Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  The Olympians went to Phoenix for a final exhibition with eight victories against no losses. “And this was against NBA teams,” Packer said. “This was not ragtag NBA players. By the time the exhibition got to Phoenix, Bob and I had a conversation. Michael had made a believer of him. He told me, ‘I’ll tell you what about Michael Jordan. I had questions about him before, but he’s going to be the greatest damn basketball player that ever lived.’ ”

  Knight had said little publicly to reporters about any Olympic player, because he didn’t want to upend the team’s balance with inflated egos. Even so, he admitted to reporters after coaching the exhibition games, “Michael is a great, great basketball player.”

  The Olympians claimed the last exhibition game in Phoenix, 84–72, with Jordan’s 27 points including an open-court slam in which he accelerated past a retreating Magic Johnson. On another sequence, he fed the ball to Ewing in the post on the left block, then somehow managed to bolt to the right block to score on a stick-back of the center’s missed shot.

  Play after play, Jordan proved quite a spectacle. “The NBA guys would stand around and watch him,” USA teammate Jon Koncak told a reporter.

  Lakers coach Pat Riley, who was on the bench for the NBA stars that day, said afterward, “He’s as gifted a player as I’ve ever seen play ball.”

  Later, Jordan would observe that it was the physical challenge of the exhibition games that prepared him to charge out of the gate for his rookie NBA season. Packer pointed out that Knight’s roster had no true point guard, rather a collection of versatile players, the most versatile of whom was Jordan, capable of playing three positions—both guard spots as well as small forward.

  1984

  Olympic basketball play opened July 29 at the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles, with the Soviet Union and Hungary both boycotting the games, ostensibly in protest of the United States boycott of the 1980 games in Russia. The US men’s team encountered no stiff opposition and won eight games by an average of 32 points. Jordan led the team in scoring at 17.1 points per game. “It became obvious what Michael could do and how he could do it as an all-around player,” Packer pointed out. “But it’s not like Michael went out and scored 40 a game in the Olympics. That’s not how that team played.”

  Although Knight’s systematic offense gave him limited playing time and scoring opportunities, Jordan thrilled crowds and teammates alike during practices and games. “When Michael gets the ball on the break, only one thing’s going to happen,” said Steve Alford. “Some kind of dunk.”

  “Sometimes the players get into the habit of just watching Michael,” Alford said, “because he’s usually going to do something you don’t want to miss.”

  As the Americans raced past their opponents, one international journalist showed Jordan a foreign magazine with his photo on the cover declaring him the greatest player in the world. The journalist asked Jordan what he thought of it. “So far,” he said frankly, “I haven’t come across anybody who can keep me from doing what I want to do.”

  From dominating the teams filled with NBA stars to humbling the best international teams, he had experienced quite a rise that summer. The only real drama came when the Americans blew a 22-point lead against West Germany as Jordan committed six turnovers and hit just four of fourteen shots from the field. Knight exploded in anger on the bench, but Team USA caught itself in the free fall and preserved a 78–67 win. The coach’s nasty humor boiled over in the locker room afterward when he ordered Jordan to apologize to his teammates.

  “You should be embarrassed by the way you played,” he yelled at Jordan, whose eyes were tearing up as he stood speechless and shocked in the midst of his teammates.

  Jordan was the team’s leader, the one whose fire had stirred them all. They appreciated his talent and his drive, and were shocked to witness him being berated, Sam Perkins would later reveal. “We didn’t think Michael played that bad, really. But that was us. Coach Knight knew what was in store. And it propelled Michael.”

  Later, in his pro career, Jordan would be accused often of bullying his teammates. Perhaps he had learned some of that in his short months with Bobby Knight. “It’s not that I’m scared of him,” Jordan told reporters covering the Olympic team. “But he’s the coach, and he’s been successful with this style of coaching. And I’m not going to challenge that at all. Playing for him for four years is something I don’t want to think about. But he’s straightforward. He says what he means. Whatever words he uses, you don’t have any trouble understanding.”

