‘Legends and Soles’: A memoir of Sonny Vaccaro, the man who created Nike’s Air Jordan

Sonny Vaccaro has a slight advantage, in that his memoir, Legends and Soles: Business, Creativity and Basketball: A Memoir of an Improbable Life, follows a film made on the subject—or rather, on a part of Vaccaro’s life. Matt Damon played Vaccaro in Air (2023), a film that focussed predominantly on a single—possibly the most memorable—phase of Vaccaro’s professional life.

Vaccaro is believed to be instrumental for sports brand Nike’s multi-million-dollar endorsement deal with basketballer Michael Jordan in the mid-1980s, considered to be the greatest sports business deal in history. The revenue share deal, which has reportedly earned Jordan $1.5 billion since inception, was orchestrated by Vaccaro at a time when the athlete was a little-known, upcoming young player.

Vaccaro worked at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, the three biggest sports shoe brands. His other claim to fame—besides the Jordan deal—was signing up Kobe Bryant for Adidas. His biggest regret remains, he says, missing out on LeBron James for Adidas because the German company cut down on the offer that Vaccaro had suggested.

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It’s these aspects of the book that stand out—the economics of shoe brands, competition among them, endorsement deals, valuations, and what basketball players gain out of it. For over four-odd decades, Vaccaro was in the middle of it all, working with coaches and players from high schools, organising tournaments, chatting up parents to figure out the best deals for shoe companies.

By all standards, he led a colourful life, hobnobbing with the sport’s biggest talents and businesses, and working as a conduit for the two.

Vaccaro’s initiation into the sport’s business started with a high-school all-star game and camp that ran for more than 40 years and established his place in basketball. He mentions a lot of serendipitous events in his life that led to successes and highlight his achievements with each of the major brands he worked with.

Once a notorious man in college basketball—called a “sneaker pimp”—as a Nike consultant, he came up with a plan to pay coaches to put their school players in Nike shoes. A part of that job description was to sign Jordan as the company’s signature athlete before he had played even one game for the Chicago Bulls. As the sneaker wars between Nike and Adidas intensified in the 1990s, Vaccaro was in the centre of it all, “commercialising” sport, gaining from it.

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While his relations with Phil Knight, the founder of Nike (played by Ben Affleck in the film), eventually soured—so much that Knight and Jordan played down Vaccaro’s role in the deal in a 2015 USA Today Sports article—irrespective of which version is true, Vaccaro’s name is permanently attached to Air Jordan.

Vaccaro claims to have been unceremoniously and inexplicably dropped from the Nike roster, in a chapter called “Fourteen Years and Ten Minutes”, which created a permanent rift between the two men. It led Vaccaro to join Adidas first, and when the James deal went south, he ended up at Reebok. Vaccaro’s disdain for Knight comes out clearly in Legends and Soles, as does his admiration for other key Nike employees of the time, Robert Strasser and Peter Moore.

In later years, Vaccaro, ironically, turned from shoe shark to a reformer of sorts. He spearheaded a landmark legal case, O’Bannon vs NCAA, which allowed athletes to earn money off their name, image and likeness against exploitation by the governing body. For most of his career, Vaccaro remained at loggerheads with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), while making his living off amateur basketball players. He admits to it, mentioning an instance when during a hearing of the Knight Commission on intercollegiate athletics, he was asked “Why should a university be an advertising medium for your (Vaccaro’s) industry?” Vaccaro replied, “You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir, but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

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Vaccaro’s story gives an insight into the world of sports marketing and branding. Jordan’s deal paved the path for other commercial arrangements that made millionaires out of athletes such as Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. It’s a textbook study on the importance of identifying—correctly—future stars of a sport and locking them up on deals that benefit marketers.

A lot of this memoir, though, is about high school basketball, its coaches and stars, which is largely uninteresting. You don’t learn more about the famous athletes he worked with—Jordan, Bryant, James, among others—except for a brief mention of Jordan being non-confrontational.

Vaccaro sees himself as an important figure in the world of basketball, as a wealth creator for young sportspeople. “Gloria teared up,” he writes about James’ mother. “Elated that Sonny Vaccaro had not only made a special trip up to the Bay Area but had confirmed everything that had been written about Gloria’s son.”

With Legends and Soles, Vaccaro gets an opportunity to bring his version of the story out on the Jordan-Nike deal—though the film does a better job of it—some years after Knight’s memoir, Shoe Dog, came out with just a passing mention of Vaccaro.