Stuff You Should Know - Adidas v. Puma: A Sibling Rivalry

Episode Date: November 29, 2018

Join Josh and Chuck today as they go down the sport shoe rabbit hole, detailing the strange tail of the brothers who brought Puma and Adidas to the world. Sibling rivalry, Nazis, shoes - there's a lot to unpack here. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Andrew over there, the guest producer. I'm wearing Adidas. Chuck is wearing Puma. Andrew's

wearing Reebok. None of us are speaking to one another right now. Yeah, it's weird. Andrew is wearing white Reebok high tops with bronze pantyhose and orange dolphin running shorts. And he claims he doesn't work for Hooters part time. Oh, oh, oh, yes. I like that you didn't know that because that means you don't go into Hooters. No, no. I've seen pictures on TV. I had to go. I actually have only been there once, and that was when I worked at that awful job with the chicken killers. And it was on a stupid work trip. They made me go on, and

that was like the only place in town. And all these yokels that I worked with were like, yeah, man, let's go to Hooters. And I went in there and I was just like, oh my lord, what is, they were trapped in time. I've been there a couple of times actually when I was a younger man. It's the same, I imagine. It is, I'm sure. And I was there on my 21st birthday in Jacksonville because it was the only place open. It was like a Tuesday night or something. And I was like, this is, this is not the best 21st birthday I'll ever have.

Yeah. And hey, we don't want to yuck your yum. If you work at Hooters or if you'd love going there, more power to you. Sure. Sure. Why not, right? That's pretty awesome that you said you don't want to yuck anyone's yum. Yeah, it's funny. I was thinking about a couple of weeks ago when it was like the Costanza moment when you thought of a line after the moment when you were talking about how I was crazy for not liking olives and I got on to you. I should have said, don't yum my yuck.

Right. Or I was just funny you said that because I was thinking about that later on too. I thought that I should have said, well, actually I'm not yucking your yum. I'm yucking your yuck, which is different. Oh. You know, think about it. Man. Are you thinking about it? I think it's weird that we both thought about that moment afterward.

I think so too. Because usually we just go back into our hyperbolic chambers and float for the next six days. It's pretty great life we have. It's pretty nice. Just soaking in our own urine. God. Don't you pee in your hyperbaric chamber? Well, yeah, but I mean, that's how you're supposed to fill it up, right?

Right. So, Chuck, obviously what we're talking about today is athletic gear, sports shoes in particular. And two of the most well-known sports brands in the entire world, Adidas and Puma. And some people might not know this, Chuck, but Adidas and Puma were founded by two brothers who spent many decades of their lives not speaking to one another. And some people might even know that, that they are rival brands founded by rival brothers. But I guarantee they don't know the full story behind one of the most bitter family rivalries of all time that gave us Adidas and Puma.

And it is extraordinarily fascinating. There's Nazis, there's Run DMC, there's all this stuff all rolled into one. And it turns out that this is, it's one of the better stories I've ever come across. That's right. And before we dive into that awesome story to head off emails, I know I said hyperbolic and sort of hyperbaric, not such thing as a hyperbolic chamber. No. I guess it could be.

It's a chamber that's like, I'm the biggest chamber ever. Probably so. All right. So, this is a great story and I had heard bits and pieces of this over the years. But it is interesting that Nazis and Run DMC and feuding brothers all come together too. Because you know my Pumas, I've been a Puma guy for many, many years, even though I did have a pair of Adidas superstars at one point. But they're too flashy.

No, I liked them, but they were, you know, white shoes aren't good on me. I get them too dirty too quick. So now I just vary my Pumas between the black and the black suede and sort of like the olive green suede usually. You know, Adidas makes non-white shoes you could try. Yeah, but those classic white superstars with the three blue stripes, those are the ones. The shell toes. Yeah.

Well, I mean, they have some other cool ones too, like gazelles are pretty cool. Like the flat bottom soccer shoe and yeah, my brother was into, I've worked gazelles for a while when I was a soccer poser, but my brother was into Stan Smith's. Oh yeah. Those are cool too. I've got some, some Stan Smith's, they're like this blue mesh and now that I think about it, if I have a loyalty to either one, it would be Adidas, but I don't, I don't consider myself like Adidas loyal.

