He never attended law school and wasn’t a plaintiff or defendant in a major case, but sports marketing pioneer and college athlete advocate Sonny Vaccaro is one of the most transformative figures in American sports law.
His new book, Legends and Soles: The Memoir of an American Original (HarperOne), offers an intimate look into how he obtained that status. Authored with investigative journalist and New York Times best-selling author Armen Keteyian, Legends and Soles details Vaccaro’s life and career in sports. The book canvasses how Vaccaro played a key role in turning Nike from a middling sneaker company into a global empire.
A key reason: Vaccaro understood NIL before it was even a term.
In the early 1970s, Vaccaro told Nike executives “they were wasting their money on NBA players who weren’t going to move the needle for them.” He recalls, the NBA “was tainted by a series of drug scandals” and “even the championship game was broadcast on tape delay.”
Vaccaro urged sneaker executives who assumed landing established NBA players for endorsements was the pathway to success to instead think about influencing from a direct, in-person perspective.
“I explained to them that basketball influencers were local, found in the school gyms and on gritty urban concrete courts with no nets on the hoops,” Vaccaro wrote. “The way to kids’ hearts and minds was at street level—their heroes were the stars at the local high schools and playgrounds and the nearby colleges.”
Nike executives heeded Vaccaro’s advice, which included distributing sneakers to high school students and creating the Roundball Classic, Vaccaro’s famed national high school all-star game.
Legends and Soles also recounts how Vaccaro recruited and signed Michael Jordan to a Nike deal that would forever change the sneaker industry. Vaccaro explains how gaining Jordan’s trust wasn’t easy, especially when the topic of Vaccaro declining to pick Jordan for the Roundball Classic—by that point a marker of true prospect status—surfaced in his first meeting with Jordan. This occurred in the summer of 1984, right before Jordan would represent the U.S. as an Olympian and join the NBA.
“In truth,” Vaccaro wrote, “none of the dozens of coaches and local scouts in my nationwide network had touted Michael to me.” Vaccaro adds that unlike Patrick Ewing and A.C. Green, Jordan “didn’t have a Chicago / Philadelphia / LA / New York City reputation.”
Jordan also had doubts about partnering with Nike, Vaccaro recalls.
“I’ll listen,” Jordan told Vaccaro. “But you should know, I’ll probably sign with Adidas. I’ve never worn Nikes. If Adidas even comes close, I’m going with them.”
Vaccaro explains that he built a case for Jordan to sign in part by telling him, bluntly, “you’ll be a partner in the business.” The deal foresaw Jordan gaining a percentage of every shoe sold and “a package of star perks that no other company would even consider.” Jordan—now the highest-paid athlete of all-time, who Sportico estimated is worth more than $3.75 billion in inflation-adjusted lifetime earnings—took Vaccaro’s wise advice and signed with Nike.
Vaccaro acknowledges there were low points in his career that remain sources of frustration. One was when he felt betrayed by Adidas executives in the company’s failed signing of LeBron James.
In May 2003, Vaccaro was Adidas’ point person for landing basketball stars as endorsers. James, widely regarded as one of the greatest NBA prospects of all-time, was a month away from being picked first overall in the 2003 NBA Draft. Vaccaro and his wife, Pam, had spent years bonding and gaining the trust of James and his mother, Gloria. Backed by repeated assurances from Adidas executives, Vaccaro assured James and his mother that Adidas would offer him a 10-year, $100 million endorsement deal—a deal unheard of for a player not yet in the NBA, especially one making the jump straight from high school.
Except Adidas never made that offer.
As Vaccaro explains in the chapter, “A Betrayal in Malibu,” Adidas presented a $70 million offer to James. Although the $70 million could increase with various bonuses, “that didn’t matter,” Vaccaro wrote. “My heart jumped out of my throat.”
He said Adidas also hurt its chances by including “a dense series of paragraphs that resembled a Supreme Court brief” with “words like incentives, performance benchmarks, ifs, thens, time frames.”
“Not only had I been ambushed,” Vaccaro wrote, “so had LeBron and Gloria. They sat impassively, peering down at the document, a lawyer-concocted financial word salad that numbed my mind, much less that of a fresh-out-of-high school 18-year-old. They had my word on this.”
Vaccaro explains that not only did the offer fall $30 million short of what was promised, but by couching compensation as dependent on incentives, the Adidas offer “had the net effect, psychologically, of making LeBron prove himself to us, rather than the other way around.”
James declined Adidas’ pitch and signed a seven-year, $90 million deal with Nike. He would, of course, go on to become one of the greatest players of all time. Vaccaro, meanwhile, quit Adidas, despite having “no employment options in my back pocket.” He wrote that losing James “was the most bitter disappointment of my entire time in the shoe marketing business,” adding that company executives “had lied to me, undermining my credibility.”
Later on, Legends and Soles explores the last two decades of Vaccaro’s career. He has spent that time advocating for reforms to college sports.
The book includes details on Vaccaro objecting to the NBA and NBPA banning high school players from jumping to the NBA. The two sides negotiated an age eligibility rule that, as of 2006, requires players to be 19 years old and, for Americans, one year out of high school. This part of Legends and Soles was especially familiar to me as I collaborated with Vaccaro when I was an attorney in age eligibility matters. Vaccaro recounts how he pushed for Congress to hold hearings on the age restriction, but—he wrote—then-NBA commissioner David Stern “scuttled” that from happening.
The most recent part of Vaccaro’s career is where his work led to dramatic changes for college athletes. Legends and Soles offers numerous insights into his collaboration with former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon, who brought the historic case against the NCAA and Electronic Arts over the use of players’ likenesses in video games without player consent and without payment. O’Bannon, with Vaccaro as a key advisor, defeated the NCAA. The victory led to states adopting NIL statutes, which make it illegal for the NCAA, conferences and colleges to punish college athletes for using an American right they already have—the right of publicity—to sign endorsement, sponsorship and influencing deals.
“In my mind,” Vaccaro wrote, “Ed will forever be remembered as The One: the one who looked at all the reasons he could have said ‘no’ and instead raised his right hand and said, ‘I’ll do it’—a resolute act of courage and commitment that helped open vast new avenues of economic opportunity for present and future generations of college athletes and their families.”
The sports law world has noticed Vaccaro’s contributions to the industry.
Attorney Alan Milstein, who has represented Allen Iverson, Carmelo Anthony, Maurice Clarett and other celebrity athletes in legal matters over the years, told Sportico that Vaccaro altered the trajectory of the sports industry in ways that ensured athletes would be rightfully compensated.
“Sonny,” Milstein said, “spent his younger days tirelessly fighting for young men to maximize their potential on the basketball court. That is why it was so gratifying to see that in his later years he was instrumental in finally toppling the NCAA power structure so athletes like Ed O’Bannon could receive the benefits to which they were always so entitled.”
