Lot one, and this is the one I want you all awake for, because there is a detail in this shoe that I have never seen anywhere else and I intend to get proper money for it. Look at the sole. Look at it. That outsole carries five distinct patterns — five, count them — and each pattern has been designed to visually outline one of the five basic movements a new tennis player learns.
The shoe is a diagram. A child looks down and the footwork is drawn there, on the rubber, underneath them. Somebody in a design office decided that the bottom of a shoe was a teaching surface, and I have valued a great many objects and I have rarely seen an idea that good executed that quietly. Do I hear an offer. I do not care.
It is not for sale, it is just correct.
The rest of the catalogue entry, and I will be quick because I am honest and quick in that order: rubber outsole, removable insole — which matters more than it sounds, because a removable insole is what lets a growing foot take an orthotic or a thicker sock without buying the next size up. Sized for big kids.
What I do not have, and will not conjure: the upper material, the midsole construction, the closure system and the court surfacing. The manufacturer's own record does not carry them and I am not going to call out numbers off the back of the room.
Now — Pardubice, and we are moving fast because this town does not slow down. The Winternitz Automatic Mills: Josef Gočár's Rondocubist brick, and it milled grain for one hundred and one years. A hundred and one, and then it stopped, and now it is a cultural centre.
Going once on the flour trade, sold to the arts.
And the Zelená brána is a sixty-metre Renaissance gate tower with a public gallery near the top, which is the best-value climb in the entire country and nobody is bidding.
You will wear these everywhere from a junior clinic back home to the ramparts and moat at the castle, and by the way, they are ideal for a whole day on foot here, which is precisely how a town this size should be taken.
The bottom of the shoe is a diagram. Five patterns, five movements, drawn on the rubber, under the child.
Buy on Amazon