Maybe the most remarkable thing about Sonny Vaccaro is that after thousands of interviews, a documentary and a feature film about his one-of-a-kind basketball life and decades worth of news stories that connect him to some of the biggest milestones in American sports, he still has plenty of new stories to tell.
“There’s enough (material) for another one!” Vaccaro told me in a phone conversation this week, shortly before his new book, “Legends and Soles: The Memoir of An American Original” is officially released by HarperOne publishing company. “I hope God gives me the time.”
But if this book is the last official account of how the now 85-year-old Vaccaro became the Godfather of summer basketball, the marketing executive who convinced Nike to bet everything on Michael Jordan and the man who took down the NCAA in federal court, it’s more than enough to tell the story of how an immigrant’s kid from a small mill town outside of Pittsburgh changed American sports forever.
‘If it’s the last thing I did, other than being with my wife all these years, it’s the best story I could have left — there’s no question about it,” Vaccaro said.
Though a typical conversation with Vaccaro is a high-speed, meandering journey of tangents and anecdotes that are often incomplete, his book is a straightforward, easily digestible series of key points in his life that explain exactly how he went from aspiring football player who thought he was headed to Kentucky on scholarship to basketball camp impresario to Nike, where he sold company executives on a plan to take over college hoops by paying coaches to outfit their teams.
“The deal is this,” Vaccaro writes in the book, recalling his pitch to UNLV’s Jerry Tarkanian in 1978. “I give you $10,000, and a lot of Nike merchandise — shoes, T-shirts, sweat suits, bags — and you do your part: Suggest to the kids that they wear Nikes. Practices, games, tournaments. That’s it.”
“That’s it?” Tarkanian replies. “And all I gotta do is suggest that the kids wear free brand-new basketball shoes?”
“That’s it,” said Vaccaro, who made the deal and wrote Tarkanian a $2,500 check out of his personal account — money he didn’t have at the time. But that was Vaccaro’s deal with Nike in those early days: Once he got the handshake from the coach, only then would the company wire him the reimbursement.
Some of these stories have been well-known for decades in the world of basketball and sports marketing. But they became more mainstream after Vaccaro was the subject of an ESPN “30 for 30” titled “Sole Man” and then again in 2023 with the Ben Affleck-directed movie “Air,” which covers the 1984 pursuit of Jordan by Vaccaro (played by Matt Damon) and Nike, which at the time was nothing like the international behemoth it is now.
But many of the “Legends and Soles” anecdotes within those major events have never been written about before, Vaccaro said.
Perhaps the most prominent involves a meeting at the 1984 Olympics that Vaccaro had arranged between Nike founder Phil Knight and Billy Packer, who was the most prominent college basketball analyst of his time.
According to the book, Knight was still waffling on whether to put a massive deal in front of Jordan, who was originally more inclined to sign with Adidas. Keep in mind, Jordan was the No. 3 NBA draft pick coming out of North Carolina — not exactly a slam dunk to be the best player of his generation, much less all time — even though Vaccaro was convinced he was the guy Nike had to sign.
So Vaccaro asked Packer to come to Nike’s post-Olympic party and sit down with Knight — not knowing exactly what he’d say about Jordan. But by the end of the meeting, Knight was convinced.
‘That was the coup de gras,” Vaccaro told me.
Why?
“Because (Packer) was neutral,” Vaccaro said. “Knight wanted someone not involved.”
This is important because, over the decades, Knight and even Jordan have disputed the genesis of the most important and lucrative deal in the history of sports marketing, downplaying Vaccaro’s involvement.
But as Vaccaro started the process of writing his memoir several years ago, he reached out to some of the people involved in these stories and asked for their recollection to see if it matched his own.
One of them was Packer, who remembered it just as Vaccaro did.
“I said, ‘Billy, would you mind writing this down so I have it? Because no one will believe it if something happens to me,’ ‘ Vaccaro told me. “So he wrote me a letter, and it got lost so he wrote me a second one.’
Packer died in 2023, by which point Vaccaro had gotten serious again about putting his life story on paper — something his sister-in-law Mary Jo Monakee had encouraged and helped with until she passed away four years ago.
At that point, Vaccaro had 150,000 words and 20 hours of tape-recorded monologue that needed to be molded into a readable book. That’s when Vaccaro and his wife, Pam, brought in noted journalist and author Armen Keteyian to put it all together — covering his bitter exit from Nike, his ill-fated pursuit of LeBron James on behalf of Adidas, the AAU sneaker wars and ultimately his role in convincing former UCLA star Ed O’Bannon to be the lead plaintiff in an antitrust case against the NCAA.
Throughout the book, Vaccaro notes how a series of coincidences and chance meetings defined his path. And while many former basketball players he knew from his camp agreed that the NCAA’s monopoly over name, image and likeness rights needed to be challenged in court, none wanted the burden of being the lead plaintiff and all the publicity that would come from taking on amateurism.
But just a few days before Vaccaro called on him, one of O’Bannon’s colleagues at the car dealership where they worked told him about a video game his son was playing as O’Bannon from UCLA’s 1995 championship team. It was O’Bannon’s number, his shaved head and even his left hand — and he was getting nothing.
Though it has taken many years, multiple court cases and been messy in implementation, Vaccaro’s role in correcting that economic wrong is undisputed.
What could be a better tribute to a man whose career started at the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic back in Pittsburgh with a simple principle: If you get the best high school talent to play the best high school talent, people will watch. And care. And eventually, everyone will make money.
Despite all the controversies and “sneaker pimp” accusations over his influence in college sports and youth basketball, Vaccaro was always right about that. And in “Legends and Soles,” it’s his turn to tell us exactly how it happened.
