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Error Jordan: Key figures still argue over who was responsible for Nike deal
Phil Knight, Michael Jordan, George Raveling, Sonny Vaccaro and Peter Moore share different stories
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Nike co-founder reflects on his career as he plans to step down in 2016.
USA TODAY Sports
Nike’s Air Jordan brand started in 1984 with shoes for Michael Jordan.(Photo: Rick Bowmer, AP)
The partnership between Nike and Michael Jordan has grown into the richest deal in sports marketing history — disputed history, it turns out, more than 30 years after their courtship.
“It’s a lot of people who think they created the success of the Jordan Brand, which is kind of ironic in some ways,” Jordan told USA TODAY Sports.
He’s the only who sounded even slightly amused about who gets credit for the landmark deal — consummated in 1984 after Jordan left the University of North Carolina for the NBA — that gave birth to Air Jordans, the Jordan Brand and the Jordan sneaker-and-apparel enterprise that still generates $2 billion annually.
Charges of exaggeration, deception, betrayal and conspiracy were leveled during interviews with USA TODAY Sports with those involved in the deal. Jordan weighed in, as did Nike co-founder Phil Knight, Nike executive George Raveling, former Nike basketball adviser Sonny Vaccaro and former Nike executive Peter Moore.
Knight took exception to assertions made by Vaccaro. In an ESPN documentary about Vaccaro released this year, Vaccaro said Nike signed Jordan only after he recommended it do so and that his contacts enabled him to make Nike’s first pitch to Jordan.
USA TODAY
Phil Knight sees the finish line as Nike’s leader
“The signing of Michael Jordan, yeah, success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan,” Knight told USA TODAY Sports in his first sit-down interview since announcing he will step down as Nike’s chairman next year. “A lot of people want to take credit for signing Michael Jordan, most obviously Sonny Vaccaro. On ESPN he said he was the key to the thing. Sonny helped, but he wasn’t the MVP in that process.”
Knight said the MVPs in the deal were former Nike executives Rob Strasser and Peter Moore. Strasser, then Nike’s marketing whiz, is dead. But Moore, creative director at the time of the deal, said it was Vaccaro and Strasser who were the MVPs. And Jordan, well, he said something different.
Michael Jordan
“In all honesty, I never wore Nike shoes until I signed with Nike,” Jordan said. “I was a big Adidas, Converse guy coming out of college. Then actually my parents made me go out to (Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Ore.) to hear their proposal.
“Prior to all of that, Sonny (Vaccaro) likes to take the credit. But it really wasn’t Sonny, it was actually George Raveling. George Raveling was with me on the 1984 Olympics team (as an assistant coach under Bob Knight). He used to always try to talk to me, ‘You gotta go Nike, you gotta go Nike. You’ve got to try.’
Michael Jordan shows off the 23rd edition of the Air Jordan shoe. There are currently 29 versions of it. (Photo: Marcus Eriksson, AP)
At the time, Raveling also was head coach at the University of Iowa and had an endorsement deal with Nike. In fact, Vaccaro secured the deal for Raveling.
“He actually introduced me to Sonny in L.A. And then, I didn’t know who Sonny was at the time,” Jordan said. “I knew of him, but I never really met him. …
“I absolutely fell in love with (Strasser) when he actually made the first presentation of the Jordan thing, the Air Jordan concept. I did meet Phil and obviously Phil was on a much bigger scale at that particular time. So Rob Strasser and all those guys, those are the guys I connected with initially. But before all of them it was George Raveling first.
“Sonny didn’t influence me to go to Nike. He got a deal proposed. He talked to Strasser. Strasser at the time, from what I understood and perceived, he really didn’t know the type of player and the type of person I was. He was looking at whoever he could find to fit that mold from what he was trying to do from an Air Jordan standpoint.
“Sonny watched me play in the McDonald’s (All-American) Games and all that stuff. His strong points were he knew all the kids growing up. I never played AAU, so he didn’t have any contact with me then. The only time I think he would’ve seen me play was the McDonald’s All-American game coming out of high school. And he followed me throughout college.
“When I got a chance to play in the Olympics, I became very good friends with George Raveling. He’s the one, in all honestly, that really persuaded me to look at Nike, because I wasn’t ready to look at Nike.”
George Raveling
“I’ve always felt that Michael’s and my version about how he got to Nike was totally different than what was being perceived out there or people were saying,” said Raveling, who is Nike’s Global Basketball Sports Marketing Director. “But we both chose to leave it alone and let people say what they want to say.
“What had happened was I was the assistant coach on the ’84 Olympic team and that’s how Michael and I became lifelong friends. Michael, myself, Patrick Ewing and Vern Fleming — who was also on the team — we were kind of inseparable. We went everywhere together, whether it was to the mall, the movies, McDonald’s, wherever it was.
George Raveling was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame this year. (Photo: Jessica Hill, AP)
“We had a long training camp. … And so I had a lot of time to spend with Michael and I was trying to recruit him to come to Nike. In the interest of accuracy, Sonny had asked me to try to get a meeting set up between him and Michael. And Michael had always been reluctant to pursue Nike.
“I mentioned to Michael, ‘Why don’t we go over and meet with Sonny?’ And he was reluctant to do it, but I kept bugging him and I said, ‘Hey, just common sense. If someone says they’ve got a better deal for you, you should listen.’ If nothing else, if it was just to get me out of badgering him, he said, ‘OK, I’ll go.’
