Just shoe it: Three companies competed furiously for LeBron James

The mail kept coming to inmate No. 38980-060. One from Adidas. One from Reebok. Yet another from Nike.

"Two or three a week, from each of them, since Day 1," Eddie Jackson said.

He had been in the Loretto (Pa.) Federal Correction Institution since Jan. 7, and the frequent mail wasn't his only contact with the shoe companies. Reebok sent a representative to get face-to-face advice on landing an important client, Jackson said.

For the shoe companies, it was not important that Jackson was serving a three-year sentence for scams that netted him $197,000. What was important was that Jackson was the surrogate father of LeBron James, making Jackson one of the people closest to the most heralded high-school basketball player ever.

"If they have a kid they are interested in, they want to make everyone around him happy," Jackson said from prison recently.

In the end, Nike won out over the other shoe companies, signing the 18-year-old James to a $90 million endorsement deal May 22. It included a $10 million signing bonus and incentives that could double James' take, according to published estimates confirmed by people involved with the negotiations.

Only a handful know what happened on the road to the deal, and most of them are not talking. But through interviews with Jackson, Adidas, Nike and the negotiators of the deal — agent Aaron Goodwin and attorney Fred Schreyer — an extravagant, wild picture emerges.

The mad dash to lure James included a Malibu mansion party hosted by Adidas, a tantalizing $10 million sign-now-and-it's-yours check dangled by Reebok and rap songs written in his honor and performed live at Nike.

"It was a journey that people only read about, or dream about having," Jackson said.

Three of the best-known companies in the world went to such extremes because stars sell shoes. The companies think James could become the most popular basketball player since Michael Jordan — whose Air Jordan shoes helped make Nike an international icon.

The parties, flattery and prison communications were all part of a contest to see who could get closest to James.

"The secret to this business is really understanding the relationship pattern," said Ralph Greene, Nike's global director of basketball sports marketing. "In any case, there are several people that are important, and it's a matter of how you are able to get next to those folks."

The pursuit of James started three years ago, when Adidas executive Sonny Vaccaro saw a tape of him playing as a high-school freshman.

After more than two decades of scouting potential superstar basketball players for Nike, then Adidas, "He was the best I ever saw," Vaccaro said.

Shortly thereafter, Adidas signed a deal to outfit James' high-school team in Akron, Ohio, with free shoes and uniforms.

During James' senior year, the pace quickened. Adidas and Nike each dispatched representatives to dote on James and his family. They showed up at his games. They showered him with free shoes and shirts.

Reebok laid low.

By early May, the James camp was ready to hear formal sales pitches from all three companies. They asked Reebok to go first.

Reebok declined to comment on the negotiations. But Schreyer and others involved in the negotiations described the company's presentation.

After school on May 8, James and his mother jetted off to Reebok headquarters just outside Boston.

In a conference room, company execs spent most of their time trying to convince James that he shouldn't sign with Nike, Schreyer said. You'll get lost in the crowd of All-Stars, they told him.

They talked about Reebok's turnaround in recent years. It had reversed sliding sales by positioning itself as a hip, young brand, latching onto endorsers who fit that image, such as player Allen Iverson and rappers Jay-Z and 50 Cent.

The execs showed James several sketches of what his signature shoe might look like with a Reebok logo, Schreyer said.

Then Reebok made a bold move.

Reebok chief executive Paul Fireman pulled out a cashier's check for $10 million. Sign now, and this is yours, he told James.

"The temptation was like, 'Wow,' " Schreyer said. "But you've got to have confidence it would not get worse."

It didn't.

James returned to Akron that night on a private jet.

The next day after school, Adidas, whose U.S. headquarters are in Portland, sent another private jet to whisk James and his mother to Los Angeles. This time, he took along a few of his friends for a glitz-filled weekend. James agreed to pay for his friends to join him on the trip, said Vaccaro, Adidas' director of sport.

After arriving, the group headed straight for Staples Center. James and crew watched the Los Angeles Lakers crush the San Antonio Spurs 110-95 in the second-round NBA playoff series.

The next day, around noon, a limo picked up the James clan from their beachfront Santa Monica hotel, dropping them off at a posh Malibu mansion. Adidas rented the property for the day from a wealthy record producer, Vaccaro said.

With sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean and the beach below, James sat back to take in Adidas' spiel. Execs presented him with a prototype shoe that sported an Asian-inspired logo with his initials.

They unveiled a potential marketing campaign, which included billboards sporting the Adidas three-stripes logo headlined with messages such as "Do you want to be the next superstar?" and "Will you use fame to change the world?"

"The presentation was tremendous," Vaccaro said.

But he knew that might not be enough.

"Nike can do Spielberg."

He was right.

A week later, James was dining in Portland with a few Nike basketball execs on a Friday evening.

The real show commenced the next morning in Beaverton, Ore., at Nike headquarters, a campus with buildings named after famous athletes.

Inside the John McEnroe building, chief executive officer Phil Knight led off a series of brief speeches, said Greene, the Nike sports marketing director. PowerPoint slides displayed Nike's commanding position in the industry — a U.S. market share for athletic footwear double that of Adidas and Reebok combined.

The group then walked across campus for a product presentation in the Mia Hamm building. Tinker Hatfield, the architect behind Jordan's line of shoes, showed off some ideas. Months earlier, he and two other designers visited James in Akron to get direction on how to build a shoe for him, said Goodwin, James' agent. They knew James had an artistic side; he designed the green-and-gold uniforms his high-school basketball team wore the past three seasons.

So Hatfield was ready when James came to town. He and other Nike employees began opening drawers that revealed one spiffy new sneaker after another — all in his size 15 and sporting his initials.

James and his entourage were impressed, Goodwin said.

"Nike had shoes he could actually put on his feet," he said. "There is a difference between concepts and actual shoes."

After a lunch break, they gathered in the Tiger Woods conference center. On a big screen, images of Nike-sponsored athletes in action rolled by, spliced together with highlight footage from James' high-school games.

Up next, a team of four poets took turns rapping tributes to James and his talents.

"Nike's entire presentation truly blew the family away," Goodwin said.

Then they talked money. And later that evening, Lynn Merritt, Nike's senior director of basketball development, hosted a dinner at his home in Beaverton.

While James madly punched the buttons on a video game console with Merritt's teenage son, Goodwin and Schreyer, a Portland lawyer who provides legal assistance to Goodwin and other agents, discussed the negotiations. The presentation was slick, but James' advisers weren't sold. Reebok had thrown more money on the table.

The next day, James returned to Akron. The city was still littered with billboards and bus signs that Adidas plastered up the week before. The company surprised him with the signs, some carrying the messages he saw at the marketing pitch in Malibu.

But within a day after the Nike show had ended, Adidas essentially bowed out of the bidding for James, telling Goodwin the company would go no higher, Vaccaro said. Vaccaro would not say how much Adidas bid.

By May 21 — the deadline Goodwin gave the companies for sealing a deal — his hometown newspaper reported Reebok had become the favorite with an offer exceeding $75 million.

"Reebok was vowing to make a huge commitment to the kid, and he could not turn away from that," Goodwin said.

On the other hand, Nike's offer had become considerably sweeter and closer to Reebok's.

"The kid started thinking, 'Hell, apples and apples, I want to go with Nike,"' Goodwin said.

Soon the deals were essentially the same, Goodwin said.

After reviewing the final offers, James made the call.

"I want to go with Nike," Schreyer recalls him saying.

And the deal was done.