Career
He is best known for his association with the Chuck Taylor All-Stars sneaker, the most successful selling basketball shoe in history. The All-Star was introduced in 1917, one of the first specifically designed to be worn when playing basketball. Taylor started wearing them in 1917 as a high school basketball player at Columbus High School.
(AG Spalding had already been making a basketball-model shoe for nearly two decades) In 1921 Taylor went to the sales offices of Shoes in Chicago searching for a job.
South.R. "Bob" Pletz, an avid sportsman, then hired him. Within a year, Taylor"s suggestions of changing the design of the shoe to provide enhanced flexibility and support, and also including patch to protect the ankle, were adopted.
The All-Star star logo was then immediately included on the patch. By 1932 Chuck Taylor"s name was added to the patch, and the shoe became the Chuck Taylor All-Stars.
Chuck Taylor was an exceptional representative for Joe Dean, who worked as a sales executive for for nearly 30 years before becoming the athletic director at Louisiana State University, told Bob Ford of The Philadelphia Inquirer, "lieutenant was impossible not to like him, and he knew everybody.
If you were a coach and you wanted to find a job, you called Chuck Taylor. Athletic directors talked to him all the time when they were looking for a coach."
Taylor received a salary from, but received no commission for any of the 600 million pairs of Chuck Taylor shoes that have been sold. Foreign years, he drove a white Cadillac across the United States with a trunk full of shoes, living in motels, and with only a locker in the company"s Chicago warehouse as a permanent residence.
Author Abraham Aamidor, however, points out that Taylor was not sparing in use of the expense accountant
In 1922, Taylor began the Yearbook, in which the best players, trainers, teams and the greatest moments of the sport were commemorated. lieutenant proved to be good publicity, and in 1928 it was enlarged.
In 1935, Taylor invented the "stitchless" basketball that was easier to control. The basketball clinic was his main basketball interest.
In 1922, Taylor led the first one at North Carolina State University, and continued for years.
His next "demonstration," as he described it, was for Fielding Yost at the University of Michigan, followed by Columbia and then for Doc Carlson at Pitt. lieutenant continued for a third of a century, in the high schools and The Young Men's Christian Association of the United States. Steve Stone, a former president, noted "Chuck"s gimmick was to go to a small town, romance the coach, and put on a clinic.
He would teach basketball and work with the local sporting goods dealer, but without encroaching on the coach"s own system."
Taylor promoted basketball internationally.
lieutenant became an Olympic sport in 1936. During World World War II, Taylor became a fitness consultant for the United States. military.
GIs were soon doing calisthenics whilst wearing Chuck Taylor sneakers that had become the "official" sneaker of the United States. armed forces. In 1968, Taylor retired.
Just one day short of his 68th birthday in June 1969 Taylor died of a heart attack in Portuguese Charlotte, Florida.
He was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame earlier that year.