In 1994 the most coveted rookie in basketball turned down Nike. Grant Hill, the clean-cut Duke star drafted third by the Detroit Pistons, the player everyone expected to become the next face of the sport, signed instead with Fila, an Italian company best known for tennis sweaters. For about three years that decision made Fila the second biggest basketball brand in America. Then Hill’s ankle gave out, and the whole thing vanished almost as fast as it arrived.
Turning down the swoosh
The Nike pitch, by Hill’s own telling, did not land. There was a grand global vision, a plan to beam him in by satellite from the Great Wall of China, and money he felt was light for a top pick. His father, the former NFL running back Calvin Hill, pushed him to take a meeting with Fila at its Baltimore-area office. Fila offered more money, royalties on his own line, a cut of other products, even a hand in recruiting other athletes. Hill signed, and became just the fourth player in NBA history to launch a signature shoe in his rookie season.
The Fila 95 and the GH2
The first shoe, the Grant Hill 1, also sold as the Fila 95, arrived for his 1994-95 rookie year at around eighty dollars. It reportedly sold more than a million and a half pairs that first season, the biggest debut for a signature shoe since the original Air Jordan 1 a decade earlier. Hill shared Rookie of the Year. The follow-up, the Grant Hill 2, is the one people remember, a clean patent-leather basketball shoe designed by David Raysse that reportedly did around a hundred and thirty five million dollars in sales and made up roughly a tenth of all Fila footwear. It is still cited as one of the best-looking basketball shoes ever made.
How Fila almost caught Nike
For a stretch in the mid-1990s this actually worked. On Hill’s back, Fila climbed to around third in athletic footwear worldwide and, by 1997, trailed only Nike in American basketball-shoe sales, ahead of both Reebok and adidas. Hill was the anti-hype pitch, the polite Duke kid parents liked, an alternative to the brasher stars, and a generation of kids who did not want Jordans wanted Grant Hills instead. In 1997 Fila re-signed him for a then-record seven years and eighty million dollars. For the brand’s full arc, see our history of Fila.
The ankle
Then it ended, and it ended on an ankle. Hill hurt his left ankle in April 2000, played through it into the playoffs, and made it worse. What followed was years of surgeries, a serious staph infection, and a move to Orlando where he managed a handful of games a season instead of leading a franchise. The player who was supposed to inherit the league spent his prime in street clothes instead. Fila and Hill parted ways when the deal expired in 2004, and during the split the company even reissued the GH2 stripped of his name, calling it simply the Fila 96.
The shoe that outlived the moment
The part nobody expected is that the shoe came back without the career. 2Pac wore the patent GH2 in the artwork for All Eyez On Me in 1996, and that image kept it alive in sneaker memory long after Hill stopped playing in it. In 2018, the year he entered the Hall of Fame, Hill signed a lifetime deal with Fila to bring the line back, and the GH2 has returned in anniversary editions and a 2Pac collaboration since. Grant Hill the player never got the career his rookie season promised. Grant Hill the shoe, somehow, got a second life it never needed.
