![]() ![]() You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. “Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?” Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education. The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. ![]() Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors. These were eminent reformers-among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. ![]() “I ’m not hiding,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. ![]()
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