Well I'm a Puma guy just because they look good on me and they're comfy, but I was also a low-top converse all-star guy for a while and in high school, of course in the preppy days, I was all about the tree torrents. I never had tree torrents. It was a look. Oh, I know for sure. I was comfy. I was right after tree torrents when I started getting into shoes, K Swiss were in.

Oh yeah. I never had any of those. Those are cool. And what was the other shoe, the vans? There's a particular style of vans that I really still enjoy. The slip-on ones with the black and white checks? No, those are cool, but I don't know if I can pull those off at 47. You could, but people will laugh at you behind your back.

That's already happening. Yeah, I'll remember at some point. Okay, well just shout it out. And plus I just wanted to cover our bases by saying as many name brands as possible. Don't forget British Knights. Oh, the BKs? Yep. So Chuck, let's start the story, shall we?

We're going to have to get in the way back machine for this one. Okay. And this is also full of urine. So that was you though. Let's let everybody know. We're going to go back to the end of World War I in Germany and we're going to go to a little town that I'm going to let you pronounce because I've been trying and I cannot do it. And I thought it was interesting that we're recording this now because we just acknowledged

and recognized the 100 years removed from World War I. The end of World War I. Yeah. And the beginning of the Spanish flu that killed like three times as many people right after it. Yeah. That's another celebration. Right.

So we're going back there. We're just going back 100 days almost to the day. Yeah. And so the name of that town is Herzogenerach. Well, I could have done at least that good. Yeah. Herzogenerach. It's not exactly said that like that.

Here. Let's play this. Herzogenerach. That's how it's said. Okay. Okay. So maybe we should just have that voice say it for us, but we're not going to. It turns out the locals just call the town Herzogenerach.

Sure. So that's all we'll call it. It's a little tiny village in Bavaria. They can't even pronounce it. No. They're like, we're not even going to try and we were born here. Don't be too hard on yourself, Josh, is what they're saying. So in Herzog, it's a little town in Bavaria, a little village.

There's a river running through it. Yeah. Significantly. Yes. And in around 1918, one of the villagers who was born there, a guy named Adolf Dessler takes a seat in his mother's laundry, his mother ran a laundry out of their house. And he starts cobbling athletic shoes, specifically track shoes, I think, to begin with. And he had a knack for it.

He started making shoes that athletes actually wanted pretty early on, pretty much out of the gate. And he started doing so well so quickly that within a year or two, he asked his older brother, who is by far the more outgoing, extrovert salesman type of the two brothers, his older brother Rudolph, to start selling his shoes, start kind of creating a business operation out of it. And I think within just a few years, they had 12 employees and they founded a company called Sports Farbrick Gebruder Dessler, which they call GEDA for short.

Yeah. So Gebruder is, you know, for brothers. So Gebruder Dessler is the Dossler Brothers shoe company. And people were like, wow, so I don't have to wear my high heel leather sport boot any longer on the pitch. I don't have to tie some sharp rocks to the bottom of my feet. So their nicknames, you'll probably hear referred to them as Adi and Rudy, R-U-D-I. And if you kind of put your head to it, you can see where this is headed.

This is exciting. So the laundry business wasn't going well. So like you said, little Adi started making these shoes and things started going great. And it turns out they made a pretty good team at first because they complimented one another in what they were good at. So Adi was creative and he was the brains and Rudy was a little more extroverted and he was a really good salesperson. Right.

So they start to do a pretty good business. And if you're like, well, it's a weird thing to start doing as a younger man to start making sport shoes. It turns out that Herzo is like a shoemaking town, has a long tradition of shoemaking. In 1922, for example, their population was 3,500, but they had 112 shoemakers. That's amazing. That's a high shoemaker to regular population ratio. So it's not the weirdest thing ever.

But they're plotting along, they're making really high quality shoes. Like right out of the gate, Adi had a real, like I said, a talent for making high quality athletic shoes. And one of the first things they made were a track shoe that one of these articles says looks like a ballet slipper with some nails coming out of the front of it, the front bottom, the fore sole. And it just changed everything. It was a genuinely great track shoe.

