The Redemption of a Sneaker Pimp

Did Sonny Vaccarn ruin cnllege sports? Is he really the right guy to save them?

o there he was in the late 1970s, tooling around the country in a rented red or black Thunderbird, zipping from college campus to college campus, sit­ting down with the basketball coaches, most of whom he knew and knew well, telling them he was going to give them shoes for their team, gratis, at schools where the players had often been wearing secondhand sneakers. He would throw in a little gravy for the coach—$5,000 or $10,000—which he paid with checks from his person­al account because the company for which he worked, a little $25-million-a-year outfit named Nike, headquar­tered in the Oregon boondocks, hadn't given him any instructions or a budget. And now here he is at the age of 73, still zipping from campus to campus, but on a dif­ferent sort of mission. "I started it off," Sonny Vaccaro acknowledges loudly, standing behind a blond wood table and facing a classroom of students at the Univer­sity of California at Berkeley. "Nothing was ever done clandestine." He tells them of his early Nike days when

he began the commercialization of col­lege athletics and earned the enduring enmity of many collegiate purists. "I've been called every name in the book," he says. And he has, among them "the last don," "bagman" and "sneaker pimp."

But Vaccaro's new mission is not to denigrate himself. His mission is to de­stroy the National Collegiate Athletic Association—the organization that gov­erns college sports and has denied its athletes any share of the money they bring in to their universities while the NCAA itself takes a sizable cut. "The student athlete is a fiction," Vaccaro told the class, flitting from one indict­ment to another. "The majority of the athletes do not get their degrees. Ama­teurism is not a word; it's a trick." And of the NCAA: "What do they do? They actually do nothing."

After 30 years working successively at Nike, Adidas and Reebok, Vaccaro no longer peddles sneakers. In fact, he hasn't earned a paycheck in five years, and when he lectures he pays his own travel expenses. He has given more than $4 million to various charities through his nonprofit foundation. Now when he goes from campus to campus, he is selling his cause, trying to get stu­dents to think about the abuses of col­lege sports. The NCAA accuses Vaccaro of "overwhelming cynicism" for ques­tioning the organization's commitment to amateurism and vehemently insists it will never pay athletes. Vaccaro has facilitated a lawsuit against the NCAA that, if successful, may wind up chang­ing the face of college sports. He calls it a revolution, and he may be right.

Vaccaro's suit springs from the way college athletes are treated, especially by the NCAA, a consortium of colleges and universities that was formed early in the 20th century with the original purpose of providing safety regula­tions. At the center of the dispute is a form that every college athlete is

compelled to sign in order to receive a scholarship. According to Jon King, one of the head attorneys in Vaccaro's case, no university has ever advised an athlete to seek legal counsel before sign­ing the form, and no athlete has ever done so. Athletes just sign. But there is a hitch. Although the scholarship is guaranteed for only a year, by signing the form, athletes also sign away in per­petuity the rights to their likenesses as college athletes. The NCAA claims that athletes retain the rights to their names and images as long as they are not identified with their college teams, but since names and likenesses have little value when stripped of their athletic associations, these rights are basically worthless. Meanwhile, the NCAA sells the images and names attached to the teams—to ESPN in classic game tapes, in DVDs, on vintage jerseys, in game

photos and to the video game manufac­turer Electronic Arts. The NCAA makes millions. The athletes make nothing.

What is galling is that when it comes to college athletics, we are talking not just about millions of dollars in rights to former players but ultimately billions of dollars in rights to current ones. Ac­cording to the Knight Commission, an independent agency that monitors col­lege sports, the 10 public universities with the highest sports budgets spent a median of $98 million in 2009, a num­ber the organization estimates will rise

to $250 million by 2020. Duke econo­mist Charles Clotfelter says the average salary for head football coaches at major universities soared from $377,000 in 1981 to $2.4 million in 2009, both ex­pressed in 2009 dollars. And the NCAA gets its share of the largesse. In April 2010 it signed a $10.8 billion contract with CBS and Turner Sports for the right to televise the next 14 years of its March Madness basketball tourna­ment. As author Michael Lewis put it in a New York Times op-ed about college sports, "Everyone associated with it is getting rich except the people whose labor creates the value."

