Tennis great Stan Smith on life lessons, Arthur Ashe's legacy and his namesake shoes

Los Angeles Times

5 hours ago

Fancy footwork won him Wimbledon.
Simple footwear won him everything since.
'The shoe has had a life of its own,' said Stan Smith, 78, whose eponymous Adidas kicks, with their timeless lines and leather uppers, are the king of all tennis sneakers with more than 100 million sold. 'People from all walks of life have embraced them.'
Not surprisingly, Smith has a head for business to match his feet for tennis.
With that in mind, he and longtime business partner Gary Niebur wrote the just-released 'Winning Trust: How to Create Moments that Matter,' aimed at helping businesses develop stronger relationships with their clients, with tips that readers can apply to their personal relationships and to sports.
'The book is about developing relationships that can elevate the element of trust, which is a depreciating asset in today's world,' Smith said this week in a call from the French Open.
When it comes to building and maintaining high-stakes relationships, Smith and Niebur have distilled their process into five key elements they call SERVE, a recurring theme throughout the book. That's an acronym for Strategize, Engage, Recreate, Volley and Elevate.
For instance, recreate — as in recreation — means to build bonds through fun shared experiences, and volley means to trade ideas back and forth to find solutions.
'When people realize that you care more about the relationship than the transaction,' Niebur said, 'trust follows.'
A onetime standout at Pasadena High and USC, Smith was a close friend of the late Arthur Ashe, the UCLA legend whose name graces the main stadium court at Flushing Meadows, N.Y., home of the U.S. Open.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Ashe's victory at Wimbledon, when he beat the heavily favored Jimmy Connors in the 1975 final. Ashe remains the only Black man to win the singles title at that storied tournament.
'Arthur was a good friend,' Smith said. 'He made a huge impact, and much more of an impact in the last few years of his life when he was fighting AIDS and the heart fund, and obviously for equal rights.'
Ashe, who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion he received during heart-bypass surgery, died in 1993. Although he was four years older than Smith, the two developed a close friendship when they traveled the globe as Davis Cup teammates and rising professionals.
Smith has vivid memories of traveling with him, Ashe in his 'Citizen of the World' T-shirt with his nose forever buried in a newspaper or magazine. Smith was ranked No. 1 in the U.S. at the time, two spots ahead of his pal, yet the wildly popular Ashe always got top billing.
'When we went to Africa, I was the other guy who played against him in all these exhibitions,' Smith told The Times in 2018. 'They would introduce him as Arthur Ashe, No. 1 player in the U.S., No. 1 in the world, one of the greatest players to ever play the game … and Stan Smith, his opponent.'
Smith laughs about that now, but it used to chafe him. Finally, he raised the issue with his buddy.
Recalled Smith in that 2018 interview: 'Arthur came up to me and said, 'I'm sorry about that. If we do a tour of Alabama, I'll carry your rackets for you.' He was in tune with everything.
'Arthur was a quiet leader walking a tightrope between a traditionally white sport and the black community.'
Smith will be at Wimbledon next month, where his UCLA friend will be honored.
As for his shoes, they're everywhere, and have been since the 1970s. Adidas originally developed the shoe for French player Robert Haillet in the mid-1960s, and the sneakers were known as the 'Haillet.'
In 1972, the company switched to Smith, naming the shoes in his honor and printing a tiny picture of his mustachioed face on them. There were subtle changes to the Haillet, including a notch in the tongue for laces to pass through and a heel better shaped to protect the Achilles tendon.
They sold like crazy. In 1988, Stan Smiths made the 'Guinness Book of World Records' for the most pairs sold at 22 million. Yet that was only the beginning as sales surged with the release of the Stan Smith II and retro Stan Smith 80s. The most common ones were solid white with touch of green on the back.
'Hugh Grant turned around last year in the [Wimbledon] royal box and said, `First girl I ever kissed, I was wearing your shoes,'' Smith told The Times in 2022. 'Another guy said he met this girl when he was wearing my shoes. It was so meaningful that they both wore the shoes for their wedding seven years later.
'It started off as a tennis shoe. Now it's a fashion shoe.'
Smith's personal collection has climbed to more than 100 size 13s in all sorts of colors, including his favorite pair in cardinal and black, an homage to his USC roots.
In 2022, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Smith's Wimbledon singles title, Adidas gave all of its sponsored players a pair of shoes with SW19 on the tongue — Wimbledon's postcode — with the date of that match against Ilie Nastase inside the right shoe and the score of the match inside the left.
At Wimbledon this year, the spotlight swings to the other side of Los Angeles, to an unforgettable Bruin, a sports hero who impacted so many lives.
For Smith, his friendship with Ashe was an early example in his career of a relationship forged with trust.
The book, incidentally, is affixed with a unique and fitting page marker.
A shoelace.