NEARLY THREE DECADES later, Philadelphia 76ers forward P.J. Tucker's face still immediately lights up, his eyes growing large as he describes what sounds like a religious experience for him.
Tucker's friend William Kane brought to AAU practice a mail-order magazine called Eastbay.
"'Yo, what is that?'" Tucker asked, he recalls in an interview with ESPN. "Everybody's like looking over his back. He's like, 'It's Eastbay. It's where you get the shoes from.'"
As a young basketball player in the mid-1990s growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, Tucker couldn't keep his hands and eyes off a magazine that would help cultivate his lifelong sneaker obsession.