good.film
2 years ago
AIR (USA, 112 min, Ben Affleck). The funny and fascinating story of the lengths Nike went to land Michael Jordan… including winning over his Mum, who knows exactly the value of her son’s immense talent.
What’s AIR’s key social insight? AIR takes us back to a moment in history when Black superstar basketballers were pulling in millions of dollars for white-owned corporations like the NBA and Nike - but not for themselves. By insisting on a first-of-its-kind profit-sharing deal, Michael Jordan kicked off a re-distribution of wealth from established corporations to the players - changing the way that all athletes were valued and compensated, forever.
What social cause does AIR explore? Racial Equity. Discover other top movies & TV shows that explore racial equity at good.film.
Okay, real talk: if you’ve ever negotiated your own salary, you’ll know just how tricky it can be to dig in your heels and battle for what you’re worth. Now imagine you’re the greatest basketball player the world has ever seen - no, scratch that. You’re about to be the greatest, but you haven’t shown it yet. It’s your rookie season. You barely made your college play-offs. And you’re part of a minority that’s been historically screwed over in pay rates and business dealings. NOW how do you fight for your worth?
Much more than a shoe, we promise. AIR is about a deal that changed the face of sports endorsement history and the way we think about celebrities and products forever. And Sonny Vaccaro, the one man who had the brainwave: why just make shoes for any basketballer, if we can make ONE shoe that’s synonymous with ONE player?
Great plan, so long as you hit on that one player who people can’t take their eyes off. Oh, and you have to land him first, before your giant, global competitors. You might be thinking - but you’re NIKE. The biggest sportswear brand on Earth. It’s a slam dunk, right?!
Not in 1984, it wasn’t. Nike was struggling with traction and relevance - all the street ballers and cool kids wore Adidas and Converse. Nike shoes were seen as joggers, a track shoe - to put it bluntly, on the courts, they were a joke. It’s that uphill battle we join in on as Sonny and his crew set out to build a shoe great enough to convince the man who’ll soon become the greatest NBA player of all time to step into it - and create the legendary Nike Air Jordan.
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AIR’s a sports movie, right? Not so fast! First off, a love of basketball is in no way required to appreciate this story. In fact, apart from a quick opening scene, and some footage the characters watch on videotapes, we barely see the game played at all. No, AIR is a film you could sit your Nan in front of with zero complaints (especially if she fancies Matt Damon). It’ll just plain entertain you, no matter your sportiness - or total lack thereof.
But the true meaty filling in this Damon-Affleck sandwich - and the aspect that gets us here at good.film excited - is how the film explores the themes of racial inequality and pay disparity in sports for minority players. Back in 1984, White basketball players had an average salary that was almost 175% higher than Black basketball players. Stop for a second and re-read that. Now, ponder how you’d feel if you knew the dude or dudette in the next cubicle was pulling down nearly twice as much as you for doing the same job (and before you start shaking those fists, yes, we know that pay parity for us regular folks still isn’t where it should be at just yet!).
And that’s just game payments. Equally as unfair were the 80s-era merch & endorsement deals - like the one for Nike’s ‘Air Jordan’ basketball shoe that forms the crux of AIR’s story. There were deals made with Black basketballers, no question - like Julius Erving or ‘Magic’ Johnson’s exclusive footwear deals with Converse. But these kinds of sponsor contracts were far more rare, and unequivocally underpaid, when compared to their White teammates.
Fortunately, things have changed for minority players: take Patty Mills, an Aussie of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander descent, who holds the record for most NBA games by an Australian player. 2021 was a mega year for Patty: he not only came in #3 on the power rankings for Aussie sportspeople, but broke the record for most 3-pointers for one NBA team and bagged himself an Olympic bronze (Australia’s first ever medal in basketball). So you’d agree he earned himself the $16 million deal that came his way straight after - nice payday, Patty!
