going back 100 days almost to the day.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and so the name of that town is

Speaker 4 Herzog Ginerach.

Speaker 3 Well, I could have done at least that good.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Herzog Ginnerach.

Speaker 3 It's not exactly said that like that. Here, let's play this.

Speaker 4 Helzogen Orach.

Speaker 3 That's how it's said.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 So, so maybe we should just have that voice say it for us, but we're not going to. It turns out the locals just call the town Herzo.
So that's all we'll call it.

Speaker 3 But it's a little tiny village in Bavaria.

Speaker 4 They can't even pronounce it.

Speaker 3 No, they're like, we're not even going to try, and we were born here.

Speaker 3 Don't be too hard on yourself, Josh, is what they're saying.

Speaker 3 So in Herzo, it's a little town in Bavaria, a little village. There's a river running through it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Yeah, significantly.

Speaker 3 Yes. And in around 1918, one of the villagers who was born there, a guy named

Speaker 3 Adolf Dassler,

Speaker 3 takes a seat in his mother's laundry. His mother ran a laundry out of their house.
And he starts cobbling athletic shoes, specifically track shoes, I think, to begin with. And he had a knack for it.

Speaker 3 He started making shoes that athletes actually wanted

Speaker 3 pretty early on, pretty much out of the gate.

Speaker 3 And he started doing so well, so quickly, that within a year or two, he asked his older brother, who is by far the more outgoing, extrovert, salesman-y type of the two brothers, his older brother Rudolph, to start selling his shoes, start kind of creating a business operation out of it.

Speaker 3 And I think within just a few years, they had 12 employees and they founded a company called Sportsfabrik Gebruder Dassler, Dassler,

Speaker 3 which they call Geta for short.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so Gebrude is, you know, for brothers. So Gebrude Dassler is the Dossler Brothers shoe company.

Speaker 4 And people were like, wow, so I don't have to wear my high-heeled leather sport boot any longer on the pitch.

Speaker 3 I don't have to tie some sharp rocks to the bottom of my feet.

Speaker 4 So their nicknames, you'll probably hear us refer to them as Adi and Rudy, R-U-D-I.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 if you kind of put your head to it, you can see where this is headed.

Speaker 3 This is exciting.

Speaker 4 So the laundry business wasn't going well. So like you said, little Adi started making these shoes and things started going great.

Speaker 4 And it turns out they made a pretty good team at first because they complemented one another in

Speaker 4 what they were good at.

Speaker 4 So Adi was creative and he was the brains and Rudy was a little more extroverted and he was a really good salesperson.

Speaker 3 Right. So they start to do a good, pretty good business.

Speaker 3 And it's, it's, if you're like, well, it's a weird thing to start doing as a younger man to start making sports shoes. It turns out that Herzo is like a shoemaking town.

Speaker 3 It has a long tradition of shoemaking. And in 1922, for example, their population was 3,500, but they had 112 shoemakers.

Speaker 4 That's amazing.

Speaker 3 That's a high

Speaker 3 shoemaker to regular population ratio. So it's not the weirdest thing ever.
But they're plodding along. They're making really high quality shoes.
Like right out of the gate,

Speaker 3 Adi had a real, like I said, a talent for making high quality athletic shoes.

Speaker 3 And one of the first things they made were a track shoe that one of these articles says looks like a ballet slipper with some nails coming out of the front of it, the front bottom, the foresole.

Speaker 3 And it was

Speaker 3 It just changed everything. It was a genuinely great track shoe.
At the time,

Speaker 3 the people who were running, sprinters who were running track, they didn't have any traction when they were taking off.

Speaker 3 This gave them traction and just gave them an immediate leg up over the competition.

Speaker 3 And so the athletes really, really liked the shoes that they were putting out, and the company started to grow and grow and grow.

Speaker 3 And then I think the 1928 Olympics in Los Angeles is where they really debuted their shoes.

