On board with Solemates owner Paul Fireman

BORN: 1944, CAMBRIDGE, MASS, US
LIVES: FLORIDA, US
WIFE: PHYLLIS
CHILDREN: THREE
BOATS: SOLEMATES AND A LITTLE HARBOR 38

The name of his boats bears explanation. He is married to his childhood sweetheart, Phyllis – they have known each other since they met at a youth community centre when they were 12 – and she came up with the name. Given their long life together and his business background, it could not be a more fitting name.  Fireman’s professional success, although he does not volunteer much about it during our conversation, is well known, and much of it is linked to the Reebok sports brand.

He turned this relatively obscure company – established as an offshoot of a British family business in 1958 – into one of the world’s best-known athletic shoe brands after he acquired the distribution rights for the US market in 1979. Only a couple of years later, it was a household name, and by 1984, Fireman had acquired the whole company.

Reebok was the first company to introduce aerobics shoes for women, became the go-to brand for tennis stars Boris Becker and John McEnroe and outfitted, among others, the athletes of the Soviet Union in the Mikhail Gorbachev years (more on that later). Fireman steered its fortunes off and on for 26 years until he sold the brand to adidas in 2005.

Reebok wasn’t his first experience in business. He also spent a few years selling fishing tackle, although he’s never been a fisherman (“I don’t like fishing,” he says), but he did seem predestined to run a shoe company. Born on Valentine’s Day in 1944, he grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts, a working-class area of New England known as “shoe town”. (During the Civil War, Brockton was America’s largest shoe producer, and it remained a shoe manufacturing centre well into the 20th century.)

“I am proud of it,” he says of his origins, “and I still have many of the same friends. You know that,” he says to Connor, who has been listening. “Absolutely,” Connor says. “I see you happiest when you’re with your original core friends. Just being real, being Bostonian.”

Despite his city roots, Fireman gravitated to the water. The first boat he ever owned was a “Boston Whaler type” when he lived in Cape Cod. The boat marked the beginning of an unsinkable passion.  But before he owned boats, he was a member of the Boston Harbor Sailing Club, where he competed in Solings – open keelboats that demand skill and precision. “It’s where I learned as much about boating,” he says. 

As a boat enthusiast and sailor, he followed the career of fellow New Englander, naval architect and sailor Ted Hood. Hood built boats under the Little Harbor brand in Rhode Island. Fireman acquired a 12-metre Little Harbor power boat, “my first big boat. Very, very nice boat.”

To this day, he keeps it in New Jersey, a piece of history that has been part of his life for more years than he can remember. “My passion was sailing, but I could not get my wife to sail, so I got a motorboat instead.”

It was through Andrew Winch that he started speaking to Feadship about a custom yacht. He and broker Bill Sanderson (then with the Palm Beach office of Camper & Nicholsons) had scoured shipyards for a boat they could transform in a shorter time frame, but could not find one.

The first Solemates ended up being a 52-metre, 750GT custom yacht built at de Vries. The interior was by Andrew Winch and the Firemans’ Boston-based designer, the late Judith Ross. Fireman was also very much involved. “I like building. I like designing. Because my whole life I have been in design.”

For instance, he pushed the yard to modify the air ventilation system for the engine room to avoid the bulky air handlers on the main deck. His solution, which consisted of multiple ducts in different sizes with fans to draw the air up, worked and saved space, but has never been replicated as far as he knows.

Delivered in 1998, the first Solemates was the first yacht Feadship built to meet the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) safety specifications (in addition to SOLAS) at the owner’s request.

“The boats have been fabulous. We’ve had some wonderful experiences. How can you not love it?”

In 2010, he moved to a larger Lürssen, a good opportunity as it was already under construction. He went to the German yard and recalls meeting Peter Lürssen and seeing one of the giant vessels the German shipyard is known for.

The 60-metre, 1,182GT yacht that he was there to buy was already on the cusp of being too large for his taste. He simply could not comprehend why anyone would bother with a boat so much bigger still. It accommodated a full orchestra and concert stage. “I don’t understand why you need a 300-, 350-, 400-foot [yacht]. I don’t know what you do with it all,” he says.