Back to 1984, though, and lace up your Air Jordans tight, as the story introduces the calmest eye-of-the-storm you’d hate to face in any business negotiation: Jordan’s Mum, Deloris. Like any Mum, she knows how hard her son has worked to get to where he wants to be. But unlike nearly every other Mum, she knows without doubt that his talent isn’t just prodigious - it’s freakish. It’s immediately clear that the last thing Deloris is going to let happen is having her son railroaded into an unfair, underpaid deal… by a boardroom full of white men.
That brings us to the phone call. Sonny, the Nike man, and Deloris, the protective Mum. She breaks the news to Sonny: the Jordans have weighed up the offers and Nike, the underdogs, came out on top. Sonny is elated: he’s landed his big fish. His bets have all paid off. With one gigantic hitch: they won’t accept just a simple yearly payment. They’re after a cut. Of every shoe sold. As the colour drains from his face, Sonny explains that these kinds of deals simply don’t work that way. To which Deloris Jordan replies: “Well, maybe they should.” It’s a defining, flag-planting moment. “If not now, when?” her words imply. “If not Michael, then who?”
Without spoiling the scene, the writing & performances both brilliantly convey how a crunch moment of opportunity vs. utterly unshakeable faith can, quite literally, change the way things are done forever. Sonny was right: percentage cuts of merchandising weren’t offered to athletes in the 1980s. It was unthinkable; what the Jordans were asking for almost didn’t compute. But as the calm, measured and rock-solid Deloris Jordan, Viola Davis has her heels dug in. She makes it superbly clear that they know how much value Michael Jordan will bring to this piece of footwear. Deloris isn’t rude about it. It’s not a greedy ask. She’s simply posing a (stunningly valid) question: if the shoe only has value because Michael wears it, why shouldn’t he be entitled to a piece of that worth?
In her New York Times review, Manohla Dargis described the scene as ‘touching’ and ‘deftly handled’, writing that it “brings the larger racial stakes of the landmark deal into crystalline focus to make a richer, heftier, more meaningful story… it’s hard not to be moved.”
It’s hardly a spoiler alert to say that Nike and Michael Jordan teamed up as a result of that fateful call. It turned out to be a slam-dunk of a deal where absolutely everybody won. As the New York Times puts it, “Nike went on to buy its former rival Converse on its way to becoming the juggernaut it is today. Last year, Nike’s Air Jordan brand brought in $5 billion in annual revenue.” And, thanks to his insistence on that percentage deal, Jordan himself continues to see a cut of every shoe sold to this day.
But AIR is not a film that glorifies earnings. It’s not about the money. It’s about VALUE. On Nike’s side, they were desperate to prove they weren’t just a jogging shoe company. They spotted a generational talent early, and they bet the whole farm on one play. On the Jordan’s side, they had Adidas and Converse both ready to sign MJ up. They didn’t need Nike, and they didn’t need to take a punt. But what they did need was to know that Michael’s VALUE was seen, was respected, and was fairly compensated. As Deloris Jordan puts it, irrefutably: “A shoe is just a shoe… until my son steps into it.”
Sitting on a 98% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes as we type this, you might say AIR has hit nothing but net. Here’s some of the best takeaways and reax we’ve spotted so far:
Fully on board, or disagree big time? We’d love to hear your take. Leave a review to share your thoughts on AIR with the good.film community!
Because you don’t get the movie you expect. Directing his fifth feature, Ben Affleck has brought one of the greatest basketball stories ever to the screen… and it hardly features any actual basketball. Instead, we get a story about angry agents, genius designers, risk-it-all CEOs and a resolute mother, as protective as a lioness, who calmly refuses to accept one iota less than she knows her son is worth.
If that all sounds a bit bait & switch, trust us, AIR is anything but a disappointment. As Moneyball proved, you can take the sports out of a sports movie, replace it with bean-counting, whiteboards and contract negotiations, and still get an absolute ripper if your characters - and their impassioned speeches - are winners. And AIR’s got both: an A-grade, committed cast and a magical script from Alex Convery that came straight off the 2021 Blacklist of hottest unproduced screenplays. The take home? We reckon AIR is in rarefied air.