Speaker 3 And a German sprinter was wearing a pair pair of their track shoes, and all he won was a bronze medal, but he won a bronze medal wearing the Dassler Brothers shoes.

Speaker 4 And as a German sprinter. Exactly.
So that should say it all. It does.
So he was wearing these track spikes, and this helped.

Speaker 4 I mean, this got him a little bit of notoriety, but it was really in 1936 in Berlin at that very, very famous Olympic Games where a young athlete named Jesse Owens dominated and literally tore up the track wearing those

Speaker 4 Gebruda Dassler track spikes with Hitler in the stands. And people are like, those shoes are amazing.
And Jesse Owens was like, that's kind of me, but yeah, sure, the shoes are great.

Speaker 4 But I'm also a vastly superior athlete to the rest of these chumps out here.

Speaker 3 Yep. So that was the Olympics that Jesse Owens famously finished in first place, won the gold, and did another lap around the track, went up into the stands and slapped Hitler right in the face.

Speaker 4 Oh, man, slapped his little stash right off that lip.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 the fact that Jesse Owens was wearing these shoes immediately brought international attention to Geta, the Gebruder Dosler company.

Speaker 3 So I saw one article that said, had World War II not happened,

Speaker 3 this business would have just gone global. immediately and it started to but then when world war ii broke out and that was the 1936 Olympics, I think I said the 1928 Olympics.

Speaker 3 It was, I think, the 1932 Olympics that I talked about first. But the 1936 Olympics, within just a couple of years, the Nazis invaded Poland and were running Germany.

Speaker 3 And World War II kicked off in earnest. And the time for sports apparel kind of got derailed a little bit.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so

Speaker 4 just like in the United States and actually in countries all over the world, the war effort was,

Speaker 4 it's not like they were just like, all right, we have a few companies that manufacture military needs for our military, and that's going to be good enough.

Speaker 4 It's like, no, we need to really co-opt kind of any manufacturing that we want to. to go toward the war effort.
And certainly Germany did that along with the U.S. and kind of everyone else.

Speaker 4 And everything from Hugo Boss to Lufthansa to these little shoemakers in this small town in Bavaria.

Speaker 3 Yeah, their factories were co-opted for the war effort, basically. And what the Dosler brothers factory ended up making are something called the Ponzerschreck, which means the tank terror.

Speaker 3 And it was modeled after the American Bazooka, which was one of the first shoulder-mounted, recoilless rocket launchers that had enough power to punch right through a tank and blow up everybody inside.

Speaker 3 They were nasty little buggers. And the Panzerschreck was the German version of the bazooka.
And the German version of the bazooka was created in the Dosler Brothers shoe factory.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's December 1943 is when they kind of made the full switch and these

Speaker 4 little, you know,

Speaker 4 German ladies who were sewing shoes the week before were now manufacturing

Speaker 4 German bazookas.

Speaker 4 The good news is by this time, because these things were really effective actually, and

Speaker 4 had they been brought into the war sooner, things might have really changed. But thankfully by this time, even though they were doing the job, it was too late.

Speaker 4 The tides had turned and the Allies were steaming toward victory. And even though they started pumping out these bazookas, it was sort of too little, too late.

Speaker 3 Yeah, have you ever wondered about the name bazooka?

Speaker 4 Not until just now.

Speaker 3 Okay, well, I did, and I was like, what does a bazooka mean? Apparently, there was an entertainer, I think he might have been vaudeville, kind of a country act. Okay.
And he bazooka Joe?

Speaker 3 I can't remember his name. It doesn't matter.
He created a musical instrument out of brass called a bazooka. And it was kind of like a trumpet and a trombone together.

Speaker 3 It was a weird little instrument, but he was popular enough that, and the bazooka looked like his instrument enough that it became called the bazooka, this shoulder-mounted rocket launcher.

Speaker 4 Interesting. I thought so too.
Sure, why not?

