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Nearly 50 years later, you can still hear it in Sonny Vaccaro’s voice, an unmistakable confidence and certainty that is something much more than hindsight bias.

An idea that proved to be revolutionary was something that, to Vaccaro, was simple, straightforward and obvious, even if others around him couldn’t conceive of it.

In order to transform a small company primarily focused on running shoes into a preeminent  brand that would come to dominate all levels of basketball in the United States, Vaccaro believed an initial, all-important step had to be taken by Nike – it had to pay college basketball coaches.

“I just had total belief in what my ideas were,” Vaccaro told me late last month.

He had good reason to feel that way. With those words he said to Phil Knight and other Nike executives, Vaccaro forever changed college basketball and college sports as an enterprise.

Vaccaro has re-entered the national consciousness with the release last month of ‘Air’, a film that chronicles Nike’s pursuit and ultimate signing of Michael Jordan, with Matt Damon portraying Vaccaro. To this day, it’s what the 83-year-old former sports marketing executive is most known for. He’s the man who convinced a company to stake its future on a 21 year old from North Carolina who had yet to play an NBA game and wouldn’t even be one of the first two picks in that year’s NBA Draft. It paid off in a way perhaps even Vaccaro didn’t think was imaginable. Jordan became a singular athletic and cultural figure worldwide that, maybe more than anyone else, helped transform Nike into the $200 billion behemoth it is today.

It’s at the college level, however, where one of his other most impactful legacies resides. He’s the man who invented and executed the deals between shoe companies and men’s college basketball coaches – and later, shoe companies and entire athletic departments – that fundamentally reshaped the sport and has helped drive the industry’s economic model in the decades since. It’s an arrangement that made all sides wealthy, except, of course, the players wearing the shoes and apparel, an inequity Vaccaro has dedicated the better part of the past 20 years to rectify.

It’s a concept that radically changed his life, Nike’s fortunes in the world of basketball and how the college game functions. And it all started with a leap of faith and a flight to Portland.

It was all a dream…until it became very real

Of all the potential people who could have become such an omnipresent force in the world of basketball, Vaccaro was an unconventional choice.

He wasn’t a star player – in fact, he never even played the sport – nor was he a prominent coach or administrator. But rather quickly, he showed that he had certain traits that transcended whatever a more conventional background in the sport could have provided him.

While teaching special education at a high school in his hometown of Trafford, Pa., a working-class borough about 20 miles east of downtown Pittsburgh, a 24-year-old Vaccaro sketched out a plan for an all-star high school game that would bring the best youth basketball players from around the country to Western Pennsylvania. Dubbed the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, it debuted in 1965, 12 years before the first McDonald’s All-American Game. For many years, it was the marquee showcase for the top high-school talent in the nation.

Vaccaro ended up leaving his teaching position, not only to run the Roundball Classic, but to take on a series of other occupations. He was a recruiter for a sports agent and later became an agent himself. He relocated to Las Vegas, where he was an active sports gambler (his younger brother, Jimmy, is a legendary Vegas bookmaker).

Soon, Vaccaro’s attention shifted to something else in the realm of sports – shoes. He enlisted an Italian shoemaker to craft nine different prototypes for footwear that he drew up, including a sandal-like basketball shoe. He got the ear of executives at Nike, who he flew out on his own dime to meet with at their Oregon headquarters in 1977.

The prototypes were an entry point to a larger, more consequential conversation. Vaccaro had mentioned his work with the Roundball Classic, which had made him an influential figure nationally in basketball circles. After doing research on him, Nike arranged another meeting with Vaccaro. This time, they paid to fly him out. Once he arrived, they asked him a direct question – how do we get involved in basketball?

That year, Nike brought in $71 million in sales, but only 10% of that came from its basketball shoes. At the time, Converse was the dominant brand in the sport, with 80% of the 1,150 four-year colleges with a men’s basketball team wearing its shoes. Knight and the rest of Nike’s leadership hoped to change that, but it didn’t know how to go about doing it. So they asked Vaccaro, the man who had deep connections with virtually every coach in college basketball due to his involvement with the Roundball Classic.

He had a step-by-step proposal. Nike would pay coaches as consultants, give them shoes, t-shirts and other apparel emblazoned with the company logo for their players and assistants to wear and get the kind of publicity even the most deft advertising campaign couldn’t provide. NCAA rules prohibited companies from giving free shoes directly to athletes or paying those players to wear them, but the organization’s dense rulebook didn’t say anything against paying coaches. In that, Vaccaro found a loophole – coaches got money, college athletes got free shoes and Nike got exposure.

“Can we do that?” they asked Vaccaro. “Could we get in trouble? What about the NCAA?”

