Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  Vaccaro had gotten raises from Nike over the seven years he had been with the company, and was doling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to college coaches, but he was making just $24,000 a year in base pay for his efforts. So he smiled and said, “Sure.”

  Strasser had learned to trust Vaccaro’s instincts, but he had misgivings about the gamble. To make one player work, Nike would have to tie together many things, including shoes and clothing, into a unique product line, complete with advertising and branding.

  Rob Strasser approached David Falk and told him that Nike was thinking of signing Jordan. Falk and Strasser had worked deals with other athletes, and they agreed that Jordan should be marketed as they might market a tennis player, as an individual, more than as a basketball player, who had been traditionally marketed through team connections. Strasser suggested that Falk make a pitch to sign Jordan. Falk told him he would begin exploring that idea, although he cautioned Strasser that it was rare for players to leave Carolina early, which wasn’t entirely true. The easy part of the deal would be getting Dean Smith’s attention, since David Falk’s partner Donald Dell already had a relationship with Smith.

  Dean Smith would be seen several times that spring having private conversations with Falk and others at ProServ, so perhaps Smith was taking into account the shoe endorsement prospects when he nudged Jordan into turning pro later that spring. Smith never disclosed such a connection, but as Billy Packer observed, Smith never disclosed anything. For the most part, Smith was gauging Jordan’s pro appeal based on his conversations with NBA teams, including the Philadelphia 76ers, who at the time were coached by Billy Cunningham, one of Smith’s former stars.

  The Sixers told Smith that if they were able to get the second or third pick in the draft, they would select Jordan. But while Cunningham loved Jordan, owner Harold Katz seemed intent on taking Charles Barkley, former Sixers coach Matt Guokas revealed in a 2012 interview.

  Regardless, Jordan’s “decision” to leave college early added momentum to Vaccaro’s plan to build a product line around him. Rob Strasser and Peter Moore, Nike’s creative designer, met with Falk in Washington, DC, in August 1984. By that time, Falk had put together a list of ideas for the name of Jordan’s shoes and gear. On the list was the name “Air Jordan.” Strasser and Moore fixed on it immediately.

  “That’s it,” Moore said. “Air Jordan.”

  By the end of their meeting, Moore had already sketched out the logo, complete with a badge with wings around a basketball and the words “Air Jordan.”

  Meanwhile, Vaccaro still had to persuade reclusive Nike chairman Phil Knight that making such an extravagant offer to a young, relatively unknown and untested NBA rookie was a good idea. He set up a dinner meeting with Knight during the Olympics in Los Angeles, and invited Billy Packer to come along, ostensibly to help sell Knight on the idea.

  Knight, a former miler, founded Nike along with Bill Bowerman, the legendary track coach at the University of Oregon. Knight allowed extroverts like Rob Strasser to conduct much of the day-to-day operations of Nike. The big decisions and strategies, however, still required his blessing. Knight was acutely aware that Vaccaro had built relationships that paid off in huge sales growth for Nike. In fact, the Sporting News would soon include Knight and Vaccaro on their list of the one hundred most powerful people in sports. Over dinner, Vaccaro talked at length about the young player named Jordan, Packer remembered. “Knight was very noncommittal. He asked a lot of questions but was noncommittal. There was no, ‘Boy, Sonny, I hope you can get him.’ I didn’t know if that was just Phil Knight’s demeanor or what. But it wasn’t like he was gushing or saying, ‘Jeez, is there any way we can help you? We’ve got to have this guy.’ It wasn’t that at all. It was very businesslike, very calm. And Sonny was going on as to why he thought Michael could be this great marketing item. Even at the Olympics it was obvious there was still a lot of selling to be done for Michael to be a commodity for Nike.”

