8 Chapter Eight: Air (2023)
Matt Damon won “Best Actor” for his role as Sonny Vaccaro in 2023’s Air from the Hollywood Critics Association. Viola Davis was also recognized with a win as “Best Supporting Actress” for her role as Deloris Jordan, Michael’s mother, by the Hollywood Critics Association at their midseason film awards in the summer of 2023. Damon received a “Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy” nomination at the Golden Globes, which went to Paul Giamatti for The Holdovers. Neither actor received an Oscar nod, which is a bigger shame to me than the NBA giving Charles Barkley or Karl Malone the Most Valuable Player award over Michael Jordan, because Air is a nearly perfect Michael Jordan movie, and Damon and Davis are 99.9% of the reason why.
Remember in season five of Game of Thrones when Tyrion told Missandei and Grey Worm that “A wise man once said the true history of the world is a history of great conversations in elegant rooms”? Well, the true history of the world’s greatest sneaker is a history of unforgettable conversations between Deloris Jordan and Sonny Vaccaro in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Portland, Oregon.
Air is unique in its Jordan storytelling in that Michael Jordan is barely featured in it. His presence looms large over every line and scene, but physically he is mostly left in the shadows. He’s portrayed by the actor Damian Delano Young, though the viewer mostly only ever gets a glimpse of the back of his head. An underestimated role as an actor, but a hugely important one, as Young’s position in one of the film’s most important scenes—the Nike boardroom, where Vaccaro, Phil Knight, Rob Strasser, Howard White, and others are pitching Nike to Jordan and his parents—allows for Damon to deliver one hell of a monologue.
“A shoe is just a shoe until somebody steps into it. Then it has meaning. The rest of us just want a chance to touch that greatness. We need you in these shoes, not so that you have meaning in your life but so that we have meaning in ours,” Damon as Vaccaro delivers at the crescendo. “Everyone at this table will be forgotten as soon as our time here is up, except for you. You’re going to be remembered forever because some things are eternal. You’re Michael Jordan and your story is going to make us want to fly.”
It’s natural for this to be the scene one thinks of first in discussions of Air. It was an unlikely and hugely meaningful moment that changed basketball, shoes, and popular culture forever. Nike was still a fledgling company when Jordan was drafted in 1984 and didn’t have particularly strong standing in the basketball world. Jordan wore Converse sneakers at North Carolina, and the makers of the first basketball shoe ever, the “Chuck Taylor Converse All Stars” were a couple years away from releasing the “Converse Weapon,” and the greatest shoe commercial ever featuring Jordan’s fellow NBA stars Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Isaiah Thomas, Kevin McHale, Mark Aguirre, and Bernard King.
Adidas, a German company that was more powerful locally and globally than Converse, was the front-runner, and it was seen as a formality that Jordan would sign himself over to the three-stripe life. Converse may have been the basketball sneaker pioneers, but by 1984 Adidas caught up and looked destined for basketball sneaker supremacy. The German outfitters first started luring high-end hoops talent when they released the “Superstar” in 1965 and the “Top Ten” in 1979. The feet of Hall-of-Famers like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robertson, and Jerry West were always adorned with the signature three stripes. Their progress in the 1980s was outpacing Converse and absolutely dwarfed Nike (for more on the arms races and history of basketball sneakers, A History of Basketball in Fifteen Sneakers by Russ Bengston is required reading).
The star power of their biggest competitors is what gave Nike the unlikely edge to sign Jordan, who didn’t want to be seen as equals to any of his contemporaries no matter how great they were. Nike had a chance, but they had to play it perfectly (and of course also offer Jordan some out of this world royalties that were seen as insane at the time), and Vacarro’s speech summed up everything Jordan was looking for.
It’s an earlier scene in the film that fully encapsulates the concept of mythmaking and how it relates to Jordan’s legend.
Vaccaro pops a game tape into a VCR at the Nike offices and declares “I found him!”
“Who’s that, Jesus?” asks his colleague, Rob Strasser, who is excellently portrayed by Jason Bateman. Seriously, the acting across the board in this film is just so fucking good.
Referring to Jordan as Jesus in the film is also a clever nod to one of his several nicknames and the moment when he told Reggie Miller, “Never talk trash to Black Jesus.”
