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" It&amp;#039;s not everyday that you get to play basketball with an NBA All-star, so when Carmelo Anthony invited The Style Blog to come workout with him as part of Degree&amp;#039;s Do:More campaign, we jumped at the chance. And after we were done schooling the reigning scoring champ up and down the New York City hardwood (he and the collective onlookers may remember it differently), Melo chatted with us about the evolution of the NBA style game, his famously awful Draft Day suit (it&amp;#039;s number three here), possibly designing a watch with IWC, and what he&amp;#039;s doing more of to prepare for the upcoming NBA season. ESQUIRE.COM: Nice kicks, sir. Where&amp;#039;d you pick those up? CARMELO ANTHONY: They&amp;#039;re Tinkers. Tinker Hatfield, the guy who designed Nike&amp;#039;s Jordans for more than twenty years, sent them over to me. ESQ: What do the boys at Syracuse think about you wearing Oregon University sneakers? CA: They&amp;#039;re cool with it, actually. I put a picture of them up about a year ago, so they know. Plus it was a gift, and I&amp;#039;m not one to turn down gifts. ESQ: You&amp;#039;re obviously one of the NBA&amp;#039;s style icons, but who do you think are some of the best dressed players in the league besides yourself? CA: That&amp;#039;s tough, man. Everybody has their own very unique type of style. LeBron has his look, Dwyane Wade is really fashionable, and Russell Westbrook takes it to a whole other level. So those are the guys. But now everyone has started to get more into the style game; Amare, Tyson, and the rest of my teammates have started dressing the part, too, so it&amp;#039;s getting more competitive. ESQ: What got you interested in style? CA: I&amp;#039;ve always been interested. At a young age you always wanted to have the nice stuff, the best stuff, the stuff that looked good, the stuff that at the end of the day the girls were going to enjoy looking at, and that just carried over to when I got older. But I didn&amp;#039;t have any money back in the day, so then I got some money and everything changed. ESQ: Now that you&amp;#039;ve grown more style-conscious, do ever wish you had a do-over on your Draft Day suit? CA: Yeah, it was terrible. Now that I look back, it was just... terrible. But it was the timing of everything. Fashion wasn&amp;#039;t as much of a priority when we were eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. You weren&amp;#039;t really thinking about wearing a suit. If I was being drafted now I would keep it simple. A simple two-button suit and that&amp;#039;s it. ESQ: How do you think Stern&amp;#039;s installation of the 2005 Dress Code contributed to the NBA style renaissance? CA: You know, at first we didn&amp;#039;t really understand it. We thought of it as a punishment. But as we started getting older and more mature and more comfortable with ourselves, and as the fashion game started to change, we gravitated toward it and eventually ran with it as players. Before the dress code it was just show up and wear whatever you want; sweats and T-shirts. But you wouldn&amp;#039;t wear just anything you want to the office, so that&amp;#039;s how we look at it now. ESQ: So why did you join up with Degree for the Do:More campaign? CA: We actually started working with Degree to inspire people to do more in their everyday lives, and to try to push themselves to the limits and do something that they probably never thought they&amp;#039;d do ever, ever in their lives. It was all about pushing that limit and seeing how far you can push yourself. ESQ: I know you&amp;#039;ve become an avid boxer, but what else have you been doing more of to prepare for the upcoming NBA season? CA: I did some pretty unorthodox training this summer. We did some running in the ocean on the beach down in Puerto Rico, which is harder than anything I&amp;#039;ve ever done. It&amp;#039;s different than just running in a pool. It&amp;#039;s tough man. ESQ: I saw that you also recently partnered with IWC watches. CA: Yeah, it&amp;#039;s something that we&amp;#039;ve been going back and forth on for so long, and it finally came to fruition, so I&amp;#039;m excited about that. ESQ: Are you operating as the face of the brand or are you ready to get your hands dirty and design something of your own? CA: Designing a watch is definitely the next step. I want to start working on an actual timepiece that&amp;#039;s my own design and then start on some other fun stuff with those guys, whether it&amp;#039;s doing an accessory line with them and some books and videos. Just making it more fun and trying to connect those dots between the older generation and the younger generation. ESQ: Any hints as to what the Carmelo Timepiece will look like? CA: I haven&amp;#039;t put anything on paper, but I&amp;#039;ve definitely been thinking about it. There are a lot of ideas on my desk that we&amp;#039;ve been talking about and working on for a long while. We have talks going on right now about some exciting stuff that I can&amp;#039;t discuss right now, but I&amp;#039;ll let you guys know when the time comes. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/style/interviews/a24984/carmelo-anthony-interview-1013/>