great

Alexander-Arnold and Robertson played together on 279 occasions – an average of 35 games a season in all competitions in their eight seasons together.

And each of them only played more games with Mohamed Salah.

Robertson joined from Hull City for £8m in 2017-18 with Alexander-Arnold, an academy product, having made his debut the season before.

They won 185 of those 279 games, losing 43 times.

The two full-backs played attacking roles in former boss Jurgen Klopp’s high-energy football – and had a hand in nearly unprecedented numbers of goals.

In isolation their assist hauls would be remarkable but the fact they were both doing it at the same time is even more amazing.

In March 2019 Alexander-Arnold told the BBC: “We both thrive off each other’s performances.

“We have got a competition between ourselves this season to see who gets more goals and assists. It’s a healthy competition.”

Only on 10 occasions in Premier League history has a defender created 10 or more goals in a Premier League season – and Alexander-Arnold and Robertson have each done it three times.

In 2019-20 they assisted 25 goals between them.

Stones has been with City for nine seasons after joining from Everton for £47.5m.

He has enjoyed a trophy-filled spell at the club, winning six Premier League titles, the Champions League, two FA Cup and four League Cups, while also being capped 83 times for England.

Though he has played 277 games for his club, he only managed 13 starts last term, including six in the Premier League.

“I think we all self-doubt as players and feel things, and we want to get back as quick as possible. Maybe that’s a downfall sometimes that you try and push too soon,” he said.

“Definitely family [help], I think that’s my biggest thing, being around them and having their support.

“You can feel very lonely at times when you’re training by yourself and that’s the difficult part of it, being in a team sport, not training with the team when you run out on the pitch in your rehab.”

Stones has suffered a succession of foot, hamstring and thigh injuries over the past two campaigns, missing a total of 164 days and 33 games, according to Transfermarkt., external

Stones said: “There’s been points where you think you’ve been giving all this effort, you dedicate all your life – especially how I approach or go about my life and football, I give everything – on and off the pitch to be here or be ready to play games, and those are the dark days.

“I think everyone’s been through them and think, ‘why is this happening?’. You wish it would have gone a different path, but like I said, it’s self-doubt, there’s a lot of things.

“All of us have been through different upbringings and challenges through life and what did we do within those situations, was it fight or was it give up?

“I was a fighter from a young age, in difficult moments, you have to look at the bigger picture and realise what are your morals, what you believe in, and fight to make it worthwhile.”

Basketball Hall of Famer and former Lakers fan favorite Vlade Divac broke his hip Thursday when he fell from his motorcycle while riding near the Adriatic Sea coast in Montenegro.

On Friday, a spokesperson for a hospital in Risan said the 57-year-old Serbian basketball legend now has an artificial hip after emergency surgery.

“During the day, a surgical procedure was performed,” hospital spokesperson Ljubica Mitrovic said of Divac. “He is in a stable general and physical condition and is under a careful supervision of the medical staff.”

Divac, a 7-foot-1 center, was drafted by the Lakers in 1989 after leading the Yugoslavia men’s basketball team to an Olympic silver medal the previous year. He became a full-time starter during his second season as a Laker and soon emerged as a fan favorite, with frequent appearances in commercials, sitcoms and late-night talk shows.

After seven seasons with the Lakers, Divac was traded to the Charlotte Hornets for the recently drafted Kobe Bryant on July 1, 1996. (The Lakers would sign another 7-1 center, Shaquille O’Neal, as a free agent later that month.)

Divac played two seasons with the Hornets and signed with the Sacramento Kings as a free agent in 1999. He spent six years there — a stint that included his only All-Star season, in 2000-01 — before returning to the Lakers for the last of his 16 NBA seasons in 2004-05.

After finishing his career with 13,398 points, 9,326 rebounds, 3,541 assists and 1,631 blocked shots, Divac had his No. 21 jersey retired by the Kings in 2009. He was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2019.

Divac was the Kings’ general manager from 2015 to 2020.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Duhhhh-nuh. Duhh-nuh. …

Friday marks 50 years since the 1975 film “Jaws” from Steven Spielberg introduced audiences to that infamous John Williams movie score — and the fear that they should clearly feel over the great white shark lurking just beneath their feet, waiting to chomp down on their dangling legs as they enjoy a day at the beach.

Except, over the past six decades, marine biologists like Chris Lowe at the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach have found that great white sharks and their selachian counterparts not only don’t want to eat humans but also would like to avoid us if at all possible.

