Nike Remembers Kenny Moore, Bill Bowerman’s First Product Tester

Honoring what until now has been an untold story, Nike honors the history of the birth of the Cortez and the man who was essentially the brand’s first product tester, Kenny Moore. As the story goes, while Moore was a distance runner at the University of Oregon under coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman, he suffered a stress fracture in his foot due to wearing inappropriate shoes for training. Moore had mistakenly been wearing high-jump shoes, which offered no arch support or cushion that a distance runner needed.

Bowerman being the notorious cobbler and tinkerer that he was, set to work creating a better distance running shoe for Moore while he recovered from his foot injury. After a series of various prototypes created that were each built with new tweaks and modifications, Moore had put over 1,000 miles on Bowerman’s creations, effectively making him Nike’s first wear-tester. The end result of all the prototypes and wear-tests? The Nike Cortez.

Now Nike celebrates this history of the Cortez, creating a special edition of the shoe inspired by one of Bowerman’s early prototypes, complete with a graphic recreating the legendary coach’s hand-written “Moore” label across the white leather upper. Along with two nylon and suede colorways inspired by the earliest editions of the Cortez, the Kenny Moore collection releases August 25th via the Nike SNKRS app and select Nike Sportswear retailers.