As Rocky explains over the phone, there is—as usual—more to the story than sneaker blogs would have you believe. He remembered seeing the D3 in the wild, back in the early aughts. “It was years back, man, maybe '01. People really hated them in the hood,” he said. Rocky, being Rocky, loved them: “It just seemed a hybrid of different sneakers mixed in one. You got a Nike Air sole, a hiking boot at the top of it. The D3 reminds me of the Charles Barkley, some Air Maxes and a pair of Jordans. That's what I love about it.” He had little company. “It was seen in passing by skaters here and there, but predominantly, there were no people really rocking that shit in the hood whatsoever,” Rocky explains.

But fashion, the idea goes, moves in 20-year cycles. And conveniently enough, the things that made the D3 so gnarly when it came out in 1998—all that foam, a multi-tier sole, a real propensity to fuck up your entire outfit—also happen to be the things that, in the right combination, make for a perfect sneaker in 2018. “If you think about what Demna [Gvasalia] does with Balenciaga, if you think about what Raf Simons does with his shoes, if you think about even Kanye with the Yeezys, it's all infusions of soles that wouldn't traditionally be appropriate for the body of a sneaker, and color ways that don't really match—but actually make a perfect picture,” Rocky says. Sneakers in 2018 are judged primarily by how large and ugly they are—and by that measure, the D3 was about 20 years ahead of its time.

So when Rocky and Under Armour sat down to talk shop, he knew exactly what he wanted. “I already knew the design I wanted to do. I kinda wanted to reconstruct the body. It's almost like if you get a vintage television or game console or arcade game and you just refurbish it, that's what I did.” That is, on one condition, Rocky says: “I didn't want to do too much without actually having Dave involved.”

Dave is former pro skater Dave Mayhew. More importantly, Mayhew is also the guy who designed the D3 in the first place. He’s on the call, too, and between my questions, Rocky and Dave sweetly trade compliments. Rocky makes it very clear that this wouldn’t have happened without Dave; Dave knows it wouldn’t have happened without Rocky calling him up out of the blue. “Initially I worked on the shoe decades ago,” Mayhew explains. “I was just living my life, and out of nowhere got contacted by Under Armor. They wanted me to get together with Rocky and just kinda discuss the whole thing. At first I was a little hesitant, just because [the D3 is] kind of a gift and a curse for me.” But they got together, hit it off, and decided to bring the monster back—or the spirit of it—in a new way.