You might not have noticed, but anime is everywhere in the sports community. If you check out an NFL game, you will probably seen one or more players bust out a Kamehameha to celebrate a solid play. Guys like Goku are big with athletes, but Dragon Ball doesn’t have a monopoly on professional sports.
No, just take a look at Monkey D. Luffy. The would-be Pirate King has his own niche in the NBA circuit thanks to one player.
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Over on Twitter, Rudy Gobert highlighted his new custom basketball sneakers. The new kicks, which can be found below, feature Luffy on the sides. The hand-painted pieces show the pirate in all his red-and-gold glory, and the shoes were painted to match. The Air Dominates were give a bright paint job, and their tips feature the logo of the Straw Hat crew.
@rudygobert27 One Piece PEs
— Kickstradomis (@Kickstradomis) March 13, 2018
Put my bro Rudys favorite character Luffy on his Air Dominates. Gonna look amazing with his @utahjazz city Jerseys. #teamkickstradomis pic.twitter.com/ZDK9vPN5aL
There’s no word on whether Gobert has any kind of Devil Fruits gift. If the player gets a variant of the Gomu Gomu no Mi, then he will be all but unstoppable on the court.
For those of you unfamiliar with Gobert, the player is a pro basketball player from France. The athlete made his NBA debut with Utah Jazz. At over seven-feet tall, Gobert plays center and named an All-NBA Team meber during the 2016-2017 season. The player’s customized anime shoes were done by Kickstradomis, an artist known for modifying sneakers with custom artwork.
Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has been collected into 87 volumes, with a few chapters yet to be included. It has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best selling manga series worldwide with 430 million copies sold worldwide.
One Piece is currently in the middle of the “Whole Cake Island” arc and is now streaming on Crunchyroll and FunimationNOW.
Do you wish you had One Piece sneakers like these? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @MeganPetersCB to talk all things comics, k-pop, and anime!
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