11/23/23, 7:45 PM Paul Fireman: Sole Man

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Paul Fireman: Sole Man

In more than a quarter century running Reebok, Paul Fireman turned it from an obscure brand into an industry
behemoth, and did so with plenty of heart and humanity

BY T E R RY L E F TO N
6 .1 4 . 2 0 2 1

C
hanging David Stern’s mind once the late NBA commissioner had set his course? It would be
easier teaching an elephant to waltz. Yet that’s exactly what Reebok Chairman and CEO Paul
Fireman did in 2001 in a deal that got his company NBA uniform rights for a decade. It had taken
Reebok seven months to complete a new NFL deal model in 2000 that resulted in an
unprecedented exclusive license across every team; the NBA called with interest the next day.

Soon after, Reebok was pitching a similar deal to Stern, who was impressed, but told Fireman he was too far
down the road with Nike to consider Reebok’s offer. As a testament to Fireman’s salesmanship — the first trait
cited by those in the industry when they talk about the former Reebok chairman and CEO — he knew
precisely what to say to turn around the obdurate NBA commissioner.

“Nike’s a great company,” Fireman recalls saying to Stern, “but you know and I know that Nike’s not for you.
They can produce everything I can. But you’ll never live with Phil [Knight]. It’s just not who you are.”

Former Reebok Senior Vice President of Footwear Ed Lussier’s memories of that meeting are even more
pointed. “Paul told them that Nike would own him and David Stern never wanted anyone having leverage on
him,” said Lussier. “You could see Stern’s face fall.”

Lifetime Achievement: Previous honorees

2020 Larry Tanenbaum
2019 Tim Finchem
2018 Michael Eisner
2017 Jerry Jones
2016 Bud Selig
2015 Dick Ebersol
2014 Dan Rooney
2013 Jerry Reinsdorf
2012 Paul Tagliabue
2011 Billie Jean King
2009 Peter Ueberroth

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11/23/23, 7:45 PM Paul Fireman: Sole Man

Two days later, Stern was signing preliminary agreements with Reebok. Within two years, Reebok was making
every NBA jersey.

“Paul Fireman just had an innate understanding of what made people tick,” recalled Lussier, who started
selling Reebok shoes at track events and eventually spent 20 years with the company. “He knew how to
motivate and convince people.”

Fireman could do a lot more than that. His most indispensable assets may have been his eye for product and
his consumer sensitivity, traits first honed at his family’s outdoor sporting goods company, Boston Camping,
and later put to expert use at Reebok. Pair those skills with a flair for timing and the result was a string of
successes at the footwear brand, including the Freestyle, the Pump, the Question and Answer, the Blacktop
outdoor basketball shoes, and the Classic, still one of Reebok’s most popular items.

“This whole thing is about making a great product, but more importantly, telling a story,” said Fireman, the
recipient of Sports Business Journal’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “If you can’t tell the consumer a
compelling story, forget it.”

Fireman’s story is certainly compelling. After a single year of college, he spent 15 years at Boston Camping. At
age 35 in 1979, Fireman famously discovered Reebok, then an obscure British brand with roots that stretched
back decades, while walking the aisles of a Chicago sporting-goods trade show. With Nike and Adidas
entrenched in the marketplace, he thought it might be too late to enter the space, but, he said, “I liked their
history. I positioned it that Reebok was already a leader.”

Fireman acquired the North American sales rights for

SEE ALSO
$65,000. Five years later, he got the entire brand,
running the company for another 22 years and turning
it into a behemoth of the sports apparel industry Peter Gabriel on Fireman’s fight
before selling it to Adidas in 2005 for $3.8 billion. for human rights
Now 77, Fireman and his wife of more than 50 years,
Phyllis, spend most of their time in Florida. “I have no Reflecting on the Nike wars
special talents,” insists Fireman from his spacious
home in Palm Beach, Fla., filled with modern art and a Life in golf taught Fireman to play
Sealyham Terrier named Charlie. “I think I know what
people want or I know how to find out. In the early it where it lies
days of Reebok, I knew that if I wasn’t successful the
first time I wasn’t going to have a second at-bat. So I Remember when Fireman almost
grabbed my little notebook.”
owned the Patriots?
Decades after Reebok became a billion-dollar
company, there are stories of Fireman unboxing Forum: Paul Fireman has the
products and helping set up displays at off-site
presentations.
touch

“Paul’s a true visionary who’s had an enduring impact

on this industry,” said Sal LaRocca, NBA president of global partnerships, a 30-year employee of the league.
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11/23/23, 7:45 PM Paul Fireman: Sole Man

“He was ahead on so many things we now take for granted, starting with his vision to bring the Reebok brand
to the U.S. 40 years ago.”