Speaker 3 But the point is, is that all of a sudden, the Germans who had been totally helpless against the American tank divisions were messing the American tank divisions up.

Speaker 3 And the source of their power was the Dosler Brothers shoe factory. And you mentioned their seamstresses welding bazookas together.

Speaker 3 Also in their factory, there was forced labor of French POWs.

Speaker 3 So they had slaves and seamstresses working together to create bazookas to take out the American tank divisions or the Allied tank divisions, thanks to the companies that would eventually become Adidas and Puma.

Speaker 4 All right. That's a great setup.

Speaker 4 Thank you. That's only part one into what is a very interesting story.

Speaker 4 So we're going to take a little break and we'll come back and talk about

Speaker 4 what went wrong with these two brothers right after this.

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Speaker 4 All right, so

Speaker 4 we're gonna we got to go back in time a little bit because we we sped right up to World War II.

Speaker 3 It was just too interesting to wait to talk about any longer.

Speaker 4 But we need to go back to about 1933 because these brothers ended up fracturing in a big, big way.

Speaker 4 And there have been, you know, some legendary sibling rivalries through the years, but this is really one of the greats.

Speaker 4 And I believe even Rudy wrote as an older man,

Speaker 4 the relation to my brother was ideal from 1924 till 1933.

Speaker 4 Then his young wife tried to interfere with business matters, although she, with her 16 years, had no experience at all, and the warfare began. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So here's how the story goes: is that in 1933, Adi was indeed married to a 16-year-old, which seems very creepy now, but back then it was not the strangest thing in the world.

Speaker 3 Slightly less creepy.

Speaker 4 Slightly less creepy. Well, they just, it was a different time.
Okay. So he was married to a 16-year-old and tried to get involved in the business.
Rudy was not happy about this.

Speaker 4 And they all lived together. The two brothers and their wives all lived together in the same townhouse,

Speaker 4 which is not a great recipe for success anyway. Right.
You know, you need to have your own place.

Speaker 3 So you can imagine that all the little bickering and snide remarks and just all the stuff that if you have two couples that don't really, really, really like and love each other living together will accumulate.

Speaker 3 If you translate that to a business relationship, it's going to be hard on the business, and it was. For sure.
So there was apparently

Speaker 3 a series of just little things like that. But as far as the family legend goes, the real break happened during World War II when the Allies were bombing

Speaker 3 the village of Herzo.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 Rudy and his wife made their way to the bunker, the bomb shelter. And shortly after that, Odi and his wife, I think her name was Kata,

Speaker 3 they made their way into the bomb shelter. And when they entered, he said, Oh, it looks like the bastards are here again.

Speaker 3 And Odi apparently went to his grave saying that he was referring to the Allied bombers, but Rudy took it that Adi was talking about Rudy and his wife. Yeah.
And apparently that was the final straw.

Speaker 4 Yeah, this was true evidence that things were really bad.

Speaker 4 If something as simple, possibly, as just a little misunderstanding of whether or not the bastards were the Allies bombing or you, my brother and my sister-in-law. Right.

Speaker 4 So, I mean, things were pretty bad if this is what did it.

Speaker 3 Right. So, that's World War II is still going on.
And at some point, Rudy gets called to go fight for the Nazis. He gets drafted.

Speaker 3 So, Rudy has to go to war. And the whole time he's away, he's

Speaker 3 so this rift has already happened. So, he's suspecting, one, that his brother and his brother's wife plotted to get him drafted.
And he can't get that idea out of his head.

Speaker 3 So much so that apparently multiple times he deserted his post to go home to make sure that he wasn't being ousted from the business he'd built with his brother.

Speaker 3 And then he gets arrested for desertion. And he's sure that his little brother ratted him out for desertion.

Speaker 4 Which he may have.

Speaker 3 And so he's arrested. He's held for a while.
And as he's making his way back after the war to Herzo,

Speaker 3 he gets picked up by the Allies for under suspicion of being a Gestapo agent.