  Having been humiliated by Knight, Jordan played with a fury down the stretch, including 20 points in the final as Team USA doused Spain, 96–65, for the gold. He embraced the smiling Knight in a long hug afterward and moments later waved a small American flag on the medal stand. He kissed the medal, sang the national anthem, and then bolted into the stands to present the gold medal to his mother.

  He reminded her of the vow he made as a disappointed nine-year-old after the American loss to the Russians in 1972. He couldn’t have known then that the price of a gold medal would be submitting to Knight’s bullying. Jordan was not someone who took humiliation well. As sweet as the moment proved to be, it left a bitter aftertaste.

  Anthony Teachey hadn’t made the cut for the Olympic team, but had the opportunity to observe Jordan sacrifice his talent to meet the demands of yet another controlling coach. That struck Teachey as nothing short of remarkable. “A lot of people have never seen it,” Teachey said in a 2012 interview. “If you look at his style, he adjusted from high school to college, from college to Olympics, from Olympics to pros, because he had the character to play for coaches like Dean Smith or Bobby Knight or Phil Jackson.”

  No one was more pleased and relieved by Jordan’s Olympic performance than Rod Thorn. It confirmed that the Bulls general manager had gotten the draft right. “Playing in the Olympics really gave Michael an impetus,” Thorn explained in looking back. “He became a household name, because the Olympics were in Los Angeles, because the games became a highlight film every night of his dunks and flashy moves, even though he didn’t get to play that much.”

  Two weeks later, on September 12, 1984, the Bulls announced Jordan’s signing to a seven-year, $6 million deal, the third highest in league history, behind those given to Houston big men Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson. It was by far the greatest deal ever offered a guard. “It took some give and take,” Bulls partner Jonathan Kovler quipped. “We gave, and they took.”

  Within days, other NBA agents would voice the opposite view. Why would an obvious star like Jordan sign a contract that could stretch out for seven years at inferior money? “It doesn’t make sense,” George Andrews, the agent for Magic Johnson and Isiah Thomas, told the Southtown Economist. Agent Lee Fentress said such a deal would seemingly guarantee trouble down the road as the value of player contracts had already begun to increase dramatically.

  “I don’t want to play God,” David Falk had said in announcing the deal. “Michael and his mom and dad made the decision themselves.”

  One key element was a “Love of the Game” clause that Jordan had insisted upon. The standard NBA contract called for the agreement to be voided if the player was injured in some activity other than a team-sanctioned one. Jordan wanted the freedom to compete wherever and whenever he wanted with impunity, as defined by his love of the game. The team made the concession in light of the favorable terms the Jordan family had approved.

  “My attorneys had some problems with the contract, but I didn’t,” Jordan told reporters in Chicago. “I’m happy the negotiations are over, and I’m anxious to start fitting in with the Bulls. It won’t be the Michael Jordan show. I’ll just be part of the team.”

  Chapter 15

  BLACK POWER

  THE FIRST TIME officials from Nike met with Sonny Vaccaro, they wondered if he might be a mob figure. He certainly looked the part, with his name, his accent, and his mannerisms, and there was an air about him that suggested he knew se
crets, things regular people didn’t know. The same impression struck Michael Jordan when he initially sat down with the pudgy Italian with the droopy eyes. “I’m not sure I want to get mixed up with this shady kind of element,” Jordan later admitted thinking.

  Vaccaro privately chuckled at the awkwardness of it all. His close friends were fairly sure that there was nothing the least bit criminal about him. But Vaccaro never did much to dispute the impression that he was a mafioso. He sort of liked the idea that people thought he was connected. In the business world, any edge helped.

  Besides, Vaccaro was indeed connected to any number of made men in gaudy suits. But they were basketball coaches, not gangsters. America’s top college coaches couldn’t really be sure about him either. They just knew that the fat checks Vaccaro wrote them cleared. In basketball in 1978, you could buy your way into a hell of a lot of good graces. Sonny Vaccaro would transform Nike into living proof of that axiom.