At the time, people who were running, sprinters who were running track, they didn't have any traction when they were taking off. This gave them traction and just gave them an immediate leg up over the competition. And so the athletes really liked the shoes that they were putting out and the company started to grow and grow and grow. And then I think the 1928 Olympics in Los Angeles is where they really debuted their shoes and a German sprinter was wearing a pair of their track shoes. And all he won was a bronze medal, but he won a bronze medal wearing the Dassler Brothers

shoes. And as a German sprinter. Exactly. So that should say it all. It does. So he was wearing these track spikes and this helped, and this got him a little bit of notoriety, but it was really in 1936 in Berlin at that very, very famous Olympic Games where a young athlete named Jesse Owens dominated and literally tore up the track wearing those Gibruda Dassler

track spikes with Hitler in the stands. And people are like, those shoes are amazing. And Jesse Owens was like, it's kind of me, but yeah, sure, the shoes are great. But I'm also a vastly superior athlete to the rest of these jumps out here. Yeah. And that was the Olympics that Jesse Owens famously finished in first place, won the gold and did another lap around the track, went up into the stands and slapped Hitler right in the face.

Oh man, slapped his little stash right off that lip. So the fact that Jesse Owens was wearing these shoes immediately brought international attention to GEDA, the Gibruda Dassler Company. So they, I saw one article that said, had World War II not happened? This business would have just gone global immediately and it started to. But then when World War II broke out and that was the 1936 Olympics, I think I said the 1928 Olympics, it was, I think the 1932 Olympics that I talked about first. But the 1936 Olympics, within just a couple of years, the Nazis invaded Poland and were

running Germany and World War II kicked off in earnest. And the time for sports apparel kind of got derailed a little bit. Yeah. So just like in the United States and actually in countries all over the world, the war effort was, it's not like they were just like, all right, we have a few companies that manufacture military needs for our military and that's going to be good enough. It's like, no, we need to really co-opt kind of any manufacturing that we want to go to toward the war effort.

And certainly Germany did that along with the U.S. and kind of everyone else. And everything from Hugo Boss to Lufthansa to these little chewmakers in the small town in Bavaria. Yeah, their factories were co-opted for the war effort, basically. And what the Dossler Brothers factory ended up making are something called the Panzerschreck, which means the tank terror. And it was modeled after the American bazooka, which was one of the first shoulder-mounted recoilless rocket launchers that had enough power to punch right through a tank and blow

up everybody inside. They were nasty little buggers. And the Panzerschreck was the German version of the bazooka. And the German version of the bazooka was created in the Dossler Brothers shoe factory. Yeah. And December 1943 is when they kind of made the full switch in these little German ladies who were so in shoes the week before were now manufacturing German bazookas. The good news is by this time, because these things were really effective, actually.

And had they been brought into the war sooner, things might have really changed. But thankfully, by this time, even though they were doing the job, it was too late. The tides had turned and the allies were steaming toward victory. And even though they started pumping out these bazookas, it was sort of too little, too late. Yeah. Have you ever wondered about the name Bazooka? Not until just now. Okay.

Well, I did. And I was like, what does a bazooka mean? Apparently, there was an entertainer, I think he might have been vaudeville, kind of a country act. Okay. What's the name of the bazooka, Joe? I can't remember his name, it doesn't matter. He created a musical instrument out of brass called a bazooka.

And it was kind of like a trumpet and a trombone together, it was a weird little instrument. But he was popular enough that in the bazooka looked like his instrument enough that it became called the bazooka, this shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. Interesting. I thought so, too. Sure, why not? The point is, is that all of a sudden, the Germans who had been totally helpless against the American tank divisions were messing the American tank divisions up.

And the source of their power was the Dossler Brothers Shoe Factory. And you mentioned their seamstresses welding bazookas together. Yeah. They're also in their factory, there was forced labor of French POWs. Sure. And they had slaves and seamstresses working together to create bazookas to take out the American tank divisions or the Allied tank divisions, thanks to the companies that would eventually become Adidas and Puma.

All right, that's a great setup. That's only part one into what is a very interesting story. So we're going to take a little break and we'll come back and talk about what went wrong with these two brothers right after this. Watch why, why, why SK has paid. If you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael.

And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we got to go back in time a little bit, because we sped right up to World War II. It was just too interesting to wait to talk about any longer. But we need to go back to about 1933, because these brothers ended up fracturing in a big, big way. And there have been, you know, some legendary sibling rivalries through the years.

