Tennis star’s balls fall out of his shorts…

Adidas and Puma are two of the top sportswear brands in the world.

Interestingly though they were actually started by two brothers.

In the 1920s in Germany, brothers Adolf and Rudolf Dassler set up a shoe making business but soon fell out with each other and went their separate ways.

Adolf (Adi) Dassler kept the original company but renamed it Adidas (named after his first name and part of his surname) whilst Rudolf left and set up Puma.

Since the split there has been intense rivalry between the two companies and over the years there have been some famous examples of both of them trying to outdo the other in terms of publicity.

For example, back in the 1970s at the start of the 1970 World Cup final, arguably the world’s best ever footballer famously stopped the referee with a last minute request to tie his shoelaces just before the kickoff. The result was that millions of TV viewers saw Pele tie up his Puma football boots.

An early example of “guerrilla marketing” and priceless publicity for Puma.

More recently there was some rather unusual publicity for Adidas.

At the recent Wimbledon tennis Championship in London, the unlucky losing finalist Andy Murray had a few problems with his shorts.

Adidas pay a significant sum to Murray to sponsor him and in return he wears Adidas tennis gear, including Adidas shorts.

In his Wimbledon match against fellow Adidas sponsored tennis player Marcos Baghdatis, he lost two points after a tennis ball fell out of his Adidas shorts mid-point (Murray puts one tennis ball in his pocket whilst taking his first serve in case he needs to take a second serve).

Luckily for Murray he went on to win his match against Baghdatis but for Adidas it could have been an embarrassing problem had he lost because of the design of their shorts.

Adidas reportedly said that the error in the depth of the pockets was due to the shorts being handmade.

There’s a saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity and to be honest this has probably turned out ok for Adidas.

More people are probably now aware that Adidas sponsor Murray and they will no doubt change the design of the pockets so there’s no danger of the public seeing one of Murray’s balls popping out of his shorts in the future.