I owned a pair of the original Air Jordan basketball shoes, but at the distance of more than 30 years I can’t recall how I managed to acquire them.

Possibly it involved the proceeds from picking zucchini, the most distasteful task for which I’ve ever received a paycheck.

(Actually it might be the most distasteful task I’ve been involved with, wages or no wages.)

I do know that the flashy footwear didn’t boost my vertical jump.

Which then, as now, is as easily measured with a credit card as with a yardstick.

Not that I expected to acquire even a smidgen of Michael Jordan’s prodigious abilities simply by donning his signature red, black and white high-tops.

Hand me a Fender Stratocaster — please, I’d love to own one — and I wouldn’t come any closer to replicating Jimi Hendrix’s or Eric Clapton’s licks than I do now with a much cheaper electric guitar.

(I struggle mightily just to bash out the comparatively rudimentary chords of The Ramones, although even badly played they make a pleasant racket.)

I had all but forgotten those shoes, which I must have scrapped before I went off to college, until my memory was reawakened in the way that it so often is — I read a book.

“Glory Days,” to be specific.

Although it’s the subtitle that really explains what author L. Jon Wertheim, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated magazine, was up to with the book published earlier this year.

“The summer of 1984 and the 90 days that changed sports and culture forever.”

A bold claim, to be sure.

But over 24 chapters and 294 pages, Wertheim assembles a compelling case for his assertion that this distant summer was littered with milestones whose significance lingers yet, with the 21st century better than a fifth of the way gone.

As I mentioned, I don’t remember the particulars of my obtaining my Air Jordans.

It definitely didn’t happen in the summer of 1984 — or any other season in that year, come to that.

Air Jordans didn’t go on sale to the general public until April 1, 1985, and I was hardly the sort to merit the honor of getting a pair before almost everyone else.

Wertheim’s book is the sort of popular culture history that I particularly enjoy, with its relatively narrow focus.

Sometimes an author delves deeply into a single event, or a band or an athlete or a place, and endeavors to explain why that one thing, or one person, was so influential.

Wertheim chooses as his fulcrum point one season, a roughly 90-day period.

Jordan is a key figure — perhaps the key figure — in Wertheim’s narrative.

It was an inspired choice.

And not as obvious a choice as it might seem today, when Jordan has long since attained a legendary status rivaled by few athletes from his or any other generation.

In the summer of 1984, by contrast, Jordan, having decided to forego his senior season at the University of North Carolina, was trying out for the U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team for the Los Angeles games, and preparing for the NBA draft.

Possibly the most piquant anecdote to illustrate Jordan’s relative anonymity then — and certainly the one that resonates most with Portland Trail Blazers fans — is that the Blazers, with the No. 2 pick in the draft, passed on Jordan in favor of Sam Bowie, the injury-plagued Kentucky center.

(The next generation of Blazer fans would gain their own sorrowful story after the 2007 draft, when Portland picked another 7-footer with lower limb problems, Greg Oden, over Hall of Fame shoo-in Kevin Durant.)

Wertheim returns to Jordan several times in the book, between chapters examining such landmarks from that summer as the rivalry between the Celtics’ Larry Bird and the Lakers’ Magic Johnson, the dominating performances on the tennis court of Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe, the Summer Olympics in L.A., and the brief resurgence of the Chicago Cubs.

As the book’s subtitle indicates, Wertheim doesn’t limit his nostalgia to sports.

He also devotes one chapter to “The Karate Kid,” a movie I must have seen in the theater that summer although my memory in that regard is as murky as with the acquisition of the Air Jordans. Another chapter focuses on the Jackson brothers’ (Michael, of course, being the most famous of the sextet by a country mile) “Victory Tour.”

Wertheim deftly sets his main topics against the backdrop of American society, weaving among them brief references to the political and economic situation. Ronald Reagan, naturally, comes up occasionally, as he was that summer in the final year of his first term and campaigning for what would be an electoral rout of Walter Mondale in November 1984.

I was both entertained and educated as I read “Glory Days.” For instance, if I ever knew this I had long since forgotten that Dutch, my favorite member of the Cobra Kai dojo in “The Karate Kid” due mainly to his inimitable neck roll warm up, is Steve McQueen’s son, Chad. This fact pleased me far more than it ought to have done.

But mostly I was surprised by how few distinct memories I had not only from that summer, but from the epochal events that Wertheim writes about with precision and eloquence.

I was, to be fair to myself, 13 that summer.

And 13-year-old boys, whatever their attributes might be, aren’t as a rule dedicated diarists or especially deep thinkers.

Still and all, I was a bit chagrined to realize how few details I had retained.

And I don’t ascribe this scarcity to my failing memory.

I’m certain that I simply wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on. This strikes me as passing strange because, as a budding teenager, I had at least an average affinity for sports, music and movies.

I can’t figure out what I was so engrossed in during that long ago summer that kept me from forming more specific memories of such events as the Olympics and the NBA draft, the omnipotence of Prince’s “Purple Rain” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.”

But I’m pretty sure girls were involved.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.