Looking Back On A Simpler Time When Nike Still Made Hockey Equipment
Not sure if you guys have turned on the news or not but a lot of people have been talking about Nike recently. And it got me to thinking about a much better, much simpler time in human existence. That time was when Nike was still out there making hockey equipment instead of focusing all their attention on other silly things like football and such. When Nike was making hockey equipment, people didn’t have a single care in the world. Everybody was happy. Everybody loved each other. The only thing on people’s minds was “Far out, man! When am I gonna pick me up a pair of those totally tubular Air Accel skates. Those things are the bomb. They’re funky fresh! Cowabunga, dude!”. That’s how people talked back then. The times were good, but the vocabulary was strange. That’s besides the point however. Because the Nike Air Accel ice hockey skates were able to accomplish something that very few things in the history of humankind have been able to accomplish–World Peace. It didn’t matter if you were a guy, a girl, gay, straight, white, black, a bunch of mutated turtles doing karate. Everybody agreed that those skates were the shit and everybody needed to have them. Obviously Sergei Fedorov is the first beauty that comes to mind when you think about those skates and Nike hockey in general. But as soon Wayne laced them up, it was game over.
There was no war. There was no corruption. There was no world hunger. There was only Nike Air Accel ice hockey skates. And soon after the skates came the Mario Lemieux twig.
Personally I’ll always remember Mario Lemieux as a Jofa guy but that yellow stick will always be one of his greatest gifts to the game. Unfortunately, Nike’s run in the NHL was a rather short one. After a while they decided to ditch the 4500 look to their helmets and design this catastrophe of a bucket, which I’m pretty sure ended up becoming Easton’s helmet.
And then shortly after that, Nike purchased Bauer to partner up with them under the name “Nike Bauer”, only to end up cutting ties and selling Bauer in 2008. I’m pretty sure Nike is still somehow involved with Bauer in one way or another but they’re not making product anymore and that logo isn’t anywhere on the ice anymore. It’s like the late great Andy Bernard once said–“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them”. Those were the good old days and we can always be thankful for that. At least we’ll always have the memories and these commercials to take us back.