PORTLAND, Ore. — Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have joined forces again, co-producing and starring in "Air," a film that depicts how Nike signed a young Michael Jordan to a signature shoe deal in 1984. The landmark deal changed the trajectory of Nike, which was struggling at the time, and set a new standard for athlete endorsements.
Affleck, who is also directing the film, plays Nike co-founder Phil Knight. Damon plays sneaker salesman-turned-Nike executive Sonny Vaccaro.
The movie also stars Jason Bateman, who plays Rob Strasser, a Nike executive and Vaccaro's boss; Chris Messina as David Falk, Jordan's agent; Viola Davis and Julian Tennon as Jordan's parents; Chris Tucker as Nike junior executive Peter Moore; Tom Papa as NBA executive Stu Inman; and Marlon Wayans, who plays coach George Raveling. Jordan will not be portrayed in the film.
Variety, in an October 2022 article, referred to the film as a "witty boardroom procedural zeroing in on a few fateful days in the life of Sonny Vaccaro." The movie is slated for release in theaters on April 5, 2023 by Amazon Studios.
Affleck and Damon wrote the script for Good Will Hunting in 1997, which won an Oscar for best original screenplay. This is the first time Affleck has directed Damon. Affleck has directed critical and commercial hits like Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Argo.
In 1984, Nike was struggling. It had set record sales the year before of nearly $700 million, but according to a 1992 article in the Washington Post, "by the following spring, its earnings had plunged for the first time, and the business press was rife with speculation about the firm's demise or, perhaps, its impending sale."
The signature shoe endorsement deal with Jordan, for five years and $2.5 million, came at the right time, revitalizing the brand. In its first year, Nike did $130 million in sales of Jordan's signature shoe, millions more than expected. Last year, the Jordan Brand generated more than $5 billion in annual revenue.
Knight and Vaccaro have sparred over the years about who deserves credit for Jordan's signing. Knight fired Vaccaro in 1991.
"The signing of Michael Jordan, yeah, success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan. A lot of people want to take credit for signing Michael Jordan, most obviously Sonny Vaccaro," Knight said in a 2015 USA Today article. "He said he was the key to the thing. Sonny helped, but he wasn't the MVP in that process."
Knight gave the most credit to Strasser and Moore. Jordan said it "really wasn't Sonny," and gave the majority of the credit to Raveling and Strasser.
But Vaccaro, who had claimed in an earlier ESPN documentary that his recommendation and contacts enabled Nike to sign Jordan, took full credit.
"Phil Knight's lying, Michael's lying more than Phil and Raveling is insane," he said in the same article. "Everyone's trying to rewrite history. It goes beyond Jordan. I am the savior of Nike."
