Eastbay was more than just a magazine for basketball players

NEARLY THREE DECADES later, Philadelphia 76ers forward P.J. Tucker’s face still immediately lights up, his eyes growing large as he describes what sounds like a religious experience for him.

Tucker’s friend William Kane brought to AAU practice a mail-order magazine called Eastbay.

“‘Yo, what is that?'” Tucker asked, he recalls in an interview with ESPN. “Everybody’s like looking over his back. He’s like, ‘It’s Eastbay. It’s where you get the shoes from.'”

As a young basketball player in the mid-1990s growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, Tucker couldn’t keep his hands and eyes off a magazine that would help cultivate his lifelong sneaker obsession.

“I was like, ‘Yo!’ Mind blown,'” Tucker said as if transported to his adolescent days. “Oh my gosh. Crazy.”

It was Tucker’s introduction to the shoe catalog — not a PlayStation or Nintendo 64 — that would deliver some of his fondest childhood memories as he flipped through the pages and obsessed over the hottest kicks.

“It’s crazy to think now, like how passionate I was about that magazine,” said Tucker, who still has vintage copies of Eastbay in storage.

Each monthly copy featured the newest sneakers from every brand across the athletic industry, for sports from basketball to volleyball.

Before the internet and do-it-all smartphones were in every household and every palm, Eastbay was what fed sneaker junkies.

“Eastbay was like how now when you just look online and all the people you follow [for releases],” Tucker said. “It was like waiting for that magazine to come in and just circle stuff. … I couldn’t…