  Just looking at Vaccaro in his rumpled warm-up suits with a day’s shadow of fuzz on his face made Billy Packer laugh. “It would be another thing if he was a Wall Street executive or a Madison Avenue hotshot,” Packer said. “But that’s not what he was. He was a guy from the streets. Basketball wasn’t there to let him into its inner circle. So he operated outside the circle and became incredibly successful for himself and the company.”

  Vaccaro revolutionized the sport without ever really attempting to cover up what he was: that friendly guy from Pittsburgh. Well, at least for half of the year. The other half of the year he was from Vegas. If his goombah aura by itself didn’t rattle people, then his Vegas connection did the trick. For half of each year you could find Vaccaro hanging out at the seedy sports books in establishments like the Aladdin or the Barbary Coast, where you could get odds on just about anything. There he made part of his living on “commissions” earned from placing football bets for “clients.” Hearing Vaccaro explain it made it seem all the sketchier. He was also rumored to do a little gambling of his own. He was a Runyonesque figure who stood out even in Vegas, a place with an abundance of Runyonesque figures. It was said there that the closer it got to kickoff time, the more you heard his name being paged over the loudspeakers in the sports books.

  That a character like Sonny Vaccaro could ever wind up working for a company like Nike is better explained by what Vaccaro did with the other half of each year, back in Pittsburgh. He was just twenty-four years old in 1964 when he and college roommate Pat DiCesare founded the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, one of basketball’s first high-profile tournaments for all-star high school players. They had developed it as a charitable event in Pittsburgh, but in a relatively short time, Vaccaro discovered that his tournament satisfied a huge need by providing a showcase for high school players to be seen by college coaches. The Dapper Dan was soon drawing top players each year and top coaches, everyone from John Wooden to Dean Smith.

  That was the key to his influence, Vaccaro would tell anybody who would listen. It was all about relationships. “The Dapper Dan gave me entrée,” he said, looking back in 2012.

  The tournament itself never netted more than about $3,000 in any given year, but it was a gold mine in terms of connections. Vaccaro got friendly with all the top coaches. His power came to mirror that of Five-Star’s Howard Garfinkel, except that Vaccaro’s vision involved basketball marketing, whereas Garfinkel focused on evaluating talent.

  Drawing the top basketball celebrities to an event also meant drawing the top media. By 1970, Sports Illustrated was reporting on Vaccaro’s game. “It was impossible to turn around in the William Penn Hotel without bumping into one coach or another looking for high school players in lobbies, hallways, coffee shops, elevators, and occasionally under a potted palm,” the magazine’s Curry Kirkpatrick wrote of the scene. “The ubiquitous group had converged on Pittsburgh to watch the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, an annual high school All-Star game that in the six years of its existence has emerged as the best event of its kind.”

  It was immensely entertaining just to watch Vaccaro work a hotel lobby, according to talent evaluator Tom Konchalski. “He had conversations going with about eight different people at the same time in different parts of the lobby. John Thompson had just been hired at Georgetown, and Jerry Tarkanian was still at Long Beach State. Sonny Vaccaro knew everyone there. It was like he was juggling coaches. There would be like thirty coaches in the lobby. He was showing respect toward them and keeping conversation afloat with all thirty.”

  By 1977, Vaccaro had grown bold enough to pay a call to Nike’s offices in Portland, Oregon, to pitch his idea for a new shoe. Nike wasn’t interested, but Rob Strasser, one of the company’s top executives, was fascinated by Vaccaro’s relationships with all those coaches. Other Nike bosses wanted to have the FBI run a background check on Vaccaro, but Strasser would have none of it.

  He hired Vaccaro at $500 a month, put $30,000 more in his bank account, and told him to go sign coaches to Nike endorsement contracts. “You have to remember,” Vaccaro said. “At the time, Nike was just a $25 million company.”

  It was an easy play for Vaccaro. He’d sign the coaches to a simple Nike contract, write them a check, and send them free shoes for their players to wear. He began signing coaches in bunches, including John Thompson at Georgetown, Jerry Tarkanian, who had just taken the job at UNLV, Jim Valvano at Iona, and George Raveling at Washington State.

