Aaron Kr. 
The LeBron James More Than A Game World Tour has covered some serious ground in the last month, hitting ten different cities on three different continents along the way. On Saturday, the tour made its final stop in Los Angeles, and with that, as you know, means new City Pack and Artist Series editions of the Air Max LeBron VII. Like the other City Pack versions, the Los Angeles installment sports the city name on the back of the Air bubble with the tongue and medial windows showing off a classic snapshot of high-school age LeBron storming onto the court. The Artist Series version for Los Angeles sees the Air Max LeBron VII get one of its most creative makeovers yet thanks to local artist C.R. Stecyk III. Stecyk captures the laid back L.A. vibe with a combination of Metallic Rust and Gold to rep the both the local soil and the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and some blue sky graphics with the silhouettes of palm trees on one shoe and telephone poles on the other. Keep reading after the jump for detailed looks at both pairs and to get some more info on the artist and his motivation behind this clever interpretation.
Los Angeles Artist Collaboration
At a presentation that took place during Nike’s grassroots activities in Los Angeles, C.R. Stecyk III gave James a uniquely designed pair of Air Max LeBron VII shoes.
Basketball related elements and themes have remained constants throughout many of Stecyk’s pieces. This attendant basketball fascination dates back to his tenure playing in city park leagues. Other characteristic aesthetic labors of his include extensively modified and adorned cycles, automobiles and skateboards and evocative documentation of other Angelino pursuits. Stecyk has been loosely affiliated with Nike since the Blue Ribbon Sports days when they had their original store on Pico in Santa Monica. He was one of the first to cross modern basketball shoes over into skating as an early adapter of prototype Blazers. He also was a writer and production designer on the documentary film Dogtown and Z Boys which won awards at the Sundance Film Festival.
Stecyk took his inspiration for the one-of-a-kind shoes from the city of Los Angeles, paying homage to the new monuments of urban shift in the city. The multiplicities of LA are reflected on the surfaces of the shoe. It is clad in colors derived from the region’s natural hues such as the incandescent blues of the sky and the rich rusty bronze of the clay soil of the Pueblo. Sole theatrics can be glimpsed on the inside where a hand engraved metallic plate view of Los Angeles City Hall is located as a symbolic tribute to the city’s center. Unique elements of the extended city such as the palm trees and telephone poles which sometimes function as basketball standards can be viewed on the exterior.
“There are countless thousands of places to shoot hoops that range from makeshift defacto rims to full blown arenas,” said Stecyk, adding, “Basketball is an integral fact of the populace’s life — in LA it is literally the sport of the people.”
