He sells company on paying college coaches and providing shoes for their Buy Kobe 9 Online camps and teams

He sells company on paying college coaches and providing shoes for their camps and teams

Strasser and Laurie Becklund. Strasser and Laurie Becklund, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc

In the summer of 1977, a small-time basketball promoter named Sonny Vaccaro came to Oregon to see the men at Blue Ribbon Sports. Vaccaro, who had been referred by sports agent Jerry Davis, carried with him prototypes of a sandal-type basketball shoe he had designed and hoped to sell to Nike.

About half a dozen managers took Vaccaro to lunch at a local Chinese dive, where they listened to him talk about his shoe. Nobody was very interested in it. They were fascinated, however, by Vaccaro. Maybe they had seen too many movies, but they believed Sonny had Mafia written all over him.

A plump man with big brown eyes and an impish laugh, Vaccaro had grown up in Trafford, a factory town outside Pittsburgh. After graduating from Youngstown State, he started teaching special education at Trafford High School and coached local all-star tournaments in Ohio and elsewhere.

At age 24, he drew up a plan to start a high school charity basketball tournament and persuaded a local newspaper to sponsor it. The "Dapper Dan" as he envisioned it, was a tournament that allowed the country's best high school players to compete against each other while giving college recruiters a central spot to scout them. By 1977, he was 38, a former teacher with an ex-wife and four children to support.

Vaccaro was something of an institution in the Las Vegas sports books like the Barbary Coast or the Aladdin. He could be seen most days, unshaven, in a well-worn warmup, reading the paper in coffee-shop booths near the action. His name was paged every few minutes, particularly as kickoffs drew close. He lived off what he made from football bets, either betting alone or in pools.

But, he would stress to anyone who happened to ask, he kept his betting season separate from his working season. August through the Super Bowl was Vegas and football. The rest of the year was Pittsburgh and basketball.

Rob Strasser, Blue Ribbon's large, gregarious marketing director, loved characters, and feared the world was running short. He instinctively liked and trusted Vaccaro. Vaccaro didn't show up in a coat and tie and try to be something he wasn't Buy Nike Air Max Shoes Online. He came to Oregon on his own nickel, and didn't ask for anything other than a chance to be heard. When Blue Ribbon misplaced his prototype sandals, Vaccaro didn't get upset or make threats.

Over the next few months, Strasser talked to Vaccaro about basketball, and the prototype shoes were forgotten.

By 1977, Blue Ribbon already had one of the biggest basketball promo programs--45 pro players under contract, 10 of whom were Nike Pro Club members, who were receiving increasingly expensive annual trips. In 1977, Pro Club players and their families went to the Royal Lahaina in Maui, a first-class, old-style resort on the Kaanapali Coast. When some players complained about paying their own phone bills, Blue Ribbon got a taste of just how pampered top NBA players were becoming.

The NBA's a stupid place for Nike to spend money, Vaccaro said over and over again.

"Nobody's taking on these young kids in the colleges," Vaccaro said. "Black and East is basketball. It isn't pros Cheap Sale Kobe Shoe. It isn't West Coast white kids. You guys are missing the playgrounds, and you're missing the colleges and that's what basketball's all about."

"We're selling a lot of basketball shoes compared to a year ago," protested Strasser.

Vaccaro shook his head.

"You know a guy named George Case with Pro-Keds?" he asked. "He came to the Dapper and gave kids a few pairs of shoes. No T-shirts, just shoes. They loved those shoes because they got them at the Dapper, which meant they were some of the best high school players in the country. They were like a badge of honor."

Basketball wasn't an individual sport like track, Nike's mainstay. A company usually had to get a whole team in a shoe because it was part of a uniform. The question was how to do that without breaking NCAA rules, which prevented companies from giving free shoes directly to individual athletes or paying them to wear shoes Buy Kobe 9 Online.

The rules didn't forbid the paying of coaches, and Strasser and Vaccaro figured that was their opening. The coach got money from Nike. The kids got free shoes. The schools spent less on their equipment budget at a time school budgets were constricting. Who could possibly be a victim?

But Strasser did have one major concern.

"We don't want to look like we're paying college kids to wear shoes," he said to Vaccaro. "Let's focus on the coaches. Make them part of a Nike advisory staff. Set up clinics, and give their kids free shoes. Let's also do an annual trip for the coaches and their families so that we can make them feel like part of the Nike family."

"OK," said Vaccaro confidently.

"What's in it for you?" asked Strasser.

"I want to be Joe Dean," he said. "I want to beat Joe Dean."

Every basketball junkie in the country knew who Joe Dean was. He had been Converse's key basketball promotion man since 1970, and had gotten the best teams in the country in All-Stars.