Sonny Vaccaro Pays Homage to Legendary Nike Patriarch Phil Knight

On Tuesday, Phil Knight announced that he will be stepping down as the chairman of Nike in 2016. That news might not have made such massive waves across the sports world if not for Sonny Vaccaro.

The 75-year-old basketball impresario played a pivotal part in transforming Nike from a track shoe business run out of the trunk of Knight's Plymouth Valiant into the world's pre-eminent sports apparel brand. It was Vaccaro, the founder of the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic in his native Pittsburgh, who exposed Knight to the opportunities inherent in hoops.

In 1984, Knight and Vaccaro signed Michael Jordan to his first shoe contract, thereby tipping off a revolution in the way sports are marketed and consumed around the world. 

Knight ultimately fired Vaccaro from Nike in 1991, in the midst of the company's meteoric rise. "They did well after that, but I also did well after I left," Vaccaro told Bleacher Report. "I don’t know enough, and I guess I’ll never know. That’s fine."

Vaccaro went on to become the king of summer basketball, working closely with Nike's chief competitors. Since then, Vaccaro has delved deep into player advocacy, with his victory in the case of Ed O'Bannon v. the NCAA as the latest feather in his well-adorned cap.

Bleacher Report caught up with Vaccaro by phone, from his home in Palm Springs, to get his reaction to Knight's announcement and his thoughts on the man himself. What follows are excerpts from that conversation, edited for clarity and length.

On his relationship with Knight...

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"He allowed me to use my mind. All the time I was there until the day I got fired, on my personal level, was unbelievable. The guy was and is a genius. There’s no question about that. He knew. He was focused. He was going to make this company, or die trying, the No. 1 brand in the world.

"There’s no question, the years I spent with him, his drive was...he was an athlete. He was a runner. He hired many people in those early years who were very, very good at what they did. One of the first people he hired was Rob Strasser, who was Phil's right-hand man. Then signing Jordan and the designer, Peter Moore, and all that.

"If you’re just talking about Phil, Phil was driven then. He climbed Mount Everest three times in this industry. Everyone is compared to Nike and will always be compared to Nike."

On Knight's accomplishments...

"It’s Steve Jobs before that. There was nothing else. There were shoe companies. There was Converse. They were successful, but they owned the world and they did nothing. The rest of their lives, they did nothing innovative.

"Phil Knight, not only did he win basketball; he won everything. He’s got the greatest collection of athletes ever assembled. All the all-star teams and all the whatever start from when he started and put them in every sport, from tennis to basketball to soccer, whatever. They ended up owning the sports world in a very, very competitive market, because Adidas owned soccer. They no longer own soccer. Converse owned basketball. They’re no longer Converse. Hell, Nike bought Converse! He just ran roughshod over them, he’s so successful.

"And marketing started with 'It’s gotta be the shoes' and a guy named Peter Moore, when he designed the first Jordans, marketing to African-Americans. This was all out of the box, with Jordan and Spike Lee. He’s going to write this book that you don’t have enough pages to write. The campus that he built up there, it’s a memorial to his Mount Rushmore of athletes—getting Tiger Woods to signing Jordan to coming up with all those tennis lines."

On comparing Knight to Steve Jobs...

"I’ve used Steve Jobs as my analogy. Jobs’ was a technical thing. Phil Knight’s business was a human thing. He made his on human beings. He put the shoes on. The individuals made the product, whereas technology made Steve Jobs, all the computers and all that shit. You can’t goddamn figure it out, right? It’s impossible to do what he did, right?

"But Phil, the shoes, the equipment, the clocks that they run now, all this new stuff and the materials that they use. But it’s still geared by athletes, human beings. Everything is predicated in the marketing mind.

"They’re a marketing company. They’re not an athletic shoe company. They’re the best marketing company ever to live. He created it. They were so far ahead of everyone, and still are, in marketing. That’s basically what they do. They had $100 million budgets when other companies weren’t making $100 million. They were spending it."

On Knight's eye for talent...

JACK SMITH/Associated Press

"I believe that his decisions on people were great. And he also knew that you had to give a lot of money to certain athletes. The Tiger Woods thing is just as big as Michael Jordan. Phil used to have—and he used it with me a few times—he used a statement, 'After a while, they’ll think I underpaid them.' He told that to athletes and coaches throughout the tenure that I was there. Otherwise, he gave them a hell of a lot of money. He knew the value was a hell of a lot bigger than what we gave them."

On Knight's legacy...

"He’s just too big. He hasn’t killed anybody, so you can’t go into a character thing or whatever. You could only not say, if you’re sticking in the business world, you can only praise him because there’s nobody like him in this world, in this industry. He did it.

"When I went there, it was on a lark. When I ended there, it was getting fired. But in between, it was an unbelievable journey. No matter how you feel about him personally or if you get pissed or something, what he did can’t be done again because times have changed. He knocked those people right out of the box."

Josh Martin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter.

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