In this article:
- Netflix recently dropped another amazing documentary titled Untold: The Rise and Fall of AND1 that details the meteoric rise and fall of one of the coolest basketball brands of all time.
- This documentary instantly calls us back to the late ‘90s and early 2000s when street basketball was first coming into the mainstream and the AND1 Mixtape Tour was rivaling SportsCenter in terms of viewership.
- In this film, you’ll get to hear the players, company owners, fans, and many others talk about the golden age of AND1 and where they went wrong.
Netflix has become the primary source for documentary films and limited series in recent years, and they continue to churn out more and more fantastic documentaries just about every week.
From the iconic series Making a Murderer that had actual impacts on some of the cases that it documented to the Tiger King series that just about broke the internet, Netflix documentaries have completely changed the game. And, recently, Netflix has been releasing a series of sports-focused documentaries under the moniker Untold, one of which was Untold: The Rise and Fall of AND1.”
This documentary came onto the platform on August 23, 2022. Not long after, I was browsing through the Netflix homepage and The Rise and Fall of AND1 came up on my recommended watches.
Immediately, I was transported through my memory to the early 2000s. I was standing in my concrete-floored basement in my pajamas, dribbling a basketball, and watching AND1 Mixtape: Volume 9, copying every move that I saw The Professor or AO pull out of their bag.
AND1 was seriously mind-blowing stuff for a young basketball fan. I must’ve watched those mixtapes hundreds of times and then ran straight to the local playground to try out my new moves against some competition.
So, naturally, when I saw that there was a new documentary on Netflix titled Untold: The Rise and Fall of AND1, I thought to myself, What ever happened to AND1? And then I immediately turned on the documentary.
This documentary details the meteoric rise of the AND1 brand to the point where they became a serious competitor with Nike and then their tragic fall from grace brought upon by greed and, ultimately, being too small a fish in too large a pond.
While AND1 still exists today (in fact, they still sponsor NBA All-Star Fred VanVleet), the brand doesn’t enjoy near the prominence that it once had in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
From the Streets
The AND1 brand was born when three graduate students at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania had the desire to apply their business acumen to something that they all loved dearly: basketball.
Jay Coen Gilbert, Seth Berger, and Tom Austin would all meet up at the local playgrounds after classes to run pick-up games after classes. One day, the idea dawned on them: What if we could make money from street basketball?
Not long after, the trio began printing t-shirts featuring the AND1 logo accompanied by trash-talk phrases and selling them out of the trunk of a car. Here are some of the iconic phrases that AND1 fans might remember:
- “Get Off The Court. You’re Embarrassing Yourself.”
- “Don’t Laugh. You’re Next.”
- “I’m Sorry. I Thought You Could Play.”
- “I’m The Bus Driver. I Take Everyone To School.”
- “I Saw A Picture Of Your Game On A Milk Carton.”
- “My Game’s Butta. You’re Toast.”
- “Call Me The Surgeon. I Just Took Your Heart.”
- “What’s Wrong? Momma Forget To Pack Your Game?”
It was instantly electric. As more and more AND1 shirts began to populate local hoop courts, it was clear that they had tapped into the heart of the street basketball scene.
Before long, the brand was being sold in Foot Locker stores and, not long after that, they signed NBA acolyte Stephon Marbury as the poster child for their first pair of shoes.
Things blew up even more when, in 1998, they released their first mixtape. It was a VHS tape featuring prominent New York City streetballers doing unfathomable tricks and flashy moves set over a hip-hop beat.
They circulated these mixtapes around the streets for free, and they soon became one of the pillars of the AND1 brand.
With the exploding popularity, the AND1 execs decided to assemble a team comprised of the players that appeared in their mixtapes. They put these players on a bus and had them tour around the country and challenge streetballers from other cities.
These“Mixtape Tour” games were televised on ESPN and were competing with the channel’s flagship program SportsCenter in terms of ratings. By 2001, AND1 was the second-largest basketball brand behind Nike.
It was clear that AND1 was a smashing success. The Mixtape Tour was traveling to over 30 different countries, shoes were flying off the shelves, and Vince Carter wore a pair of AND1 Tai Chi shoes when he won the dunk contest in 2000.
However, just as AND1 was seeming to cement itself as a staple of the basketball industry, things began to fall apart.
Deflation
What exactly deflated the AND1 brand is hard to pin down. It seems as if a lot of unfortunate circumstances came together at the perfect time to take the wind out of AND1’s sail. Just when it looked like David was going to take down Goliath, like AND1 might actually be able to give Nike a run for their money in the basketball space, things began to unravel.
First of all, unrest began to boil among the players on the AND1 Mixtape Tour. Some of the players began to squabble about who was getting paid more than who. There was also the general feeling that the massive amount of income generated through the AND1 Mixtape Tour was not being fairly passed down to the players.
On top of that, Nike began to formulate a strategy behind closed doors to take down AND1 and reclaim its market share. And, during the 2001 NBA All-Star Break, Nike dropped one of the most memorable commercials of all time.
The “Freestyle” commercial featured NBA stars such as Vince Carter, Rasheed Wallace, Baron Davis, Jason Williams, Lamar Odom, and Darius Miles all performing streetball moves to the sound of an Afrika Bambaataa beat. It was a nail in the coffin for AND1.
Finally, as pressure mounted to keep the AND1 brand afloat, Seth Berger (one of the original founders) was trying to raise three kids under the age of 7. Eventually, it was decided that the AND1 brand would be sold to American Sporting Goods in 2005.
Under its new direction, AND1 would never be the same. The Mixtape Tour fell out of mainstream prominence and shoe sales withered away. Still, the AND1 golden era made a lasting impact on the game of basketball.
The Rise and Fall of AND1
Despite the fact that the AND1 brand no longer enjoys the same renown that it once did, the brand still had a profound impact on the game of basketball. NBA players today, on the whole, have a much flashier style of play that was inspired by street basketball.
In fact, former AND1 golden boy Rafer “Skip to My Lou” Alston was even drafted in the NB, largely because of the exposure he got through AND1.
AND1 represented one of the major reasons that we basketball fans love the game so much: it’s more than a game, it’s a form of self-expression, a form of art. It’s no wonder that street basketball and hip-hop and graffiti are all inextricably linked.
They were all born from the same creative spirit, which started in the hearts of cities and branched out to the suburbs and all over the world.
For those of us that grew up watching the AND1 Mixtape Tour, Hot Sauce, Main Event, Helicopter, The Professor, Sik Wit It, Half Man Half Amazing, and the entire AND1 team were the coolest people on Earth.
Getting the chance to hear their take on the story of the rise and fall of AND1 in this new Netflix documentary really brought me down memory lane. Even if you’ve never held a basketball, Untold: The Rise and Fall of AND1 is worth a watch.
For more sports legends (and scandals), check out Netflix’s latest Untold documentary about Manti Te’o and the infamous catfishing scandal.