In those days, the Lakers played at the Forum in Inglewood. Lacking a practice space of their own, they happened to practice at the gym of the large public school where Edwards was a student. “On any given week, we’d see Magic, Kareem, or James Worthy,” he recalls. Edwards took to drawing them.

D’Wayne Edwards

Edwards and others began to notice that in his drawings, the shoes looked better than the rest of the athlete. “I spent more time on footwear than on muscle tone or uniform,” Edwards says. Soon, he was drawing the shoes without the athlete, and designing sneakers of his own. He’d draw shoes on 3×5 index cards through Mrs. Weathers’s math class. She’d take them away and gently scold him. But the young Edwards noticed something funny: Mrs. Weathers might have easily thrown them into the trash–yet she didn’t. After studying them for a while, she tucked them carefully away in her desk drawer.

Edwards worked at a McDonald’s; the manager told him if he kept his head down, he could climb the ranks and make $40,000 a year some day. But by then, of course, Edwards had dreams of becoming a footwear designer. At 17, Edwards entered a Reebok design competition and won. The prize was supposed to be a job–but Edwards was too young. If Mrs. Weathers’s interest in his work suggested he had talent, the Reebok win clinched it: “That gave me at least the push to know that I could do it.”

Design school was out of the question; he couldn’t afford it. So Edwards signed up with a temp accounting firm, and as luck would have it, was assigned to be a file clerk for the shoe company LA Gear. An investment group had recently taken a larger stake in the company and was looking for suggestions from employees on how to improve it. Edwards’s suggestion was the same thing every day for six months: an original shoe design, signed with his name. Finally, the CEO called Edwards into his office. “Are you the guy putting sketches in boxes?” he asked, and Edwards confessed. The CEO hired him as a designer.

From there, Edwards’s trajectory was like that of a basketball player going in for a dunk: up, up, up. Soon enough, Edwards was working at Nike, and after a while, he was handed the prize dreamed of by athletic footwear designers everywhere: the chance to design an Air Jordan. Only eight people have designed Air Jordans in the franchise’s history, Edwards says. He was the sixth.

He still remembers the first time he met Michael Jordan himself: in 2001, at the pitch meeting revealing Edwards’s design. Jordan walked into the conference room–one of only two people Edwards has met who had a glow about him (the other was Hank Aaron). Edwards began speaking, and Jordan, noticing his nervousness, cracked a few jokes at Edwards’s expense. But then Edwards started going into the details of the shoe’s design, modeled after Jordan’s favorite car, the Aston Martin. “Once he found out I knew what I was talking about, it became more about the shoe. It was just a normal conversation between two people about some sneakers. And the dude was just as big a sneakerhead as all the other sneakerheads out there,” Edwards recalls.