“He wasn’t the CEO of Nike,” Convery says, noting that he spoke with Vaccaro himself while polishing the screenplay. With this as his goal, Vaccaro sets out to convince the player-and more importantly, his mother, Deloris, that Nike is the right brand to partner with for a shoe.Ĭonvery says he saw Vaccaro as a captivating figure, an unexpected and unsung hero of Nike. While others on the marketing team suggest doing multiple deals with other players, Vaccaro makes the case that they should put all their resources towards signing Jordan, banking on him becoming an NBA star. In the film, Vaccaro, a former high school basketball tournament organizer, is in charge of helping to develop the fledgling basketball division at Nike by identifying and recruiting top talent in the league for shoe deals and endorsements. Much of Air centers on the lengths that John Paul Vincent “Sonny” Vaccaro, a sports marketing executive at Nike, will go to to sign 21-year-old NBA rookie Michael Jordan to a shoe deal with the company. Sonny Vaccaro and Michael Jordan’s relationship Matthew Maher as Peter Moore, Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro and Jason Bateman as Rob Strasser in AIR. Here’s what to know about Michael Jordan’s legendary Nike signing and how it inspired Air. We all know how it ended, but to be able to look at how we got there was very compelling.” “They obviously entered a different stratosphere because of the Jordan deal. ![]() “It’s hard to imagine now a world where there was skepticism about how well Michael Jordan would transition into the NBA or a world in which Nike was destined to be just a running apparel company,” he tells TIME. The road to their partnership was complex, with Jordan’s mother Deloris (Viola Davis) playing an influential role in the life-changing negotiations.įor Air screenwriter Alex Convery, the humble origin story of one of the greatest sports deals of all time provided a wealth of real-life material to draw inspiration from. At the time, Jordan was a soon-to-be NBA rookie ranked third in the draft, while Nike was a veritable underdog in the world of sports shoes, known more for its running sneakers than flashy basketball kicks. Neither Jordan nor Nike were the household names they are now at the time of the signing in 1984. Directed by and co-starring Ben Affleck, who plays Nike co-founder Phil Knight, the movie centers on how Sunny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), a sports marketing executive, signed Jordan to his first-ever shoe contract with Nike, in an unprecedented deal that would change the face of sports marketing and athlete equity in endorsement deals forever. The trailblazing relationship between Jordan and Nike is the focus of a new film, Air, which releases in theaters on April 5. ![]() ![]() Over the course of his storied career and beyond, Jordan, considered by many to be the greatest basketball player of all time, has also been hailed as an icon of marketing, thanks to lucrative endorsement deals-chief among them, his longtime partnership with Nike, whose gargantuan impact in the sports shoe industry is largely attributed to their initial deal with Jordan. ![]() When it comes to athletes, few figures loom larger in the collective imagination than NBA legend, Michael Jordan.
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