Michael Jordan having no interest in Nike, a company that had 17% of the basketball sneaker market share in 1984, was understandable. He was and Adidas guy all the way through his collegiate career and wore Converse solely because of the University of North Carolina being a Converse school. David Falk, Jordan’s agent, urged him to take up meetings with Adidas and Converse and tried to push Nike under the rug. That is of course, until Sonny Vaccaro would take matters into his own hands.
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Despite being a company worth upwards of a billion dollars in 1984 due to their track-and-field department, the Nike basketball division was given merely $250,000 to sign 3-4 guys from the ’84 Draft. There would be no way that Nike would be able to afford Michael and this is why David believed their efforts were moot.
Sonny (a basketball talent scout for Nike) on the other hand didn’t want to take no for an answer. He believed in MJ before anybody else at Nike did. He wanted to offer him ever last cent of the $250,000 budget and to do so, he approached the Jordans directly, without David Falk’s permission.
David Falk went off at Sonny Vaccaro for going to Michael Jordan and his parents by himself
Sonny Vaccaro rented out a car and drove to North Carolina to meet with Deloris Jordan and James Jordan at their home. He wanted to build a more personal connection with the family instead of meeting them for the first time at a corporate meeting. His trip worked as Nike snagged a meeting with the Jordans not long after.
The repercussions of this ‘secret’ meet-up came to the fore very quickly however as David Falk called Vaccaro and went in on him, yelling any and every type of profanity that he could conjure up.
“You show up at the house? Are you trying to ruin your f**king career,” asked David rhetorically to Sonny as per the movie ‘Air’. “My job is to protect Michael and his family from people like you. I’ll bury you alive and light you on fire and dance and p*ss on your grave.”
Suffice to say that Falk was not pleased with Sonny bypassing him and making him look irrelevant to his clientele. Towards the end of the verbal abuse however, Falk admitted that if Nike were to somehow miraculously sign MJ, both him and Sonny would become ‘best friends’.
David Falk and Peter Moore both believed they came up with the name ‘Air Jordan’
All reports indicate that David Falk came up with the name ‘Air Jordan’ for Michael’s line of sneakers. Not only did he come up with the name, he apparently came up with it in a single minute.
Peter Moore, the designer of the ‘Air Jordan 1’, had also come up with the same name as depicted in ‘Air’. He believed he was the first to come up with it but Sonny and Strasser would break the news to him that Falk had already come up with it. Howard White in ‘The Last Dance’ even confirmed that he first heard the name from David.
