Sneaker Wars

I have been accused by my wife on more than one occasion of being overly infatuated with athletic shoes (although, in my defense, its been years since I bought a new pair), so I was interested to see this review in her newest copy of Business Week of the new book Sneaker Wars: The Enemy Brothers Who Founded Adidas and Puma and the Family Feud that Forever Changed the Business of Sport (aside: subtitle are out of control these days).  Their bottom line on the book seems to be: starts slow, gets better, but this bit in the review was pretty fascinating:

Bizarrely, the bickering brothers continued to share a villa, with their wives and children, in the Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach until 1948, when Rudolf and employees loyal to him formed a rival shoe company called Puma. Adi renamed his outfit Adidas. So great was the animosity between the brothers that the whole town became embroiled. Residents declared their loyalty to either Adidas or Puma according to the shoes they wore and sometimes refused to speak to members of the other side.

Shoe gangs!  How good is that!  This is the type of thing that I have come to expect Wikipedia to be golden on but unfortunately the pages for both Rudolf Dassler and Adolf Dassler are pretty slim.  

Oh.  Yeah, they were Nazis.