CINCINNATI — In the summer of 1997, junior Alex Meacham made the Cincinnati Bearcats men’s basketball team as a walk-on. It should have been a dream come true for the local kid, playing for his hometown university, under the legendary coach Bob Huggins, on a team ranked preseason No. 1 the previous year that just sent Danny Fortson to the NBA. And it was, save for one hangup.



Meacham was a Jordan guy. He always wore Michael Jordan’s signature shoes on the court growing up, idolizing him like so many others from that era. Meacham had already collected more than 100 pairs of Jordans by the time he got to college. UC, however, was a Nike team, and while Jordan’s shoes were under the Nike umbrella, the two entities were still somewhat distant cousins at that time.



“That shouldn’t have been something that was high on my list of things to worry about, but I was a shoe guy, I’m young,” Meacham remembers. “I was actually...