Speaker 3 He's sure again that it's his little brother Adi who got him this time landed in a POW camp that he stays in for a little while and it turns out he was right there is documentary evidence from an American officer who took the accusation down and apparently it was Adi who went to the Americans and said my brother is a Gestapo agent you may want to arrest him what a jerk this is the level of stuff these brothers are doing to one another

Speaker 3 and the the rift just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger there's one other thing we have to say because the wife, the younger wife, the 16-year-old Kata,

Speaker 3 gets historically blamed for creating this rift. I think in a lot of ways unfairly.
Sure. She's also the one who saved the family business single-handedly.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so in April 1945,

Speaker 4 the Americans march into Herzo. Those tanks pull up in front of that factory.

Speaker 4 And the soldiers, the American soldiers, are out there like kind of going over what they should do. Should we destroy this building building or not?

Speaker 3 This is the place where the Ponzer Shreks were made.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so Adi's wife Kata comes out and she basically walks right up to these enemy soldiers and says, We only want to make shoes.

Speaker 4 We only desire to make shoes.

Speaker 3 And they're like, why are you talking like Colonel Klink?

Speaker 4 And she said, we all do. Oh, okay.

Speaker 4 And that's basically like she convinced them to spare the factory. They did so.
And not only that,

Speaker 4 the Air Force, the U.S. Air Force, set up operations there at their air base and realized that they really liked these shoes.

Speaker 3 Well, they found out that this was the company that made Jesse Owens' famous track shoes.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and so they went off the charts. They started getting these huge orders for sports teams, American sports teams, because of this.

Speaker 3 So this is all going on.

Speaker 3 or it's all starting while Rudy's off in the POW camp because his brother ratted him out. And the business all of a sudden is starting to turn international.

Speaker 3 Like you said, people around the world are taking notice of this thanks to the American GIs who are coming back with this geta sportswear.

Speaker 3 And when Rudy comes back, it's done. His brothers ratted him out.
There was the whole thing in the bomb shelter. And the brothers split the company that they built together.

Speaker 3 They split Gebruder, Dessler, and or Dessler, and they go off and found their own companies.

Speaker 4 Yeah, 15 years after that bunker incident. Yep.
So it took a long time to finally boil over.

Speaker 4 And in between, there was another war. They were not good Nazis, we should point out.

Speaker 4 Kind of, you know, they were members of the Nazi party, and Rudy did get drafted. But like he said, he deserted his post a lot.
And

Speaker 4 they really did just want to sell shoes.

Speaker 3 Right. He's like Dwight Schroott's uncle

Speaker 3 or grandfather who spent a lot of the war in allied POW camp.

Speaker 4 That's right. So, like you said, they split up the company, and

Speaker 4 we mentioned earlier that this river ran through the center of town, and I said, significant.

Speaker 4 And it is significant because it literally divided the town, and they set up their business. It's not like one of them said, Well, I'm going off to Berlin.
Right.

Speaker 4 They just set up camp on opposite sides of that river.

Speaker 4 Adi Dosler said, I will name my company Adi Das.

Speaker 3 Actually, at first, they named it Adas.

Speaker 4 Well, yeah, but everyone said that stinks.

Speaker 3 Well, no, that was a different one. That one, there was a children's footwear line already called Adas.
So he added the I and turned it into Adidas.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Rudy went with Ruda, and everyone said that no one's going to buy shoes named Ruda,

Speaker 4 especially in the United States. And he said, I don't understand.

Speaker 4 And they said, don't worry about it. So somehow he got Puma out of Ruda.

Speaker 4 Right. Which I don't get, but it's a name that stuck.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and it works. Puma's definitely better than Ruda for sure.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 So, these two go off and form directly competing companies that split from the same company that the brothers had founded together.

Speaker 3 And Adidas and Puma started making pretty good headway out of the gate. At first,

Speaker 3 Rudy had the sales team, had the marketing team, had the ability to move some product.

