Netflix Documentary Shows AND1 Profited From Black Culture

I almost literally bumped into Barnes. I didn’t know his name, but it seemed like he wanted all the real smoke. He looked like the toughest skinny guy I’d ever met, and the reason was that he had a tattoo on his arm of the dead-faced, trash-talking AND1 guy: the same logo on the t-shirts he wore. when I wanted to feel intense. AND1 was so important in my life that the tattoo was just the highlight of the trip.

Afterward, I literally told people that I didn’t think I could make it as a college basketball player. When asked why, I replied that they have guys with AND1 tattoos and that I’m not ready for that level of aggression.

Streaming the Netflix documentary “Untold: The Rise and Fall of AND1” reminded me of that time in my life. In 2001, AND1 was everything I wanted to be. As a Southern Californian who grew up in a white neighborhood, the elements of expression in basketball have always been muted. I remember the first time I heard someone say “act like you’ve been there before.” My answer was always “why?”

AND1 was the proverbial “why” for all things mainstream basketball in the late ’90s. And, as the documentary points out, it all started with the jerseys. I must have had a dozen of these shirts. My favorite was a drawing of the guy AND1 holding up a milk carton with the print “missing” and your game just below it (“I saw your game on a milk carton”). The shirt did what I wasn’t allowed to do. It was the expression of hip hop combined with the spirit of competition. We all ate it.

All that said, the documentary really didn’t make me happy. It did a few things right, like highlighting the origin story behind the brand and explaining the feelings of those who created it. It also captured the chaos behind the promotional tour of the best streetballers. That is all.

My biggest problem with the document is that they spent time highlighting the racial element in terms of these executives riding on the backs of these black athletes, but not at all in what the executives were actually producing. I almost spit out my metaphorical coffee when I found out that a white kid from the Wharton business school designed all these shirts! It seems to me that these three white guys wanted to hack into black culture to enrich it, and they succeeded.

This is not to say that they were the first to do it, but they might have been the first to do it that way. Just the t-shirts make me feel like Ghostface Killah wrote his copy, but he’s not Ghostface, not a rapper, not a dancer, not a black person. He’s a white kid imagining what black people do when they talk trash. And, of course, he had to imagine, because he probably grew up acting “like he’s been there before.”

The documentary should have included much more. For example, when AND1’s mixtapes started coming out, they spawned a new mixtape culture. “Untold” frames it as if they were the only guys making tapes and that once Nike found out, the race was over. But I remember watching all the AND1 tapes, as well as others like “Ball Above All,” which was essentially the same thing but with the best high school talent in the country. That’s where I learned about TJ Ford, Julian Sensley and James “Flight” White. I wish they had gotten into what mixtape culture became and how it’s still a huge part of society, albeit in the form of TikTok and Instagram.

Another thing they didn’t really focus on was the journey these guys were taking competitively. A big question when the Tour was going on was how good these guys really are. This manifested itself in great stories about Skip and AO trying to make it to the league.

In the basketball world, the consensus at the time was that those two guys could actually play and the rest couldn’t. “Untold” showed the New York game from the tour, but what they didn’t mention was the AND1 stars losing to the local New York team. In fact, the best player on that New York team was Corey “Homicide” Williams, who was my teammate in the D-League a few years later. He said that they were not great players and that he was proud to beat them. People wanted a piece of these guys really, but the doctor made it seem like it was all fun and games.

No. People’s reputations rose and fell like stocks. That’s part of the reason the pay scale was all over the place. It was as if they were paid based on who had the drive.

There’s a reason I led with former Warrior Matt Barnes. I look back on that moment when I met him and how he was the epitome of toughness, cultural relevance and genius. Everything feels weird now. When you make t-shirts that say “your game and your girl are both trash,” what voice do you imagine he’s in? The company’s founders certainly didn’t spell these shirts the way they talk, and I know this, because they sounded like white Penn kids in all of their interviews.

It’s just another example of how black people never get rich off their own culture, but white people who emulate it well always do. Eminem is the biggest example, but I’ve never been so upset with Eminem. But Google old photos of Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears and tell me what many of his outfits look like. Find out who created Fresh Prince. White showrunners used to openly ask if “this is what black people would do”. I guess when you have a culture that produces lightning in a bottle on a regular basis, someone will always try to capture that for themselves. It’s always strange to know how many things I loved as a black kid as perfectly *me* were created by white guys in a lab. If the guy from AND1 had been designed differently, if the font didn’t look like graffiti, if the language didn’t sound like the homies said it, he would never have had a single piece of AND1 clothing, and Matt Barnes wouldn’t would have his only tattoo that I know for sure was designed by a Wharton graduate.

All that said, “Untold: The Rise and Fall of And 1” was a trip down memory lane that was funny at times and frustrating at others. But truth be told, I think I’d rather watch a miniseries about street basketball than learn about some Ivy League kids who made a diorama about hacking black culture and won.

Maybe one day we’ll get that document, and AND1 will be the part of history where streetball became mainstream, but was then used as nothing more than a vehicle to make four people rich (and match shoes to the values by Sean John). At least we enjoy the time and the moment. Nothing can change how you made me feel 20 years ago.