“Believe it or not, a lot of the times they’re big babies. They’re big scaredy-cats,” Lowe told me.

As part of the series I’ve completed over the last year in The Wild, exploring how to react should you see a potentially dangerous animal on the trail, I spoke to Lowe, who has studied sharks for the past 35 years, about how you should react if you see a great white shark in the wild.

Lowe said that unlike 50 years ago when “Jaws” was filmed — where sharks’ populations were so low that even the “Jaws” filmmakers could barely find a shark in the ocean to record — the great white shark population has bounced back thanks to conservation efforts.

“Sharks are probably swimming by people way more often than they would ever imagine — they just don’t know they’re there,” Lowe said. “I think your chances of seeing a shark, any shark — a white shark, a leopard shark, a bull shark, a tiger shark, no matter where you go — is actually getting much better.”

Cal State Long Beach Shark Lab student assistant Julianne Santos shows Huntington Beach junior lifeguards a white shark jaw during a July 2023 presentation.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Please note that my conversation with Lowe focused on how a beachgoer should react if they see a great white shark off the coast of a Southern California beach, and I primarily asked him for tips for folks swimming or snorkeling. The Shark Lab has a great short guide for surfers, and there is other guidance available for spearfishers.

All right, no need for a bigger boat. Let’s dive in.

1. Observe the shark’s behavior

You’re swimming in the ocean, perhaps snorkeling, and you see a great white shark swimming about 20 feet from you. First, “take a deep breath and go, ‘Wow, that’s so cool,’” Lowe said.

Next, observe what the shark is doing. Is it relaxed? Has it spotted you yet?

Lowe said that oftentimes, you will see a shark because the animal wanted you to or allowed you to see it. The majority of human-shark encounters in Southern California occur without the human ever knowing it happened.

“We see it all the time from our drones — they’ll come up behind people, and in fact get what I would consider uncomfortably close to people, and then it’s almost like [they think,] ‘OK, that’s not what I thought it was,’ and then they just turn and take off,” he said.

I asked what uncomfortably close means, thinking 15 feet, 10 feet. “Three feet,” Lowe told me.

2. Keep your eye on the shark

“Let the shark know you see it,” Lowe said. “As the shark is swimming around you, you should pivot to always face the shark. That is part of this body communication that all animals use. If you’re ever threatened, do you ever turn your back on the threat?” (No.)

Move calmly and naturally as you float in the water. Do not throw anything at the shark or jerk around.

Most often, this is where the encounter ends, Lowe said. If the shark doesn’t feel threatened, you’ll observe the shark until it leaves the vicinity, and then you can alert a lifeguard of what you saw.

3. If you suddenly lose track of the shark, look behind you

You might have (even accidentally) startled the shark by moving too quickly.

When Lowe and his students go out into the ocean to tag sharks, they will pull up next to a shark and start recording it with a camera and taking other measurements. But if they startle it or if the shark feels threatened, the shark almost always loops around and tries to get behind the boat. It’ll do the same if you scare it.

People mistake this as the shark stalking them. “Actually, no,” Lowe said. “That’s how it’s investigating you safely. People forget these animals are just as much worried about their safety as we are [worried about ours].”

Researchers with the Shark Lab at the Cal State Long Beach have found that sharks and humans swim together at some California beaches more often than previously thought.

(Carlos Gauna / Cal State Long Beach)

4. Keep your distance as you keep watching the shark

If a shark feels threatened, it will arch its back and drop its fins and start an exaggerated slow-motion swimming behavior, Lowe said. “They will open their mouths, they’ll bear their teeth,” similar to an angry cat, he said.

You should, if you haven’t already, start to back away slowly from the shark, maintaining eye contact. Unlike the movies when people thrash out of the water, you want to backpedal at a normal speed. Remember, this animal is likely scared too.

Do not move toward the shark. “If you chase that shark, if you pursue it, it will break out of that behavior, and it will rush in and bite. And then it will take off,” Lowe said. “That’s a defensive response.”

5. If the shark gets in your space, bop it on the nose

Hopefully your encounter has ended by now, as this next tip is for exceedingly rare instances when a shark is getting in your space.

If you’ve been backing away from the shark, and it keeps coming toward you, getting within arm’s length, give it a “good pop to the nose,” Lowe said.

“The animal has to know you’ll defend yourself,” he said.

