How Michael Jordan helped transform Nike from uncool jogging brand to selling £22bn-worth of trainers a year

AIR Jordan trainers are now so highly prized that rare ones can fetch more than £1million and shoppers have rioted over the release of new designs.

But when Nike first tried to sign up basketball rookie Michael Jordan in 1984, the -loving player didn’t want anything to do with the firm.

The company was seen as an uncool jogging brand, while its co-founder was considering selling up following a round of job lay-offs.

Not that Jordan, 60 — widely considered to be the greatest basketball player of all time — was everyone’s first pick either.

He was only rated the third best choice among the young college players ready to be offered professional contracts.

Now new movie Air, by Ben Affleck, and starring his old pal Matt Damon, tells the story of the man who brought Nike and Jordan together in the biggest sports marketing deal of all time.

Nike shifts £22billion-worth of sports shoes a year, twice the amount of its nearest rival Adidas, with £3billion of that due to Air Jordans.

But the success probably wouldn’t have happened without little-known marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro, who once declared: “I am the saviour of Nike.”

The other key player was Jordan’s business-savvy mum Deloris, 81, who persuaded her son to forget Adidas in return for a contract that gave him a 25 per cent share of the profits from the trainers named after him.

No sportsman had signed a deal like that before, and here was a player yet to be picked for a top-level game.

‘Clear underdogs’

Air director Affleck says: “Even before he stepped on an NBA court Michael completely transformed the world of sports marketing and how athletes are compensated, championed by his mother, who envisioned his future and knew his worth.”

Right from the start Michael Jordan was underestimated.

At 15 he was considered too short at 5ft 10in for his high school basketball team.

Yet in a year he shot up by four inches and was soon being pursued by US colleges for their sides.

Even when he scored the winning shot for the University of North Carolina in the national championship final in 1982, some fans considered it to be a lucky one.

One man who believed otherwise was Vaccaro, who worked at Nike from 1977 to 1991.

The former PE teacher, who once admitted betting £800 a day on sport, was willing to gamble all of Nike’s basketball marketing budget on Jordan.

Vaccaro, now 83, was a controversial figure in the game because he paid college coaches to kit their players out in Nike trainers.

In Air, which opens in cinemas on Wednesday next week, Nike’s founder Phil Knight, played by Affleck, is depicted as not wanting to pay £200,000 a year to secure Jordan’s signature.

And the rest of the Nike team think that Vaccaro (Damon) has no chance of persuading the highly rated young prodigy to put a pen to their contract.

On court Jordan wore Converse trainers, which were then the predominant basketball brand, and off it he slipped on Adidas clothes.

It would be another four years before Nike dreamed up its now iconic Just Do It slogan.

Damon says: “I always had this idea of Nike as this absolute powerhouse in the basketball shoe market, which they are now.

“But when you catch them at the beginning of this story, they are the clear underdogs.”

Times were so tough at Nike that Knight was thinking of canning its basketball department.

He once wrote that “Orwell was right — 1984 was a tough year”, and told Fortune business magazine that he had thought about selling his creation.

Jordan appeared to be an unlikely saviour.

The day before he was due to fly to his meeting with Nike the then 21-year-old told his parents that he didn’t want to go.

It was his mum Deloris who changed his mind.

At the meeting Jordan’s main demand was a new sporty red Mercedes.

Vaccaro rolled two toy cars towards the young player and told him: “With the money you’re going to make, you can buy lots of cars.”

Deloris wanted to extract an even higher price from Nike.