How much is a college athlete worth to a school? A 2006 study by Robert Brown, a professor at Cal State-San Marcos, determined that a college basketball player who was an NBA prospect was worth between $900,000 and $1.2 million a year in terms of the revenue he brought to his team. But Brown also found that despite this val­ue, the University of North Carolina, to cite one example, awarded a total of $318,097 in scholarships that year to its entire basketball team. A more recent study, by the National College Players Association, an advocacy group for college athletes, determined that the average Football Bowl Subdivision player was worth $121,048 per season and the average Division I basket­ball player $265,027. But remember, that's the average over all the FBS and Division I teams. The numbers are much higher at the highest-revenue-producing schools. According to the NCPA, the average football player at the University of Texas is worth $513,922 per season, and the average Duke basketball player $1,025,656. And yet the NCPA estimates that 85 percent of big-time college athletes live below the poverty level, with an average short­fall of $3,222 between what they get in scholarship money and what it costs to meet their living expenses.

This is what Vaccaro says riles him. He willingly admits he helped create what he calls a "cesspool" of money that leads to (continued on page 136)

5DNNY VACCARD

(continued Jmm page 68) corruption and abuses. Now he wants to drain it. Technically, Vaccaro's lawsuit con­cerns compensation for former athletes who were forced to sign away their rights in re­turn for their scholarships and whose images the NCAA then sold to ESPN, Electronic Arts and the Collegiate Licensing Company—the latter two of which are defendants in the suit along with the NCAA. The grounds of the suit are that the NCAA, by imposing a single scholarship rule for all its member schools, ef­fectively created a cartel that violates federal antitrust law since athletes have no recourse. It is sign or else. As Walter Byers, a former ex­ecutive director of the NCAA who later called for reform, puts it in his book, "A meeting among business competitors to harmonize their bids in a contract is usually called a con­spiracy. More than 900 members agreeing by contract through the NCAA to issue com­mon contracts to young people recruited to play on various sports teams seems to fit that niche." That's exactly Vaccaro's point.

Should Vaccaro win, former athletes will probably be compensated. But the ramifi­cations of the suit go far beyond those ath­letes. If Vaccaro succeeds in voiding the NCAA's monopoly on the images of former athletes, it will go a long way toward voiding

the restrictions the NCAA forces on its cur­rent athletes—everything from preventing schools from crafting their own scholarship rules, which has kept athletes from shopping for the best package, to preventing athletes from signing individual deals with shoe com­panies. Without those restrictions, the NCAA, which doesn't have too many other functions beyond imposing rules, may well go out of business. At least that's what Vaccaro hopes.

More than that, he wants to be the one to plant the dagger. Vaccaro knows that the NCAA usually manages to wriggle free from legal action because the courts seem to buy what has been called "the magic of amateur­ism." Athletes, the NCAA says, get a free education, though Vaccaro and others find this argument disingenuous. Professionally bound athletes, he says, aren't in school for an education, and the education they get is a "joke," with majors tailored to make it easy for them. "One school has a housing major for athletes," he howled during the Berkeley lecture. "A real estate agent has more educa­tion than a housing major." Indeed, despite the NCAA's professed efforts to enforce high­er educational standards, 14 teams in the NCAA men's basketball tournament in 2012 failed to graduate 50 percent of their athletes.

Still, the amateurism-education tactic has proven so successful that it has seemed futile to challenge the NCAA's authority,

and few people have even dared—until now. But as Vaccaro told that Berkeley class, "The first one over the wall always gets shot." Vaccaro is spoiling to be the first one over that wall, even if he gets shot.

If college athletics had a Faust, it would be Sonny Vaccaro, which obviously makes him an improbable savior. He was the guy who was always dangling money in front of col­lege coaches and then college administra­tors, and they just couldn't help themselves. As he once confessed to Robert Lipsyte of The New York Times, "What I'm doing is morally wrong." There are those who even accuse him of almost single-handedly destroying college basketball by dangling sneaker money in front of young athletes, encouraging them to emphasize individual skills at the expense of the team, the better to advertise themselves. The NCAA always seems to have regarded him as a kind of gangster—first pressuring him to rat out his friend Jerry Tarkanian, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas coach who was con­stantly under investigation by the NCAA for various infractions (Vaccaro says he never knew anything about Tarkanian's alleged wrongdoing), and then investigating Vac­caro himself for having given gifts to several players (he was completely absolved). The

NCAA refuses to speculate about his motives now, but it has quietly impugned him as a way of impugning the case. Attorney Jon King says, "He doesn't seem like someone who fits into their sort of executive club."