  Meanwhile, Strasser and Vaccaro also still had to sell the Jordans on the idea of Nike. Michael would admit later that at age twenty-one he was still quite immature and really didn’t know or care much about the business of shoes. But Vaccaro turned to his old friend George Raveling, an assistant coach on Bobby Knight’s Olympic team, to help bridge the gap to Jordan. Raveling introduced Jordan to Vaccaro in Los Angeles during the games. “It was at Tony Roma’s and George brought Michael over there and introduced me,” Vaccaro recalled. “That’s the first time in my life I’d ever met Michael. We sat down and talked about his going to Nike. He didn’t even know about Nike. You have to understand that. And I told him, ‘Michael, you don’t know me, but we’re going to build a shoe for you. No one has this shoe.’ ”

  It was not a great first impression, from either perspective. Jordan thought Vaccaro seemed shady. Vaccaro considered Jordan something of a brat. That became obvious when Jordan seemed to ignore the talk about the product line to ask Vaccaro for a car. “If you take this deal you can buy any car you want,” Vaccaro told him.

  “I want a car,” Jordan emphasized.

  “Michael was a pain in the ass, he was,” Vaccaro recalled. “First of all, he didn’t compute the money. Second of all, he was still a kid, this guy coming out of North Carolina. Whatever. A shoe contract meant nothing back in the eighties. So he was totally indifferent. He didn’t want to come with us. He wanted to go with Adidas. In the eighties, Adidas had the nicest sweat suits.”

  Jordan did ask about money, and Vaccaro told him not to sweat it. If the deal came together, Jordan would be a millionaire. Jordan’s main interest continued to be a new car. Vaccaro came to understand that if the car was what snared Jordan, then he needed to produce a car.

  “We’ll get you a car,” he promised.

  Jordan smiled, but that did nothing to reassure Vaccaro. “You know Michael’s got that smile,” he said. “He looks at you. It’s a very tricky smile. You never know what that smile means.”

  The Nike contingent knew that Falk was also talking to Adidas and Converse, but Strasser’s relationship with Falk kept them confident. That September, the agent was wrapping up Jordan’s contract with the Bulls. Plus, Nike knew its plan for Jordan went far beyond what Adidas or Converse contemplated. Vaccaro and Strasser felt sure that Jordan would realize what an incredible deal he was being offered.

  The day after Team USA won the gold, Falk, Strasser, and Vaccaro sat down to negotiate the scope of the Jordan deal. Indeed, Nike threw its entire budget at Jordan, a $2.5 million package over five years, a combination of guarantees, a signing bonus, and annuities. Nike also agreed to a major commitment to advertise Air Jordan. In terms of pro basketball shoe deals, the agreement was unprecedented, due to the 25 percent royalty Jordan would get on each Air Jordan shoe sold. He would also get royalties on Nike Air shoes. Truth be told, Falk could have perhaps gotten as much as 50 percent on the royalty for Jordan, Vaccaro said in 2012. “David wanted more cash up front. In 1984, there was no guarantee any of these shoes were going to sell.”

  Nonetheless, the deal represented an enormous gamble. After all, Jordan was headed to a poorly managed team in a league that was still under the long shadow of its partying and cocaine-abusing culture of the 1970s. The Bulls team that had just signed Jordan featured several players who had deeply invested in the idea that things go better with coke. If Nike had done a formal risk assessment, it might well have been enough to kill the deal. However, this was not about business plans. It was about Sonny Vaccaro’s hunch.

  The night before Jordan and his parents were to fly to Oregon to hear Nike officials present their vision for the Air Jordan campaign, Jordan phoned his parents and told them he wasn’t going. He was tired of all his recent travels and the last thing he wanted was a cross-country trip for a shoe he didn’t even like. Deloris Jordan insisted that her son be at the airport in the morning. She would have it no other way. Sure enough, Jordan was at the Raleigh-Durham airport early the next day.

  Strass
er, Vaccaro, and all the Nike people were there at the meeting. Among them was Howard White, the former University of Maryland basketball player who would play a role in the company’s long-term relationship with Jordan. Phil Knight even dropped in, a rare thing for the chairman. Vaccaro and the other Nike representatives were immediately struck by Deloris Jordan’s focus and professionalism. “I can tell you she is one of the most impressive people I’ve met in my life,” Vaccaro said, “because she was able to negotiate this life for her son.”

