AMOR PERFECT UNION: Sonny Vaccaro and the Ivy Way

“I’m not a fan of the system,” Sonny Vaccaro said to me following his speech at Harvard Law School.

This, coming from the man who had spent much of the last hour and a half, as well as the last four decades, ripping “the system” (also known as the NCAA) a new one, seemed like somewhat of an understatement.

Vaccaro, advertised by the Law School’s Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law as the “Godfather of Basketball,” took the crowd from his humble beginnings just outside of Pittsburgh in Trafford, Pa. to his stints as an executive at all three major sneaker companies (NIKE, adidas, and Reebok) to his recent retirement from the shoe and basketball camp industries.

Vaccaro’s journey in the basketball world, which started in 1964 when he created the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, the first-ever national high school all-star tournament, would turn him into one of the most influential and controversial figures in the sport.

His innovations included working with NIKE to pay both high school and college coaches to deck their players out with the Swoosh, convincing Phil Knight’s then-upstart sneaker company to “just do it” by throwing unheard amounts of cash at a kid from UNC named Michael Jordan after the 1984 draft, and founding the ABCD Camp in New Jersey and the Big Time Tournament in Las Vegas, both Meccas on any high school star’s pilgrimage to the NBA when Vaccaro was still running them.

To players, Vaccaro has been a kind of sage, a wise uncle who has advised and assisted the likes of Kobe, LeBron, and most recently mega-prospect O.J. Mayo. Vaccaro has also made many of those under his tutelage very wealthy, whether by signing them to shoe deals or encouraging them to take the jump from high school straight to the NBA or both.

But while Vaccaro has plenty of admirers, he has no shortage of critics either, especially in the NCAA. He has been portrayed as a basketball mobster, a blight on the integrity of the game who has brought about the age where NBA hype starts in middle school and teenagers are drawn away from the amateur game by the allure of multimillion shoe deals and signing bonuses.

To Vaccaro, the claims of his critics are representative of the hypocrisy of “the system,” which cries foul over the degradation of amateurism while treating its athletes as a supply of indentured labor.

In his speech, he criticized the mass marketing of college athletes (billboards of Heisman trophy candidates, memorabilia being sold) without any compensation for the athletes themselves. He challenged the myth of the student athlete, blasting a culture where athletes take easy classes if they even attend them at all, grade inflation is rampant, and players jump ship to the NBA the first chance they get (despite the league’s new draft eligibility age requirement, supposedly there to improve college ball and teach players the right way to play the game).

The speech, which lasted roughly an hour and a half, had a strange effect on me. It made me appreciate the sports environment at Harvard.

Crimson sports don’t garner the same fanfare or attention as larger, non-Ivy League programs. We don’t attract the nation’s top prep school stars to play in Lavietes Pavilion and Harvard Stadium. A big reason for this is that the Ivy League has outlawed athletic scholarships, which leads to major prospects diverting their attention to other schools. But although this means that Harvard students can’t enjoy an ACC or Big Ten type of athletic environment, it also is the reason why our sports programs don’t exhibit the ills that Vaccaro pointed out in the rest of the NCAA.

“The purest form of amateurism of all sports in America,” Vaccaro said of the Ivy League. “I admire them, and I adhere to their principles. Unfortunately they can never be competitive, but fortunately that’s good.”

There is no corruption of the term “student-athlete” at Harvard. Our athletes are held to the same academic standards as every other student, and must meet those standards while balancing the huge time commitment that their sports entail.

When I e-mailed Harvard men’s basketball coach Tommy Amaker about the role of education in college sports, he wrote back, “I would prefer to speak about the role of college sports within the world of education. Education is always our first priority, and college sports can be a tremendous way to enrich that education.”

And as for Harvard sports not being competitive, that’s not altogether true. We have several nationally ranked teams and individual athletes, and the athletic department has shown a desire to improve the programs which have traditionally struggled—most notably by bringing in Amaker this year to coach a men’s basketball team that has never won an Ivy League title—while staying within the bounds of its education-first policy and not turning its unpaid athletes into marketing tools.

I’m not saying that our basketball team is going to be able to go head to head against Duke anytime soon, and I’m not saying that I ever see Harvard becoming as sports crazed a campus as USC.

I’m just saying that I can live with the state of athletics here a little easier knowing that Harvard remains one of the last places where words like “amateurism” and “student-athlete” are still real words that represent real principles, rather than code names that cover up corruption and greed.

—Staff writer Loren Amor can be reached at lamor@fas.harvard.edu.