  “You got to remember back in those days $5,000 was a lot of money to a coach,” Packer recalled. “I just got glimpses of that stuff. Only Sonny knows how much he paid coaches.”

  To the coaches, it seemed almost too good to be true. “Let me get this straight,” Jim Valvano supposedly said. “You’re going to give me free shoes and pay me money? Is this legal?”

  It was essentially basketball’s version of payola. It was legal, but the ethics of it raised eyebrows. The main idea was simple enough, to get coaches to outfit their amateur players in Nike shoes, sending a strong message to fans and consumers. When Indiana State’s Larry Bird appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1978 in a pair of Nikes, it was a huge boost to Vaccaro’s credibility. He had snared the ultimate payoff for his new “client.”

  The company’s sales soared, and soon Strasser was depositing another $90,000 in Vaccaro’s bank account with a directive to sign more coaches. When the Washington Post wrote an article questioning the ethics of Nike’s approach, company executives braced for a blast of negative publicity. Instead, they mostly received inquiries from coaches wanting a piece of the action. Vaccaro had unleashed a tide of cash into American amateur basketball. Soon shoe companies were not only underwriting college coaches and their teams, but they also moved into youth basketball. “It has changed the game,” Tom Konchalski said of the payola that Vaccaro pioneered. “Now kids twelve and under playing AAU basketball, they think they’ve made it.”

  The Vision

  By 1982, Vaccaro was paying out millions in Nike money to college coaches. He was a guest of John Thompson that year at the Final Four in New Orleans when he was struck with his next great idea. He saw that while James Worthy had been named the Most Outstanding Player, it was Michael Jordan who had stolen the show. “Something happened,” Vaccaro said of Jordan’s shot to beat Georgetown, “in front of the world.” A star had been born.

  Vaccaro didn’t know Michael Jordan. Dean Smith was under contract to endorse Converse shoes, which his Tar Heels wore in games. Jordan himself loved all things Adidas. He especially liked the shoes because you could just pop them out of the box and they were ready to wear. You didn’t have to break them in. He wore Adidas shoes in practice, then dutifully donned Converse for games. Vaccaro believed that Jordan’s charisma was going to make him a great force in marketing. He wanted Nike to sign Jordan to a contract and build a product line around him. Vaccaro made that known to Rob Strasser and other Nike officials in a January 1984 meeting. At the time, Jordan was still a junior and had not yet decided to skip his senior season.

/>   Company executives had a $2.5 million budget for pro basketball shoe endorsements and were thinking about spreading it among several young players, including Auburn’s Charles Barkley, whose style of play and offbeat charisma had brought him recognition, and Sam Bowie, who would be drafted by Portland, so close that he was almost on Nike’s “campus” in Oregon. It made sense to spread the Nike budget across the array of interesting young players in the very deep 1984 draft. “Don’t do that,” Vaccaro told Strasser. “Give it all to the kid. Give it all to Jordan.”

  He went into something of a rant about Jordan’s appeal, how he was the figure to drive athletic shoe marketing to a new level. Most important of all, Vaccaro went on, Jordan was the best player he had ever seen.

  Jordan could fly, Vaccaro told Strasser.

  In that era, many pro basketball shoe endorsement contracts ran less than $10,000. Only one player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of the Los Angeles Lakers, was thought to be making even $100,000 a year from his shoe deal.

  What made Vaccaro’s appeal seem even stranger is that the public had yet to adopt Jordan as an icon. “Back then, Michael wasn’t glorified, glamorized,” Vaccaro pointed out. “He was very good, but he was seen as another guy on Dean’s team.” Vaccaro argued that Jordan was about to zoom off into an unimaginable stardom, unlike anything a mere basketball player had ever achieved. And Nike had to hitch its fortunes to that rising star. “My point was, whatever money we had, give it to him,” Vaccaro recalled. “Rob listened to me. That’s when Rob asked me, ‘You gonna bet your job on it?’ ”