■■■■
Indeed, Fireman was renowned for his ability to discern consumer trends and preferences as — and even
before — they were building. Among the innovations that Reebok and Fireman crafted that are still around are
marketing to women and marrying the worlds of sports and music in footwear.

Reebok’s revolutionary Freestyle shoe — the first designed for aerobics — rode the fitness craze of the 1980s
to where Reebok briefly surpassed Adidas and Nike in market share. It’s unclear now whether the 17 million
“Jane Fonda’s Workout” tapes sold in the 1980s did more for Reebok or vice versa. What is clear is that
Reebok captured a third of the U.S. athletic footwear market within three years, largely based on those
distinctive kicks, which were fashioned partly from soft glove leather and came in pastel colors pink and blue.
In addition to Fonda wearing the shoes, Cybill Shepherd styled orange Freestyles with her black gown and
matching opera gloves on the red carpet at the 1985 Emmy Awards. Reebok sales had already grown
geometrically during the 1980s to around $1 billion, then they spiked aerobically. The company went public in
1985.

“Paul was just spectacular at liberating possibility,” said Angel Martinez, one of Reebok’s first three
employees, who pitched the idea for the Freestyle after visiting his wife’s aerobics class. “Paul was just a
genius at finding opportunities and when he does, he’s just a can of gasoline next to a match.”

And when basketball, hip-hop music, fashion and culture began to coalesce just before the turn of the
century, Fireman and Reebok were there early. They signed 1996’s No. 1 NBA draft pick, Allen Iverson, and
created what is still the brand’s top-selling signature shoes, and also signed hip-hop royalty like Jay-Z and 50
Cent to endorsement and apparel deals. Fireman said Jay-Z took a lot of money and a great deal of
persuasion. “He didn’t really care for the shoes,” Fireman recalled. “He did care about being the first music
person who had their own shoes.” When Jay-Z’s S. Carter Reebok shoes debuted in April 2003, packaged
with a Jay-Z CD, 10,000 pairs were sold in a week, then the fastest launch in company history.

Now, rappers with shoe deals are as routine as convenience stores at gas stations. Cardi B is signed with
Reebok and along with AI is the brand’s top performer.

“We made the sneaker business look like the music business, which is what the sneaker business looks like
today,” said Steve Stoute, CEO of ad agency Translation, who helped engineer Reebok’s embrace of hip-hop
culture. “We weren’t going to convince people that Reeboks will make you jump higher or run faster, so we
beat them at lifestyle. Paul Fireman consistently pushed the boundaries of the footwear business and reset
those boundaries every single time.”

Then there is Fireman’s vision of apparel exclusivity for league licensing deals. Though radical at the time, that
strategy also endures.

“He came to the NFL with a compelling vision and convinced us that this kind of seismic shift was necessary,”
said Gary Gertzog, Fanatics president of business affairs, then the NFL’s general counsel and senior vice
president of business affairs. “It was a way to elevate his own brand, which was also brilliant. He has that
vision great entrepreneurs have. When it was necessary for him to be a charmer, he was, and when he had to
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11/23/23, 7:45 PM Paul Fireman: Sole Man

Offered Brian Jennings, NHL executive vice president of marketing, who has spent three decades at the
league: “He was a change agent for the industry who had the ability to see three or five years ahead. His
model of exclusivity breathed new life into licensing and Reebok serviced that business like no one before —
they got after every SKU.”

By 2005 Reebok had league rights to the NBA, NFL and NHL. Fireman called his accumulation of those rights
“a power process. By having the license for those brands exclusively, we had part of everybody’s retail puzzle.
They couldn’t go to retail without the licensed product, so that gave us leverage.”

Fireman’s pioneering was not restricted to business. An archetypal Kennedy Democrat, he had loftier goals.
“The truth for Reebok was that we had bigger ideas than selling shoes,” said Martinez, who spent more than
21 years there, with titles including executive vice president and chief marketing officer. “We actually wanted
to change the world, even if it was by just 1%.”

