--- title: "The Reebok Pump Cost $170 and Wore a Basketball on Its Tongue" url: https://quietmenace.com/sneakers/reebok-pump-history/ author: Quiet Menace Editors section: Sneakers published: 2026-10-30 updated: 2026-10-30 topics: Sneaker History, Industrial Design, Heritage Brands --- # The Reebok Pump Cost $170 and Wore a Basketball on Its Tongue > Reebok borrowed an air bladder from a ski boot, raced Nike to the shelves and priced the result like a luxury good. A rookie's dunk in Charlotte did the rest. On February 9, 1991, at the Charlotte Coliseum, a Boston Celtics rookie named Dee Brown bent down before his dunks at the NBA Slam Dunk Contest and pressed the tongues of his shoes. He was inflating them. The shoes were black Reebok Omni Zone Pumps with an orange ball on the tongue, and when Brown beat Shawn Kemp in the final with a no-look dunk, ESPN reports, Reebok ran a full-page advertisement in *USA Today* with the photograph the following Monday. Most accounts, including ESPN's and Wikipedia's, put the dunk in 1991. Mental Floss dates it to February 1992. Whichever year you take, it was the moment a sneaker feature became a piece of television. ## A ski boot and a race The idea arrived with an acquisition. In 1988 Reebok bought Ellesse, and with it came an inflatable tongue originally developed for a ski boot. According to [Wikipedia's history of the shoe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reebok_Pump), the technology came from Ellesse's founder, Leonardo Servadio. Paul Litchfield, who ran Reebok's advanced concepts group, took charge of turning it into a basketball shoe. Paul Brown, Reebok's vice president of design, moved the pump to the tongue and covered it in silicone so that it looked like a basketball. The prototypes reached Massachusetts on February 4, 1989. The next day Reebok showed the shoe at the Super Show trade fair in Atlanta, and found that Nike had an inflatable shoe of its own, the Air Pressure. That set a deadline. Litchfield wanted the Pump on shelves by Black Friday of 1989, and Reebok made it. The first Pump was released on November 24, 1989. ## The price It cost $170. [ESPN's 30th anniversary history](https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/28149048) reports that this was about $70 more than the next most expensive sneaker on the market, a figure that comes from Paul Fireman, who was running Reebok at the time. Mental Floss called it an astronomical sum for the time. The launch nearly went wrong. A stitching error meant that a batch of the first shoes would not inflate, and Litchfield's team had to restitch them. The sources disagree on the size of the problem. ESPN puts it at about 3,000 failed pairs in an order of 5,000 to 7,000, while Mental Floss says that none of the first 7,000 pairs would inflate. Reebok sold it hard. Dominique Wilkins was the first endorser, and he introduced the shoe in a television commercial in November 1989. He also won the 1990 dunk contest wearing Pumps. In March 1990 Reebok ran a bungee jumping commercial, which Mental Floss says CBS aired once before banning it. ![Blue and white high-top basketball shoes hanging from a basketball net](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1635770997852-57b433492848?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *A pair of blue and white high-tops hung from a hoop. They are Fila basketball shoes, a stand-in for the Pump era. Photo by Abhay siby Mathew on Unsplash* ## A whole range of air Reebok spread the bladder across its line. In 1990 it released the Omni Zone, Twilight Zone and SXT Pump, along with the Court Victory Pump for the tennis player Michael Chang, who won 34 singles titles including a Grand Slam. By 1991 the technology had moved into cross-training, golf and running. The pump mechanism was patented in May 1992 as US patent 5,113,599. The numbers were large. By the end of 1990, according to [Mental Floss](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/69922/adjusted-inflation-history-reebok-pump), Reebok had logged $500 million in Pump sales, while Nike expected about $10 million from the Air Pressure. By the time Shaquille O'Neal signed with Reebok in 1992, six million pairs had been sold, and the price of the top model had dropped to $130 by that summer's Olympics. Here are the main models, drawn from the sources above. The table is Quiet Menace's own. | Year | Model | Note | |---|---|---| | 1989 | The Pump | Released November 24 at $170 | | 1990 | Omni Zone, Twilight Zone, SXT Pump | The range widens | | 1990 | Court Victory Pump | Worn by Michael Chang | | 1992 | Shaq's Pump | Six million pairs sold by now | | 1994 | Instapump Fury | A stripped-back design | | 2005 | Pump 2.0 | Launched in April | Reebok as a whole rode the wave. ESPN reports that in 1990 the company shipped 75 million pairs of shoes worldwide and grew its revenue by 18 percent to $2.2 billion, and Mental Floss says total company sales rose another 26 percent in 1991. The Pump spread with it. Wikipedia records the Blacktop model in 1991 and the Pump Graphlite in 1992. In 1994 the brand partnered with the basketball film *Above the Rim*. It did not last. By 1992, Mental Floss notes, Nike held 30 percent of the industry. In 2004 Reebok's sales reached $3.8 billion while Nike's were $12 billion. The Pump had won a battle with the Air Pressure and lost the war with everything else Nike made. ## After the boom The original concept slowly gave way to the Instapump Fury, released in 1994. It was a stripped-down version of the idea, and it became the Pump that fashion loved, popular, according to ESPN, with collaborators and with fashion houses such as Chanel and Vetements. For the Fury's 20th anniversary in 2014, Reebok reissued it in its original black, citron and red and released 27 collaborative versions. Reebok kept reinventing the bladder. In 2005 it launched a Pump that inflated itself with each stride, which Mental Floss says was developed with engineers from MIT and NASA. Collectors, ESPN reports, blame the endless reissues for flooding the market and flattening resale prices. In September 2014 Reebok released a Keith Haring Crack is Wack collection and reissued Chang's Court Victory Pump. In 2015 it unveiled the ZPump Fusion. ## Wearing one now A retro Pump is a big, technical shoe, and it looks best when the outfit lets it be the point. Wide trousers, a plain sweatshirt and nothing else trying too hard. Test the pump before you buy a used pair. It belongs with the other tech-race sneakers of the same decades. Our histories of the [Nike Air Max 1](https://quietmenace.com/sneakers/nike-air-max-1-visible-air/) and the [Air Jordan 1](https://quietmenace.com/sneakers/air-jordan-1-history/) cover Nike's side of the contest, and our report on the [sneaker resale economy](https://quietmenace.com/culture/sneaker-resale-economy/) explains what reissues do to prices. For more, see [sneaker history](https://quietmenace.com/topics/sneaker-history/), [industrial design](https://quietmenace.com/topics/industrial-design/) and the [Quiet Menace sneakers section](https://quietmenace.com/sneakers/). The Pump was also a lesson in timing. Reebok saw Nike's inflatable shoe at a trade show in February and still had its own in stores before the end of November. Plenty of sneakers have had a gimmick. The Pump made its gimmick into a gesture, a rookie bending down on a dunk contest floor to pump up his shoes, and that is why people still remember it. --- Filed under: [Sneaker History](https://quietmenace.com/topics/sneaker-history/), [Industrial Design](https://quietmenace.com/topics/industrial-design/), [Heritage Brands](https://quietmenace.com/topics/heritage-brands/) Hero image: Photo by Ivan Baton on Unsplash (Unsplash License)