At the Final Four in April, the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame will announce its Class of 2025 — players, coaches and contributors.
Sonny Vaccaro will not be among them, extending one of the puzzling — if possibly politically motivated — omissions in sports.
Vaccaro is most famously known for signing Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal at Nike, a story told in the 2023 movie “Air” featuring Matt Damon (playing Vaccaro) and Ben Affleck (as Nike’s Phil Knight).
It was a pivotal moment in basketball, not just for the billions in shoes that would be sold, including via Jordan’s signature brand, but in the way Nike marketed an individual athlete into a global icon (MJ’s otherworldly play being the key, of course).
That alone might be enough to get Vaccaro into the Hall as a “contributor.”
It is a loosely defined category that includes everything from NBA owners, NCAA executives, a former Indiana High School Athletics commissioner, the inventor of the shot clock, a team broadcaster and lots of people who worked on rules committees.
The list is fine. The contributor wing isn’t wrong, but it’s also not exactly the highest bar to clear.
Yet signing MJ and conceptualizing groundbreaking concepts in sports marketing is but a part of Vaccaro’s story, fully told in his just-released autobiography “Legends and Soles” with Armen Keteyian.
In 1965, Vaccaro founded the first national high school all-star game — the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic — in his native Western Pennsylvania and ran it for 43 years all the way through LeBron James selling out the United Center in Chicago. There was also one of the first national high school all-star camps — eventually the culturally significant ABCD Camp. Grassroots basketball was essentially born.
At Nike, he came up with the idea of signing college coaches — and then entire university athletic departments — to shoe deals, leading an explosion of investment and growth in the college game.
After a split from Nike, he brought Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady to Adidas and began the so-called “shoe wars,” which led to massive sponsorship dollars being poured into high school and travel teams across the country and eventually the world.
To pretend the game of basketball — from city playgrounds to the pro arenas — wasn’t significantly impacted by Vaccaro, that his “contributions” to it are somehow non-Hall worthy is ludicrous. You simply can’t tell the story of the sport — the whole story — without him.
If you deserve to get in for running state high school organizations, then Sonny deserved to be in decades ago.
“I don’t know what it takes,” said Vaccaro, now 85, on Tuesday from his home in California. “I didn’t audition. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t have to be in but I’m not going to dwell on it. It’s not some slight, because I’ve lived a pretty damn good life.”
The problem with Vaccaro’s candidacy appears to be the enemies he made along the way; he was an outsider and agitator in a sport that normally celebrates them.
No matter his job title, he was always a fierce and outspoken proponent of players’ rights, especially against the NCAA. At heart, he was a blue-collar kid from the coal town of Trafford, Pennsylvania. It led to incredible loyalty from many of the game’s greatest talents but also intense scrutiny from much of the establishment of the sport.
In 1976, the NCAA sent a retired FBI agent turned investigator to Vaccaro in an effort to get dirt on one of their favorite targets, then-UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian. When the interview went dry, Vaccaro found himself under IRS investigation and forever painted by the NCAA as a problem.
“For the next 40-plus years, the NCAA and I remained in one level of confrontation or another …” Vaccaro writes in the book.
“We’ll soon see how that worked out.”
How that worked out was Vaccaro organizing a groundbreaking lawsuit against the NCAA, with former UCLA star Ed O’Bannon as the lead plaintiff. The 2015 court victory over the NCAA opened up name, image and likeness rights to so-called “amateur” athletes, leading to things like Caitlin Clark starring in State Farm commercials while still at Iowa. The NCAA has been reeling ever since.
Maybe the Hall voters just aren’t paying attention. Or maybe a still bitter college sports industry is leaning on the process. Or maybe it is Nike, who engaged in decades of discord after firing Vaccaro. Or maybe it’s the lingering smear campaigns that painted Vaccaro as a Las Vegas-based middleman with a bent for gambling. Whatever it is, he didn’t even make the finalist stage.
The powers that be spent years and years trying to hold Vaccaro back, but he always seemed to prevail in the end. He’s lived a one-of-a-kind life, built on loyalty and handshake deals, his oversized personality driving everything.
There is almost no aspect of the modern game that Vaccaro didn’t impact, and his book tells it all — from Jordan to Kobe to LeBron to O’Bannon and so on. It’s a fascinating read to serve as a bookend to the movie.
As for the Hall of Fame, sure, Vaccaro says he would like it because, if nothing else, his accomplishments — “with the help of many, many people” — would be memorialized. However, at his age he refuses to get too deep in who or what is keeping him out. He jokes that maybe it’ll happen the year after he eventually dies, sort of a sympathy honor.
“I’ve been held back by the people that vote,” Vaccaro said with a shrug. “They must have a logical reason.”
No. They don’t.
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