He never has. Indeed, nefariousness al­ways seemed to cling to Vaccaro. It's prob­ably in part because he's Italian and looks a bit like a low-level mobster from The Sopra­nos: dark complexion, raccoon eyes, a broad forehead and, in his younger days, a shape that prompted former USC coach George Raveling to nickname him Pear. His basic wardrobe once consisted of a sweat suit. (At his wedding to his second wife, Pam, he jok­ingly had the band play The Godfather theme for their first dance.) In part, it is because he spent a good deal of time in Las Vegas, where his younger brother Jimmy still runs the book at an operation called Lucky's, and because he cultivates a Runyonesque per­sona in a world of other Runyonesque char­acters with such odd nicknames as Tootie, Dushie and Hambone. And in part it's be­cause the idea of handing checks to coaches seems vaguely sinister, though there is noth­ing criminal or immoral about it despite Vac-caro's own professions of remorse.

At first blush, it's hard to say exactly what Vaccaro stands to gain in taking on college athletics, except to shake that gangster im­age. He is an unpaid consultant to the case, and if he wins, there is no payday for him, only for the former athletes whose cause he is championing. You can press him all you want to try to uncover some ulterior mo­tive, but you'll always get the same answer: He's doing it for the kids. His voice rising when he talks about them, Vaccaro seems genuinely angry about the treatment of marginalized young athletes.

There is nonetheless a personal element to this fight—one that is buried deep in Vac-caro's own history.

Nicknamed Sonny by his mother for his sunny disposition, John Paul Vaccaro grew up cheek by jowl with Serbs, Croats, Poles and fellow Italians in the small town of Traf-ford in western Pennsylvania, 17 miles from Pittsburgh, where everyone was an outsider. It was hardscrabble coal and steel country. His father was an immigrant who poured molten steel at die nearby Duquesne mill, missing just a single day of work in 43 years. His mother was the daughter of Italian immigrants, and two of her brothers schooled Sonny in base­ball and football, both of which he so excelled at that the Pittsburgh Pirates offered him a $3,500 signing bonus to play baseball and the University of Kentucky offered him a scholarship to play football as a five-foot-10, 170-pound running back. He chose the latter, he said, because Kentucky's quarterback was a fellow Italian, Vito "Babe" Parilli.

That, though, is ancient history. Most people pick up the Vaccaro story 20 years later, in the 1970s, when Vaccaro was in his 30s and quit his job teaching and coaching at Trafford High, left his wife and four children and became a vagabond. He calls these years his "lost weekend," after the Billy Wilder movie, diough it was more like a lost half de­cade. He spent summers in Las Vegas, gam­bling and living off comps. The rest of the time he lived out of his car or on a friend's couch. He was aimless.

What ended his lost half decade was a for­tuitous relationship with two sports agents, Lew Schaffel and Jerry Davis. The two asked Vaccaro to use his connections from a high school all-star basketball game he ran in Pittsburgh called the Dapper Dan to help the agency sign former participants now out of college and headed to the NBA. At the time, Davis represented a middling guard named Phil Chenier who had a $2,000-a-year sneaker contract with a small com­pany headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon named Nike, which was so little known that most people pronounced it "Nicky." Vaccaro had never had anything to do with shoes, but while running a summer basketball camp at a dormant ski resort in Seven Springs, Penn­sylvania that year, he noticed how the kids blew out their flimsy canvas sneakers. On impulse he decided to design new leather basketball shoes—some with holes for ven­tilation, some with Velcro fasteners, one that was backless like a sandal—and had a shoe­maker friend manufacture prototypes. Davis wrote Sonny a letter of introduction to the head of Nike, a man named Phil Knight.

As Vaccaro remembers it, he brought the shoes slung over his shoulder in a burlap bag to a series of wallboard cubicles that constituted the unimposing Nike offices in Beaverton, thinking this might be his golden ticket. The Nike execs examined the shoes absently, took him to dinner at a Chinese restaurant (Vaccaro thinks it was because he was a curiosity—"an Italian guy from Pittsburgh") and then sent him on his way. They never talked about shoes again. But about two weeks later Nike's market­ing director, a man named Rob Strasser, asked Vaccaro to fly out again to pick his brain about how Nike might make a beach­head into basketball. Vaccaro was hoping he might get Nike at least to contribute shoes to the Dapper Dan, but he also casually men­tioned to Strasser that if Nike wanted to get kids to wear its basketball shoes, it shouldn't just sign up garden-variety NBA players like Phil Chenier. Nike ought to give shoes to Fort Hamilton High School in New York, where a phenom named Albert King played, and to teams at other inner-city high schools. Kids wanted to wear the shoes of the cool­est athletes, and these high-schoolers were the coolest. As Strasser mulled the idea, he decided to attend the Dapper Dan, and he was impressed by what he saw. When he got back to Beaverton, he told Vaccaro the high schools would get their sneakers. As Vaccaro puts it, "That's the birth of the shoe indus­try as we know it."