Speaker 3 But Adi had the technical know-how, the dedication to making high-quality footwear that athletes, like professional athletes, wanted to wear.

Speaker 3 And so he could get his shoes onto athletes who would wear them on the world stage. And eventually,

Speaker 3 his,

Speaker 3 I guess, his tack won out over his brothers. And

Speaker 3 from a very early stage on, Adidas has always led Puma, at least as far as sales revenue goes.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and you know, there were mistakes from both of them along the way, business-wise.

Speaker 4 One of the big ones for Puma early on was that Rudolph got into a spat with a coach of the German national soccer team.

Speaker 4 And of course, all that did was open the door for his brother and Adidas. to go in there and say, what about these shoes? Which is exactly what happened.

Speaker 4 And so at the 1954 World Cup, Germany wears Adidas with those signature stripes. And even though they were not favored at all, West Germany actually won against

Speaker 4 Hungary, I believe. Yes.
And that was a huge, huge deal on a national, international stage.

Speaker 3 It was like the miracle on ice on grass.

Speaker 4 You mean they were stoned?

Speaker 3 They were all stoned out of their gourds.

Speaker 4 The miracle on ice on grass.

Speaker 4 That might have legs, my friend.

Speaker 3 I think it might too.

Speaker 4 You need to trademark that.

Speaker 3 Well, I do officially right now.

Speaker 4 Trademarked. I love it.
So that was one mistake.

Speaker 4 Adidas would, of course, go on to make some mistakes later.

Speaker 4 I know that you sent that one article where they talked about how

Speaker 4 they said, you know, at one point that, like, yoga, no one's going to do that. So we're not going to make yoging shoes.
Right. And aerobics, that's a...

Speaker 3 That's a flash in the pan. Sure.
Who cares about physical fitness?

Speaker 4 And so you mentioned Reebok earlier. It's hard for the young folk out there who are listening to know this, but there was a time when Reebok was the name in sports apparel.

Speaker 3 Well, plus all, yeah, and Reebok, this article says that they lost their way at some point, but the way that Reebok kind of

Speaker 3 took the lead for a little while was saying, no, we'll get into jogging, we'll get into aerobics, and we'll make this stuff.

Speaker 3 At a time when Adidas and Puma were ignoring it. One of the other mistakes that both Adidas and Puma made was that they were so focused on beating one another,

Speaker 3 they just completely dropped the ball, as it were, on the rise of Nike.

Speaker 3 And Nike was able to take over and apparently right out of the gate. And since then, Nike has always been the leader in sports apparel.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and Adidas is two and Puma's three, right? Yeah. Amazing.

Speaker 3 So you have an option. these days.

Speaker 3 You can buy your sports apparel from a company that's been known to use child labor or a company that used forced French labor under the auspices of the Nazi Party in World War II.

Speaker 4 Hooray!

Speaker 3 Let's take a break.

Speaker 4 Yeah, we'll take a break and we'll talk about how this rift still oddly carries over in that town today and run DMC.

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Speaker 4 All right, so back in the day when they first split off this company and that river's running through this town,

Speaker 4 it was a really big deal.

Speaker 4 It wasn't just a sibling rivalry. It became a town-wide rivalry

Speaker 4 in that you worked for one company or the other as a family. Like

Speaker 4 husband and wife didn't work. They didn't split up and one worked at Puma and one worked at Adidas.

Speaker 3 Plus, I mean, if you fell in love with somebody from a family across the river, like you, that was sorry. You got a Romeo and Juliet thing thing going on that ain't going to work out.
Is that crazy?

Speaker 3 It is. And I was glad that one of the local historians who was interviewed for one of these articles said it wasn't like bloody or anything.
Like no one lost their lives over this.

Speaker 3 It was just, you know, if you worked for Puma, you stayed on the Puma side of the river. If you worked for Adidas, you stayed on the Adidas side of the river.
And each group kept to themselves.