How hard should you strike its nose? “It’s not a little flick, it’s not a hand wave,” Lowe said. “You want the animal to know you will defend yourself because, in many cases, they are just as afraid of getting hurt as you are. A little bop on the nose quite often is enough to stop that from happening, and of course, you keep backing up. That’s the best you can do in those circumstances.”

6. If attacked, fight back with all you’ve got

If the shark bites you, you should punch it in the nostrils, eyes and gills. “There are pretty good eyewitness accounts of people fighting back, and that making a difference and then getting the shark to release. And in some cases, they don’t even see the shark after that,” Lowe said.

Most sharks bite once and leave.

Like other apex predators in California, sharks have in rare instances attacked and, in even rarer instances, killed people.

In the past 75 years, there have been about 223 shark incidents in California, with “incident” defined as a documented encounter where a shark touched a person or their surfboard, paddleboard, kayak, etc., according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Of that, at least 195 of the incidents involved white sharks. None of the 16 fatal shark incidents in California occurred in L.A. County.

These numbers feel even lower when you consider that millions of people visit California’s beaches every year.

Even with the large number of white sharks present along Southern California beaches, swimming and recreating along the coastline remains a largely safe activity, Lowe said. (In terms of risks, you’re much more likely to step on a stingray.)

I hope you will never need these tips and instead have great experiences this summer on our beautiful beaches.

I have to admit that, as someone who grew up in the landlocked state of Oklahoma, I came into this conversation with a lot of fear. It doesn’t help that my wife watches the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week every year. But after talking to Lowe, I feel about sharks like I do about bears and mountain lions. They live here too, and when we visit their homes, we could see them. More often than not, they mean us no harm and want to be left alone to live their lives — just like we do ours.

“People need to stop thinking of these animals as nothing more than these mindless animals,” Lowe said. “They are more like us than [people] think. If somebody was invading your personal spaces, you should defend yourself. You will defend yourself, whether you do it innately or not. The animals will do the same. If they feel threatened, they will protect themselves.”

3 things to do

Note: Out of concern for the safety of community members who could be targeted in ICE raids, multiple outdoors events have been postponed this week. Please check before heading out to make sure the activity you’re attending is still happening.

Visitors take a guided nature hike during an open house at the Chatsworth Nature Preserve by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in celebration of Earth Day on April 23, 2022.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

1. Hike on the longest day of the year in Chatsworth
The Chatsworth Nature Preserve will host a summer solstice event from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday featuring guided hikes, storytelling, live animal exhibits and more. Guests should wear hats and comfy shoes and they should bring refillable water bottles and sunscreen. Dogs are not allowed. Visitors should enter through the Valley Circle Boulevard gate, west of Plummer Street. Learn more at ladwp.com.

2. Tend to trees near Malibu
The Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains needs volunteers from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday to care for newly planted oak trees in Nicholas Flat in Leo Carrillo State Park. Participants will water, weed and mulch around newly planted trees and possibly plant acorns to replace trees that died. Volunteers will also collect data for a reforestation project. Volunteers should wear comfortable clothing and durable shoes. Register at eventbrite.com.

3. Celebrate inclusivity and nature in San Dimas
L.A. County Parks and Recreation will host Pride Outside at 5 p.m. Friday at the San Dimas Canyon Nature Center (1628 N. Sycamore Canyon Road in San Dimas). The event will include a hike alongside representatives from Pomona Valley Pride, which is partnering with the county for the event. Learn more at the park’s Instagram page.

The must-read

A view of the Chuckwalla Mountains. President Biden established Chuckwalla National Monument shortly before leaving office, protecting over 600,000 acres of public lands in the California desert.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

The Chuckwalla National Monument, a 624,000-acre desert landscape next to Joshua Tree National Park, faces an increased threat of losing its federal monument status after a recent ruling from the Department of Justice. Times staff writer Lila Seidman reports that a May 27 legal opinion by President Trump’s DOJ overturns a more than 80-year-old Justice Department determination that presidents can’t revoke national monuments created by their predecessors under the Antiquities Act. This opens a wide window for Trump to dismantle Chuckwalla and the Sáttítla Highlands near the Oregon border, which President Biden established as national monuments shortly before leaving office. “Whether presidents have the authority to alter monuments is hotly contested,” Seidman wrote. “Litigation challenging Trump’s previous monument reductions was still pending when Biden reversed them and the matter was never settled.” We’ll keep you posted on what happens next.