Thus began Sonny Vaccaro's Nike period, which is when the sneaker money began to flow. By the time he made his third trip to Beaverton, he was armed with another idea. Vaccaro suggested that Nike give away shoes to major college basketball programs and then pay the coaches for the privilege of having their teams wear them. He knew the coaches would bite because they didn't make all that much money; the legendary UCLA coach John Wooden reportedly never made more than $35,000 in base salary and even then only after winning nine NCAA champi­onships. The first coach Vaccaro approached was his old friend Jerry Tarkanian of UNLV, who got $10,000 and 120 pairs of shoes.

Tarkanian couldn't believe his good fortune. Within a year, Vaccaro had between 60 and 70 coaches under contract.

Even before Vaccaro, college sports were never as pristine as their advocates would like fans to believe. Decades ago athletes were frequently paid under the table and occasionally over it. Still, when Vaccaro be­gan doling out Nike money, he changed the complexion of amateur athletics by open­ing the door to outside commercialization and demonstrating just how much could be made on the backs of college athletes. Even­tually he would pay coaches in the "serious six figures" to have their teams wear Nike, and when the competition got hot in the early 1980s, the top coaches even got Nike stock, which, if they held it, would be worth millions of dollars today. That led to all sorts of deals between college coaches and high school coaches who had players the former coveted. Vaccaro described to the Knight Commission how college coaches could ef­fectively launder sneaker money by having the companies underwrite coach-sponsored tournaments or camps—money that could then be diverted to the high school coaches or even high school players without being traced. Vaccaro was the first man to see this as the future of college athletics—the first man to see that for all the protestations from the NCAA and universities, it was about one thing and one thing only: money.

But even as he was playing Faust and sew­ing up college basketball for Nike by tempt­ing coaches, the company wasn't entirely sure he wasn't a mobster. He had no contract and was making only $500 a month, without any commissions. It was probably the best money Nike ever spent. In 1985, thanks to Vaccaro, all four NCAA finalists wore Nikes. As he put it, "Being a Nike school was almost tantamount to being a school at all."

It's the summer of the NBA lockout, 2011, and half a dozen or so NBA stars, including Russell Westbrook, Al Horford and Tyreke Evans, are working out in the St. Monica Catholic High School gymnasium on a quiet side street in Santa Monica where Vaccaro once lived, operating his basketball empire from a table in Izzy's Deli. When Vaccaro saunters into the gym, he is greeted with broad smiles and bear hugs, like a favorite uncle. Just about everybody outside college basketball's ruling powers loves Sonny Vac­caro. The night before, he and his wife, Pam, were having dinner with Arn Tellem, one of the NBAs most powerful player agents and one of Sonny's closest friends. The next day he is having lunch with an NBA gen­eral manager who reminisces about how he and Vaccaro circumvented the NBAs player combine assessing potential draftees by set­ting up their own workouts for the players they favored. Even though he is out of bas­ketball, Vaccaro routinely gets calls from cur­rent, former and prospective players seeking his counsel about agents, sneaker deals and life. He even gets calls from ninth- and 1 Oth-grade prospects. On draft night in 2011, five general managers phoned him for his intelligence on draftees—in the old days, he says, 25 would have called him—and so did several of the draftees themselves, including

the number one choice, Kyrie Irving, whom Vaccaro had never even met

That is unusual, because just about everybody in basketball has a history with Vaccaro. The biggest NBA stars all played in his Dapper Dan games or, after 1991, their successor, the Roundball Classic, where Vac­caro made a point of meeting each invitee. And more attended the ABCD summer bas­ketball camp Vaccaro inaugurated with Nike money in 1984 at Princeton, where he per­sonally selected the best 120 (later 200) high school players in the country for one week of instruction and games. Vaccaro counseled every single player at the camp one-on-one, which is why they all know him and why he knows all of them. Vaccaro's memory is encyclopedic. He not only remembers every player who ever attended ABCD, he also re­members every single play in every game. He says he never missed one.