Speaker 3 That was all.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and it still carries over to this day some of those recent interviews that we both read.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's certainly now it's a little more good-natured ribbing, but they say when you walk around this town, walk through a playground, and you see will, you will see kids kitted out in all Adidas or all Puma.

Speaker 4 And this is carried down from generations where they were Adidas or Puma families, and it was a really big deal and still remains so to this day, such that the mayor, who actually came from a Puma family.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah. But to be mayor, you can't, you know.

Speaker 3 You got to be a politician.

Speaker 4 Sure. So he will wear to some events, casual events, Puma gear and sometimes Adidas gear.
Eventually in 2009, they had a friendly soccer match between the official Puma sponsor team and Adidas team.

Speaker 4 And he wore one Puma shoe and one Adidas shoe just to remain neutral, I guess.

Speaker 3 And to look like a total jackass.

Speaker 4 Probably so. Then it showed him rubbing like his Puma, his Adidas foot later on.
They caught him on camera.

Speaker 3 So this is, like you said, there was a soccer game that was played between Adidas and Puma, kind of a reconciliation thing on International Peace Day back in, I think, 2009. Yeah.

Speaker 3 That happened. Think about this.

Speaker 3 The Rudy and Adi Dosler died in the 70s within four years of each other. This was 2009 before the companies finally...

Speaker 3 kind of had this reconciliation game.

Speaker 3 And yeah, today still, it's like you kind of, well, you'll gently, you know, make fun of somebody wearing Adidas if you're a Puma family or whatever. But while the brothers were alive,

Speaker 3 you just steered clear of everybody who was on the other side. And so much so that Herzo was known as the town of the Lowered Gaze.

Speaker 3 Because if you came upon somebody on the street, you would look at their shoes to see what shoes they were wearing before you decided whether you were going to talk to them.

Speaker 4 That's so funny.

Speaker 3 It was that established.

Speaker 3 These brothers' hatred and rivalry of one another, and they didn't speak for decades,

Speaker 3 spread out into the town that was divided by this river. And the town itself took sides

Speaker 3 because of this rift between these brothers that all started, supposedly, in this bomb shelter during World War II.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and the mayor hacker, his first name is German.

Speaker 4 Could that be right?

Speaker 4 Maybe the German. Maybe the journalist.

Speaker 3 The journalist is really lazy and didn't, they were just like, he's a German. We're just going to call him that.

Speaker 4 I wonder if he pronounces it German.

Speaker 3 That's what I would say. Or Herrmann?

Speaker 4 Because they don't say Germany over there anyway.

Speaker 3 But yeah, they say Deutschland. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But would it be Hermann?

Speaker 3 No, I guess they spell the Hermans with an H.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think it would be Mayer German Hakke.

Speaker 3 Right. Oh, yeah, there is an H.

Speaker 4 German Haki Saka.

Speaker 3 Who's on grass?

Speaker 4 But he says if

Speaker 4 someone comes in through the door to this day, your gaze still wanders to their shoes it's just in the DNA of those people that this athletic gear is so important it's so strange it's such a cool cool weird story it is a great story of sibling rivalry and bitterness and hatred and like you said they didn't speak for decades apparently

Speaker 4 Much later in life, there were a couple of times when they were rumored to have spoken. Once, I think they ran into each other at an airport.

Speaker 4 Once they saw each other at a hotel.

Speaker 4 And I believe on the deathbed,

Speaker 4 which one tried to get in touch with the other?

Speaker 3 Rudy.

Speaker 4 Rudy

Speaker 4 put out the call, said, I would like to see my brother Adi one more time. And Adi went, no, thanks.

Speaker 4 I'm good. Nine.

Speaker 3 Can you believe it?

Speaker 4 Yeah, man.

Speaker 4 That's tough.

Speaker 3 They died. The family sold the business in the 80s, late 80s, and they got bought by like corporate conglomerates.
Sure.

