Update: The sneakers sold for $11,200.
Bruce Mortenson is the man with the golden shoes.
They’re actually a pair of old sneakers, far from pristine, missing their laces with the soles that are crumbling apart.
But they’re worth at least $6,000. Maybe more.
Mortenson knows that because his 44-year-old kicks are for sale on eBay, where the current bid is $6,200, with 300 other potential bidders watching the sale, which ends Sunday night.
The secret to why these stained shoes are so valuable can be divined by the distinctive swoosh patches sewn to the sides of the shoes and the date they were made: 1972.
These are a pair of Nike Moon Shoes, handmade prototypes of what would become the iconic bestselling Nike waffle-soled running shoes, the legendary Waffle Trainer, which helped launch a little shoe company into the giant brand it is today.
Mortenson, 72, of Minnetonka, is a bit of a local running legend himself: an elite runner who once placed sixth in the Boston Marathon and set masters running records as an older competitor.
He was in his prime in 1972 when he was offered a pair of Moon Shoes, the first Nike waffle-soled shoes made and used in competition.
Jordan Geller is a sneaker collector from Portland, Ore., and creator of what he says is the world’s first shoe museum, the ShoeZeum. Geller said only a dozen Moon Shoes were made, hand-cobbled by early Nike employee Geoff Hollister under the direction of Bill Bowerman, co-founder of Nike.
Bowerman was also the track and field coach at the University of Oregon where Mortenson was on the track team after running at St. Louis Park High School under Roy Griak, later the University of Minnesota track and field coach.
The early Nike prototype sneakers were called Moon Shoes because the knobby studs on the rubber sole left prints in the dirt similar to the footprints being left by Apollo astronauts who were walking around the dusty moon’s surface at the time.
The shoes were described as having a waffle sole because Bowerman, according to Nike lore, used an actual waffle iron to make the first experiments in creating a new grippy rubber sole.
It was “a game-changing innovation,” according to Geller. “It’s the shoes that changed everything.”
Geller said the Moon Shoes were given to athletes competing at the 1972 Olympic marathon trials.
Mortenson said Hollister was a former teammate at Oregon, working at Blue Ribbon Sports, a small sporting-goods store started by Bowerman and Phil Knight, another former runner at Oregon.
Mortenson, who also worked at the store, remembers that the new Nike shoes had more cushioning and support than the Japanese racing shoes he was running with, called Tigers.
He had just come off his best marathon time of 2:19:59 in Boston that April. But he didn’t have a great race at the Olympic trials that summer of 1972.
He ran a 2:36 and didn’t make the Olympic team. But he didn’t give up on the shoes, using them in about a dozen local road races in Minnesota before replacing them with newer, better models.
Mortenson would go on to run a total of 64 marathons, winning five. He served as president of the board of the Twin Cities Marathon and is an inductee in the Minnesota Track and Field Hall of Fame. He said he’s still running about 40 miles a week, and his lifetime mileage is about 175,000, which is about three-fourths of the way to the moon.
He held onto his Moon shoes over the decades, even though he no longer wore them. He got them out of the basement for about eight years when they were on display at the Twin Cities Running Company store in Eden Prairie.
Mortenson said he decided to finally sell the old shoes after hearing that another 1972 Olympic trials runner, Mark Covert, had sold his Moon Shoes to Geller for an undisclosed price.
Geller, who said he once had a Guinness-record 2,388 pairs of sneakers in his collection, reportedly outbid Nike itself to own Covert’s shoes.
Mortenson’s shoes aren’t in as good condition as Covert’s, who beat him in the Olympic trials. But, “I’m thinking maybe these shoes are worth something,” Mortenson said.
He contacted Geller, who is helping him sell his pair on eBay.
“My wife said, ‘Get rid of them and get anything you can for them,’ ” Mortenson said.