But this is really one of the greats. And I believe even Rudy wrote as an older man, the relation to my brother was ideal from 1924 to 1933. Then his young wife tried to interfere with business matters, although she with her 16 years had no experience at all. And the warfare began. So here's how the story goes. Is that in 1933, Adi was indeed married to a 16-year-old, which seems very creepy now,

but back then it was not the strangest thing in the world. Slightly less creepy. Slightly less creepy. Well, they just, it was a different time. So he was married to a 16-year-old and tried to get involved in the business. Rudy was not happy about this. And they all lived together. Two brothers and their wives all lived together in the same townhouse, which is not a great

recipe for success anyway. You know, you need to have your own place. So you can imagine that all the little bickering and snide remarks and just all the stuff that, if you have two couples that don't really, really, really like and love each other, living together will accumulate. If you translate that to a business relationship, it's going to be hard on the business and it was. For sure.

So there was apparently a series of just little things like that, but as far as the family legend goes, the real break happened during World War II when the allies were bombing the village of Herzog. And the Rudy and his wife made their way to the bunker, the bomb shelter. And shortly after that, Adi and his wife, I think her name was Kata, they made their way into the bomb shelter. And when they entered, he said, oh, it looks like the bastards are here again. And Adi apparently went to his grave saying that he was referring to the Allied bombers,

but Rudy took it that Adi was talking about Rudy and his wife. And apparently that was the final straw. Yeah. This was true evidence that things were really bad. If something as simple possibly as just a little misunderstanding of whether or not the bastards were the allies bombing or you, my brother and my sister-in-law. So I mean, things were pretty bad if this is what did it. So World War II is still going on.

And at some point, Rudy gets called to go fight for the Nazis. He gets drafted. So Rudy has to go to war and the whole time he's away, so this rift has already happened. So he's suspecting one that his brother and his brother's wife plotted to get him drafted and he can't get that idea out of his head. So much so that apparently multiple times he deserted his post to go home to make sure that he wasn't being ousted from the business he'd built with his brother. And then he gets arrested for desertion and he's sure that his little brother ratted him

out for desertion. Which he may have. And so he's arrested, he's held for a while and as he's making his way back after the war to hurt so, he gets picked up by the allies for under suspicion of being a Gestapo agent. He's sure again that it's his little brother, Adi, who got him this time landed in a POW camp that he stays in for a little while. And it turns out he was right. There is documentary evidence from an American officer who took the accusation down and apparently

it was Adi who went to the Americans and said, my brother is a Gestapo agent, you may want to arrest him. What a jerk. So this is the level of stuff these brothers are doing to one another and the rift just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. There's one other thing we have to say because the wife, the younger wife, the 16 year old Kata, gets historically blamed for creating this rift, I think in a lot of ways unfairly. She's also the one who saved the family business single-handedly.

Yeah. So in April 1945, the Americans march into Hurtzo. Those tanks pull up in front of that factory and the soldiers, the American soldiers are out there like kind of going over what they should do, should we destroy this building or not? This is the place where the Ponzer Shreks were made. Yeah. So Adi's wife, Kata, comes out and she basically walks right up to these enemy soldiers and

says, we only want to make shoes. We only desire to make shoes. And they're like, why are you talking like Colonel Clink? She said, we all do. And that's basically like she convinced them to spare the factory. They did so. And not only that, the Air Force, the US Air Force set up operations there at their air base and realized that they really liked these shoes.

Well they found out that this was the company that made Jesse Owen's famous track shoes. Yeah. And so they went off the charts. They started getting these huge orders for sports teams, American sports teams because of this. So this is all going on or it's all starting while Rudy's off in the POW camp because his brother ratted them out. And the business all of a sudden is starting to turn international.

Like you said, people around the world are taking notice of this thanks to the American GIs who are coming back with this get a sportswear. And when Rudy comes back, it's done. His brother's ratted them out. There was the whole thing in the bomb shelter and the brothers split the company that they built together. They split Gebruder, Dossler, and they go off and found their own companies. Yeah.

15 years after that bunker incident. So it took a long time to finally boil over. And in between there was another war. They were not good Nazis. We should point out kind of, you know, they were members of the Nazi party and Rudy did get drafted. But like you said, he deserted his post a lot. And they, you know, they really did just want to sell shoes.