With that in mind, Fireman and Reebok in the mid-1980s campaigned against sweatshops, and for good
corporate citizenship at a time when that was unheard of — and widely considered unwise — for a public
company. He championed human rights, pulling manufacturing shops out of South Africa in 1987 in protest of
apartheid before most companies did so. Reebok had what’s believed to be the first vice president of human
rights. Fireman still vividly recalls cutting off business with a South Korean factory that was making more than
4 million pairs of shoes annually because, as Fireman put it, “they just wouldn’t comply” with the company’s
labor and manufacturing specifications.

“Paul was just a genius at finding opportunities.”

Angel Martinez
One of Reebok’s first three employees

In 1988, Reebok sponsored the Amnesty International Human Rights Now! tour, a $10 million marketing
expense, and established an annual Human Rights Award honoring young activists. That program ran until
2007, but was re-established this year.

“He had no fear about taking risk and breaking rules — Paul just wanted to do things Nike or Adidas
wouldn’t,” said former Reebok CMO Muktesh “Micky” Pant, later the CMO at Yum Brands. “He always knew
what he wanted, whether that was the NBA or Jay-Z.”

Like so many former Reebok executives, Pant called his years at the company the most fun of his career,
recalling misadventures like delivering a million-dollar check to 50 Cent at a concert venue and signing Jay-Z
to a contract inside a Las Vegas casino.

“My philosophy was that everybody’s equally important and good ideas can come from anywhere,” said
Fireman. “Some guy in the warehouse told me, ‘If you really want to get somebody important, sign Jay-Z.’ I
had no idea who Jay-Z was, but great ideas can come from anywhere.”

Fireman wasn’t shy about doing his own research, too. He launched a line of tennis shoes, the Club C, in 1985
after asking around at local courts in the Boston area and learning what most players didn’t like about the
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11/23/23, 7:45 PM Paul Fireman: Sole Man

shoes in which they were playing. Within two years Reebok had better than 20% of the tennis footwear
market. That shoe is still in production, long after the tennis boom of the 1980s ended.

“Paul could see potential long before anyone, and he never had a problem going against the grain,” said Mark
Holtzman, New York Yankees vice president of non-baseball events, who was vice president of sports
marketing at Reebok from 1985-93. “He had an ability to walk that fine line between fashion and performance
before, and probably better, than anyone.”

Yet those working for Fireman had to get accustomed to frequent shifts in priority and direction. It was a
management style as different from Nike as Portland is from New England.

“Paul was never afraid to try something new and so you weren’t either,” said retired Hasbro President and
COO John Frascotti, who spent 16 years at Reebok. “Reebok got a lot of its mojo from doing things that were
independent of convention; it was just freethinking about what’s possible.”

As former Asics America President Gene McCarthy, who spent 20 years with Nike, and held titles at Under
Armour and Reebok, explained, Fireman “created a chaos of sorts and I thought that was because he felt the
best ideas surface through chaos. Not everybody could understand that.”

Fireman once admonished a senior executive at its Canton, Mass., offices one February that he had no
business being anywhere but with kids in Florida during spring break, so he could “find out what the
consumer is putting up with — then you can figure it out with them.”

“Linear thinking’s overrated,” laughed Martinez. “You learned never to go into a meeting with preconceived
notions.”

David Pace was senior vice president and general counsel at Reebok from 1995-2006 and directed the
company’s licensing deals and its sale to Adidas. “The thing about Paul was that he liked ‘new and novel’ as
much, if not more, than he liked the dollars,” said Pace, now an independent consultant. “The fastest way to
get fired at Reebok was to become someone who only managed others. You had to be creative, because he
always came at you with a different perspective.”

So, while senior management would often be summoned to Fireman’s office for the latest left turn, “we
learned to respect that, because we knew Paul was always willing to roll the dice, and once he did, he was all
in,” said Lussier.

That was true whether Fireman was signing Shaquille O’Neal two weeks before the Orlando Magic took him
with the top pick of the 1992 NBA draft, or launching Greg Norman’s Shark apparel brand that same year,
which eventually surpassed $100 million in sales. “Nike was courting me and I really didn’t know much about
Reebok,” said Norman. “Paul’s personality and vision hooked me.”

John Lynch, Reebok’s head of U.S. marketing and a 21-year employee of the brand, said Fireman perpetually
stressed listening (his admonition was “two ears/one mouth”) and recalls Fireman always situating himself at a
place in the room where he could gauge everyone’s reactions.