It was a one-time deal, but it was memorable. “We won,” he says, “in the cruising category, of course.” The experience left lasting memories, and there have been a couple of sailing team reunions since, including last summer, to remember the fears and the thrills.

“A 52-footer is really a speck, a needle head in the middle of an ocean, and we ran in some rough weather at some point,” he recalls when I ask him about the experience. “You either got scared, or you got numb. I got numb. The race we won in 96 hours and change. You race to the finish line –wherever it may be – and then you motor into Bermuda, so we motored into the [Hamilton]Princess docks. It was great.”

While they were riding high on adrenaline upon arrival, they were also spent. With nine crew and only six spots on the boat, three of them headed to the hotel. “I remember going in the shower and almost falling over. I was as dizzy as can be. I fell asleep for a couple of hours.”

The race had been tough on everyone. One of them, “a real tough guy, who had been in the US Navy for two, three years”, was sick for two days. But all was forgotten by the time they walked down Hamilton’s main street to the yacht club and celebrated with other racers, all slimmer than they were just a few days before but ready to take on the next challenge.

Winning the race in their class was quite a feat, as he came to find out during a lunch with New York Yacht Club members when he applied for membership. The vetting of new members is a lengthy process.

Normally, they make you go office to office through the city. I told them I can meet with you, but I don’t have time for this [meeting around the city],” he recalls saying. “I was running a fairly good-sized business,” he adds by way of an explanation. So they agreed to meet at the yacht club over lunch. “They all knew each other. The head guy from Sports Illustrated was there, the guy from this company, that company was there, all sailors,” he says. “They were talking among each other.

As they traded tales, Fireman understood that no one had come in better than 12th after years of racing. Finally, he says, they remembered they had a guest and turned their attention to him, asking how he had done in the Bermuda race. “We did good,” he replies sheepishly. “I did not want to tell them at first.”

When he admitted to coming first, “in the cruising category, of course”, they were stunned. “They were all good sailors,” he says, acknowledging that so much can go wrong in a race and so much depends on a perfect set of decisions and circumstances. “You have to get the eddy right, the winds right, the stars right,” he says.

“I had a navigator there. At the time, he was around 55. Wonderful guy. He had done [the race] 16 times at that time; the best he came in was 14th to 15th. They gave him a special award for navigation. And when he won that, it was like his whole life was complete.”

While his love for competition and sailing feels real, he’s also found joy on trips around the world. He took his family to the Galápagos Islands in 2011 on board the Lürssen.

“The Galápagos were exceptional, unique. We got millions of pictures there.” A pelican was a regular visitor to the yacht’s swim platform, as were the sharks. Despite their presence, he followed a local dive guide to explore the world below the surface. “There was a lot going on down there,” he says. “Whitetips – they were big. Everything looks 20 per cent bigger.”

Throughout his travels, Fireman, his family and friends visited some of the world’s most exclusive spots. He remembers a star-studded party on a terrace overlooking the bay of Monaco.

Not his cup of tea, perhaps, but he enjoyed it anyway. And there was the time a crew member from another yacht came aboard after they pulled into their slip in Port Hercules to present them with a dinner invitation. Fireman had plans for his guests and declined.

With a nod, the crew member left but promptly reappeared, offering this time afterdinner coffee and the chance to meet their “special guest”. They felt they could not refuse a second time. When they got on board, they noticed men wearing “short sleeves, Hawaiian-style shirts and wiffles [caps]. I knew they were bodyguards.”

The host was a tall man in a white linen suit clutching a drink who turned out to be the top executive at the time from construction giant Bechtel. Fireman and his friend, a historian, immediately recognised his guest – the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. Reebok was outfitting their athletic teams, and he wanted to meet Fireman.

However memorable such experiences were, he prefers the out-of-the way spots. “My wife and I have simple tastes,” he says, adding that she is the best cook he knows. “Better than any chef!”

“The boats have been fabulous,” Fireman says, in a reflective mood after telling a few more stories. “I’ve enjoyed every bit of them. We’ve had some great trips and wonderful experiences. How can you not love it?”

First published in the December 2025 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.