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How Puma Born

How Adidas and Puma were born
Pele stopped the referee with a last-second request to tie his shoelaces at the opening whistle of a 1970 World Cup finals match and then knelt down to give millions of television viewers a close-up of his Pumas.
The Brazilian was complying with a request by Puma's representative Hans Henningsen to raise the German sports shoe company's profile after they gave him $120,000 to wear their boots.
The clandestine advertising for Puma was a huge triumph for the company over hated cross-town rivals Adidas in the early days of the war for market supremacy in sports merchandise.
Barbara Smit, a Dutch author and journalist, has spent five years trawling the archives of the Adidas and Puma headquarters in the Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach to research Rudolf and Adolf Dassler -- 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 (Three Stripes versus Puma), tracks the remarkable rise of the Dassler brothers during Germany's [Images] sport-obsessed 1920s, their cooperation with the Nazis, their ugly post-war split and their hatred-driven competition that created separate empires.
"As embittered rivals, the estranged brothers led their respective companies to the top of the world," Smit wrote.
"Muhammad Ali, Franz Beckenbauer and Zinedine Zidane [Images] became legends in the three stripes of Adidas while soccer god Pele...and Boris Becker achieved global fame in Pumas."
The book chronicles the decline of both family-run firms caught off guard by U.S. rivals Nike and the failure to spot new trends such as the running boom.
FAMILY RIFT
Both 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...