It’s been 16 years since Michael Jordan played his last professional basketball game, but he still makes more money than every current NBA player when it comes to sneaker earnings—and the rankings aren’t even close: Jordan made $130 million from his Nike in 2019, Forbes reports. Here’s the story behind why Michael Jordan didn’t actually want to sign with Nike at first.

Michael Jordan ‘s sneaker earnings are four times that of second-place LeBron James, who made $32 million from his sneaker deal. That’s also a lot more than third-place Kevin Durant, who made $26 million in 2019. It’s hard to imagine Jordan with anything other than Nike these days, but he didn’t always want to wear the now-iconic Swoosh. In 1984, the year he was drafted third overall by the Chicago Bulls, Jordan set his sights on Adidas.

In the 1980s, Nike was known only as a performance sneaker brand. The most popular shoe in the NBA at the time was Converse, which featured superstars like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. With a roster of big names already under its belt, the company couldn’t afford to give a rookie like Jordan a run for his money. “They told me, ‘We can’t imagine you getting ahead of them,’” Jordan recalled in “The Last Dance,” a 10-part documentary series that chronicled his and the Bulls’ pursuit of a sixth championship in 1998.

While Jordan preferred Adidas, his agent, David Falk, wanted him to go with Nike. “Adidas really wasn’t interested in Jordan at the time,” said Falk, who represented Jordan from 1984 to 2003. “We couldn’t do it at the time, so I wanted Michael to go with Nike because they were an up-and-coming brand.”

Jordan, then 21, was stubborn. “I couldn’t even get him on a plane to go see the Nike campus,” Falk recalls. “So I called his parents.” As Jordan recalls, his mother pushed him to plan, and Nike eventually offered him a deal that a rookie like MJ couldn’t refuse. “Back then, the best guys were probably getting $100,000 or so,” Nike CEO Howard White says in the documentary. “He was getting $250,000. It was like, What are you going to pay him? A young rookie who hasn’t done anything yet? You have to erase that from your memory.”

As part of the deal, Jordan also got his own shoe line: Air Jordan. It didn’t take long for the brand to take off. “Nike’s expectation when we signed was that by the end of the fourth year, they were hoping to sell $3 million worth of Air Jordans and make a profit, but surprisingly, in the first year, we made $126 million,” Falk says.