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The ‘Galaxy’ Nike Air Foamposite One: An Oral History
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Learn how the stars collided in hoops, hip-hop, and commerce, resulting in footwear’s big bang: a $10 billion aftermarket.
“It was mayhem,” Anfernee Hardaway recalled. “They had to shut the stores down. Everybody wanted it.“
Throughout the ’90s, the man nicknamed “Penny” had seen it all in the Sunshine State from All-NBA nods to operating tables. However, neither stare-downs from Michael Jordan or Shaquille O’Neal breaking backboards compared to the rage at Florida Mall outside Orlando on Feb. 24, 2012, for the launch of the “Galaxy” Nike Air Foamposite One.
“To this day I’ve never seen anything like it,” footwear reporter and industry insider Nick DePaula said. “I’m talking 2,000 people, cops on horses, people running everywhere, police on loudspeakers with riot gear on and everything.”
Remixing a 1997 spaceship of a sneaker endorsed by Hardaway during his days with the Magic, the $220 retro-release reimagined in intergalactic graphics and glow-in-the-dark detailing made news nationally due to the uproar in Orlando and similar scenes all across America.
On the toes of its first formal retro release, Boardroom explores the story of a fallen star, a DC comet, and an All-Star Weekend energy release with enough gravitational pull to turn an entire industry upside down, changing the internet and outside in real-time.
This is the oral history of the “Galaxy” Nike Air Foamposite One.
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Heaven Cent
Despite nagging knee injuries derailing Hall of Fame potential, Penny Hardaway’s career is not a tragedy, but rather a miracle.
Raised by his grandmother, Hardaway worked his way from playground prospect in Memphis to the top high school player in America. An armed robbery in college left Penny with a lead bullet in his right foot, placing his All-American hopes in jeopardy right in his backyard.
Quickly, bad luck would flip as the eventual Orlando Magic lottery pick would lead the Florida franchise to its first NBA Finals appearance as an All-NBA first-teamer — at only 23 years old — beating MJ and Pippen’s dynastic Bulls. Fans and media across the country noticed as did the executives in Oregon.
Scoop Jackson (Former SLAM Magazine Editor): Penny was Magic Johnson with a jump shot. He was First-Team All-NBA twice before Shaq was once. Penny was not a fluke.
When they beat the Bulls? If you talk to Michael Jordan? Their problem was Penny Hardaway. The Bulls were like, ‘What the fuck are we going to do with this dude? He’s the problem.’
He was one of the few players that wasn’t shook by Mike. He not only gave you the numbers but he gave it to you in a way that was still fascinating.
There was still a style, a flair, a swag to the shit that he did.
Gentry Humphrey (Former Nike Executive): I worked with Penny on signature shoes. We’d take technologies that we were trying to put together and share them.
We had already created a shoe that we thought would be in Penny’s likeness, but we normally bring a bunch of shoes that would represent the bag for the rest of the season. In the bag was the Foamposite.
Penny Hardaway (Four-time NBA All-Star, Univ. of Memphis Head Coach): Nike’s done a terrific job since 1993 of putting me in the hottest sneaker out.
I wanted [Foamposite] it because I knew it was going to be innovative. I knew it was different from anything I’d seen or worn. At the height of my career, I felt like I could take that shoe to another level.
Fernando Medina / NBAE / Getty Images
Scoop Jackson: Penny is a normal, down-to-earth guy. But when it came to sneakers? He turned into Pharrell. He wanted the wildest, most different shit. His sneaker game could speak for him. He was always searching for something that was different.
Gentry Humphrey: We said, ‘Maybe we have something here.’ After that, it was making sure the shoe could be as commercial as possible because it was at a more premium price than anything on the market at that time.
Jeffrey L. Johnson (Former Nike Innovation Engineer): When I got to the Foamposite, the idea was already there, even the sample. But they were struggling with making it viable. The technical engineers were saying, ‘This is not possible, you can’t commercialize and grade this.’ Mathematically I just thought that wasn’t accurate.
During that time, I made 19 trips to Taiwan over the course of three years. Every month and a half I was back in Taiwan, driving our agenda and products with a piece of it being Foamposite.
1997 Nike Air Foamposite One Ad (Image courtesy of Nike)
Gentry Humphrey: It was a tribute to Penny to be able to push something new and similar to MJ, not be afraid to go against the grain. With Penny it was easy to do the colorway that connected with the Orlando Magic. The phenomenon that it’s become on the East Coast?
