The person who may have had the biggest impact on this week's UCLA dust-up against Arizona wasn't on the court at Pauley Pavilion. Instead, he sat in Section 213, Row 8, Seat 12, talking my ear off, letting off a tremendous amount of steam.
"I have mixed emotions about watching this game," said Sonny Vaccaro. "I just can't watch without getting mad at the whole ridiculous system."
Vaccaro -- a controversial 69-year-old who proudly admits that some refer to him as a "fat, Italian gangster" -- has had broad and significant impact on modern basketball. The summer hoops camps he ran for decades were a spawning ground that helped the Kobe Bryants and Kevin Garnetts of the world go from high school straight to the pros. The shoe company endorsement deals he signed with college coaches and NBA players helped create the current gilded age of big-money corporate sponsorship in basketball.
In 1984, Vaccaro convinced the suits at Nike to sign a young point guard from North Carolina. Air Jordan was born. The rest is history.
"Everybody wanted something from me then," said Vaccaro, his voice scratchy, as always, and still tinged with the Pittsburgh hardness of his youth. "I'd get call after call after call from the coaches and the players, every day. . . . Now, it's a lot different."
Two years ago, Vaccaro abruptly stopped putting on camps. He left his job as a shoe exec for Reebok. But rather than easing into retirement, he carved out a new niche. Angered by a long-simmering distaste for the masters of college sports, and by the 2005 NBA rule that forced American high school kids to wait at least one year before joining the league, he launched himself into a one-man crusade against the very entities that helped make him: the NCAA and the NBA.
Today, instead of a high-powered job wooing college coaches and future superstars, Vaccaro toils in relative obscurity. With little fanfare, he rails at what he considers to be great injustice. "Completely and totally un-American; add to that, anti-free market," he says of the NBA age limit. "Absurdly arrogant . . . a cabal . . . racist" are just some of his terms for the powers that rule big-time college sport.
To press his point, he has taken to the college-lecture circuit, eagerly making his case at places such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn and the University of Maryland, where he has been extremely well-received, according to Wharton School of Business professor Ken Shropshire.