Vaccaro's admirers say that because of the Dapper Dan and ABCD, Nike actually benefited more from Vaccaro's basketball instincts than he benefited from Nike's deep pockets. There was always another sneaker company waiting to employ Vaccaro, but there wasn't another Vaccaro. Though he never played basketball and had coached

it only at the lowest amateur ranks, he had an uncanny eye for talent, which is what led to probably his greatest triumph at Nike. As Vaccaro tells it, some time after North Caro­lina's NCAA tournament win in 1982, Rob Strasser, Nike's marketing guru, invited him to a high-level two-day meeting at a private mansion outside Beaverton. The subject: how to expand Nike's brand to professional basketball. Nike had earmarked $500,000 to be divided among selected NBA stars to endorse Nike shoes. The question, of course, was which stars they should select. When Vaccaro was asked to weigh in, he unhesitatingly told them to give the entire pot to North Carolina junior Michael Jor­dan, who had declared he was leaving to go pro. Jordan was one of the few college stars who hadn't played in the Dapper Dan or at ABCD. His college stats were hardly strato­spheric, and North Carolina was a Converse school to boot, but Vaccaro said he had a gut feeling Jordan would be the gold standard. Asked by one attendee if he was willing to bet his job on it, Vaccaro said he was.

Now he had to convince Jordan to sign with Nike. The two met at a rib joint in Santa Monica. Jordan said he was partial to Adidas because he thought they had more style. Vaccaro looked him in the eye and

said, "You're going to have your own shoe. Your name is going to be on every shoe the kids wear." Jordan laughed, Air Jordan was born, and Nike soared. So too did the as­pirations of just about every college player. In time they all thought they might get a Jordan deal, which raised the stakes of col­lege basketball even higher—again, thanks to Vaccaro.

But there was one more milestone in the Vaccaro-Nike saga—one that would, more than anything else, lead to Vaccaro's ultimate realization about the hypocrisy of amateurism and his role in it. It was a call in the late 1980s from Sam Jankovich, the athletic director of the University of Miami, with a proposition: Rather than pay the coaches, Nike should pay the university itself for an "all school" deal in which every Miami team would wear Nike. Vaccaro claims it was a bracing mo­ment. For all the abuse that has been heaped on him from some quarters—and that he sometimes heaps on himself—for having de­spoiled the purity of college athletics, he says, "I know in my heart that never ever should I or Nike or any shoe company be held respon­sible for any business that was done between corporate America and amateur basketball or football and universities. They initiated it." As soon as Miami signed, other schools lined up for the same deal. As Vaccaro told Strasser, "We've got it made now."

But as it turned out, when it came to cor­porate America, Vaccaro wasn't much luckier than the amateur athletes he had befriended and defended. In August 1991, a few years af­ter the Miami deal, he got an urgent call that he was needed at an emergency meeting in Beaverton. No sooner did he walk into Phil Knight's office than Knight said, "I've got to let you go." Vaccaro, shell-shocked, quit in­stead. The entire conversation took less than 10 minutes. A week later Knight offered him $250,000 for the rights to the Dapper Dan and ABCD, which Vaccaro owned, but he re­fused to sell. Vaccaro still has no idea why he was fired. Even today, a Nike spokesperson refuses to comment on Vaccaro.

Word of the firing traveled fast. The next day, he got a call from Converse offering to finance ABCD, and the day after that he was contacted by Strasser, who had recently left Nike to take over Adidas, with the promise that as soon as things were up and running there, he would bring Vaccaro aboard. Jor­dan called to ask if there was anything he could do. Six of his Nike coaches pitched in to buy him an engraved gold Rolex watch. But perhaps the greatest tribute would come later, from an economist who told Vaccaro he had created more wealth than any other person who was not the head of a company. "It starts in 1977," Vaccaro says ruefully of his relationship with Nike. "They own nothing. I leave in 1991; they owned everything."

And so began act two of Sonny Vaccaro's basketball odyssey. He spent his first post-Nike summer with Converse. Then, within six months, Strasser made good on his promise with Adidas. Financially it was a boon since Strasser gave him Adidas stock as well as a salary.

But even more important than the money was the revenge for his dismissal. Vaccaro

knew he couldn't pry away Nike's colleges without having players at ABCD whom those colleges wanted. Since Nike also had, thanks to Vaccaro, most of the best inner-city high schools under contract, Vaccaro had to go to the one place to which he and Nike hadn't paid attention: nonscholastic amateur teams. He began scouting Amateur Athletic Union teams and forming relation­ships with the top AAU coaches and their players to insure they would go to ABCD rather than the rival Nike camp. They did. "You keep score," Vaccaro says, compar­ing his ABCD camp with Nike's new post-Vaccaro camp. "When it was all over, I had this guy, this guy and this guy, and they had that guy. We won. That's it.' Kevin Love and Derrick Rose, two high school stars who played at Nike schools, even attended ABCD. As one NBA general manager put it, "Sonny was the brand. Nike wasn't the brand. Adidas wasn't the brand."