Right. He's like the white shrews uncle or grandfather who spent a lot of the war in an Allied POW camp. That's right. So like you said, they split up the company and we mentioned earlier that this river ran through the center of town and I said, significant. And it is significant because it literally divided the town and they set up their business. It's not like one of them said, well, I'm going off to Berlin.

Right. They just set up camp on opposite sides of that river. Adi Dossler said, I will name my company, Adidas. Actually at first they named it Adas. Well, yeah, but everyone said that stinks. Well no, that was a different one. That one, there was a children's footwear line already called Adas. So he added the I and turned it into Adidas.

Yeah. Rudy went with Ruda and everyone said that no one's going to buy shoes named Ruda. Especially in the United States. And he said, I don't understand and they said, don't worry about it. So somehow he got Puma out of Ruda, which I don't get, but it's a name that stuck. Yeah, and it works. Puma is definitely better than Ruda for sure. So these two go off and form directly competing companies that split from the same company

that the brothers had founded together. And Adidas and Puma started making pretty good headway out of the gate. At first, Rudy had the sales team, had the marketing team, had the ability to move some product. But Adi had the technical know-how, the dedication to making high quality footwear that athletes, like professional athletes wanted to wear. And so he could get his shoes onto athletes who would wear them on the world stage and eventually his, I guess, his tack won out over his brothers.

And from a very early stage on, Adidas has always led Puma, at least as far as sales revenue goes. Yeah, and there were mistakes from both of them along the way business-wise. One of the big ones for Puma early on was that Rudolph got into a spat with a coach of the German national soccer team. And of course, all that did was open the door for his brother and Adidas to go in there and say, what about these shoes? Which is exactly what happened.

And so at the 1954 World Cup, Germany wears Adidas with those signature stripes. And even though they were not favored at all, West Germany actually won against, who Hungary, I believe. Yes. And that was a huge, huge deal on a national, international stage. It was like the miracle on ice on grass. You mean they were stoned? They were all stoned out of their gourds.

The miracle on ice on grass, that might have legs, my friend. I think it might, too. You need to trademark that. Well, I do officially right now trademarked. I love it. So that was one mistake. Adidas would, of course, go on to make some mistakes later. I know that you sent that one article where they talked about how they said, you know,

at one point that like, yogging, no one's going to do that. So we're not going to make yogging shoes. And aerobics, that's a... It's a flash in the pan. Sure. Who cares about physical fitness? And so you mentioned Reebok earlier. It's hard for the young folk out there who are listening to know this, but there was

a time when Reebok was the name in sports apparel. Well, plus, yeah, and Reebok, this article says that they lost their way at some point, but the way that Reebok kind of took the lead for a little while was saying, no, we'll get into jogging. We'll get into aerobics and we'll make this stuff at a time when Adidas and Puma were ignoring it. One of the other mistakes that both Adidas and Puma made was that they were so focused on beating one another.

They just completely dropped the ball as it were on the rise of Nike, and Nike was able to take over and apparently right out of the gate. And since then, Nike's always been the leader in sports apparel. Yeah. And Adidas is two and Puma's three, right? Yeah. Amazing. So you have an option these days.

You can buy your sports apparel from a company that's been known to use child labor or company that used forced French labor under the auspices of the Nazi party in World War II. Hooray. Let's take a break. Yeah. We'll take a break and we'll talk about how this rift still oddly carries over in that town today and run DMC. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Which episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s? Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. You're asking to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so back in the day when they first split off this company and that river's running through this town, it was a really big deal. It wasn't just a sibling rivalry. It became a town-wide rivalry in that you, you worked for one company or the other as a family, like a husband and wife didn't work. They didn't split up and one worked at Puma and one worked at Adidas.

Plus, I mean, if you fell in love with somebody from a family across the river, like you, that was sorry. Yeah. You got a Romeo and Juliet thing going on that ain't gonna work out. Isn't it crazy? It is. And I was glad that this, one of the local historians who was interviewed for one of these articles said, it wasn't like bloody or anything, like no one lost their lives

over this. It was just, if you worked for Puma, you stayed on the Puma side of the river. If you worked for Adidas, you stayed on the Adidas side of the river and each group kept to themselves. That was all. Yeah. And it still carries over to this day, some of those recent interviews that we've both read.