Speaker 3 Ironically, Puma now owns Reebok, and Gucci owns Puma.

Speaker 3 Adidas is still just Adidas, but again, it's owned by like a mega conglomerate.

Speaker 3 And they've just gone enormous and make billions of dollars a year. So the families aren't necessarily involved, but one family member still works in the business.
His name is Frank Dosler.

Speaker 3 I believe he was Rudy's grandson. and he used to work at Puma.
He was pretty high up in Puma.

Speaker 3 Now he works as the head of the legal department for Adidas.

Speaker 4 Man,

Speaker 4 switching sides.

Speaker 3 It's a pretty good indication of how much this Cold War has kind of thawed between the two companies quite a bit. Because the people who are running it have no skin in the game.

Speaker 3 They don't care anymore, you know?

Speaker 4 Yeah, or he's an attorney and he would just have to the most money.

Speaker 3 Right. He's like, let me suck your blood.

Speaker 4 So we have a fun little post script on this. I know we've been talking about Run DMC.

Speaker 4 And again, you young'uns, it might be second nature now to associate athletic gear and hip-hop and rap music and culture. But back in the early 1980s, that was not the case until Run DMC came along.

Speaker 3 No, like

Speaker 3 your rappers probably dressed like a Ghana. king.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Or maybe like the New York dolls.

Speaker 4 Yeah, or just like, I mean, sometimes I feel like I've seen just like denim jackets and just sort of like just sort of streetwear, which is the unhipest thing I've ever said.

Speaker 3 It was pretty unhip. I didn't want to say anything, but I'm glad you said streetwear.

Speaker 3 So, you know, play clothes.

Speaker 3 So, Run DMC changed everything when they released a single called My Adidas. Yeah.
And I saw elsewhere that they released a single My Adidas kind of in retaliation to

Speaker 3 a song called Felon Shoes.

Speaker 3 So have you ever noticed that Run DMC wore their Adidas without laces with the tongues popped out?

Speaker 4 Oh, I noticed.

Speaker 3 That was supposedly because that's how people in prison had to wear their shoes because they weren't allowed to have shoelaces and they were kind of saying like, we're down with all of our buddies in prison.

Speaker 3 Interesting. So the song Felon Shoes basically was making fun of that and basically teaching kids not to not to emulate prisoners.

Speaker 3 And Run DMC took issue with that and they ended up releasing My Adidas, the song on Raising Hell in 1986. Sorry, Raise in Hell.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 3 Which I remember my family was on a bus to Disney World once, I think, and the windows were foggy. And I was so into Run DMC, I just wrote Raisin Hell in the fog on the window.
Dude.

Speaker 3 People on the bus thought that was really hilarious.

Speaker 4 That is a great story.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I was into MyAdidas too because of Run DMC, but it wasn't just me.

Speaker 3 Apparently, if you went to a Run DMC show on the Raise in Hell tour or the Together Forever tour in 1986 or 87, when they sang my Adidas, everybody would take off their shoes and hold their Adidas in the air.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 That's how big of an impact this song had.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and in 1986,

Speaker 4 a senior employee at Adidas named Angelo Anastasio went to that tour at Madison Square Garden, saw this happen with the Adidas sneakers, and was like, hold on a minute.

Speaker 3 Wait just a second.

Speaker 4 We could have something something here.

Speaker 4 Ran back to the headquarters, and

Speaker 4 within just a few days, they signed them to a million-dollar endorsement deal. And that was like a sea change forward for hip-hop groups getting money in all sorts of ways.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and apparently it made Adidas's sales just go through the roof.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah. Yeah.
And it's like that began the marriage of like, I'm going to put out a record. I'm going to get a shoe deal.

Speaker 4 I might get a vodka sponsor.

Speaker 4 I'll get money flowing in from all kinds of directions and run DMC started it all.

Speaker 3 A vodka sponsor. That's hilarious.

