“PUT the whole $500 000 behind Jordan,” Nike’s “grassroots and college guy”, Sonny Vaccaro, recommended to the entity’s marketing executive, Rob Strasser, during a strategizing assembly on ‘how we’re gonna dig ourselves out of deep s – – t’ in Beaverton, Oregon in early spring, to wager its entire basketball marketing budget for the 1984 season on an unproven shooting guard rookie who’d been playing for the University of North Carolina Tar Heels in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship before being drafted by the Chicago Bulls in the National Basketball Association.
A habitual gambler of Italian extraction who’d grown up in the steel town of Trafford, Pennsylvania where he mentions that gambling was a social ritual, Vaccaro continued – á la the very poker player he was, going convincingly “all in” – sans a hint of boondoggling when, to Strasser putting it to him whether he’d bet his job on his wager, he retorted: “You’re damn right I will. And you can hold me to it.”
The interloper at the rendezvous, somehow, the conviction of Vaccaro’s instinct in pining for a player who wasn’t even yet in the pro ranks, convinced even Nike’s honcho Phil Knight to sign Michael Jordan onto its roster.
Vaccaro’s confidence was calculated risk considering that beginning around 1982, Reebok had supplanted Nike as No.1 in sports goods market share and when the brand identified by the swoosh logo plummeted to a more than 60% quarterly loss during which its stock tumbled to less than $10 a share – it shed more than 300 jobs in what was referred to as the “Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.”
‘Twas against such a backdrop that Strasser announced to agents representing Nike athletes the cancellation of dozens of NBA endorsement deals – and had invited Vaccaro to Oregon for his input on the sporting manufacturer’s pre-draft pro-player endorsement discussion ahead of that year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
With a background in basketball recruiting and a history of promoting college basketball through his co-founding of The Dapper Dan Roundball Classic – the first national high school All-Star basketball game whose alumni, et al., comprised Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal and Patrick Ewing, and which would endure for 43 years – Vaccaro had gotten on board at Nike in 1978 after he had arrived at its offices with the intention of showing co-founder Phil Knight and Strasser samples of shoes he had requested a hometown cobbler to make in the hope that the sportswear manufacturer could develop the designs for mass production.
Alas, the universe had a wonderful fortuitous twist on his original mission as his influential involvement in grassroots basketball secured him an unexpected job with the putative title, head of college basketball, with the brand.
And his hunch, delivered at the Nike bosberaad, about Jordan that, “he’ll be an even bigger hero when he wins a gold medal this summer”, would, not long thereafter be proven on the dot when the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles translated into a coming-out party for the then 21-yearold Michael Jordan, who led Team USA – which was the last amateur-level U.S. team to win an Olympic championship in men’s basketball – in scoring (accounting for 17.1 double-figures) and dazzled the worldwide viewing audience with his athleticism and speed.
The task of recruiting Jordan into the Nike stable would fall on Vaccaro himself as he initiated a tetea-tete with the athlete during a pre-Olympic training camp at a Santa Monica restaurant at which he unpacked the dimensions of the package – which would make the basketballer the centerpiece of Nike’s brand marketing – the player could expect. (Unprecedented in the NBA, the endorsement would include a custom designed signature shoe plus a complete line of apparel and products emblazoned with the Jordan name – with royalties for every shoe sold due unto him.)
Although he informed Vaccaro that “you should know, I’ll probably sign with Adidas” during the lunch encounter – Jordan would eventually signup with Nike on a deal comprising of a signing bonus of $200 000; a base guarantee of $250 000 a year for five years; a 20c-per-pair royalty on a Jordan line of shoes (5% of the brand’s annual revenue – Jordan receives around $330 million annually); and $1 million in year one in marketing and advertising.
(Vaccaro describes the $5 billion-a-year partnership as a landmark moment in sports marketing history – with the advent of the Air Jordan sparking a meteoric turnaround in Nike’s fortunes.) What more, the Air Jordan commercial which Spike Lee produced would elevate Jordan to immortal status.
Legends and Soles is the tale of the hotshot gambler Jordan’s nicknamed “Vegas Sonny” – together with whom the Chicago Bulls demigod once played non-stop Gin Rummy card game for an entire 9-hour flight from Europe to the United States. It is a memoir of “the godfather of summer basketball” for whom “gambling is one of the arteries in my life” who even married the love of his life, Pam, at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
Having started out developing strategy for Nike’s involvement in basketball and becoming an advertising executive, Vaccaro’s momentous relationship with the entity would endure for fourteen years until he was suddenly dismissed for unethical manner of conducting business.
This anecdote is but one of numerous about the son of Italian immigrants who realized his American Dream through persuasive gab to become “The Guy Who Bet His Job on Getting Nike to Sign Michael Jordan.”
This is the narrative of the “Steel Town Kid” whose story about how he signed Michael Jordan to Nike and the Air Jordan brand has been made into the 2023 film, Air, by Hollywood besties, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon – in which the latter plays Vaccaro in the movie.
The tome is co-authored with Armen Keteyian, a Connecticut-based multi Emmy Award-winning journalist and author of New York Times bestsellers.
A trade paperback, Legends and Soles is published by Harper Collins UK and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R440.
Top image (Legends and Soles author Sonny Vaccaro limned with Michael Jordan, the basketball legend whose association with Nike he initiated).