Happy adventuring,

P.S.

The Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, which manages more than 75,000 acres of public land around L.A. County, announced this week that it is reopening multiple hiking areas closed in response to the Palisades fire. This includes the popular Escondido Canyon Park & Falls, which I’m eager to see, and San Vicente Mountain Park. A few Wilders, who recently emailed me regarding trail closures, will be happy to hear Westridge-Canyonback Wilderness Park and Mandeville Canyon are reopening too. You can read more about other recent trail reopenings here.

For more insider tips on Southern California’s beaches, trails and parks, check out past editions of The Wild. And to view this newsletter in your browser, click here.

Sexton, who explained his rivalry with O’Gara during the formative stages of his Test career was “tough”, said he is not sure if Prendergast or Crowley have been affected by the online discourse.

“Sometimes you can get a sense, but I’m not sure. All you can do is try to advise in terms of what worked for me,” added the five-time Six Nations winner.

“I was exposed to it a little bit at the very start and it’s tough, because as a kid all you want to do is play for Ireland and then you do it and suddenly you’re getting criticised – not all the time, but sometimes – and you’re like, ‘wow, this is tougher than I thought it’d be’, but it builds a resilience.

“You find out who are your mates, who you can trust and those you can lean on. Going forward, they’ll be stronger for it.”

While Sexton feels Prendergast and Crowley deserve time to prove their worth, he believes they are already ahead of where he was at the same stage of his career.

“The work ethic they have, they’re humble guys,” said Sexton, who will continue to work with Ireland’s fly-halves in a full-time capacity after he completes his British and Irish Lions coaching duties this summer.

“They want to learn and practise hard and that’s the thing you look at the most as a coach; the attitude and how humble they are because ultimately that’s what will stand to them going forward.”

In 2022, Kyra Davis Lurie heard a story on KCRW’s “Curbed Los Angeles” about the residents of South L.A.’s West Adams Heights, nicknamed Sugar Hill after a community of wealthy Black Harlemites. Learning about the sumptuous soirees Academy Award-winning actor Hattie McDaniel hosted in her Sugar Hill mansion, Lurie realized there was a hidden Black history waiting for her to unearth. But how she created the enthralling historical novel “The Great Mann” is a story that owes as much to Lurie’s ability to reinvent herself as it does to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” the iconic 20th century critique of the American dream, which provided a touchstone for the novel.

Lurie, 52, grew up in Santa Cruz, far from the neighborhood where McDaniel, Louise Beavers, Ethel Waters and other striving Black actors and business pioneers depicted in “The Great Mann” lived. While she visited family regularly in L.A., Lurie stayed up north, where she penned the light-hearted 2005 book “Sex, Murder and a Double Latte.” She quickly followed it with two more mysteries. Encouraged by her success, Lurie struck out for L.A. to pursue her dream of getting into a TV writers room. The 2007 writers’ strike deferred that goal, so Lurie pivoted to write three erotic novels which, she reveals, were “critiques of capitalism wrapped in a romance novel.”

By the time she heard about Sugar Hill and its famous inhabitants, Lurie was ready to take on a more nuanced challenge. But many literary agents weren’t receptive to her change of genre. “It was as if Marlon James had gone from writing comic books to ‘A [Brief] History of Seven Killings,’” she says, name-checking the famous Jamaican writer and his Man Booker Prize-winning novel. But as Lurie continued researching the neighborhood and its history, she knew she had to tell its story, even if using “The Great Gatsby” as her North Star proved problematic.

“I’m a huge Fitzgerald fan,” Lurie says, “even though there was a line in that book that always bothered me.” She’s referring to Nick Carraway’s reference to “two bucks and a girl” upon seeing three wealthy Black people passing by in a white-chauffeured limousine. “While it was probably used to get a laugh in 1925, it was demeaning,” Lurie says of the scene. “In the wake of the Red Summer of 1919 [when a record number of race riots and lynchings of Black Americans occurred in the U.S.] and the destruction of Black Wall Street in the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, Fitzgerald’s language says a lot about America’s cultural climate at the time.”

Was it subversive to use Fitzerald’s most famous novel to frame the story of a vibrant Black enclave whose prosperity rivaled that of Jay Gatsby and his ilk? Absolutely, Lurie says, adding, “Through a Black reimagining of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ I tried to marry a family’s story with a little-known part of L.A. history.”

