The longtime basketball coach who swayed Michael Jordan to sign with Nike over Adidas died at 88 on Monday. George Raveling spent over 20 years coaching college basketball, during which time he also served as an assistant coach for the U.S. team at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. It was there that Raveling met Jordan, who helped the U.S. win gold that year and was about to start his record-breaking NBA career with the Chicago Bulls. According to Jordan, Raveling convinced him to sign with Nike during that Olympics run. “He used to always try to talk to me, ‘You gotta go Nike, you gotta go Nike. You’ve got to try,’” Jordan said in 2015. Raveling’s persuasion worked, and the first Air Jordan shoe earned $126 million in its first year of sales (as memorialized in the Matt Damon and Ben Affleck-produced movie Air). Jordan and Raveling stayed close as Raveling made the switch from coaching to working for Nike in the early ’90s. Jordan said in a statement on Tuesday that Raveling “blessed my life with wisdom, encouragement, and friendship.” Outside of basketball, Raveling provided security for Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington in 1963.
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