Morris: Let’s listen to shoe guru Sonny Vaccaro

SONNY VACCARO started all this mess. He was the first to inject commercialism into college athletics, and he pleads guilty to the charges.

Vaccaro, in Columbia to speak at the College Sports Research Institute at South Carolina, said he had an accomplice in selling Nike, adidas and Reebok contracts to coaches and athletics programs.

That was the NCAA.

“I started professionalism in college athletics. I did,” Vaccaro said. “But, at any time, the college presidents, the college coaches could have said ‘no’ to Nike and we would not have been able to do it. I didn’t have a gun to their heads. I wasn’t in a back alley with a drug deal. ... If they said ‘no,’ it would have been over.

“But they didn’t because we helped pay their bills.”

Now Vaccaro says the NCAA speaks out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to upholding the amateur status of its athletes. Out one side, the NCAA states that athletes are not permitted to accept extra benefits from boosters. Out the other, colleges outfit all their athletes in free gear supplied by shoe and apparel companies.

“Isn’t that an extra favor for the athletes on these teams?” Vaccaro said. “The students can’t get it, can they? Students can’t get it free. So, when (the NCAA) tells you about extra benefits for athletes, you see it every day in front of your eyes. But they don’t want to talk about it.”

Vaccaro, now retired at age 74, made his name when he formed the ABCD All America Camp in 1984 for the nation’s top high school basketball players. He also co-founded The Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, the first national high school basketball all-star game.

Then, in 1977 he began working with Nike and presented its president, Phil Knight, with an idea to supply shoes to college coaches and their teams. The idea at first was to get the Nike logo – worn by one of the school’s athletes – on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. At the time, Nike could not afford that kind of advertising.

Vaccaro also lined up professional athletes with endorsement contracts. He was the first to sign Michael Jordan to a Nike deal.

With the proliferation of televised college athletic events, shoe and apparel company logos now are seen frequently across the country. As that form of advertising has increased exponentially over the years, so, too, have the financial agreements shoe and apparel companies make with college athletics departments.

Nike began by paying coaches $10,000 each to have their teams wear its shoes. Today, companies such as Under Armour supply entire athletics departments with shoes, sweat gear, T-shirts and more. Coaches at those schools are rewarded handsomely. For instance, Steve Spurrier is paid $750,000 annually by Under Armour.

That is all well and good, according to Vaccaro, if college athletes could get a cut of the endorsement pie. He is opposed to paying college athletes, but believes a cut – say 10 percent – of an athletic department’s apparel deal should go into a trust fund.

Add in the same percentage of all merchandise sales to the trust fund and it could reach into the millions of dollars, according to Vaccaro. Under his plan, when an athlete graduated from the college, he or she would receive a share from the trust fund.

Vaccaro said merchandise sales on the backs of athletes first struck him as unfair when he signed Michigan to a Nike contract in the early 1990s. Michigan sold Nike basketball jerseys with the No. 4 of star Chris Webber, whose mother had to purchase one because a jersey given to her by the athletics department would have violated NCAA rules.

Vaccaro said another avenue of revenue for that same trust fund should come from an athletic program attaining pre-determined graduation rates. He said programs should shift the bonuses that go to head coaches for outstanding graduation rates directly to the trust fund, since it is the students who are doing the schoolwork, not the coaches.

All of that will better help the NCAA both deal with commercialism in college athletics and retain the notion of amateurism, according to Vaccaro.

He should know, because he says he was the one who created this mess.

This story was originally published March 25, 2015 at 9:25 PM with the headline "Morris: Let’s listen to shoe guru Sonny Vaccaro."