“What the hell does the NCAA got to do with this?” Vaccaro recalled saying.

Vaccaro had seen it work on a smaller scale. George Case from Pro-Keds had come by the Roundball Classic and given a few of the participants a pair of shoes. For those players, the shoes ceased to be footwear; rather, they were a badge of honor, a piece of physical proof that they had made it to a prestigious stage with the other top high school players in the country. By wearing Nikes, college players could potentially not only serve as walking (and running and jumping) billboards, but could develop an attachment to the brand they might have not otherwise had.

But before Nike brought Vaccaro aboard, Bob Woodell, who ran Nike’s shoe factory in Exeter, N.H., had a suggestion.

“Let me run an FBI check and find out if this guy is Mafia,” he said, according to a 1992 story from the Los Angeles Times.

Vaccaro was hired as a consultant for $500 a month and was given a stack of contracts by Nike executive Rob Strasser to have coaches sign. Under the deal, they’d get paid for giving Nike clinics for high school coaches and players. While the contracts did not require a coach to outfit his players in Nikes, the program got free pairs.

Now, it was on Vaccaro to follow through and enlist coaches on Nike’s side. He ventured out on the mission with a vision, one that legendary Georgetown coach John Thompson detailed in I Came as a Shadow, his excellent autobiography he wrote with Jesse Washington. As Thompson noted:

“Sonny sensed the growing influence of basketball, which was not obvious in 1977. The NCAA tournament was only third-two teams. The NBA Finals aired on tape delay. Outside the inner city, almost nobody wore sneakers for fashion. Sonny’s genius was to embrace the Black element of the game, and to recognize that Black kids set trends for what is cool throughout America.”

A movement is born and a game is changed

As he left Oregon, Vaccaro knew exactly where to turn for the first proverbial domino that would send many others into motion.

Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Vaccaro had developed a close bond with UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian, who by the mid-1970s had built the Runnin’ Rebels into a national power. That relationship grew even tighter with Vaccaro living in Las Vegas and having that much more access to Tarkanian and his program.

In his friend, Vaccaro saw a perfect starting point.

“I don’t think there were 10 college coaches in America – and I’m including all of those so-called hall of fame guys – who were bigger as a personality than Tarkanian,” Vaccaro said to me. “Tarkanian had the balls to be the original answer to the NCAA’s injustices…Jerry was always an enemy. He fought back.”

Tarkanian quickly accepted. He wouldn’t be the only one to do so, as Vaccaro ventured further into fertile, unexplored territory.

Basketball programs had contracts with shoe companies previously, but those agreements with the likes of Converse, Adidas, Pro-Keds and Puma only provided so much. As Thompson recalled, Georgetown would pay for its shoes, clothing and other apparel in its deal with Converse, with maybe a bit of a markdown on the retail price or a free piece of clothing every now and then. Those sneaker companies would pay him for speaking at camps and clinics, but it would typically only be for about $50 or $100.

Given those circumstances, Vaccaro found a captive audience. If there were any problems that arose, it came from believing Vaccaro’s pitch to be too good to be true. Surely, there had to be a catch, right? A meeting at LaGuardia Airport with Jim Valvano, then the coach at Iona, epitomized many of the interactions Vaccaro had in those early stages.

“They were shocked,” Vaccaro told me. “Jimmy’s actual quote was ‘What do I have to do – rob a bank or throw a game?’” 

Turns out, he didn’t have to do either.

Shortly after wrapping up with Tarkanian, Vaccaro signed Norm Ellenberger of New Mexico, a close personal friend of Tarkanian’s who Vaccaro admittedly only knew so well. From there, he flew to New York, rented a car and drove up and down the Eastern Seaboard with no hardened strategy beyond visiting as many coaches that he knew as he could.

Quickly, the list started to grow. There was Valvano. Then it was off to Philadelphia, where he signed Jimmy Lynam of St. Joseph’s and Don Casey of Temple. Farther south, he got an agreement from Maryland’s Lefty Driesell before venturing up to a camp run by Duke’s Bill Foster in the Pocono Mountains, where the two came to a deal. By adding the Terrapins and Blue Devils, the latter of which played in the national championship in 1978, Vaccaro secured what he described as a pair of coups. And that was before he signed Thompson, who was in the early stages of making Georgetown a dominant presence in the sport.

Later on, he traveled to Boston, where he signed Northeastern and its coach, Jim Calhoun, before making the one-mile trek northwest to Boston University, where he added the Terriers and their dynamic young coach, Rick Pitino. Both under 40 at the time, the two men are now enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame. They were clients to add to a growing rolodex, but more than that, their inclusion spoke to Vaccaro’s savvy. He was able to see traits, qualities and potential within coaches and players that few others could.