Marc Dolce (Footwear & Apparel Design Veteran): I grew up in Brooklyn, and I’d walk past Spike Lee opening his store, I’d go to the pizzeria, and I’d see Rosie Perez, I’d see Biggie sitting on the steps with all his guys.
The Foamposite was social currency. It was the most expensive shoe at that time and it looked different. You might not be able to afford a Range Rover then, but you put that on your feet? People knew what was up.
Duk-ki Yu (Major DC Founder & Marketing Vet): DC has always been into fancy shoes. Before Foamposite released to the public, Wyclef Jean performed at a promotional show for me in DC, and people saw it for the first time.
You’re coming from street culture, and a lot of the hustlers are wearing the most comfortable/hard-to-attain sneakers. People saw the Foamposite here and immediately realized it was something different. I saw firsthand the stylish street guys eyeing them like, ‘Yo, this is something.’ This is before the shoes actually came out.
The guys that were getting into clubs that didn’t allow sneakers? Guys like that were rocking these Foams.
Gentry Humphrey: As it moved from the courts to the streets it was a new way of looking at footwear protection in a whole different way. It was meant to tell that story on court, but it became a cultural icon. The DC area and everything happening in Baltimore and Virginia really took it and ran with it.
Hate is the New Love
By the early ’00s, the futuristic Foamposite was suddenly part of Nike’s storied past. The original mold for Penny’s spaceship shoes was destroyed, making retro releases impossible to produce.
But who cared? Not Nike certainly, which, 10 years after the Foamposite’s brash arrival, had renewed the classic Air Force 1 into a billion-dollar business in itself with 70 to 80% of sales coming from white-on-white low tops alone.
Still, some never forgot the Foamposite franchise — particularly a rising rapper from the DMV with range to rhyme over beats from J Dilla to Justice, holding his own on tracks tracing Lil Wayne and Lily Allen alike.
Joe La Puma (Complex SVP of Content Strategy, Host of Sneaker Shopping): Wale is an innovator. Wale has rocked everything and done everything in sneaker culture before it was prominent. He’s a real student of sneaker culture and he still loves it.
Him being from the area where Foamposites were so central? He was an early advocate organically.
Wale (Diamond Certified Artist, Washington, DC Native): The DMV is one of the most quietly influential regional cultures in the world. It was rewarding to see our aesthetic vision reach the masses like that.
[With Foamposite] we didn’t set out to teach people how to wear them, but we led the way, and I see the trickle-down of that style in every brand and fashion house’s footwear offerings ’til this day.
Penny Hardaway: I didn’t know how popular I was until I started seeing the Foamposite everywhere. Entertainers, athletes, rappers, it was just phenomenal.
Wale: It was a unique shoe. We’re a unique place. It was rugged, it was heavy, it was versatile, and most of all, something most people weren’t wearing like that.
We love to make things our own. It was expensive too, so it was equally a status symbol sneaker.
David “Sneaker Dave” Whitehead (Cincinnati-based Footwear Historian): I went to Baltimore in 2010 and Wale at this point was relevant. It was him, Big Sean, Drake, Kid Cudi, that realm.
I remember walking in the mall, and no exaggeration: every person was wearing either a Foamposite or a New Balance. There was no in-between.
Leon Bennett / Getty Images
Sneaker Dave: It’s kind of like how Travis Scott is now. We forget sometimes in footwear history that Wale had that type of buying power.
Whatever Foamposite he had on his feet? It was a very big deal in the footwear industry.
Cam Knox (Sneakerhead in Austin, Texas): Wale was the biggest influence if you were making the transition from Roc-a-Wear and Southpole to Stussy and 10 Deep. With streetwear, there was a transition age where you had to be able to keep up with the culture at that very moment.
You saw a lot of people transitioning to Foamposites and taking that band-aid off. It became contagious and influential, because once you spend $200 on a sneaker? There’s no going back.
Penny Hardaway: He played a huge role because he was one of the first ones I’d seen rocking my sneaker on a regular basis.
He definitely was the guy. I didn’t know he was a fan. I didn’t know if he was more a fan of the shoe or a fan of mine! It didn’t matter, he was representing on the highest level.
Gentry Humphrey: The decision was made to go back to the well. We decided to recreate the molds and make it happen again.
Star Wars
In the late ’00s, shifts in culture and changing seats at Nike transformed footwear in retro hybrid ways unforeseen.