Within Fireman was an innate need to be a disrupter, which was probably the best way to compete with Nike

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and Adidas. “He wanted to walk a path no one else was on,” said Josh Rattet, vice president of global
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11/23/23, 7:45 PM Paul Fireman: Sole Man

footwear at Under Armour, who grew up with three Fireman’s kids, and was once Reebok’s director of
footwear. “That was most important to him.”

Accordingly, there are those who see a lot of Fireman’s disruptive tendencies in what Michael Rubin is doing
now at Fanatics. Fanatics’ model of exclusivity with league licensing deals can trace its lineage to Fireman’s
earlier efforts. Neither man, Fireman nor Rubin, attended college for more than a year and succeeded largely
through unique amalgams of salesmanship and vision.

“These are men who just didn’t listen when anyone said ‘you can’t do that,’” said David Baxter, former
president of sports licensing at Reebok and now senior vice president, North America wholesale, at Under
Armour. “They both have magnetic personalities, and Paul especially was that guy who could walk into any
room without knowing anybody, and somehow, you’d walk away thinking ‘I have to buy what he’s selling.’”

■■■■
Assessing Fireman’s industry legacy is complex. Since he sold Reebok, Nike has burgeoned into a $37 billion
company, buoyed by one of the world’s most ubiquitous brands. The swoosh is now emblazoned on MLB,
NBA and NFL uniforms. Adidas’ purchase of Reebok did nothing to close the gap between Adidas and Nike,
and Adidas management hastened Reebok’s decline by stripping it of its most important American sports
assets and giving them to Adidas. Adidas is in the process of selling off Reebok, likely sometime this year;
most analysts think it will be lucky to get $1 billion.

With the brand he built back on the market, Fireman says he was briefly tempted to join forces with one of the
groups looking to purchase Reebok, but then recalls “I only sold because of my health — I couldn’t perform,”
said Fireman, who underwent heart bypass surgery in 2003. “I tried two or three presidents, leadership
people. I just didn’t get anybody that matched up with the brand. Some of them were very smart and could
organize, but they dismissed culture. For me in business, there was never anything more important than
culture.”

Fireman spent time post-Reebok on golf course development (see related story) and still plays, despite
having undergone a heart and kidney transplant on the same day in 2019. He also stays immersed in bridge
tournaments and philanthropy, through the Paul and Phyllis Fireman Foundation, which has given $325
million to charities that battle homelessness, fund college scholarships, and during the pandemic, support
COVID-19 relief efforts.

As for his legacy within the business? Nike is easily the bigger and more enduring business and its marketing
continuity and 50 years of relevance to its famously fickle core consumers are exceptional achievements. Still,
there’s a stark contrast between the Eager Beaverton’s “You don’t win silver, you lose gold” mantra, and
Reebok’s humanism.

“Paul Fireman re-created the footwear business, and I challenge you to find a top executive more committed
to the betterment of humanity as he was to growing his business,” said Holtzman.

“Nike was always more disciplined,” said sporting goods retail empresario Mitchell Modell, recalling that when
Reebok was on fire in the mid-1980s, he imported containers from Europe because he couldn’t buy their
products domestically. “But Fireman and Reebok brought a lifestyle element to the business that’s become
most of the footwear market.”
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And Reebok made an early impact on Nike that forced its competition to innovate. “If Fireman didn’t take that
big swing at the women’s market and hit a billion dollars before Nike, I don’t think Nike would be what it is
today,” said McCarthy. “He [Fireman] rattled Nike’s cage. No company has done that since.”

The standard Fireman set endures even amid the company’s current challenges. “Let’s be honest, the brand
is bigger than the business right now,” said Reebok’s Lynch. “That’s testimony and something largely built by
Paul Fireman who made it one of the world’s very few global sports brands.”

Certainly, Reebok showed how to compete with the sneaker behemoths that preceded it. “He showed the
industry that the women’s business could be meaningful and profitable,” said NPD industry analyst Matt
Powell.

He also created a record of achievement few executives have matched.

“Paul Fireman built the second-most successful athletic brand in the United States,” said Tom Shine, senior
vice president of sports marketing at Reebok from 2001-12. “Certainly, I respect what Nike has done, but not
always the way they did it. I respect what Reebok did and I respect how they did it. And that’s all Paul
Fireman.”

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