“There’s something about me that has a feeling for people, whether they can play or not play or whatever,” Vaccaro told me. “There were 1,000 other guys I could have taken or given the money to. But you’re talking about personalities.”

Word of the contracts rapidly spread among coaches, many of whom were eager to jump at the opportunity (and, of course, the money). Vaccaro was soon being connected to coaches with whom he previously had largely non-existent relationships. When a newspaper story about the Nike deals incorrectly cited that Iowa, not Iona, was among the company’s signees, Hawkeyes coach Lute Olson called Vaccaro about working something out. If he was going to take heat for it publicly, he may as well actually have the deal and all the spoils that come with it.

“What I basically did was take advantage of the greed of the NCAA and the schools,” Vaccaro said to me. “They didn’t give a shit that I paid those guys money.”

Vaccaro’s one-man signing extravaganza across the country paid off. By the end of the first year of offering them, Nike had signed 80 coaches. All coaches had deals of at least two years, though a select handful had four-year contracts, with Nike initially paying no more than $5,000 a year.

In those early weeks and months working for the company, Vaccaro said Nike didn’t trust him fully. They wanted him to pay the coaches up front before they’d wire him the money back to his account in Las Vegas. As eager as so many coaches were to put pen to paper, Vaccaro’s pitch often came with a caveat.

“I had to tell the coaches ‘Give me three days before you cash this,’” Vaccaro said.

Building a machine…before trying to take parts of it down

Whether it was for Vaccaro, Nike or college basketball as a whole, those early days on the road changed everything.

As competition from other companies worked to cut into Nike’s head start, contract sizes swelled. In 1982, Nike began offering company stock as compensation to a number of high-profile coaches like Thompson. By 1991, the company’s stock rose 1,000% from its price of about $5 per share late in 1982.

In 1985, one of the dreams that was first discussed in meetings with Vaccaro at Nike headquarters in the late 1970s came to fruition. That year, all four of the men’s Final Four teams – Georgetown, Villanova, St. John’s and Memphis State – were Nike schools.

Soon, interest in those contracts stretched beyond men’s basketball. In 1988, Nike signed Miami to an all-school deal, a move that had first been proposed by Hurricanes athletic director Sam Jankovich. Football was Miami’s main spot during that era and though Nike wasn’t making football shoes at that time, the Hurricanes plastered their facilities with Nike signage and the university’s bookstore sold exclusively Nike products.

The contracts weren’t without criticisms, primarily from those in academic circles who saw them as problematic and even unseemly.

"The whole issue raises very serious questions," Maryland President William E. Kirwan said to the Washington Post in 1991. "There are questions of conflict of interest. The whole image of a coach getting a large shoe contract. Players having to use a certain kind of shoes. Matters of ethics and appropriate compensation are all involved."

The link between universities and shoe companies came to a notable though perhaps predictable head in 2017, when an FBI investigation found that Adidas had funneled money to the families of top-ranked men’s basketball recruits that its clients were pursuing. Those companies, be it Adidas or anyone else, have a significant financial stake in the success of these schools and their programs. Weeks before it was ensnared in the college basketball corruption scandal, Louisville signed a 10-year, $160 million extension to its contract with Adidas while in 2015, Texas signed a 15-year, $250 million deal with Nike. And those are just two examples.

Over time, Vaccaro became far less concerned about who was getting the money than who wasn’t – the athletes whose achievements made these contracts so valuable in the first place.

Though rules prevented it, he had said in his early meetings with Nike that he’d prefer to just give the money directly to the players given that they were the ones who wore the shoes and whose connection to the product would make others want to buy it.

“I would have paid high school kids when they were out of their mother’s womb if they could play ball,” Vaccaro told me. “That was my theory. But the only way I could get our shoes on them was to pay the coaches who would naturally make the kids wear the shoes and sweatsuits. Everything would be Nike.”

Since the turn of the century, Vaccaro has become an outspoken advocate against the NCAA and its amateur model, doing so long before such a stance had mainstream support. About 15 years ago, he began calling around to various former athletes to see if they’d be interested in being the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA. Eventually, he found a taker in former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon, who became a part of the landmark O’Bannon v. NCAA case.

When examining the current state of college athletics – most notably, with players now able to earn money off their name, image and likeness – it’s impossible not to see Vaccaro’s fingerprints.

It’s an odyssey unlike any in the history of college sports, one that began with an idea and a determination to see it through.

“It was the greatest marketing deal ever,” Vaccaro said of the shoe deals he signed.

After finishing that thought, Vaccaro took a brief pause.

“Until Michael came along,” he said.

(Photos: Getty Images, the Vaccaro family)

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