Sonny Vaccaro has been one of basketball’s biggest contradictions.
He has simultaneously been an insider and an outsider, a power-broker and a rebel. He insists he’s part of the solution to some of the sport’s biggest problems, but he also has helped create them.
Vaccaro realizes he is a walking mixed message. That’s partly why he left his position as head of Reebok grass-roots basketball this month at 67, ending three decades as a marketing whiz and master recruiter for athletic shoe companies.
Vaccaro, though, is not walking away from basketball. In fact, the man who revolutionized the sport may do it again. He hopes to open several “basketball academies,” including one in Chicago, to serve as athletic and academic finishing schools.
It’s an ambitious plan, but it’s risky to bet against him. It was Vaccaro, after all, who invented the national all-star high school basketball game in 1965 in Pittsburgh. His Roundball Classic now takes place in Chicago, though Vaccaro won’t guarantee its future beyond this April’s game.
It also was Vaccaro who conceived the idea of using college coaches as endorsers and who got his then-Nike bosses to sign Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal and put its marketing muscle behind him.
And it was Vaccaro who invented the free shoe company national summer camp and “Nike high schools,” whose teams got free shoes and other gear. When he joined Adidas in 1993, it set off a war in which shoe companies with competing circuits of camps and traveling team tournaments battled fiercely for the allegiances of top athletes, making kids “Nike players” or “Adidas players” and helping spark an increase in unsavory third parties.
Vaccaro, who made Reebok a third player in shoe wars after he moved there in 2003, has had enough of the summer scene. He wants to do other things, he said Thursday, not only start the academies but also write his memoirs and give speeches.
He wants to be taken seriously as a reformer and has figured out he has no shot at that as long as people see him as a guy making a living hawking shoes.
“If I was going to continue my fight, it can’t be with a shoe com-pany,” he said. “It has to be as an individual.”
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Vaccaro sees himself as a crusader for players’ rights, which includes opposing limits on high school players’ ability to enter the NBA draft and a college system he believes enriches everyone but the athletes.
He said he is weary of fighting NCAA limits on summer basketball as well as of being blamed for everything from the sport’s big egos and corruption to the United States’ Olympic hoops pratfalls.
His academies, he said, would put basketball on an equal footing with sports that already have such programs. He said they also would clean up the sport, in part because players would enroll at established, academically strong high schools, thereby avoiding the diploma-mill charges aimed at some prep schools.
He hopes to start four or five regional academies, each with up to 20 players who would attend free of charge, living and training at an academy facility and playing a schedule likely heavy on prep school powerhouses.
Vaccaro said players would be expelled only for bad grades, not bad basketball, and that he expects most would attend college for at least two years.
He said initial talks with wealthy potential backers–none of them agents or shoe companies–has convinced him these academies are doable.
He added he wants them to be to basketball what the Juilliard School is to music and almost dared you to laugh, knowing those who consider him the Darth Vader of youth hoops will snicker anyway.
“My ultimate dream is that every player wants to grow up to go to these academies,” he said, “not necessarily to go to the NBA but to be a great student and player.
“If it happens, my life will be complete.”
Summer basketball, meanwhile, will proceed without him. Adidas, Nike and Reebok officials said Thursday their companies are tinkering with their programs but that they will stay active in the summer scene.
Nike, for example, will replace its All-American camp with four position camps, each for about 20 invitees and each featuring a different NBA star — Kobe Bryant, Vince Carter, Steve Nash or Amare Stoudemire. All 80 players will wind up at a camp LeBron James will conduct during the July period, when college coaches can evaluate players.
Nike touts these as skill-development camps, no doubt in response to charges the summer game has fostered undisciplined players with fundamental skills as solid as mashed potatoes.
It still, however, smacks of the old model, with shoe companies seeking player loyalty in hopes of signing any future stars to endorsement deals.
NCAA and NBA officials joined major shoe company representatives and others at a summit meeting last fall aimed at improving amateur basketball. Vaccaro was not invited and admits that offended him.
It was puzzling because like him or loathe him, he’s among the most influential men in basketball history. The slight may only motivate him to make his academies work and exit hoops world with a last hurrah.
He knows his place in that world is secure, though he said he prefers to let others define it.
“I know I’ve done things that never had been done,” he said. “I know that.”
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