The family story is told through the lens of Charlie Trammell III, a World War II veteran emotionally scarred by the violence he witnessed on the battlefield and at home in Jim Crow Virginia. Charlie arrives in L.A. looking for a fresh start and to reconnect with his cousin Margie, with whom he shares pivotal childhood experiences. But Margie, who now goes by the more exotic Marguerite, has shaken off the past and married Terrance Lewis, a vice president at Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co. The Lewises live with their son in Sugar Hill, along with McDaniel, Beavers and Norman O. Houston, the real-life co-founder and president of Golden State Mutual.

Soon Charlie is swept into the world of L.A.’s wealthy Black elite, a mix of real Angelenos like John and Vada Somerville, pioneering Black dentists and founders of Central Avenue’s famed Dunbar Hotel; singers-actors Waters and Lena Horne; and fictional characters including James Mann, the mysterious Black businessman recently arrived in Sugar Hill who hosts lavish parties unlike anything Charlie’s ever seen: “The air is flavored with flowery perfumes and earthy cigars. All around me diamonds glitter from brown earlobes, gold watches flash against brown wrists. The only things white are the walls.”

Mann befriends Charlie, treating the recently discharged veteran to his first hand-tailored suit and fine wine, but soon embroils him in his quest to reunite with Marguerite, the love of his life since the two met some 10 years before when they both lived in the South.

“Through a Black reimagining of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ I tried to marry a family’s story with a little-known part of L.A. history,” Kyra Davis Lurie said.

(Yvette Roman Photography)

Like Fitzgerald’s classic juxtaposition of West Egg and East Egg in “Gatsby,” “The Great Mann” is about new money versus old — interlopers like Mann and the entertainers versus businesspeople like Houston and the Somervilles. But Lurie “tried not to invent flaws” in her historical figures by doing her homework, sourcing accounts in Black newspapers, biographies and even letters between Houston and NAACP leader Walter White to depict these frictions.

“The Great Mann” is also about people reinventing themselves amid the realities and contradictions of the time. Like Black actors who played maids but employed Black “help” in real life. Or the controversy over the stereotypically demeaning roles Black actors depicted. Chief among them was Delilah Johnson, the subservient Black maid portrayed by Beavers in the 1934 film “Imitation of Life.” It’s a debate that’s introduced in “The Great Mann” when Marguerite and Terrance tell Charlie that Beavers’ home, where he will be staying and which is much grander than theirs, is paid for “with Black shame.” Also addressed in the novel are touchier subjects like White’s advocacy for the lighter-skinned Horne to get roles over her darker-skinned colleagues like McDaniel or Beavers.

But the engine that fires up the plot of “The Great Mann,” and which sets it apart from “Gatsby,” is the battle Black creatives and business owners faced to hold onto their properties. A clause placed in thousands of L.A. property deeds in 1902 restricted housing covenants at the time West Adams Heights and many other L.A. County communities were developed, prohibiting homes from being sold to anyone “other than the white or Caucasian race.” But some white sellers sold property to Black buyers anyway, who then had to fight white groups — like the West Adams Heights Improvement Assn. — to prevent eviction from their own homes.

To say how Sugar Hill’s Black residents fared in court would spoil the enjoyment of this suspenseful tale, which has put Lurie on a new path in writing historical fiction. She has another project percolating, but for now, she’s just grateful to have found her niche. “It’s been a journey,” she says of the twists and turns of her writing life, “but writing about historical Black lives feels like home to me, what I was meant to do.”

Lurie will be discussing “The Great Mann” at Vroman’s Bookstore at 7 p.m. June 10; Diesel, a Bookstore at 6:30 p.m. June 11; and Chevalier’s Books at 6:30 p.m. June 19.

Fancy footwork won him Wimbledon.

Simple footwear won him everything since.

“The shoe has had a life of its own,” said Stan Smith, 78, whose eponymous Adidas kicks, with their timeless lines and leather uppers, are the king of all tennis sneakers with more than 100 million sold. “People from all walks of life have embraced them.”

Not surprisingly, Smith has a head for business to match his feet for tennis.

With that in mind, he and longtime business partner Gary Niebur wrote the just-released “Winning Trust: How to Create Moments that Matter,” aimed at helping businesses develop stronger relationships with their clients, with tips that readers can apply to their personal relationships and to sports.

“The book is about developing relationships that can elevate the element of trust, which is a depreciating asset in today’s world,” Smith said this week in a call from the French Open.