Speaker 4 Sure. I feel like I've seen that.
No?

Speaker 3 Oh yeah, you totally have. Like P.
Diddy and Sirok vodka, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Look, it works. I associate P.
Diddy and Sirok vodka.

Speaker 4 Andrew's nodding. I mean to correct.

Speaker 3 Awesome. Thanks, Andrew.

Speaker 4 Jerry would have been like, what?

Speaker 4 My miso's getting cold.

Speaker 3 Right. Can you guys hurry up?

Speaker 3 We will hurry up, Ghost of Jerry. If you want to know anything else about Adidas and Puma, well, just go start reading up more.

Speaker 3 There's actually a book by a woman named Barbara Smit called Sneaker Wars, appropriately,

Speaker 3 all about the rift between Adidas and Puma. So if you want to know more about it, that's a pretty good place to start.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm gonna call this

Speaker 4 sponges. Okay.
Hey guys, I was listening to Pando and I was excited y'all mentioned glass sponges, which are thought to be the oldest animals on earth.

Speaker 4 I am a PhD student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, and I study marine sponges because they make all sorts of unique molecules that can be used as new medicines.

Speaker 4 I think sponges are the coolest animals on Earth, and I'd love to share some of my favorite sponge fun facts. You ready?

Speaker 4 Yes. Not only are sponges thought to be the oldest living,

Speaker 4 single living animals on Earth, but some evolutionary biologists even think sponges were the first animals to ever evolve.

Speaker 4 In other words, our last common animal ancestor could very well have been a sponge.

Speaker 3 That's so cool.

Speaker 4 Did you know the first antiviral drug approved by the FDA was developed from a molecule in a sea sponge?

Speaker 3 I didn't until just now.

Speaker 4 As a PhD student, I collect and study sponges because they are known to produce thousands of bioactive molecules, many of which have medicinal potential.

Speaker 4 I think it's pretty incredible that the ocean ocean may hold the cure to some of the most devastating human diseases.

Speaker 4 And I hope my work might inspire people to protect the world's oceans and the valuable resources within them.

Speaker 3 That's awesome.

Speaker 4 Heck yeah. Thanks for all the hard work you guys put into the show.
Y'all have kept me company on many a long night in the lab with my sponges.

Speaker 3 That's awesome. It makes me want to go chew on a sponge and see what happened.

Speaker 4 That's right. That's from Kayla Wilson from San Diego.

Speaker 3 Thanks a lot, Kayla. Thanks for the work you're doing too.
Thank you for saving humanity from grave diseases.

Speaker 4 Yeah, we'll look into these sponges, as you call them.

Speaker 3 If you want us to look into anything that we put in scare quotes, well, we want to know about it. You can go onto our website, stuffyushouldknow.com, follow us on our social links there.

Speaker 3 You can get in touch with us. You can also send us a good old-fashioned email.
Wrap it up, spank that thing on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at howstuffworks.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 4 Attention, parents and grandparents. If you're looking for a gift that's more than just a toy, give them something that inspires confidence and adventure all year long.

Speaker 4 Give them a Guardian bike, the easiest, safest, and number one kid's bike on the market.

Speaker 2 Yeah, with USA-made kids-specific frames and patented safety technology, kids are learning to ride in just one day with no training wheels needed.

Speaker 2 It's why Guardian is America's favorite kids' bike and the New York Times and Wirecutters' top pick three years in a row.

Speaker 4 That's right. My daughter has a Guardian bike and she loves it, and that thing was really easy to put together.

Speaker 4 And get this, this holiday season, Guardian is offering their biggest deal of the year: over 40% in savings on all bikes, plus $100 in free accessories.

Speaker 4 Guardian bikes have become one of the most sought-after gifts of the season, and inventory is going fast, so don't wait. Join over a half a million families who've discovered the magic of Guardian.

Speaker 4 Visit guardianbikes.com to shop now.

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