A few feet beyond the kitchen’s bold picture window, at least a dozen hummingbirds dart between feeders on the patio. Little bolts of winged frenzy on a placid, gray afternoon. Sonny Vaccaro sees this every day, but there’s still wonder in his sunken eyes at the fury in the birds’ flight, at hearts that can beat a thousand times a minute.
Or maybe it’s that he can relate.
What has amped his pulse this morning is a national newspaper’s upbeat preview of a high school football event, one that features Ohio teams playing schools from Alabama, Texas, New Jersey and California, among others.
“Every football game in the world is on TV!” Vaccaro says. “Three years ago they were killing my man LeBron! I mean, nobody gives a [hoot] what they do in football! Nobody!”
A breath. “If this was Sonny Vaccaro . . . ” he says, “No way!”
Vaccaro is just off on a non-toxic tangent. He seems more tickled by the irony than truly miffed. The real conversation has to do with Reebok’s senior director of grass-roots basketball, Vaccaro–one of basketball’s most influential and controversial figures of the last half-century–and those who will listen to his latest big idea.
The NBA and NCAA, in a fascinating turn, have said that they are prepared to invite the shoe companies into the discussion on how to inoculate youth basketball against its ills.
This would include John “Sonny” Vaccaro, 66, who readily (proudly, even?) concedes he’s been portrayed as “the antichrist in all of this.” And yet if the powers-that-be like what Vaccaro says, the nation’s entire developmental model for basketball could change.
“I’ve orally given a plan to all the organizations,” Vaccaro says. “In two weeks I promised everybody they’d have the written thesis by Sonny Vaccaro. But I have a plan.”
The grand plan
In an office laden with memorabilia, Vaccaro is reluctant to divulge details. Two days later the tricky but intriguing specifics emerge in a Washington Post story.
A facility in a yet-to-be determined locale would house players, selected by a committee. They would attend high schools in the academy’s area, and no postgraduate players would be involved. So any of the players involved still would spend a year in college or overseas before gaining eligibility for the NBA draft. Vaccaro says players would be held strictly accountable for their academic performance.
And then the questions begin.
Who funds it? If 9th-graders are included, as Vaccaro has indicated, how inexact a science is evaluating 7th- and 8th-graders for future greatness?
And what if the top players don’t want to be at the academy? And if the players still are recruited, how does this preclude the less savory elements of the process from seeping in?
Vaccaro has some answers: He says funding is the least of his worries, and that the players at the academy will be treated so well that the temptations will be mitigated.
On the one hand, NBA Commissioner David Stern, who declined to comment, indicated to the New York Times in August that he would be open to an academy run in conjunction with USA Basketball. Then there’s the other hand.
“He may pursue his idea, and good luck to him,” NCAA President Myles Brand said of Vaccaro in a telephone interview. “He’s been very successful in the past, and he may well be successful in the future. I think the problem’s bigger than that. [Vaccaro’s solution is] not broad-based. It doesn’t involve a wide range of people. He’s looking at small number of athletes.
“It isn’t the answer.”
“I’m agreeing!” Vaccaro says when told of Brand’s assessment. “This isn’t `it.’ This is a starting point.”
That is the captivating underpinning of the conversation. The shoe companies–long perceived as zealous saboteurs of fundamentals and education, in the pursuit of highlighting individual talent (and maybe signing the talent to endorsement deals)–will be ground-floor shareholders in the new process. Or at least publicly acknowledged as such.
“I think maybe we’ve had our head in the sand a while ago, that [shoe companies] were not a player,” Notre Dame men’s basketball coach Mike Brey says. “And they are a strong player. It’s just part of the climate of what we’re in. Maybe 10 years ago, maybe a little more, we had an attitude of, `How can they do that? Are they preying on young kids?’ Well, it’s the way of the world. Let’s all grow up. This is the world we’re in, this is culture we’re in.”
Said Brand: “I think the leadership of those companies are actually those people who want to resolve the issue. There’s no benefit to them in a chaotic situation.”
Such is the general reasoning as to why welcoming the shoe companies in is not akin to consulting the fox on how best to secure the henhouse.
Sponsoring AAU teams for which the youth players compete before they’re in high school, jousting to get them to specific camps, offering thoroughfares for coaches in the recruiting process–the folks at Reebok, Adidas and Nike simply have particular insight into these pliable minds.
“Clearly, the folks at Nike, the folks at Adidas, they have knowledge,” says Jim Haney, the executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC). “They’re interacting with kids, talking to them, having influence in terms of what events they attend during the summers, those kinds of things. That’s an important vantage point.”
It is what Sonny Vaccaro sees, beyond the manicured hillside outside his office window.
`I don’t need accolades’
If you want Vaccaro’s life story, consult the nearest search engine. The first guy to sign college coaches to shoe contracts, the guy who brought Jordan to Nike, the second and third marriages to Adidas and Reebok, the guy who led the charge of high schoolers to the NBA . . . it’s all there for the clicking.
It has brought him to this point. When the NBA instituted the minimum-age rule for the draft, Vaccaro says, it eviscerated his ability to help the kids. Now he must find a way, as he glibly puts it, to be “like Rodney King: Why can’t we all get along and be happy?
“As I’m going down the other side of the hill–and I’ve had the best life in the world–I don’t need accolades, I don’t need people to pat my [behind],” Vaccaro says. “What I need is someone to stand up and say, `These kids got [a bad deal], let’s make this work.'”
Protestations aside, Vaccaro keeps score. Briefly veering off topic, he points out (with justification) how much better his ABCD Camp was this summer than competing events run by Nike and Adidas. Though his altruism may be genuine, so is his desire to leave a legacy, to pioneer through undiscovered territory again in the lead wagon.
“What I give him credit for, in all honesty, is that he’s never been a status-quo guy,” DePaul men’s basketball coach Jerry Wainwright says. “Even if it’s to get people thinking, or [to start] a discussion to get everybody back to common sense.”
Thus Vaccaro’s proposition is inspired by European models, in which gifted players are identified at a young age, signed to contracts, then trained and educated by clubs. It allows those players unlimited time to work on their skills aboveboard, and the result lately has been a serious lack of gold tint to America’s international efforts.
Vaccaro’s model has an unapologetic endgame of eventually creating well-rounded elite players for gold-medal chases. By extension, the NCAA and then the NBA benefit from an elimination of influences that stress individual play and corrupt the process.
“What you’d have is an opportunity for a controlled environment where it’s completely uncontrolled now,” Seattle SuperSonics President Wally Walker says. “In the not-so-distant past, the high school coach had some control. And now that’s dissipated. It’s not the normal channel of authority, and that’s too bad.”
It is in no way a gimme. Though Brand acknowledges that the U.S. doesn’t have a “consistent developmental model” in basketball, he says the European model shortchanges education. Even Wainwright suggests a simpler approach that basically consists of permitting college coaches more year-round access to players.
Again, Vaccaro welcomes the cascade of questions and doubts. It means people are talking.
If his idea gets him pummeled, it will not be an unfamiliar position. Vaccaro says one of his favorite works is Victor Hugo’s French Revolution tome “Les Miserables,” which he says provides one of his pet notions: The first men over the wall are the first ones killed. Vaccaro has been first over the wall many times–shoe contracts for coaches, for high school teams, for AAU teams. And he’s been shot, figuratively, every time.
But as he discusses his plan to save a damaged system, he has unwittingly channeled the Hugo masterpiece for inspiration less stark but more universal: “What leads and controls the world is not locomotives but ideas.”
“I am so excited,” Vaccaro says. “I can’t wait. And at my age, you don’t want the days to go fast.”
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bchamilton@tribune.com