And Vaccaro was the brand not just be­cause of the prestige of attending ABCD, which was itself a tribute to him. It was be­cause Vaccaro made a point of personalizing everything. When he bought a mansion in Calabasas in southern California, the play­ers always had a place to stay. He and Pam didn't swim, but he had a pool dug for his basketball visitors, most of them inner-city kids who had never been in a pool before. When players needed someone to talk to, they talked to Sonny or Pam. When they needed advice, they got it from Vaccaro. When they needed money—and many who never made it to the pros did—they asked Vaccaro for it. Vaccaro has hundreds of let­ters from players—he keeps everything— and he's written hundreds more. Although he has been demonized, not a single player has ever said a disparaging word against him. That was his advantage against Nike.

And he used that advantage at Adidas when he upped the ante even more by tak­ing on Nike in the pro ranks. He set his sights on a high school star from Lower Merion, Pennsylvania he hoped would be the face of Adidas's NBA line. Again, Vaccaro was play­ing a hunch. As the son of former NBA play­er Joe Bryant, who had played in the Dapper Dan, Kobe Bryant was hardly a secret, but no one could really say how good he was or even if he was going to skip college and go pro—nobody but Vaccaro. Knowing Kobe from the Dapper Dan and ABCD, Vaccaro was fairly certain he wasn't going to college. Still, Vaccaro moved to New York with Pam and spent a year courting Kobe's parents, who would drive up from Philadelphia for Sunday brunches. Vaccaro was with Bryant on draft night—he went 13th—and then quickly signed him to an Adidas contract.

The end with Adidas came when Vaccaro was courting another high school star and ABCD legend, LeBron James. Vaccaro thought James was the best player of that age he had ever seen. So he romanced LeBron's mother, Gloria, and her boyfriend, Eddie Jackson. He outfitted LeBron's high school team with sneakers. He flew LeBron and his teammates to Los Angeles on a private jet, got them Lakers playoff tickets and feted them at a posh mansion in Malibu—at a cost in the mid-six figures for the weekend. And then he promised LeBron a $100 million,

10-year contract—a figure, he said, he had cleared with Adidas. But when the festivities ended and Adidas's attorneys tendered the contract, it was for significandy less. Vaccaro quit Adidas that night, and James eventually signed with Nike, with Vaccaro advising him to use the original Adidas offer as leverage.

He wasn't unemployed long. Reebok hired him almost immediately, sponsoring his events and paying him handsomely. But by this time he was feeling a vague sense of mal­aise. For years, with no particular purpose in mind, he had been collecting clippings about the NCAA and the way it shortchanged athletes—clippings that would eventually fill 20 boxes—though he says now that he first recognized the extent of the injustice of using young athletes to generate millions of dollars without giving them a single penny when ESPN bought the Classic Sports Network, which included die rights to old college bas­ketball and football broadcasts, for $175 mil­lion. Vaccaro says his realization was further sharpened in 1997 when he was asked to appear on a panel on amateurism hosted by Ted Koppel, and Michigan basketball star Chris Webber said that his parents had had to buy a Michigan Chris Webber jersey. The final straw, he says, was the so-called "one and done" rule, instituted in 2006 in a collabora­tion between the NCAA and the NBA, which compelled high school graduates eidier to sit out a year or to play in college for a year be­fore being eligible for the NBA draft. If they were injured during that year, they essentially forfeited their professional future.

Vaccaro appreciated the risk. He remem­bered a player at La Salle University named Kenny Durrett who had decided to turn pro in Italy, only to have his coach convince him to return to school. Durrett was injured, and

though he was later drafted by and played in the NBA, the injury probably cost him mil­lions of dollars. Similarly, Vaccaro has letters from other players—one who complained about leaving college without being able to read or write, another from a former colle­giate star who stayed for his senior season, wound up spending most of it on the bench injured and went undrafted. Now he was adrift and asking Vaccaro for advice.

