Reebok Pump Mastermind Discusses Tech’s Move To Tennis

When Paul Litchfield was tasked by Reebok owner Paul Fireman to create something fresh for the basketball market, Litchfield, his team and an outside industrial design firm landed on a concept that has enthralled the sport for 35 years, the Reebok Pump. But the Pump not only struck a chord in basketball, it also gripped the tennis world. Litchfield goes in-depth on the creation of the original Reebok Pump ahead of the 35-year anniversary in November and the pump’s transfer into tennis. Plus, he still marvels at the fascination. “It was a long time ago,” the Boston native tells me. “I am super proud of it and really happy with the product and what it became. The intent was just to do my job and do it well. It worked out pretty well.” Born out of an idea in 1988, the first Reebok Pump debuted in 1989. Litchfield, the former vice president running Reebok’s Advanced Concepts, credits the rise of sneaker culture, high-flying basketball players—from Dr. J to Michael Jordan to Dominique Wilkins—the growth of the fitness community and even the evolution of the plastics industry to converge in a way that led Reebok to search for a fresh approach to basketball product. After the Fireman edict came down, Litchfield and his Advanced Concepts team started looking at straps, hinges, braces, anything to create better ankle stability without detracting from performance. Soon the team was tracking the world of inflatable systems, something seen at the time in the form of air splints inside ski boots. “When people say you invented the Pump, that is a little strong,” Litchfield says. “I will take it for the elevator pitch, but the truth is inflatable devices were out there in the universe and what we did was create a pump bladder that was intended to create a custom-fit shoe in a mass-manufactured environment.” The byproduct of that approach was that the technology offered a performance attribute for the players, but not in a way that merely dangled on the outside of the footwear. Litchfield, who still has the first pump bladder ever made, says they started with run-of-the-mill materials—the plastic was the same as you’d see from a floatable air mattress—and then moved into TPU as the concept solidified. The first pump blader sent air down the tongue and featured quilting for even spacing. It wrapped the midfoot and ankle, meant to fill the voids found in a traditional shoe. The original had a tiny Schrader valve, made in June 1989. And it still works. Before retail release, Reebok tested concepts with local high school and junior college basketball players. The Pump Shot and Pro Pump concept models featured differing techniques, with the Pro Pump offering a dial like a dimmer switch in the heel. The idea was players could step in and automatically inflate by setting the dial how they wanted. But the young play-testers loved interacting with a mechanical pump, not a dial, forcing the team to reconfigure the design and move the pump into the tongue. Then came another moment of brilliance as Paul Brown, Reebok vice president of design, suggested making the pump an actual basketball. “That’s great for you,” Litchfield remembers saying at the time, “but I didn’t know how to do that.” He learned. And the Reebok Pump featured a basketball pump mechanism on the tongue before eventually turning into a tennis ball for the Reebok Victory Pump made famous by Michael Chang during Roland Garros in 1990. The tennis ball change debuting in Paris wasn’t the only shift. Basketball shoes of the day were true high tops. For tennis, mid-cut heights were the norm, which wouldn’t fit the bladder design. With Chang on board, Reebok knew it had to make a Pump tennis shoe, so changes were required. “We gotta evolve this,” Litchfield says about a new bladder with wings to move air from the tongue into the nodes near the ankle bones. “The intent was to take a mid-cut shoe, or a tennis shoe, and push your foot back into the heel counter and stabilize that over the base of support.” Litchfield remembers Chang becoming interested in the prototype made for him. One of the first tennis versions even included electronics with a pressure gauge. The architecture of electronics in the early 1990s didn’t fit with the shoe design and that was dropped for the final Chang-worn version. Chang wasn’t the only tennis player to don Reebok. Venus Williams famously wore the brand and donned Reebok Pumps along the way. Andy Roddick even had a later model of Reebok Pumps during his five-year stint with Reebok. Reebok toyed with the pump technology across multiple sports—a low-top running shoe was released and the team used CO2 cartridges for instant inflation on track spikes featured at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics—and iterated on the technology for years, but it was those early introductions to a footwear world not accustomed to emerging technology that really caught the public’s attention. “These things worked really well and helped secure the foot into the shoe,” Litchfield says about the technology’s evolution, “but I don’t think it was as effective as the tennis midfoot bladder or the basketball shoe’s full pump bladder that encapsulated the high tops.” Where it all worked the best, Litchfield says about a little-known piece of Pump history, was in hockey. Reebok owned CCM, starting in 2004, 15 years past the original introduction of the Pump, and the CCM 652 that included a dual-pump system to keep the ankle snug against the stiff-shell of the hockey skate (easier to do than against leather and fabric) became the best-selling hockey skate for years. Litchfield says there may not be another footwear technology that captures public intrigue like the tech of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. “I was really lucky to get into the industry and be there at the time when footwear got the attention it did,” he says. “I think the consumer likes some of the old stuff because it is kinda cool.” For the Reebok Pump, that’s 35 years of cool and a history that includes tennis as a defining moment.