Nike Air Zoom Cage 3 Glove 'Rafael Nadal'
Colorway: Volt Glow/Light Carbon-White · Style code: AQ0567-700 · Release date: May 26, 2019 · Price: $479 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: NikeCourt Air Zoom Vapor Cage 4 (CD0424-107) · NikeCourt Air Zoom Vapor Cage 4 (CD0424-102) · NikeCourt Air Zoom Vapor Cage 4 (CD0424-100) · Nike Air Zoom Spiridon Cage 2 (CJ1288-002) · Nike Air Zoom Spiridon Cage 2 (CJ1288-100)
A 'What The' shoe is usually a novelty: Nike takes a model, cuts it into panels, and gives each panel a different past colorway. Applied to Rafael Nadal it turns into something closer to a ledger. Every graphic on this Air Zoom Cage 3 is lifted from a Nike shoe he had worn while winning a Roland-Garros final, so the upper amounts to an inventory of his afternoons on that court.
There was a lot to work with. Sixty-three of Nadal's singles titles came on clay, and at one point he won eighty-one consecutive matches on the surface, the longest single-surface streak of the Open era. The shoe went on sale in May 2019, in the weeks before that year's French Open began.
Underneath the collage it is a working clay shoe rather than a display piece: Zoom Air for response, and a multidirectional pattern cut for a surface that slides under you. It sold at $140.