play 3:39 Wrappin With The Red Mamba Spurs Matt Bonner searches for the best wraps with rappers. In this episode, the Red Mamba meets up with Bushwick Bill.

BEFORE WE TELL the story of how Matt Bonner became the first NBA player to land a sneaker deal by, effectively, begging for shoes on social media, we should tell you a little about the man himself.

For the past several years, he's written a sandwich blog, the Sandwich Hunter, in which he engages in the search for the nation's greatest sandwich. In 2013, he was named the 19th-smartest man in pro sports -- so he's got that going for him. His first two years in the NBA, with the Raptors, he didn't own a car, so he took the city's Red Rocket streetcars everywhere -- which is how he scored the nickname the Red Rocket. (His Red Mamba nickname came later, on the anniversary of Kobe Bryant's 81-point game, when Kobe was live-tweeting the NBA TV broadcast and called Bonner that. Matt Bonner might be the only 12th man in the history of the NBA with two nicknames. But we digress.)

So what about the shoes? Well, let's just say Bonner marches to the beat of his own kettledrum -- and his shoe deals have gone the same way.

Matt Bonner: I gotta start from the beginning. My first two years in the NBA, I was with And1, which at the time had a lot of NBA players. They had more than half the guys on the Raptors when I was in Toronto, from 2004 to 2006. But after my first two seasons, the company got bought out or sold or something and lost or dropped some of their NBA guys.* I went unsponsored for a year and just wore whatever I could.

On January 22, Adidas signed Bonner to an endorsement deal. Todd Spoth

These were dark days for Bonner's feet. But salvation awaited him, in the form of grandpa shoes.

Bonner: While I was with the Raptors, I was good friends with a Toronto-based New Balance rep who would always say, "You gotta try New Balance. You gotta try New Balance!"But I was like, "New Balance!?"I didn't even know they made basketball shoes.

He gave me a few pairs to try out when I got a chance. One summer [after being traded to the Spurs in 2006], I was home in New Hampshire and needed a pair of basketball shoes. There they were, sitting in my parents' garage in New Hampshire. I tried them on and I was like, "Oh, my goodness, these are really comfortable."

New Balance basketball shoes -- like tiny little shiatsu massages for Matt Bonner's feet. And thus a beautiful friendship was born; New Balance sent Bonner a host of shoes to wear, without pay. Still, a few years later, during the 2010-11 season, that deal with New Balance literally exploded on the court.

Bonner: So do you remember when I had that sneaker blowout? Well, the company had sent me the prototype of a custom shoe that I'd been wearing, where it had my name and my number, [the New Hampshire state motto] "Live Free or Die"and [the image of a famous state monument called] the Old Man of the Mountain. But when I wore them in a game, within a few minutes they completely fell apart ...

The sole of one of Bonner's shoes, in fact, had almost fully detached; it was flopping around on the court like a dying fish.

Bonner: Afterward they explained to me that it was a prototype and I wasn't supposed to wear it. They'd never told me that. Then, when I emailed and asked when the new custom shoes were coming in, ones I could wear in games, they said, "Oh, we decided we're not sponsoring basketball anymore,"or whatever. I got the impression they were still going to make basketball shoes, but apparently they weren't going to put any resources into promoting or sponsoring guys, including their lone professional basketball player.