Though it is undeniable that their univer­sities exploited these young men, there are those who question whether Vaccaro him­self exploited young basketball players—a charge he vehemently denies. He says he took a commission from a player only twice, both times from professionals. "Never in my life did a kid give me anything or was there ever a due bill for anything," he insists. Neither, he says, did he ever steer a player to a particular college or a particular agent to get a kickback. To do so would have de­stroyed his relationships with other coaches and agents—relationships he needed. He claims he never hyped middle-schoolers ei­ther and actually dissuaded young stars from competing against one another at camps the way older players did because he diought it put too much pressure on them. The only charges to which he pleads guilty are buy­ing airplane tickets for St. John's stars Felipe Lopez and Zendon Hamilton so they could attend a basketball camp, buying clothes for Rhode Island star Lamar Odom because he didn't have any money of his own and put­ting up at his own house an African pros­pect named Makhtar N'Diaye—offenses the NCAA had investigated and cleared him of.

Nevertheless, by throwing money at high school, AAU and college coaches, Vaccaro knew they might wind up abusing the

system. Hence his confessions of immoral­ity, like "Manchurian candidates," he says, middle-schoolers would go to high schools and AAU programs that had agreements with particular sneaker companies, which would in turn steer them to colleges affili­ated with the same company—"So we can tie up the minds and souls of the people," was how he put it. He certainly knew that the athletes weren't getting any of that sneaker money while they were in school and that most of them would never make the pros, where they could finally cash in. The ath­letes' interests were always secondary to those of the sneaker company or the school. When Vaccaro pleaded powerless to stop the process to the Times' Robert Lipsyte back in 1997, Lipsyte told him, "You sound like an arms dealer who says there should be world peace but still sells nuclear warheads."

And yet Vaccaro finally did stop selling sneak­ers. In 2007 he quit his job at Reebok with two years remaining on his contract and de­cided to fight the NCAA and the universities. Thus began act three of his life. And though he attributes his declaration of war to his rip­ening sense of injustice, it may have had less to do with epiphanies and guilt than with a culmination of umbrage that had slowly been mounting since the time he got that football scholarship to Kentucky and the university recommended he attend a junior college to raise his grades. That was when Vaccaro dis­covered just how disposable college athletes are. He discovered it because he was one of them. In junior college, he hurt his back play­ing football, lost his quickness as well as his Kentucky offer and enrolled at Youngstown State in Ohio, where the coach thought he would be productive at even half his old speed. He wasn't. Luckily, Youngstown State's assistant football coach and head basketball coach, a fellow Italian American named Dom Rosselli, recognized in Vaccaro's extrover­sion, enthusiasm and ethnicity things that might connect with kids Rosselli wanted to recruit—black kids. Vaccaro kept his schol­arship and was able to graduate by trying to lure these kids to play for Rosselli.

Vaccaro says now that it was less about basketball than about race. All the kids he recruited for Youngstown were black. Just about all the kids who played in the Dapper Dan, the best players in America, were black. And Vaccaro says that he, as an Italian Amer­ican who was slighted by WASP America, empathized with these kids—empathized es­pecially with the handful who were recruited by white colleges and wound up without any sense of belonging or much of an edu­cation. The Dapper Dan was his civil rights movement—his way to get attention and, even more, respect for young black athletes. Before the Dapper Dan, nobody knew who these players were. After it, every basket­ball aficionado did. Three hundred college coaches attended that first game in 1965.

Today Vaccaro calls the NCAA "the most racist organization in America" for the way it uses and discards black athletes, which helps explain his determination to destroy it. In doing so, he would be avenging himself and every black college basketball player the sys­tem abused. But in order to do so, he had to

leave Reebok so no one could accuse him of profiting while he was waging his battle.

He decided to beat the NCAA at its own game. He advised a coveted California high school point guard named Brandon Jen­nings, whom he knew from ABCD, to skip college and play in Europe instead, thus tak­ing on one-and-done. Vaccaro negotiated a contract with Lottomatica in Rome for Jen­nings and got him a $2 million sneaker deal with Under Armour, including stock. The next year Jennings was drafted 1 Oth by the Milwaukee Bucks and is now an NBA star.

Still, Vaccaro realized that a player here and there decamping to Europe wasn't going to bring down the NCAA. He had to build a movement. So he began soliciting invitations to speak on college campuses—not to athletes but to law, journalism and business students he hoped he could inspire to lead the charge against the NCAA. It wasn't as much of a stretch as it might seem. His Runyonesque persona to the contrary, Vaccaro, in private, is actually professorial: articulate, highly intel­ligent and extremely well-read. He brought his message to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, even to the heart of basketball country at Duke, North Carolina and Memphis. "I didn't want to be Joan of Arc," he says. "I thought I could

be the person who said, 'I wish to hell Joan of Arc would come along.'"

