I saw the other people involved-they told me about the actors, “You’re going to have the crème de la crème.” We agreed to do the movie.Īlex comes up to Palm Springs, we get lunch, and he starts telling me about his idea. But Mandalay Bay and Sky Dance, this was major.
I knew that Matt and Ben were gonna be involved but they weren’t officially involved-they were still signing the contracts. Well, the end result was, in The Last Dance, all you could see was my rear end. I was dubious because I hadn’t talked to anybody at Nike for years. They sent a whole crew to Palm Springs and I talked for three and a half hours. We got double-crossed by the people in The Last Dance.
There’ve been a lot of things written that aren’t necessarily correct about me.
Vaccaro hasn’t just advocated for athletes in the shoe industry, though-he cofounded the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, a showcase for high school players, in the 1960s launched the ABCD basketball camp, to help promote the country’s best players, in the 1980s and scored a major win for college athletes in 2014 after leading a major case against the NCAA that resulted in college athletes being paid for the use of their names and images in video games and television broadcasts. (Adidas ended up offering James less money, lining his deal with incentives instead James signed with Nike.) Vaccaro resigned shortly after. (According to one estimate, Jordan made over $1 billion from Nike by 2020.) In the decades since, Vaccaro was fired from Nike, allegedly investigated by the FBI as part of an investigation into corporate espionage, hired by Adidas (where he signed Kobe Bryant as a high school student), and then, according to Vaccaro, burned by Adidas over what he says was supposed to be a $100 million deal with LeBron James. The deal, which gave Jordan a piece of Air Jordan profits, catapulted Nike to the front of the shoe industry and revolutionized sports marketing. To some people, the sneaker industry might not seem very sexy-but Sonny Vaccaro, the man who introduced Michael Jordan to Nike and helped broker the landmark deal in 1984, has blazed an operatic arc in his career, filled with hundreds of millions of dollars in deals, world superstars, and gut-wrenching betrayals.īy befriending Jordan’s mother, Deloris, in the early 1980s, the Trafford, Pennsylvania, native ended up signing Jordan to the athlete’s first shoe contract before Jordan had played a single game for the Chicago Bulls.
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