Adidas versus Puma: Origins of a rivalry between brothers

At the opening whistle of a 1970 World Cup finals match, Pelé stopped the referee with a last-second request to tie his shoelaces and then knelt down to give millions of television viewers a close-up of his Pumas.

Pelé was complying with a request by Puma's representative, Hans Henningsen, to raise the company's profile after receiving $120,000 to wear the shoes.

This clandestine advertising was a huge triumph for Puma over Adidas in the early days of the battle for market supremacy in sports merchandise.

Barbara Smit, a Dutch author and journalist, spent five years poring over the archives at Adidas's and Puma's headquarters in the Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach to research Rudolf and Adolf Dassler, the brothers who started making sports shoes in their mother's laundry room in the 1920s before becoming sport and business giants.

Her new book, "Drei Streifen gegen Puma," or "Three Stripes Versus Puma," tracks the rise of the Dassler brothers during Germany's sport-obsessed 1920s, their cooperation with the Nazis, their ugly postwar split and their hatred-driven competition that created separate empires.

This clandestine advertising was a huge triumph for Puma over Adidas in the early days of the battle for market supremacy in sports merchandise.

"As embittered rivals, the estranged brothers led their respective companies to the top of the world," Smit wrote. "Muhammad Ali, Franz Beckenbauer and Zinédine Zidane became legends in the three stripes of Adidas while soccer god Pelé and Boris Becker achieved global fame in Pumas."

The book chronicles the decline of Adidas (founded by Adolf "Adi" Dassler) and Puma (founded by Rudolf Dassler) as they were caught off guard by Nike and the failure to spot new trends like the boom in running.Adidas and Puma have recovered from their brushes with disaster as publicly owned companies in the vibrant $17 billion worldwide sports shoe industry, but only after long and messy separations from their family owners.

"I was fascinated by the mixture of this incredible family rift, the business feud and the sporting triumphs, which forged two mighty brands recognized all over the world," Smit said of her book, which draws on U.S. intelligence documents and more than 200 interviews conducted around the world.

Although most of the two companies' production moved to low-cost countries long ago, handmade shoes for some big names, like David Beckham, are still produced in Germany.

The New York Times