Concept Lab // Air Jordan 11 “Oklahoma Sooners”

You gotta be a pretty special player to strike a deal with Jordan Brand. But being on Team Jumpman does not guarantee retro PEs. Unless you’ve got an extremely close relationship with Mike, it’s almost impossible to score your very own Air Jordan 1 through 13. For Blake Griffin to get his own one-of-one Air Jordan 11 “Oklahoma Sooners” PE, he had to win a bet against Micahel to secure his own pair — and after The Last Dance, we all know how hard it would be to beat Mike in a betting situation.

It all happened on a trip to Mexico circa 2015, Blake told Sneaker Shopping’s Joe La Puma.

“The XIs were from that Mexico trip … Some of us had won a bet against Jordan, so we got to pick our own colors. It’s hard because there are so many colors already and colors coming out. So I made a shoe, and they were like, Well we have this one coming out. Kind of similar. So I just went back to Oklahoma roots and did Crimson and White. [The bet] was part of our team-building thing.”

Being a one-of-one pair, you can bet that there are not many photos of the sneaker doing the rounds. The above and below shots are the only two occasions where Grif has donned the pairs with cameras present. So, unless BG starts taking photos himself, it’s likely that these will be the only shots we get to see for now. Luckily, our Photoshop team can whip things up relatively realistically, and that’s just what they’ve done here — and we gotta say, we like what we see.

Considering how difficult it was for Blake, a Jordan Brand athlete, to get his hands on a PEm its very likely that we’ll never — ever — see these get a retail release. And that’s a damn shame.

Wanna see more of our sneaker concept work? You can check out every single one of them right here.