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Battle between Adidas, Puma comes alive in book
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-11-08 09:24
BERLIN, Nov 8 (Reuters) - Pele stopped the referee with a last-second request
to tie his shoelaces at the opening whistle of a 1970 World Cup finals match and
then knelt down to give millions of television viewers a close-up of his Pumas.
The Brazilian was complying
with a request by Puma's representative Hans Henningsen to raise the German
sports shoe company's profile after they gave him $120,000 to wear their boots.
The clandestine advertising for Puma was a huge triumph for the company over
hated cross-town rivals Adidas in the early days of the war for market supremacy
in sports merchandise.
Barbara Smit, a Dutch author and journalist, has spent five years trawling
the archives of the Adidas and Puma headquarters in the Bavarian town of
Herzogenaurach to research Rudolf and Adolf Dassler -- brothers who started
making sports shoes in their mother's laundry room in the 1920s before becoming
sport and business giants.
Her new book, "Drei Streifen gegen Puma" ("Three Stripes versus Puma"),
tracks the remarkable rise of the Dassler brothers during Germany's
sport-obsessed 1920s, their cooperation with the Nazis, their ugly post-war
split and their hatred-driven competition that created separate empires.
"As embittered rivals, the estranged brothers led their respective companies
to the top of the world," Smit wrote.
"Muhammad Ali, Franz Beckenbauer and Zinedine Zidane became legends in the
three stripes of Adidas while soccer god Pele...and Boris Becker achieved global
fame in Pumas."
The book chronicles the decline of both family-run firms caught off guard by
U.S. rivals Nike and the failure to spot new trends such as the running boom.
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