It was after one of these appearances, at Howard University, that he got a call from Michael Hausfeld, a prominent Washington, D.C. attorney who had won reparations from Germany for slave laborers during World War II and restitution from Swiss banks for Holocaust victims whose assets the banks had wrongly retained. Hausfeld thought he saw a similar situation in the ath­letes of the NCAA. Hausfeld grilled Vaccaro in his office about the sins of the NCAA, then got up from the conference table, hugged Vaccaro and said, "We're going to take them on." Hausfeld's attorneys hauled off Vac-caro's boxes of papers and began carefully sifting for evidence of NCAA perfidy. As Hausfeld attorney Jon King readily admits, Vaccaro was the "jump start to the entire process. He's the heart and soul of the case."

Since Vaccaro suffered no personal harm from the NCAA's contract and has no legal standing as a plaintiff, he had to recruit some­one who did have standing. (The NCAA, still thinking he was John Dillinger, as Vaccaro says, has asked for the past 12 years of his re­cords, on the theory that he induced players to join the suit by paying them.) He phoned two dozen former players. Some didn't want

to upset their alma maters. Others were hoping for coaching jobs and couldn't take the risk. When Vaccaro reached him, former UCLA star and college player of the year Ed O'Bannon was working for a car dealership in Las Vegas and had already seen his image on an EA Sports game, for which he had re­ceived no compensation. He pondered the decision for a week before telling Vaccaro, "I want to be the man."

Along with O'Bannon, there are now 20 plaintiffs, among them Hall of Famers Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell. Vaccaro says a hundred more are waiting to join the suit who will testify in court, including, Vaccaro promises, the biggest names in basketball. Also joining the suit are plaintiffs from the other college money sport, football, including former Arizona State and Nebraska quarter­back Sam Keller, who had brought a suit of his own against the NCAA for the use of his like­ness. (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has filed another action in California state court but has yet to join the Hausfeld suit.) The coaches, many of them Vaccaro's friends, have been less forthcoming, and Vaccaro isn't happy about it. "Not one college coach has stood up on a platform and said, 'I want to do what's right for these kids.' Why does it have to be me?"

That is a good question. The main answer may be that the NCAA is powerful, and it takes someone gutsy like Vaccaro to challenge it—someone who knows the abuses firsthand. But if he has taken on this burden for revenge, he has also taken it on for redemption. So the answer, in part, is that Vaccaro, a former altar boy who refuses to eat meat on Fridays, is a practicing Catholic paying penance for an ex­ploitation he helped finance even if he didn't, as he claims, actively participate. And the an­swer is that Vaccaro, a man who says the worst thing on his record is a speeding ticket but who is nevertheless still regarded as some sort of mobster, will always be an outsider among outsiders, and he takes that role seriously. And the answer is that Vaccaro cares about his lega­cy. When James Gandolfini bought the rights to Vaccaro's life story for an HBO movie, Vaccaro refused to approve the script because, to hype the drama, it showed him doing un­derhanded things he'd never done. "I turned down a pretty good paycheck," Vaccaro says.

And finally the answer is Pam, Vaccaro's beautiful blonde wife of 28 years—19 years his junior—a former actress and model from whom he hasn't been separated for more than 24 hours at a time since their marriage. It was Pam who got her husband three large framed photos for his birthday several years ago because she wanted to remind him of the "true Sonny"—photos that, he says, are "always to my back" and that now hang in his office. They are of Roberto Clemente, Muhammad Ali and Jesse Owens—his three heroes. "They all have one thing in com­mon," Vaccaro says, tearing up. "They all did something that did not benefit them." Vac­caro is hoping his lawsuit may have the same effect on his reputation. He doesn't want to be known as the man who commercialized amateur athletics. He wants to be known as the man who wound up changing the system that abused young athletes.

He just might do it.

"The student athlete is

a Fiction. Amateurism

is not a word; it's

a trick."

¦—CJcyt

Vacarro looked Jordan in the

eye and said, "You're going

to have your own shoe. Your

name is going to be on every

shoe the kids wear." Air

Jordan was born.

Vaccaro calls the NCAA "the most racist organization

in America" for the way it uses and discards black ath­letes, which helps explain his

determination to destroy it.