I mean, it's certainly, now it's a little more good-natured ribbing, but they say when you walk around this town, walk through a playground and you will see kids kitted out in all Adidas or all Puma. And this is carried down from generations where they were Adidas or Puma families. And it was a really big deal and still remains so to this day, such that the mayor who actually came from a Puma family- Oh yeah. But to be mayor, you can't, you know.

You gotta be a politician. Sure. So he will wear to some events, casual events, Puma gear and sometimes Adidas gear. Eventually in 2009, they had a friendly soccer match between the official Puma sponsor team and Adidas team, and he wore one Puma shoe and one Adidas shoe just to remain neutral, I guess. And to look like a total jackass. Probably so.

Then it showed him rubbing like his Adidas foot later on. They called him on camera. So this was, like you said, there was a soccer game that was played between Adidas and Puma, kind of a reconciliation thing on International Peace Day back in, I think, 2009. What happened, think about this, the Rudy and Adi Dossler died in the 70s within four years of each other. This was 2009 before the companies finally kind of had this reconciliation game. And yeah, today still, it's like you kind of, well, you'll gently, you know, make fun

of somebody wearing Adidas if you're a Puma family or whatever. But while the brothers were alive, you just steered clear of everybody who was on the other side. It's so much so that Herzo was known as the town of the lowered gays. Because if you came upon somebody on the street, you would look at their shoes to see what shoes they were wearing before you decided whether you're going to talk to them or not. That's so funny. It was that, it was that established.

These brothers hatred and rivalry of one another, and they didn't speak for decades, spread out into the town that was divided by this river, and the town itself took sides. Because of this rift between these brothers that all started supposedly in this bomb shelter during World War II. Yeah. And the mayor hacker, his first name is German. Could that be right? Maybe the German or the journalist was really lazy and didn't, they were just like, he's

a German. We're just going to call him that. I wonder if he pronounces it German. That's what I would say. Or hermon. Because they don't say Germany over there anyway. But yeah, they say Deutschland. But would it be hermon or no, I guess they spell the hermons with an H.

Yeah. I think it would be Mayor German Hacker. Right. Oh yeah, there is an H. German Hakehsaka. Who's on grass. But he says, if someone comes in through the door to this day, you're gay still wanders to their shoes.

It's just in the DNA of those people that this athletic gear is so important. It's so strange. Such a cool, cool, weird story. It is a great story of sibling rivalry and bitterness and hatred. And like you said, they didn't speak for decades, apparently much later in life. There were a couple of times when they were a rumor to have spoken once, I think they ran into each other at an airport, once they saw each other at a hotel. And I believe on the deathbed, which one tried to get in touch with the other?

Rudy. Rudy put out the call, said I would like to see my brother Adi one more time. And Adi went, no thanks. I'm good. Nine. Can you believe it? Yeah, man. That's tough.

So they died. The family sold the business in the 80s, late 80s, and they got bought by like corporate conglomerates. Sure. Ironically, Puma now owns Reebok and Gucci owns Puma, but Adidas is still just Adidas, but again, it's owned by like a mega conglomerate. And they just go on enormous and make billions of dollars a year. So the families aren't necessarily involved, but one family member still works in the business.

His name is Frank Dossler. I believe he was Rudy's grandson and he used to work at Puma. He was pretty high up in Puma. Now he works as the head of the legal department for Adidas. Man. Talking about switching sides. It's a pretty good indication of how much this cold war is kind of thawed between the two companies quite a bit because the people who are running it have no skin in the game.

They don't care anymore, you know? Yeah. Or he's an attorney and he was just after the most money. He's like, let me suck your blood. So we have a fun little post script on this. I know we've been talking about Run DMC. And again, you youngins, it might be second nature now to associate athletic gear and hip hop and rap music and culture.

But back in the early 1980s, that was not the case until Run DMC came along. No. Your rappers probably dressed like a gonin king or maybe like the New York dolls. Yeah. Or just like, I mean, sometimes I feel like I've seen just like denim jackets and just sort of like, just sort of street wear, which is the unhippest thing I've ever said. It was pretty unhipp. I didn't want to say anything, but I'm glad.