Stan Smith and Gary Niebur’s book, “Winning Trust,” was released earlier this year.

(Courtesy of Stan Smith)

When it comes to building and maintaining high-stakes relationships, Smith and Niebur have distilled their process into five key elements they call SERVE, a recurring theme throughout the book. That’s an acronym for Strategize, Engage, Recreate, Volley and Elevate.

For instance, recreate — as in recreation — means to build bonds through fun shared experiences, and volley means to trade ideas back and forth to find solutions.

“When people realize that you care more about the relationship than the transaction,” Niebur said, “trust follows.”

A onetime standout at Pasadena High and USC, Smith was a close friend of the late Arthur Ashe, the UCLA legend whose name graces the main stadium court at Flushing Meadows, N.Y., home of the U.S. Open.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Ashe’s victory at Wimbledon, when he beat the heavily favored Jimmy Connors in the 1975 final. Ashe remains the only Black man to win the singles title at that storied tournament.

“Arthur was a good friend,” Smith said. “He made a huge impact, and much more of an impact in the last few years of his life when he was fighting AIDS and the heart fund, and obviously for equal rights.”

Arthur Ashe celebrates after winning the Wimbledon men’s singles title in 1975.

(Associated Press)

Ashe, who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion he received during heart-bypass surgery, died in 1993. Although he was four years older than Smith, the two developed a close friendship when they traveled the globe as Davis Cup teammates and rising professionals.

Smith has vivid memories of traveling with him, Ashe in his “Citizen of the World” T-shirt with his nose forever buried in a newspaper or magazine. Smith was ranked No. 1 in the U.S. at the time, two spots ahead of his pal, yet the wildly popular Ashe always got top billing.

“When we went to Africa, I was the other guy who played against him in all these exhibitions,” Smith told The Times in 2018. “They would introduce him as Arthur Ashe, No. 1 player in the U.S., No. 1 in the world, one of the greatest players to ever play the game … and Stan Smith, his opponent.”

Smith laughs about that now, but it used to chafe him. Finally, he raised the issue with his buddy.

Recalled Smith in that 2018 interview: “Arthur came up to me and said, ‘I’m sorry about that. If we do a tour of Alabama, I’ll carry your rackets for you.’ He was in tune with everything.

“Arthur was a quiet leader walking a tightrope between a traditionally white sport and the black community.”

Smith will be at Wimbledon next month, where his UCLA friend will be honored.

As for his shoes, they’re everywhere, and have been since the 1970s. Adidas originally developed the shoe for French player Robert Haillet in the mid-1960s, and the sneakers were known as the “Haillet.”

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Tennis great Stan Smith talks about some of the ideas he hopes his new book will convey to readers.

In 1972, the company switched to Smith, naming the shoes in his honor and printing a tiny picture of his mustachioed face on them. There were subtle changes to the Haillet, including a notch in the tongue for laces to pass through and a heel better shaped to protect the Achilles tendon.

They sold like crazy. In 1988, Stan Smiths made the “Guinness Book of World Records” for the most pairs sold at 22 million. Yet that was only the beginning as sales surged with the release of the Stan Smith II and retro Stan Smith 80s. The most common ones were solid white with touch of green on the back.

“Hugh Grant turned around last year in the [Wimbledon] royal box and said, `First girl I ever kissed, I was wearing your shoes,’” Smith told The Times in 2022. “Another guy said he met this girl when he was wearing my shoes. It was so meaningful that they both wore the shoes for their wedding seven years later.

“It started off as a tennis shoe. Now it’s a fashion shoe.”

Tennis great Stan Smith with his namesake Adidas shoe.

(Sam Farmer / Los Angeles Times)

Smith’s personal collection has climbed to more than 100 size 13s in all sorts of colors, including his favorite pair in cardinal and black, an homage to his USC roots.

In 2022, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Smith’s Wimbledon singles title, Adidas gave all of its sponsored players a pair of shoes with SW19 on the tongue — Wimbledon’s postcode — with the date of that match against Ilie Nastase inside the right shoe and the score of the match inside the left.

At Wimbledon this year, the spotlight swings to the other side of Los Angeles, to an unforgettable Bruin, a sports hero who impacted so many lives.

For Smith, his friendship with Ashe was an early example in his career of a relationship forged with trust.

The book, incidentally, is affixed with a unique and fitting page marker.

A shoelace.