Converse Chuck Taylor and the Salesman Behind the Signature

On March 2, 1962, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points against the New York Knicks. He did it in Converse All Stars, canvas high tops with a rubber toe cap and a round patch on the ankle, the shoe almost everyone in the game wore. By the 1960s Converse's share of the basketball shoe market is usually put at somewhere between 70 and 80 percent. It is hard to name a brand that has owned a sport's footwear that completely since.

The shoe on Chamberlain's feet was already 45 years old.

Canvas and Rubber, 1917

The Converse Rubber Shoe Company was founded in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1908 to make rubber footwear. It started on canvas shoes in 1915 and introduced the All Star as a canvas sports shoe in 1917. The construction was simple, a canvas upper vulcanized to a rubber sole, and the basic recipe has barely moved in more than a century.

What did change was the name. For that, you need the salesman.

Who Was Chuck Taylor, Really?

Charles Taylor was a real person, which already puts him ahead of plenty of brand namesakes. He grew up in Indiana, captained his high school team in Columbus, and played semi-pro ball for the Columbus Commercials and the Akron Firestone Non-Skids, among other Midwest teams. Converse hired him as a salesman in 1921.

He is also at the heart of one of the most durable myths in sneaker history. For decades his biography included stints with the Original Celtics and the Buffalo Germans, two of the great early professional teams. No records confirm either, and Taylor never set the story straight. Journalist Abraham Aamidor's 2006 biography, Chuck Taylor, All Star, is the place to start for the documented version.

The real Taylor is more interesting than the legend. He was a gifted salesman who fed customer complaints back to the factory, and his suggestions are credited with making the shoe more flexible and supportive, which says a lot about how much a good salesman's ear was worth. He ran free basketball clinics, starting with an informal one at North Carolina State in 1922, and kept them going for nearly thirty years. He managed a traveling All-Stars team and helped launch the Converse Basketball Yearbook. Converse put his signature on the ankle patch in the early 1930s (1932 is the year most often given), and he is believed never to have received a royalty for it.

He was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1968, inducted in 1969, and died of a heart attack that June.

When Basketball Walked Away

Taylor's death lined up, roughly, with the end of the Chuck's reign on the court. Leather shoes from adidas and then Nike took over through the 1970s, a shift we cover in our adidas Superstar history, and by the 1980s Nike had passed Converse as the leading basketball brand.

The Chuck simply found other feet. Its revival through the 1980s and 1990s was driven by nostalgic baby boomers and then grunge kids rather than players, and that cheap, unfussy quality turned it into a default shoe for anyone who wanted to look like they hadn't tried very hard. It shares that path with the Nike Dunk and the Vans Old Skool, basketball and skate shoes that found their real audience once the sport had moved on. It also fits the same corner of a wardrobe as a Champion Reverse Weave hoodie, an athletic object that outlived its athletic purpose.

Bankruptcy and the Chuck 70

None of that saved the company. Converse filed for bankruptcy in January 2001 and shifted production from Lumberton, North Carolina, to Asia. In July 2003 Nike agreed to buy it for $305 million. For scale, Nike had reported $10.7 billion in revenue the previous year, against $205 million at Converse. The Seattle Times covered the Nike deal at the time.

Under Nike, Converse did the smart thing and went back to the archive. In 2013 it launched the Chuck 70, modeled on the version that predates the small early 1980s revisions to the standard Chuck. It has heavier canvas, a glossier, taller rubber sidewall and more cushioning underfoot. If you want one pair, buy that one. It costs a little more and looks noticeably closer to what players wore before basketball left. The standard Chuck is still the right call for a beater pair you plan to destroy.

The Chuck also belongs with the slim, low-slung shoes that work with tailoring and wide trousers, alongside the adidas Samba. For the full documented life of the salesman, the Chuck Taylor Wikipedia page is a good start. Converse is one of the oldest names in our heritage brands coverage, and the shoes that dethroned it fill the sneakers section.

Check the ankle patch on any pair sold today. The signature is still there, the name of a salesman who, as far as anyone knows, never collected a royalty for it.