“So we went over and we met at Tony Roma’s in Santa Monica and Sonny did most of the talking. So when we came back, I asked Michael what’d he think. He said, ‘I told you, I’m an Adidas guy.’ … But I suggested to Nike they should continue to pursue it and get him up for a visit.
USA TODAY
Who’s the athlete Phil Knight wished he had signed for Nike?
“I think Nike’s ability to get Michael to come to their campus for a meeting, particularly in the presence of his Mom and Dad and (agent David Falk), I think at that point the tide started to turn.’’
The same year Raveling was an assistant coach on the 1984 U.S. Olympic team, he also served as the best man in Vaccaro’s wedding. But the two had a falling out in 1990 stemming from the recruitment of Ed O’Bannon, then one of the top high school prospects in the country.
Sonny Vaccaro
“Phil Knight’s lying, Michael’s lying more than Phil and Raveling is insane,’’ said Vaccaro, who was fired by Nike in 1991 without public explanation and went to work at Adidas for Strasser and Moore, who left Nike in the late 1980s. “All three of them need to destroy me to live happily ever after.
“Everyone’s trying to rewrite history. It goes beyond Jordan. I am the savior of Nike.’’
Vaccaro joined Nike in 1977 and led the company’s foray into college basketball by signing endorsement deals with about 80 coaches who agreed to have their players wear Nikes. He said in 1984 Nike considered signing multiple college players headed for the pros — Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley and John Stockton — an he urged Nike to spend all of its allotted budget to sign Jordan.
Sonny Vaccaro joined Nike in 1977 and was fired in 1991. (Photo: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY Sports)
“They wanted my opinion and I won the meeting,’’ Vaccaro said. “It’s illogical to think it was anything other than all me.
“Nobody else (at Nike) really wanted (Jordan), and they didn’t know he was going (to the NBA after his junior season at North Carolina.) I just had a hunch. I can’t even explain why he was the hunch.’’
Vaccaro said his impact on Jordan’s signing led to a friendship and that Vaccaro attended Jordan’s wedding to Jordan’s first wife and Vaccaro traveled the world with Jordan when Nike’s famous pitchman was starring for the Chicago Bulls.
“I was with him everywhere, all over the world,’’ Vaccaro said. “I was with him right to the day they fired me (in 1991).
“We did business together. We did everything together.’’
The year after he was fired, Vaccaro said, the FBI investigated him for corporate espionage at Nike. No charges were filed, according to Vaccaro, and the FBI said they could not immediately provide any information about the case.
When Strasser and Moore left for Adidas, Vaccaro said, he accompanied Michael to a meeting with the former Nike executives about the possibility of Jordan leaving Nike for Adidas. Vaccaro said it was an awkward position to be in considering he was employed by Nike, not Jordan.
“Michael’s more important to me than Nike because I always felt that I brought Michael there,’’ Vaccaro said, adding that after Vaccaro joined adidas in the early 1990s he and Jordan only crossed paths at the NBA All-Star Games. “We were still warm. Even at the All-Star games, he’d tease me.
“I asked him to be part of the O’Bannon thing (the class-action lawsuit against the NCAA) in 2009. He laughed at me. He said, ‘I can’t do that, I’m a Carolina guy.’ He said, ‘You’re always in the middle of these things.’ He was playing pool. so he was always nice. Until now.’’
Peter Moore
“The truth lies very close to Sonny,’’ Moore told USA TODAY Sports via email. “This whole episode is very typical of Nike history. You get a slightly different story from everyone you talk to.
“Mr. Knight has it half right. (Strasser) was an MVP in the deal. He was the one who decided that Nike needed a basketball icon. He figured out that Nike was going nowhere in basketball which at the time was on the brink of becoming a big, big market opportunity. The inner city kid was just beginning to become important. It all makes great sense today, 30 years later, but back then Rob’s idea was thought to be risky, and so we kind of Just Did It.
“Sonny was the second MVP in the deal. He picked Jordan out of all those kids that played basketball in college. Nike was in basketball in ’84. They had several NBA players. They had George (Iceman) Gervin, Truck Robinson and several others. But (Jordan) didn’t think of Nike as a basketball company or shoe. They were running guys.
“Converse was the basketball shoe company, with Magic, Larry, and Dr. J. Strasser wanted a hero, an icon, a guy kids would want to be. He went to Sonny, which he frequently did when it involved basketball. Sonny suggested the kid from North Carolina, the kid that broke Georgetown’s heart, a Nike school.
“It was Sonny who first spoke with Michael. He told him how much he would mean to a company like Nike. In the first meeting between Nike and Michael and his family, it was Sonny and Rob who won Michael and his family over. That conversation combined with ideas that would turn Michael Jordan into a marketing super icon.
“I can honestly say without Sonny there would not be an Air Jordan. Nike would never have signed him, would more than likely never have even chased him. My guess is they would have gone hard after Patrick Ewing, one of their own from (Georgetown).
“That alone makes Sonny the second MVP of the deal. I can’t believe Knight doesn’t know and think this.’’
But the situation is understandably complicated, said Moore, who added, “Especially considering the egos involved and that each one has their version or interpretation of the same event.’’
PHOTOS: Nike Air Jordans through the years
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