  Jordan sat expressionless during the presentation, as if he didn’t care. He didn’t want to be there and was determined not to be impressed. He looked at the red and black shoes and commented that red was “the devil’s color.” Too bad, he added, that he wasn’t still at Carolina. That way the shoes could be swathed in “blue heaven.” Despite Michael’s attitude, Vaccaro couldn’t take his eyes off Deloris Jordan. He watched her expression as it was explained that her son would receive royalties on each shoe sold. Vaccaro told the Jordans that Nike was “all in” for its commitment. “I said it, and I’m so glad I said it,” he recalled. “ ‘We’re all in.’ I was betting my job. Nike was betting their future. It was unbelievable. That was our whole budget. For Michael’s mother, it was like a family, if we were willing to bet it. It was like we were saying, ‘We wanted you this much.’ It was like, ‘You’re going to make my son the future of this company.’ Like we said, ‘Michael, we’re going to go broke if you bust out.’ That’s basically what I was saying. That was the whole point of it.”

  What wasn’t articulated was the key thought on the minds of everyone in the room. This was not just an unprecedented offering in terms of finance. It was that this pot of gold was being offered to a twenty-one-year-old African American who had never played a minute of professional basketball. America had witnessed the emergence of a progression of iconic black athletes, from Jackie Robinson to Willie Mays to Bill Russell to Wilt Chamberlain to Jim Brown to Muhammad Ali. They had made their way through the gauntlet of the nation’s civil rights struggle. At no point had Madison Avenue perceived any one of these men as a suitable candidate to be the centerpiece of the kind of campaign that Nike envisioned for young Michael Jordan.

  Timing was truly everything. Though the matter was far from settled, Vaccaro gained confidence from the look that crossed Mrs. Jordan’s face. “It was Deloris’s reaction,” he recalled. “Someone was making them a partner instead of paying them a wage. And she loved that. This woman was everything. Michael loved his father, he did. But Deloris ran the show.”

  It would not immediately be recognized as such, but the meeting marked a black power moment, although it was not the black power born of protest against social injustice and racial prejudice. The black power represented by Deloris Jordan had come straight from the Coastal Plain of North Carolina, where blacks had been violently barred from politics and society. The black power she knew came from her father, and it was based in the economic realities of sharecropping and tenant farming. It was an economic black power, and it was arguably the greatest power that blacks possessed, marked by the black-owned banks and small businesses that had come to thrive during segregation in cities such as Atlanta and Durham. The often-anonymous economic gains of black professionals and entrepreneurs may not have been highly publicized, but that accumulated wealth sat at the heart of the African American experience.

  Those first Nike negotiations would bring Michael Jordan the beginnings of a life-changing economic power. Before that could happen, however, the Nike executives and Deloris Jordan would have to persuade her somewhat petulant son that the deal was in his best interest. His immediate response had been the stone face. Then he looked at Vaccaro and asked again about a car. Vaccaro pulled two miniature toy cars out of his pocket and rolled them across the table at Jordan. Years later, Vaccaro was pretty sure one of them was a Lamborghini.

  “There are your cars, Michael,” Vaccaro replied. He then reiterated that the deal would enable Jordan to buy whatever cars he wanted. In fact, Jordan was set to be paid more by the shoe company than by the Bulls. Everyone in the room seemed to smile except Jordan himself. Phil Knight quipped that the company was buying Jordan cars even before he had agreed to the deal. Then the chairman excused himself from the room.

  “Michael, at some point in time you have to trust people,” Vaccaro recalled telling Jordan. “Now in those words what I said was, and he knew it for a fact, ‘We’re betting as much on you as you’re betting on us.’ ”

  As the meeting concluded, the Nike contingent had no idea how Jordan felt about the presentation. Afterward, he told Falk he was simply fed up with meetings. It wasn’t until later that night at dinner with his parents, Strasser, and other Nike officials that Jordan began to relax. The young star was impressive that evening, gracious and charming, able to move among the clientele in the upscale restaurant with ease. His persona that night reassured the Nike executives that they were making a wise choice, that indeed this young man had that certain special something, an ability to connect with people of all backgrounds. The term “post-racial” hadn’t entered the vocabulary yet, but it could have described what they sensed about Jordan. After dinner, they had prepared a highlight reel of Jordan’s great moments at North Carolina for his viewing on the VCR in the limo on the way back to their hotel. It was the perfect touch. He also took a second look at the video of the Air Jordan line that could be his. The deal had not been closed, but bonds had been formed, impressions made.

