Who is Stan Smith? New film uncovers tennis and footwear legend
For sports fans of a certain age, the seasonal queues that form around shoe stores in anticipation of the latest Jordan sneakers are a painful reminder of the many young people who only know of the hoops legend as an athletic brand. But well before Nike reduced Michael to a Jumpman silhouette, Adidas was hawking Stan Smiths – the leather, low-top kicks that became such a fashion statement among rockers and rappers that perhaps more young people have no idea the mustachioed face on the tongue belongs to one of the most consequential players in tennis history. “A lot of sneaker enthusiasts want to understand the heritage and story behind it,” says the director Danny Lee. His latest film answers the essential question: Who Is Stan Smith?
Produced under LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s Uninterrupted imprimatur, Who Is Stan Smith? revisits the life and times of the former world No 1, from his working-class beginnings to his improbable bond with Arthur Ashe to his even more improbable emergence as a style icon – a SoCal James Bond, Sean Connery in country club kit. That’s despite, as one of his children helpfully points out in the doc, Smith rocking his trademark top lip strip for the better part of the last 50 years. That ’stache wasn’t just all the rage during Smith’s prime (in the late-60s and early-70s, mostly), it was part of a sandy-haired, cerulean-eyed 6ft 4in allAmerican package that the super agent Donald Dell turned into one of the most commercial billboards in sport. And yet: the glamor of the epoch has nothing on these times. “Now they’ve got teams, they’ve got people doing the jet set thing,” says the 77-year-old
Smith, recalling the days on tour when it was just him and his wife, Margie. “It’s still tough as a professional athlete, but back then she and I were the team more or less.”
Besides leading tennis into the Open era and helping to establish the Association of Tennis Professionals at the expense of defending his 1972 Wimbledon title, Smith helped lead the US to victory in the 1968 Davis Cup – the title that effectively kicked off the American tennis boom of the 1970s and 80s. “When I saw Stan have a jacket on that said USA, I was like, Man, could I do that?” John McEnroe recalls early in the documentary. “And I did it!”
The 94-minute documentary is slated for a soft launch in New York and Los Angeles over the next two weeks before a wider release in May. It was originally teased during the 2022 Doc NYC film festival only to be delayed by the usual industry negotiations and the Covid-19 pandemic. But now that patience is rewarded with a 50-state theatrical release that not only comes just as the calendar approaches the heart of the tennis schedule, but also with the Zendaya-led pulp fiction Challengers reviving the market for tennis drama at the box office. (Take that, pickleball!) “Thankfully,” says Lee, “we shot this two- and three-scope wide, so it’s a real visual feast on screen.”
Sneaker geeks should beware that this film isn’t an extended version of Friedman’s Shoes – the sports Emmy-award winning short Lee directed about the Atlanta shoe store where Shaq, Magic Johnson and other plus-sized athletes have trekked to in search of luxury footwear in hard