While Wale was reviving Foamposite from DC through URL, back in Beaverton a CEO change and a new Nike Sportswear category created to focus on lifestyle and icons of the past put the ’97 oddity back in the mix.
Gentry Humphrey: The Foamposite became a key as I came into Nike Sportswear with Marc Dolce. We were thinking, ‘How do we change the game up and give the consumers something they’ve never seen?’
Marc Dolce: When we did colors like “Eggplant,” “Copper,” and “Sharpie,” my goal with Penny was to help tell a story. We wanted to be able to open the shoe box and hear Lil’ Penny’s voice like a greeting card. We had so many ideas.
There was a “Milky Way” pair that Gentry wore at an event. It was a Google image that we just put there.
Nike Air Foamposite One “Milky Way” sample (Photo by Nick DePaula)
Sneaker Dave: Penny was back in full swing with Marc Dolce and Nick DePaula.
Nick DePaula (Footwear Reporter & Industry Insider): We had Penny at our Sole Collector event to launch his new Zoom Rookie. There’s tons of Penny fans in there. Gentry would always tease out new stuff or allude to what’s coming up at events like that. So he stepped out in a “Galaxy” Foam prototype.
Gentry Humphrey: The “Eggplant” Foamposite gave us a little bit of confidence that you could sell a purple shoe, but the finish was so different than what we did on the “Galaxy” Foamposite.
The story of the “Galaxy” Foamposite just worked more than anything else.
Nike Air Foamposite One “Galaxy”
Marc Dolce: All-Star Game was our Detroit Auto Show. It’s where we could put out the concept that influences our entire calendar year. It was much more than just that event.
This was one of the best internal collaborations with Nike Basketball’s performance team and Nike Sportswear. Erick Goto, Eugene Rogers, Jason Petrie, and Morgan Barnes all made it happen.
We whiteboarded probably 50 ideas and one of the things that came back was that Orlando wasn’t far from Cape Canaveral. We thought about how Foamposite felt like it was from another galaxy, no pun intended. It doesn’t feel ordinary or from the earth.
Wale: The “Galaxy” pattern was just something you hadn’t seen before — that and the Weatherman’s. Normally, a busy colorway like that wouldn’t translate well for a shoe, but on the Foamposite, it seemed natural.
It felt like a trophy piece, and maybe not something you’d wear a lot, but something you wanted everyone to see that you had.
When Disaster Strikes
Heading into 2012, astrologists and conspiracists debated doomsday theories tied to the ancient Mayan calendar. While it wasn’t the end of the world as knew it, it was arguably the year the Internet and real life became completely enmeshed.
From Facebook acquiring Instagram for $1 billion to Twitter taking off among big brands and global users alike, Web 2.0’s blend of URL and IRL had never been more intertwined.
However, it was a classifieds site founded in 1995 — back when Hardaway saw his first All-Star selection — that pushed the “Galaxy” Foamposite into a different stratosphere.
Penny Hardaway: I don’t know what made it different from any other release, but everybody wanted it. I remember a guy sold his old school car for some Galaxys.
Earl from Queens (Sneakerhead, Craigslist User): I was waiting for “Cool Grey” 11s and the kid beside me was talking about how he wanted to keep selling sneakers to get a car. I’m always able to get cars easily and cheaply.
A few months later I heard the “Galaxy” Foamposites coming out, so I had the idea to go Craigslist to trade my car. I had three cars back then and I didn’t want to deal with the headache of trying to get the Foams. It was a Chevy Cavalier in a rare color.
Nick DePaula: I love reading feedback and comments online about new launches, or hearing stories about people hunting down a pair they really wanted.
I’m telling you though, I never thought I’d be reading about someone trying to trade their car for some damn shoes.
Earl from Queens: Within five minutes of posting it, I got phone calls. After 20 minutes, it was getting so crazy I had to take the post down. A radio station called, NBC Atlanta called, just too many people. It went on for like five years!
Anytime a Foamposite would drop I’d get a bunch of phone calls. The phone calls were day and night.
Gentry Humphrey: I remember seeing the Craigslist post where someone was trying to trade it for a car. We were like, ‘Damn, this is pretty cool!’ That people value it in that light?
Earl from Queens: People say I contributed to the hype of it and I see how. That wasn’t my intention, I just wanted a pair!
I got them for like $850, and people were selling them for like $1,400, so nobody wanted to trade me the sneakers for the car anymore, and I understood.
