By Sandy Dover
As featured by Yahoo!
The Reebok Kamikaze II may be one of the greatest shoes in basketball history. A performer relative to its time in the mid-1990s, the Kamikaze II — which can be viewed in greater detail here — was a star sneaker worn by one of the greatest talents in the history of basketball, Shawn Kemp. Aesthetically, it was dynamic, it was eye-catching, but it also was much-maligned. Because of its predecessor, it failed to capture the same cache as the first version did, and because of that, it languished, in shoe stores and the hearts of sneaker fans. That’s since changed, as the Kamikaze II’s reappearance has been welcomed by people who now see its excellence as time has passed, and it has come back better than ever.
One of the main problems that I had personally with the Kamikaze II, originally, was that it wasn’t bold enough. That may seem a bit nuts to say, considering its zig-zag vertical design, but it was fairly pedestrian, because it mainly was a black shoe at retail. Kemp, a member of the Seattle SuperSonics upon its release, wore a black/white/forest green and black/white version, both of which were nice shoes, but were fairly pedestrian (and because of stricter color rules for NBA footwear, experimentation wasn’t embraced in color and companies often didn’t like making shoes that the players weren’t allowed to wear themselves); save for Kemp’s player-only version of an all-white tumbled leather Kamikaze II (which was beautiful to see), the shoe didn’t lend much else. …
SNDVR 