Street wear. So, you know, play close. So Run DMC changed everything when they released a single called My Adidas. And I saw elsewhere that they released a single My Adidas kind of in retaliation to a song. A song called Felin Shoes. So have you ever noticed that Run DMC wore their Adidas without laces with the tongues popped out? Oh, I noticed.

That was supposedly because that's how people in prison had to wear their shoes because they weren't allowed to have shoelaces and they were kind of saying like, we're down with all of our buddies in prison. Interesting. So this song Felin Shoes basically was making fun of that and basically teaching kids not to emulate prisoners. And Run DMC took issue with that and they ended up releasing My Adidas, the song on Raising Hell in 1986.

Sorry, Raising Hell. Yes. Which I remember my family was on a bus to Disney World once, I think, and the windows were foggy and I was so into Run DMC, I just wrote Raising Hell in the fog on the window. People on the bus thought that was really hilarious. That is a great story. So I was into My Adidas too because of Run DMC, but it wasn't just me. Apparently, if you went to a Run DMC show on the Raising Hell tour or the Together Forever

tour in 1986 or 87, when they sang My Adidas, everybody would take off their shoes and hold their Adidas in the air. That's how big of an impact this song had. Yeah. And in 1986, a senior employee at Adidas named Angelo Anastasio went to that tour at Madison Square Garden, saw this happen with the Adidas sneakers and was like, hold on a minute. Wait just a second. We could have something here.

Ran back to the headquarters and within just a few days, they signed them to a million dollar endorsement deal and that was like a sea change forward for hip hop groups getting money in all sorts of ways. Yeah. And apparently it made Adidas' sales just go through the roof. Oh yeah. Yeah. And it's like that began the marriage of like, I'm going to put out a record, I'm going to

get a shoe deal, I might get a vodka sponsor like, I'll get money flowing in from all kinds of directions and Run DMC started it all. A vodka sponsor that's hilarious. Sure. I feel like I've seen that now. Oh yeah. You totally have like P Diddy and Sirach vodka, I think. Yeah.

Look, it works. I associate P Diddy and Sirach vodka. Andrew's nodding. That means you're correct. Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. Jerry would have been like, what? My miso's getting cold.

Right. Can you guys hurry up? We will hurry up, ghost of Jerry. If you want to know anything else about Adidas and Puma, we'll just go start reading up more. There's actually a book by a woman named Barbara Schmidt called Sneaker Wars, appropriately, all about the rift between Adidas and Puma. So if you want to know more about it, that's a pretty good place to start. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail.

Yeah, I'm going to call this Sponges. Okay. Hey guys, I was listening to Pando. And I was excited y'all mentioned Glass Sponges, which are thought to be the oldest animals on earth. I am a PhD student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. And I study marine sponges because they make all sorts of unique molecules that can be used as new medicines.

I think sponges are the coolest animals on earth, and I'd love to share some of my favorite sponge fun facts. You ready? Oh, yes. Not only are sponges thought to be the oldest living, single living animals on earth, but some evolutionary biologists even think sponges were the first animals to ever evolve. In other words, our last common animal ancestor could very well have been a sponge. That's so cool.

Did you know the first antiviral drug approved by the FDA was developed from a molecule in a sea sponge? I didn't until just now. As a PhD student, I collect and study sponges because they're known to produce thousands of bioactive molecules, many of which have medicinal potential. I think it's pretty incredible that the ocean may hold the cure to some of the most devastating human diseases. And I hope my work might inspire people to protect the world's oceans and the valuable

resources within them. That's awesome. Heck yeah. Thanks for all the hard work you guys put into the show. You all have kept me company on many a long night in the lab with my sponges. That's awesome. It makes me want to go chew on a sponge and see what happens. That's right.

That's from Kayla Wilson from San Diego. Thanks a lot, Kayla. This is the work you're doing, too. Thank you for saving humanity from grave diseases. Yeah. We'll look into these sponges, as you call them. If you want us to look into anything that we put in scare quotes, well, we want to know about it.

You can go onto our website, stuffyshadow.com. Follow us on our social links there. You can get in touch with us. You can also send us a good old-fashioned email. Wrap it up. Check that thing on the bottom and send it off to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, hey dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.