How Sales Legend Sonny Vaccaro Changed Basketball Forever

WHILE IT MAY STRAIN THE IMAGINATION, there was a time not too long ago when college basketball coaches paid for team shoes, uniforms, balls, and other hoops-related equipment annually.

Investing in these essentials was part of the coach’s managerial responsibilities, executed well before any X’s and O’s were drawn up.

In the late 1970s, these coaches were customers of Converse, which dominated basketball. Converse had legacy positioning with the timeless shoe, the canvas Chuck Taylor All Stars. Converse also seemingly owned the future with stars Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas, and nearly every other NBA player sporting their footwear.

All that changed when a schoolteacher from Philadelphia arrived at an upstart running shoe company in Portland, Oregon named Blue Ribbon Sports.

The man was there to pitch a basketball sandal. (If the idea of a basketball sandal sounds silly to you, it did to the founder of Blue Ribbon Sports as well. He cared so little for the basketball sandal prototype—the only one in existence—that he subsequently lost it after the meeting. It was never found.)

The founder of Blue Ribbon Sports, Phil Knight, was not interested in the sandal. He was, however, interested in the passionate, confident little man named Sonny Vaccaro who brought this bad idea all the way from the east coast on his own dime.

Knight—who would soon change the name of his company to the Greek goddess of victory, Nike—informed Vaccaro his brand's revenues reached $30 million the previous year. Continued growth for the brand would require moving beyond running. They wanted to move into basketball, but they had no meaningful connections in the space.

Furthermore, they had no strategy to displace Converse, nor the second largest competitor in the market, the global German brand, Adidas.

Did Sonny Vaccaro have any ideas?

Could he help?

He did and he would.

It would require far less time and money than Knight ever imagined. It took Sonny Vaccaro 18 months to make Nike the market leader in hoops. Converse and Adidas were caught flat-footed.

How did Sonny Vaccaro do it?

He simply paid coaches to wear Nike.

Dozens of them.

Dominant hoops programs at the time (UNLV, Marquette, Maryland, Notre Dame) and small schools alike (Iona, Northeastern, Boston University) took the free money from Vaccaro with more than a bit of whimsy and wonder.

And plenty of skepticism.

It sounded too good to be true.
Every coach was curious, “Is this actually legal?”

In fact, it was, Vaccaro assured them.
And Vaccaro was right.

It was legal.

There was nothing illegal about paying Jim Boeheim of Syracuse University, for example, $10,000 for his team to wear the swoosh.

How much was Boeheim earning at Syracuse when he met Vaccaro? $25,000 a year.

$10,000 then amounted to a 40 percent increase in salary. Meanwhile, Boeheim's expense line items for shoes, uniforms, and other basketball gear went to zero. It all felt like magic. 

No court in the land would find a legal argument to punish Sonny Vaccaro, Nike, the coaches, or the universities as the Syracuse hoopsters wore Nike on the basketball court.

The court of public opinion, as we will see, would be an entirely different matter . . .