Past Greatness Doesn't Buy Future Passes
Why the shoes, the records, and the highlight reels don’t make someone worth following
I know today is a paid post day, but this has been heavy on me lately and I felt like I should share. I hope it lands the way I intend it to.
There’s a version of loyalty in sneaker culture... and sports culture, and music culture... that gets weaponized against people with good instincts.
It sounds like this: “You can’t turn on them now. Look what they gave us.”
And I get it. I really do. When something, or someone, has meant a lot to you for a long time, the idea of walking away feels like a betrayal of your own history. Like you’re erasing the memory of the first time you heard that album, or watched that player take over a game, or saw those shoes on someone’s feet and thought, I need to know everything about those.
That feeling is real. That connection is real.
But it’s not a blank check.
Sneaker culture has a particular version of this problem. We attach identity to the things we love. The shoes you wore coming up say something about who you are, where you came from, what you valued. The athletes and artists and designers who shaped those moments feel like they’re part of your story. And in a way, they are.
To me that’s actually what makes it harder when someone you looked up to says something racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or transphobic. Because it doesn’t just feel like a news headline. It feels personal. Like something you thought was yours got complicated.
And right on cue, someone in the comments will show up with the catalog. The resume. The highlight reel. As if the body of work is supposed to settle the argument.
It doesn’t.
I don’t think I need to name names here. There’s at least one person you’re already thinking of. Someone whose creative output genuinely changed things... whose shoes, whose music, whose presence in this culture meant something real to a lot of people, including me. And who has spent the last few years making it impossible to separate the work from the person doing it.
You know who I mean.
But that’s the easy example. The public one. The one everyone can point to.
What's harder to talk about are the people I've worked with directly. And I know I'm not alone in this. People I've sat across from in meetings, collaborated with on projects, created moments with that I'm still proud of. People whose names you'd recognize. And people who, over time, showed me a version of themselves that had nothing to do with the persona they'd built in public.
I’m not going to name them either. That’s not what this is about.
What I will say is that those experiences changed how I think about admiration. Because when you’re close enough to see behind the curtain, you realize pretty quickly that talent and character don’t always travel together. Someone can be genuinely brilliant at what they do and genuinely difficult, or cruel, or dismissive of people who don’t look like them or love like them, when the cameras are off.
The work was still real. The moments were still real.
But so was what I saw.
A great album doesn’t make someone a great person. A legendary career doesn’t either. Neither does a shoe that changed the culture, or a signature line that meant everything to a generation of kids who saved up their allowance to buy it.
Those things exist. They matter. They always will.
But they exist separately from how someone treats other people. From what they say when they have a platform and choose to use it a certain way. From the rhetoric they push, the harm they cause, the people they make feel less than.
Past greatness doesn’t buy future passes. It never did. We just convinced ourselves it did because letting go is hard.
I’ve been in this industry long enough to have real admiration for a lot of people. And I’ve been in it long enough to have had that admiration complicated, more than once, by what I’ve seen firsthand. It’s uncomfortable every time. There’s always a moment where part of you wants to compartmentalize. To say well, that’s separate from the work.
But I keep coming back to the same place. The people in this community who are most affected by that kind of rhetoric don’t get to compartmentalize. It lands on them whether they want it to or not.
So the least I can do is not pretend it didn’t happen.
And I think a lot of you already know this.
You’re allowed to stop following someone.
You’re allowed to stop buying their shoes, streaming their music, wearing their jersey. You’re allowed to say this person meant something to me, and they still do in some ways, and also I’m not going to keep amplifying them.
That’s not canceling someone. That’s just having standards.
The sneaker community, the music community, the sports world... these spaces are better when the people we celebrate are actually worth celebrating. Not just for what they made, but for how they move through the world. For whether they use their platform to lift people up or tear them down.
Great work should be great. And the humans behind it should be trying to be great too.
When they’re not, you get to notice that. You get to adjust accordingly. And you don’t owe anyone an apology for doing it.
Your heroes should be great human beings first. Everything else is secondary.
When you work with great people. When you know great people. Support them every way you can. They’ve earned it.
Keep building.
-Nick
If this resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you’re not yet a paid subscriber, today felt like a good reminder of why this community is worth being part of.
This is an amazing piece, Nick.
I’ve been writing creatively, in some capacity, for decades. This one moved me. I don’t know how you maintain this standard considering the breadth of the output. Thank you, brother.