I sold the car anyway, then I paid for the sneakers so it worked out.
Was a cataclysmic event written in the stars? If the storm started on Craigslist, of all places, it eventually touched down in Penny’s original place of play.
Nick DePaula: Usually with releases, it’s hard to say what the actual number of pairs really is. People were saying for Galaxy Foams it was around 3,000 pairs total. Since All-Star was in Orlando, everyone was saying that 300 pairs were dropping first there.
I’m flying in that Thursday night into Orlando at like 9. As we’re approaching the airport to land, I’m looking out the window and see this huge parking lot with helicopters flying above, and lights flashing everywhere. It looked wild. Turns out it was the Florida Mall.
To this day I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m talking like 2,000 people, cops on horses, people are running everywhere, police have loudspeakers and riot gear on and everything.
Wale: People bammed out. It’s always crazy to see the lengths people will go to for shoes, but at that time, StockX and Grailed weren’t around.
People had to bend over backwards to find grails and risked a lot to do it. Being a collector meant blood, sweat, and tears — maybe even a mortgage or a pink slip.
Nick DePaula: People started rushing the Foot Locker. After like 30 minutes, they announced that the whole launch had been called off. People were HOT. I will say, I don’t know who the hell thought it was a good idea to do a midnight release.
Penny Hardaway: Everything about the Galaxy was mayhem. That’s the biggest word I can say.
Historically, sneaker riots had happened before such as 2005’s “Pigeon” Nike SB Dunk in NYC or the lengthy lines in Los Angeles for 2008’s “McFly” Nike Hyperdunk.
Where the 2012 “Galaxy” Foamposite broke the mold was the mayhem it caused nationwide.
Trinidad Jame$ (Grammy Winning Artist, HOMMEWRK Founder): That shoe had Atlanta on fire. There are certain shoes that had the city on fire, but that was the biggest flame. Five-day lines for a pair of shoes? That’s crazy in anybody’s mind.
I was running a boutique called Ginza that was probably two blocks from Walter’s. I would work during the day and have somebody hold down the spot.
There was a family that had a tent. They were there the whole time with their mom. It was interesting man.
Terrance “Tee” Ricketts (Co-Founder of Index PDX): Blends LA was doing a raffle. They only raffled off six pairs. There was an easy 500 people there. The whole time people were like, ‘You think this is crazy? Nike Vault’s got 2,000 people there.’
I knew right away, I’m not fucking getting these.
There were more people than I’d ever seen at any release — and I was 12 years in.
Trinidad Jame$: People were going crazy for the shoe — me included. Artists started to pull up like Jeezy and I think Waka Flocka. And I wasn’t an artist at that time — I was a consumer and a stylist.
I’m definitely happy I was a part of it at that time and that the person recorded it and put it on Worldstar.
Cam Knox: People in Austin started lining up across the street from Nice Kicks at 6 p.m. the night before at a 24-hour Whataburger. Imagine a line of humans in a drive-thru at 2 a.m. with no cars staying up all night for this release.
Anywhere around Texas that hit I-35? They were here from Oklahoma to Brownsville. It was the biggest release I’d been to since the Defining Moments Package. I had a homeboy come from Philadelphia.
I’ve never seen that many people in line for a sneaker — ever. It was absolutely fucking insane.
Joe La Puma: The “Galaxy” Foamposite was like nothing I’d ever experienced. You talk about hype? The shoe looked like something you’d never seen before with that graphic. The hype was so crazy that it was unattainable.
The “Galaxy” Foamposite was like a mythical shoe. … It was the only time that I put a shoe on my Instagram where I got a message saying, ‘Don’t leave the Complex office in them,’ threatening me over them.
Duk-ki Yu: [In DC] people camped out looking for guys leaving with the bags. People were getting followed to their cars.
This was pre-StockX, it was really organic. The want and need for these shoes was all about, ‘I got it, you don’t,’ or ‘If you know, you know,’ type shit. It wasn’t based on the monetary value you could retrieve, it was making sure it was in your hands.
Josh Luber (StockX co-founder, ghostwrite Founder & CEO): I was living in New York City and on a conference call for IBM watching Twitter. When the Tweet went up I said, ‘Family emergency!’ hung up, ran, and got in a cab. I got to 21 Mercer in eight minutes and the line was out to Canal.
I knew there was no chance. I stood for hours, talked to people, and hung out. That was the moment of, ‘There’s gotta be a business here.’ The chaos, the passion, there’s something here that improves this and makes this better.
