Kicksology

So one of these days in the neighborhood me and a couple of my friends were all chilling at my friends' house, talking, having fun. All of a sudden, his dad just joined us and started talking to us.

This was so weird because his dad is a very intimidating and respectable person who usually would only say hi and bye to us and that was it. But that day, his pops was inspired and decided to lecture us about everything and nothing in particular. Telling us about the old days and how it used to be back then. I won't go too much into that lecture but one of the things I remember is the clear contrast in the way you got respect from you peers.

Djo, mine de rien, notre génération est sacrifiée dè!!! Au temps des tontons, eux quand ils partaient a l'école ils pensaient à avoir la meilleure note de la classe, là, ils seront premiers et puis voila. C'est leur prodada comme ça. In their time the way to gain respect amongst their peers was primarily through academic achievment. In our time? Academic achievment, respect from your peers, those two phrases just didn't go together. "Mon frère, si tu es premier de ta classe nous on s'en fout hein! Est ce que c'est tableau d'honneur nous on mange?"

Depending on where you're from, it varied from sports, to clothes, to fighting ability, to success with the opposite sex, to who had the most creative disses to whatever other shallow thing you can think of... But, the one thing that made you stand out where I grew up was: kicks/les pécasses.

"ah mon ga, tu as dekrou la dernière hein!"

I think this whole shoe mania was partly due to the fact that every kid(except at icsa, bloody americans!) going to school in Abidjan had to wear khaki pants and a short sleeved khaki shirt(white shirt/blue skirt for girls). And this uniform was very strictly enforced. The whole idea was that, if everyone has to wear the same uniform, cut from the same material the same way, it would be very hard for the kids to really showcase the difference in their financial status. A rich kid was forced to dress the same as a poor kid, and everybody would be happy...

Well, in theory this is a good idea, but in practice it did just the opposite. Kids can't really floss with the clothes so they gotta do it through the shoes... So the uniform created a monster: le dékroussage.

"lui la tu peux pas avec lui hein, c'est le plus grand dékrousseur de son école c'est lui qui a été le premier a avoir la dernière..."

YO THE SHOE GAME WAS CRAZY!!! The most anticipated day of the year was the first day of the year to see "qui a fait quoi". And of course, if you actually had a new shoe, no point keeping it at home because credit was given not only for having a hot shoe but being one of the first guys to have it. You may not even have been a dékrousseur, but you could catch up in the rankings by being one of the first guys to get la dernière shoe that just came out. All the major shoeheads knew each other, and every school had it's vieux père.

Kids did every and anything for the shoes, from borrowing shoes from a friend who's not in your school to fool your classmates, to forming a partnership with a friend to buy shoes and then the shoe would be owned by both of you, to selling anything you could find in the house for shoes, or even stealing your parents money, or even worse manipulating another kid so he could steal his parents money and then would buy shoes for you. For others, stealing the shoes directly from another kid and then being slick enough to avoid the trouble that would ensue.

Competitioin in schools was always hot, and the top guys would have reputations that went very far. You could litterally not know a thing about a guy, but you would know what shoes he had, what colour, when he wore them for the first time what school he goes to and who is the top shoe guy at his school. Sometimes the race was on when a major shoe came out(think jordan's), and being the first guy to get that latest shoe was like winning an award.

ah lui c'est un grand frappeur hein!

Le championnat n'était pas seulement élevé a l'école, au quartier meme c'était pire! My neighbourhood was intriguing because it wasn't really upscale like that, and most parents there made a modest/decent/comfortable living. But somehow, the neighborhood had a lot of rich kids... And the battle was fierce. I had a respectable spot in the rankings because I had managed to get an agreement with my mom to buy me two shoes every year. I argued that two was a good number because one shoe would get spoilt before the end of the year due to my intense and regular basketball playing(lol it's actually true). So I was cool cuz I was slightly above the average guy but at the same time I was way under the top guys, where all the fierce competition, pressure, and scrutiny was. Cuz once you're one of those guys people start looking at your feet every morning(litterally) to make sure your shoes are clean and that you're not wearing the same shoe too often.

But of course, with being a top guy came the prestige but also other rewards... It's amazing, the guys got the shoes not even caring the least bit about girls. It was a competition between them and their fellow guys, and girls really didn't even know much about basketball shoes. But in Ivorian schools especially, the top shoe guy got the most female attention. And that was a correlation with a significance of 1 (there's some econ/stat for you, great! my degree does serve a purpose!). I literally know a guy that still gets female attention to this day from the fact that he used have shoes 5/6 years ago. That's crazy! And it was crazier back in the day, when most of his friends were still virgins, he was enjoying, just because c'etait le vieux père du c.s.p.

Pardonnez oh! j'ai pas dit nom de quelqu'un...

On that note, yo! when are the new Jordans coming out! The lebron's are ugly, and the Carmelo's are a bit plain, plus I can't trust Converse with the Wade's!

...Stay tuned, next my first of "another night in the streets series", or what happened to the girl who was chilling alone in the streets at 4 am with 4 guys... lol, not what you think...