Appropriately, during the crescendo of this college basketball season, in which the most significant event was a shoe malfunction, a lawyer whose best-known client was a pornographic actress was indicted for threatening to shrink a shoe company’s market capitalization by making allegations about the company misbehaving in the meat market for a small number of tall “student-athletes.” What counts as misbehavior in this swamp is a murky subject.
Zion Williamson is a “one-and-done” superstar at Duke, a university (one can lose sight of this fact) that aspires to be worthy of its basketball program. There Williamson is spending the obligatory year before becoming eligible to rake in riches in the NBA, which forbids its teams to sign players directly out of high school, thereby giving institutions of higher education a year to refine future NBA talent.
In a February game, one of Williamson’s Nike shoes blew apart under the torque of his 285 pounds. This injured him, not seriously but enough to furrow the brows of those who ponder the ethics of college athletics — in a sense, a small subject. They wondered: While Williamson is serving his one-year sentence as an unpaid student-athlete, helping Duke and the National Collegiate Athletic Association make millions and more than a billion, respectively (he has 3 million followers on Instagram), an injury could ruin his prospects as a professional. So, perhaps he should be a paid student-athlete.
Nike pays Duke serious money, but not a penny — heaven forfend — to Williamson, to wear its stuff. (Duke, a private institution, can keep such transactions secret, but a comparable basketball factory, the University of Kentucky, recently extended its marriage to Nike for $30.6 million over eight years.) Williamson’s defective shoe briefly knocked $1.1 billion off Nike’s market capitalization. Michael Avenatti, former lawyer for Stormy Daniels, was more ambitious.