It started me on the path of Campless which would then become StockX.
Infinity & Beyond
The economic impact of the Galaxy Foamposite is immeasurable — or maybe it isn’t.
In the decades leading up to the footwear aftermarket’s big bang, independent sneaker transactions gradually grew from slipping $20 to a Foot Locker employee in the ’90s to scoop a pair early to shelling out an extra $100 through forums or parking lots in the late ’00s or early ’10s if you missed out on the release date.
After the “Galaxy” Foamposite release in 2012, global resale markets emerged with big backing from Wall Street elite like StockX and GOAT while existing platforms such as eBay spent millions to refind their footing in the skyrocketing space.
As of 2025, the sneaker aftermarket is said to be worth $10 billion, creating commerce across time zones online and creating solely owned resale shops at malls around the world.
Some say it robbed the purity of an underground culture, others assert it empowered people of all ages and backgrounds to learn how to manage money and trade assets.
While the cosmic commercialization of sneaker collecting made the culture mass, the “Galaxy” Foamposite Big Bang moment changed the lives of individuals forever.
Luber went from a consultant at IBM self-publishing shoe prices on Campless to the CEO of StockX backed by billionaires like Dan Gilbert and Ted Leonis.
Nick Williams went from managing a streetwear shop in Atlanta to becoming Trinidad Jame$, a Grammy Award-winning artist with IMDB credits, design deals, and one of the last great success stories of The Blog Era.
Trinidad Jame$: 2012 was the year that I got into the music industry. This was before “All Gold Everything.” I had the Foamposites before music.
Josh Luber: That’s the beauty: you can’t recreate that. It was this perfect storm that kicked off all of what happened. Instagram had just launched and that shoe happened to be at the center of it? It started so much more.
Penny Hardaway: You couldn’t have dreamed this when I was back playing. That this would still be as relevant as it is?
Gentry Humphrey: Our goal was to deliver a product that was super-compelling that we all believed in and felt would truly resonate. The love it received at launch time? That was the report card of a job well done.
Josh Luber: I didn’t buy a pair until [a few] years ago because I had never paid that much for a shoe. I think I paid $1,400 on StockX, which I thought was a good deal, but before that people were asking $10,000 or $20,000 for them.
Earl from Queens: I wore them to my wedding just to get a kick out of people pointing and smiling.
Penny Hardaway: I do still wear [the Galaxy], occasionally. I’d love to see those come back, it’s been a while. If you bring those back? You might not get the same buzz, but you’ll get some great energy.
Duk-ki Yu: Some things are better left alone, but there’s a whole generation of fans who grew up with this as a unicorn. It’s a fantasy object like a mysterious Pokemon. You heard about it but you never saw it.
For DC, it’s a validation of what the market has been asking for.
Ronald Martinez / Getty Images
Marc Dolce: I honestly believe that this was the shoe that created the opportunity for brands like StockX to exist. It was such an inflection point of changing how everything went before. People bought, sold, and traded shoes before, but for me, it was a moment that gave fuel to StockX and all those companies.
Josh Luber: There were four truly seminal moments in the history of sneakers: 1985 and the first Air Jordans, 1999 with eBay and the Internet, and then 2012 with the “Galaxy” Foamposite release. The fourth one I would say is StockX in terms of access to products.
Facebook had just bought Instagram so you had all these people rushing to IG. All sneakerheads ever wanted to do was show off their shoes and see what everyone else was doing.
Marc Dolce: It’s about social currency. Do I like to see the sky-high prices for product that I worked on? Not really, because I want them to be more accessible. When you re-release something, does it make it as memorable? I think it does.
The whole point of my role at Nike was to keep that story alive for future generations. The fact that they re-released it? My son Luca Dolce is 12 and got a pair of the new “Galaxy” Foamposites. He wasn’t even alive when they first came out.
Joe La Puma: The “Galaxy” Foamposite still feels different than the thousands and thousands of sneakers that we’ve encountered through our career, it just does. Maybe it’s how tough it was to get them, the threat, or the person selling the car. But it’s one of those ones that’s in the pantheon of releases.
Penny Hardaway: There was so much stuff going on for the “Galaxy” Foams. It was hundreds of messages of people sending me the shoe, talking about the shoe, the energy around the country about the shoe.
It was a good time for me! It took me back to the times when I was playing! For me, to be retired and to be a trending topic when it came to the Galaxys? That’s something you just dream about.