  “He listened to her,” Vaccaro said of Jordan and his mother. “She was the deciding vote. She told him, ‘They want us as a partner.’ She convinced him. She did. I’ll never forget that day.”

  Falk dutifully went to Converse and Adidas to see what they had to offer. Jordan even approached a Converse rep that he knew, telling the rep that his company “just had to get close” to the Nike offer. Neither Converse nor Adidas was prepared to offer anything near the treatment that Sonny Vaccaro had envisioned for Michael Jordan.

  Phil Knight supposedly never officially sanctioned or gave his approval to the deal. But he didn’t move to stop it either, as Rob Strasser seized on Vaccaro’s idea and made it happen. As a result, Knight’s silence became his tacit approval.

  “Phil Knight listened to a guy like Sonny and bought into it,” Packer said. “Whatever they paid Sonny, it was way below whatever he did for them. He had great vision, and one of his greatest visions obviously is that Michael would not only be this kind of a player but would be this magnetic personality that could sell sneakers and anything else.” Nike officials didn’t realize it at the time, but they had just taken the first irrevocable step in making Michael Jordan a full partner in the company.

  “He’s as much an image as he is a symbol,” David Falk said that fall after revealing that Jordan had signed deals with Nike, Wilson Sporting Goods, and the Chicagoland Chevrolet Dealerships Association. The Nike deal in particular sent gasps of surprise—and resentment—across pro basketball. Jordan himself sensed it before he had encountered a single opponent. Yet, as young as he was, he had no idea of its proportions.

  “I know everybody’s eyes are on me,” he said as he headed into his rookie season, “and some of the things I do even surprise myself. They aren’t always planned. They just happen.”

  Meanwhile, Sonny Vaccaro rejoiced at the realization that his grandest idea was about to take flight. “We could have gone under if he had been a failure,” Vaccaro said three decades later, looking back. “We put all the money we had into him. What if he’d been an average player? Nobody knew for sure at the time. We’d have been embarrassed. I mean, I don’t know what would’ve happened. But I do know what didn’t happen. He wasn’t an average player. He was someone who crossed over and made millions of dollars.”

  Chapter 16

  THE FIRST LOOK

  JORDAN RETURNED HOME in late August for yet another ceremony honoring his achievements, this time at Wilmington’s Thalian Hall, where he formally
presented his mother with his Olympic gold medal. Laney High also used the occasion to retire Jordan’s number 23 Buccaneers jersey. A month later he made the trip to Chicago for the opening of training camp.

  He had assumed that his life as a Chicago Bull would be very different from his days as a North Carolina Tar Heel. Even so, he had no idea how dramatic the difference would be. It began with coaching. No longer was he bound by the dictates of Dean Smith or Bobby Knight. His new coach was forty-four-year-old Kevin Loughery, a flamboyant product of the madcap age of pro basketball in the sixties and seventies, when he had starred for the old Baltimore Bullets. Loughery had a thick Brooklyn accent and a lopsided grin that matched his mirthful approach to the game.

  “Kevin was from the old school,” recalled former Bulls trainer Mark Pfeil. “At that time, guys were still having fun in pro basketball. You come in, do your work, then get together afterwards and hit the bars and have some fun.”

  Loughery had an intuitive feel for basketball. He had played well in the pros, averaging 15.3 points per game over twelve NBA seasons. He appealed immediately to Jordan because he had coached Julius Erving and the New York Nets to two American Basketball Association titles. As a player, Loughery had defended Jerry West in the 1965 Eastern Conference finals when West was tearing through records with a string of 40-point games. Between his experiences with West and Erving, Loughery was a man who understood that superior athletic talent dictates its own agenda. Under Loughery the team’s young star was going to get the ball as often as possible.

  Jordan would say many times that Loughery was by far the most fun of the coaches he played for. “He gave me the confidence to play on his level,” Jordan later explained. “My first year, he threw me the ball and said, ‘Hey, kid, I know you can play. Go play.’ I don’t think that would have been the case going through another coach’s system.”