Vaccaro, attempting to get the green light from Strasser to throw everything Nike had plus the kitchen sink at an all-out blitz to try and sign Jordan at the risk of missing out on every other player in the 1984 draft class, turns on the final seconds of the 1982 NCAA championship game: North Carolina vs Georgetown. The shot that made Jordan a household name when he was 19 years old.
“This is the 1982 championship game, the shot that Jordan makes,” Strasser says. “I’ve seen this. Everyone’s seen this.”
“No!” Vacarro snaps back. “We’ve been looking at it wrong.”
This is the moment Air fully embraces the number one rule of Michael Jordan storytelling.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
“Watch,” Vaccaro continues in another dazzling performance by Damon. “Here’s James Worthy, okay? Number one in his draft class, another guy we had no chance of signing.”
Worthy is a notable figure in Jordan’s tale for multiple reasons. He and Sam Perkins were North Carolina’s biggest stars on campus when Jordan arrived. Worthy says with a laugh in The Last Dance, “I was better than he was…for about two weeks.”
While Jordan is the one who hit the game-winning shot in that championship game that Vacarro is going on and on about, Worthy earned Most Outstanding Player honors at the 1982 Final Four. The Los Angeles Lakers selected him No. 1 overall in 1982, and then he became the first basketball player ever to sign a shoe deal worth more than a million dollars when another company known more for their running shoes at the time, New Balance, gave him an eight-year, $1.2 million deal, resetting the sneaker market in the NBA and paving the way for the abundance of shoe deals to come.
A further related aspect of Worthy’s deal with New Balance, is that it was negotiated by his agent David Falk, who became Jordan’s agent after he turned professional.
“Why isn’t he getting the ball?” Vaccaro asks Strasser. “They’re down by one. There’s under a half a minute to go. Why isn’t the superstar getting the ball? Why is the ball going to the 18-year-old skinny freshman from Wilmington, North Carolina?”
It’s a fair question. And Strasser responds with a fair answer.
“They probably drew up the play for Worthy, and Jordan was an option in case Worthy was covered,” Strasser says as if it’s the most rational thought in the world.
“No, that’s wrong, Worthy is a decoy,” Vaccaro exclaims. “We’ve been looking at this wrong. Look, he knows he’s not getting the ball. [Georgetown’s] in a 1-3-1 zone. What’s going to happen the second Worthy comes across the lane? That zone’s gonna collapse on him, leaving Michael Jordan open in the corner, and the ball’s going to go to him and he’s going to shoot it. Look, when he shoots it, he shoots it right away. He knows he’s getting the ball. The play is drawn up for Jordan. And now that you know that, watch Jordan.”
Okay, but wait hold on, Mr. Vaccaro/Matt Damon. Not to interrupt an impassioned speech and some truly spectacular acting, but if we could just go back to Rich Cohen’s When the Game Was War for a moment. Just a moment.
Here’s a passage from Cohen’s reporting (pg. 49):
In Jordan’s freshman year, UNC played the Georgetown Hoyas, coached by John Thompson and led by center Patrick Ewing, for the NCAA Championship. The Hoyas won the first half 32-31. The Tar Heels won the second 32-30. Eric “Sleepy” Floyd hit a shot with 57 seconds left to give the Hoyas the lead. Dean Smith called time. Jordan took a seat at the end of the bench, his face buried in a towel. The seniors stood in a circle. Coach Smith laid out a plan: Jimmy Black inbounds to Michael, who passes to Matt Doherty, who carries the ball up-court, then passes to one of the big men inside, Worthy or Perkins, for the last shot. But if they’re covered, said Smith, look for Jordan.
“You get me the ball,” Jordan told Doherty as they went back onto the floor. “I’ll make the shot.”
So, the play was drawn up exactly as Strasser suggests to Vaccaro in the movie, but where’s the fun in that? You can’t spell “dramatization” without “drama,” after all.
Bateman’s best line delivery in the entire movie comes immediately after Damon’s emphatic insistence the most important play of Dean Smith’s coaching career was drawn up for the skinny teenager from Wilmington.
“You feel like your plane is in its final descent or are you just circling?”
