Three stripes. Three stars.
Smit bills her book, "Sneaker Wars," as the story of the family and corporate competition behind Puma and Adidas, but this is an Adidas book and the story of the legendary footwear house divided. Brother versus brother. Father versus son. France versus Germany. Old World versus New World.
Smit begins with skeletal biographies of the founding Dassler brothers: Adolf (Adidas) and Rudolf (Puma). The brothers worked and lived together, but after a World War II falling out, Rudolf struck out across the river on his own, and a rivalry was born. It was a rivalry that would play out over 50 years and three generations; but, one that was dominated by the Adidas corporation and the Adidas personalities, and they equally dominate Smit's work.
The book follows the Adi/Rudolf split and then move on to the division that emerges within Adidas as Adi's son, Horst, sets up a subsidiary - if often antagonistic - France-based branch. Horst cuts his own deals, sets up his own side businesses to inflate his bottom line, and provides the hustle that takes Adidas from a European sporting goods outfitter to a global fashion empire. But, remaining closely-held for many years by some combination of Dassler family members and confidantes, Adidas is a multi-million dollar conglomerate often operating on a shoestring. The family dynamic provides the arc of conflict that sustains Smit's narrative, and her gracious portrayal of Horst Dassler as a visionary 21st century kind of global businessman in a still-flat world is the center of gravity that grounds the meat of the book's middle portion.
Horst emerges as an almost surreal character: gifted and tireless, but perhaps less than ideal in his moral approach to family and business. The story of Adidas during his life is about a house divided between his operation - run mostly autonomously out of France - and his parents' in Germany.
That division theme runs throughout the narrative as surrounding this interesting portrayal of Horst Dassler are the stories of (earlier on) the drama around the split of his uncle and his father, complete with Nazi intrigue and Olympic escapades; and (later on) the series of ownership and management changes that transitioned Adidas from the small family-owned German cleat maker into one of the Western world's most recognizable and marketable brands, and saw conflict between the Old World ownership and US-based management.
There are side trips off into some interesting characters (Muhammad Ali, Pele, Joe Namath, Kobe Bryant), but these fail to deliver in any meaningful way and it becomes clear that Smit really sees this as a Dassler story. That said, she does avoid focusing even on some of the more controversial elements of the Dassler story, for example, the founding brothers' documented ties to Nazism.