Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) is a gambler. By night, at casinos; by day, as a marketing executive at Nike, where he’s worked as a basketball talent scout since 1977. When we first meet him in “Air,” Ben Affleck’s charming new piece of Nike propaganda, he’s convinced that he and the brand to which he’s been allegiant for nearly a decade need to take their biggest chance yet to guarantee their long-term survival. The Beaverton, Oregon-headquartered company is in the middle of a lukewarm period; when the film begins, in 1984, its basketball division has a paltry 17% market share and profits are in the kind of stalemate that’s resulted in 25% of its staff getting laid off. So when Vaccaro is tasked by the brand’s CEO, Phil Knight (Ben Affleck), with coming up with an innovative and hopefully brand-salvaging shoe-line pitch with a relatively meager $250,000 budget, Vaccaro does exactly that.
Only Vaccaro’s idea doesn’t hew very closely to what Knight had had in mind; it’s so risky that it makes him immediately mad that it’s even being suggested. (To Knight’s eye, the money ideally would be spread between a trio or so of spokespeople.) Seeing greatness in a young and lanky Michael Jordan (who’s never seen or heard from in “Air” for silly reasons), Vaccaro is convinced that Nike, then mostly known for its jogging gear, should blow the entirety of the $250,000 on Jordan. They should create a line that harnesses his escalating star power and in general shirk the practice of peers like Adidas and Converse simply putting star athletes in preexisting wares, giving him a brand within the brand that both celebrates his once-in-a-generation talent and lets wearers walk around “like Mike.”
Read the column, on Air and How to Blow Up a Pipeline, on 425.
Peterson Reviews 