“Look at him,” Vaccaro responds. “Look at how relaxed he is. Look, he wants the ball. He’s calling for the ball. The whole world is watching him. He’s 18 years old. He’s three seconds away from the biggest shot of his life and the biggest shot of Dean Smith’s life. Remember the knock on Dean Smith? He couldn’t win the big one. He’d been there three times, but couldn’t get it done. This is his fourth and maybe his last time. Dean Smith didn’t even start freshmen. Michael is only the third freshman to start for the guy. And what does he do? He puts the ball in the hands of an 18-year-old freshman. Why?
“Because Dean sees the same thing I see… Greatness.”
A lower stakes lie in all of this is Vaccaro’s insistence that all of this is remarkable considering Jordan was an “18-year-old freshman.” It’s not the biggest deal in the world, but a simple fact check would have shown him that Michael turned 19 several weeks before the 1982 national championship game.
Even when you add a dose of truth serum to the story, Jordan’s game-winning/championship-winning shot is still remarkable. It’s one of the most remarkable moments in the history of college basketball. The world wasn’t accustomed to seeing players that young in moments that big and look so composed. We were still decades away from YouTube or any forms of social media channels streaming endless highlights. It was when “freshmen played on freshmen teams” as Jim Valvano said in his famous Espy’s speech. The thing I find most interesting about all the forms of Michael Jordan storytelling is the lies and the fabrications are almost never necessary. In his case, truth is almost always stranger than fiction. In a different Michael Jordan highlight video I watched as a kid (there were dozens of them), the narrator asks the audience over a particularly impressive highlight of Jordan hitting a reverse layup, “is he man or machine?”
I repeated the question to my father, who was often by my side watching with me. Basketball was his favorite sport too, and much of my childhood consisted of us shooting around in our driveway, or sitting on the couch watching games or videos about some of his favorite players, including Jordan (there was also a Magic Johnson video we rented from our neighborhood Blockbuster so many times that they eventually just told us to keep it). Dad would often lament the number of dunks these videos would always show, as thunderous dunks were nearly impossible to emulate, but he would always call attention to Jordan’s form and technique when shooting jump shots or getting back on defense.
“Man,” he’d answer this ridiculous question that I was too young to know was a ridiculous question, “there’s no way a machine could ever play that well.”
Sonny Vaccaro saw greatness in Jordan, and so it didn’t matter if the play was drawn up for him or not. It’s what possessed him to convince everyone at Nike that they should take all of the resources reserved to try and sign three players to conventional shoe deals and instead focus all of those resources into signing one player to the most unconventional and simultaneously transcendent shoe deal of all time.
Perhaps the most shocking detail of Air is that director Ben Affleck got Jordan’s signoff on it himself despite Jordan barely appearing in the film. Jordan asked for George Raveling, his coach at the 1984 Olympics and one of the first people in Jordan’s circle to encourage him to sign with Nike, to be included in the film. Affleck agreed and casted Marlon Wayans to play Raveling. The role of Howard White was also a personal request of Jordan’s. Affleck casted Chris Tucker, another friend of Jordan’s and someone he had also always wanted to work with.
Jordan also showed a skillful hand for film production by asking for the roles of his mother and father to be expanded, and that Viola Davis should play his mother. If only Jordan could have selected players for the Charlotte Hornets half as well as he selected actors for Hollywood blockbusters, he wouldn’t be known as one of the worst owners in sports, but that’s another rant for another day.
Air is the most decorated among Jordan-themed Hollywood features and the most-deserving of the Oscar nods it was denied. As much as I love Space Jam (and we will talk about how much I really love Space Jam) neither Jordan nor Bugs Bunny hold a candle to Viola Davis when it comes to starring on the silver screen. As a film, it packs quite a punch in a very contained space. The temptation to make Jordan a central part of the film had to be there, but including such a god-like figure and pulling it off without turning him into a distraction is nearly impossible. It’s a masterclass in storytelling on the margins, through conversations, and through moments of inspiration when watching a sports highlight for the hundredth time but it wasn’t until that hundredth time that you were aware of what you were even looking for in the first place.
Much like a shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it, a story is just a story until someone believes in it. Then, it has meaning.
