The Nike Cortez Was Named After a Conquistador and Claimed by Los Angeles

In 1967 a prototype running shoe arrived in Oregon from Kobe, Japan. It came from Onitsuka Tiger, the shoe company whose sneakers Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman were importing to the United States, and it came with a request. Onitsuka wanted help naming it. The 1968 Olympics were coming to Mexico City, so Bowerman suggested the Aztec.

That name lasted until adidas heard about it. The German company already sold a track shoe called the Azteca Gold and threatened to sue. So the Oregon side reached for the man who had brought down the Aztecs, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, and the shoe became the Cortez. It is a joke about a trademark fight, and it has been printed on the side of a Nike shoe for more than fifty years.

A coach's shoe

Bowerman was not a shoe designer by trade. He was the head track coach at the University of Oregon from 1948 to 1973, and his teams won four NCAA titles. His 1966 book Jogging, written with the cardiologist W.E. Harris, sold more than a million copies and helped start the American running craze.

In 1964 he and Knight, who had run for him at Oregon, founded Blue Ribbon Sports to sell Onitsuka shoes. Bowerman fed design ideas back to Kobe, and the Cortez was the most successful of them. It was a cushioned training shoe built for distance runners. According to Wikipedia's history of the shoe, the first uppers were leather, and Bowerman later moved to nylon and suede to cut weight.

Our history of the Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66 covers the Kobe company and its striped shoes for the same Mexico City Games. The Cortez is where that story and the Nike story split apart.

The split with Kobe

By 1971 the partnership was failing. As Wikipedia's account of Nike's early years puts it, Onitsuka tried to take over Blue Ribbon Sports with an ultimatum that would have handed the Japanese company 51 percent of it. The takeover never happened, and the relationship ended in 1972. Blue Ribbon had already started making its own shoes under a new name, Nike, with a new logo, the swoosh.

The Cortez was the problem. Both companies believed it was theirs. Blue Ribbon filed a federal lawsuit claiming Onitsuka had breached their distribution agreement, and the case turned on who owned a shoe that one side had designed and the other had manufactured. The court split the difference. Both companies were allowed to keep selling the shoe, but the Cortez name went to the Americans. Wikipedia dates the ruling to 1974. Onitsuka went on selling its version as the Tiger Corsair.

Nike's version barely changed. The 1972 Cortez kept nearly the same shape, and the swoosh took the place of the Onitsuka logo. In 1977 Onitsuka merged with two other Japanese firms to form ASICS, and the Tiger name went quiet for years.

An Olympic year launch

Nike released the Cortez in 1972, timed to the Munich Olympics. Bowerman was the head coach of the US track and field team in Munich that summer, and American athletes were seen wearing the shoe. It sold quickly enough that supply could not keep up, and the Cortez became Nike's first significant track shoe, years before the Air Force 1 or the Air Jordan 1.

The Cortez was not Bowerman's only experiment of those years. Around 1971 he ruined his wife's waffle iron pouring rubber into it to test a new kind of sole. That led to the Moon Shoe of 1972, made for runners at the Olympic trials, and to the Waffle Trainer in 1974. The Cortez was the conventional one, a cushioned shoe in leather or nylon, and it is the one that lasted.

The original colorway was white, red and blue. It looked patriotic in an Olympic year, and it also looked good with jeans, which turned out to matter more.

From the track to television

The shoe did not stay on the track for long. Nike made a women's version called the Señorita Cortez, and Farrah Fawcett, then a star of Charlie's Angels, wore Cortez while riding a skateboard. The best-known photograph of that look is usually dated to 1977 on the set of the show, though some accounts place the shoot a year earlier, and the image is often credited with selling the shoe to women. In 2017 Nike marked the shoe's 45th anniversary with a campaign in which Bella Hadid recreated it, rolling by on a skateboard in red and white Cortez.

Then came Forrest Gump. In the 1994 film, Tom Hanks's character receives a pair of Cortez and runs across the country in them. A generation that had never heard of Bowerman learned the shoe from a movie.

How Los Angeles adopted it

The Cortez had a Southern California head start. Blue Ribbon's first retail store opened in Santa Monica. By the 1980s the shoe was affordable and simple, and it became a fixture in Black and Latino communities across Los Angeles, from schoolyards to swap meets to car clubs. It became central to Chicano streetwear, and for many wearers it still stands for resilience.

That style traveled through music. Eazy-E wore Cortez as part of his image, and gangster rap carried the shoe far beyond Southern California. Through the 1980s and 1990s the shoe was also adopted by Los Angeles gangs, and that association has never fully left it.

Nike eventually leaned into the shoe's Latino following. It has released Cortez editions for Día de los Muertos and Latino Heritage Month, and the artist Mister Cartoon designed one that swapped the swoosh for an Aztec warrior's head, which brought the shoe's name back around to where it started. According to NPR's 2022 oral history of the shoe, Nike had made more than 700 versions of the Cortez by its fiftieth birthday.

The city's later streetwear boom grew up in the same soil. Our guide to Fairfax Avenue follows the Los Angeles street that became a streetwear hub in the 2000s.

For more, see our sneaker history hub, the Heritage Brands hub and the Sneakers section.

The shoe Onitsuka asked Oregon to name still carries the name Oregon gave it. Kobe's version became the Corsair, another name for a pirate.