‘Air’ True Story: Ben Affleck and Matt Damon Rewrote The Script After Michael Jordan Had Notes

After opening in theaters to rave reviews last month, Air—the Ben Affleck and Matt Damon movie about Nike—is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, free to all Prime subscribers.

Directed by Affleck, and written by Alex Convery, Air takes viewers back to the year 1984, before Nike was a billion-dollar corporation known for their use of child labor in sweatshops. Instead, they were but a humble shoe company whose stock was trailing woefully behind their competitors, Adidas and Converse. But everything changed when Nike successfully signed a deal for a new shoe line with a young Michael Jordan, who would go on to become the greatest basketball player of all time.

How did Nike do it? Well, that’s the story Air wants to tell viewers. But as savvy movie viewers well know, just because Air is based on a true story doesn’t mean all the details you see in the movie happened in real life. Read on to learn more about the Air true story, and how accurate the Air movie is.

Is Air based on a true story?

Yes. Air is based on the true story of how the shoe corporation Nike managed to woo up-and-coming NBA rookie Michael Jordan into a partnership, creating one of the most successful shoe lines of all time: the Air Jordans. Screenwriter Alex Convery got the idea for the film while watching The Last Dance, the 2020 ESPN documentary miniseries that revolves around the career of Michael Jordan. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Convery said the idea to tell Nike’s side of the story came from a small five-minute section from the docu-series.

“When I was watching The Last Dance and that little five-minute segment on Nike came up, I was like, ‘Holy crap, this is a movie,'” Convery said. “It’s because the deal was so unlikely. It was impossible, and there’s no reason Nike should have ever gotten Jordan. But they did, and it changed the world, really.” Convery also already had a connection to former Nike marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro, played by Matt Damon in Air, because the screenwriter was a producer’s assistant on the set of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary episode about Vaccaro,”Sole Man,” which aired in 2015. “I was around and on the phone calls and all that, but I didn’t capital-W work on the movie,” Convery told The Hollywood Reporter.

When Convery watch The Last Dance, he was surprised that the Vaccaro wasn’t featured in the documentary. So he decided to tell his movie from Vaccaro’s perspective. “I just started researching it and realized that Sonny should probably be the protagonist of this movie,” the writer said. “It’s known as the Rashomon of shoe deals. Everyone has a different version and wants to take credit, but the more and more you research it, there’s only one guy who said, ‘Michael Jordan is the guy and we should bet it all on him.’ And that was Sonny.”

How accurate is the Air movie to the true story?

Though he is not a producer on the film, Michael Jordan did give Air his official blessing. The basketball star also worked with Affleck and the production team to offer suggestions to make the movie more accurate to the true story. When Affleck met with Jordan to get his blessing for the film, the director asked Jordan if there was anything the star felt was crucial to include.

“He wasn’t somebody who was like, ‘Well, we got to talk about when I did this, and I did that,'”Affleck said in an interview with NME Magazine. “He’d only talk about other people. He wanted to make sure that other people [who] were meaningful were included in the story.”

Jordan requested that the script be changed to include several people he felt were key to the story, and Affleck and Damon did an uncredited rewrite of the script to adhere to those notes. The first addition was George Raveling, who was the assistant coach on the 1984 Olympics team Jordan played on. Raveling is played by Marlon Wayans in the film and is featured in a scene where he gives Damon’s character, Vaccaro, advice on how to court the basketball star. And that story Wayans tells about keeping a copy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech really did happen to the real Raveling.

Second was Howard White, who is now Vice President of Sports Marketing for Jordan Brand. White is played by Chris Tucker in the movie, working in Nike’s athlete’s relations division, and a key figure in the first meeting between Jordan and the company. Finally, Jordan wanted the movie to shine a light on his parents Deloris and James Jordan—particularly on Jordan’s mother, Deloris, who is played by Viola Davis in the film, by the basketball player’s request.

“I said offhandedly – which is always a mistake – ‘Who do you think should play your mother?’” Affleck explained to NME. “He said, ‘It has to be Viola Davis.’ OK! So that’s kind of like saying, ‘Can I get a basketball team together?’ Sure. It has to be [with] Michael Jordan! With that I thought, ‘This is very typical of who this guy is – it has to be the very best.’ Amen to that.”

With that ultimatum, Affleck did manage to secure Davis to play Deloris Jordan, by significantly beefing up her character, including adding that Act 3 speech over the phone, in which Deloris Jordan mandates that her son would only sign with Nike if he could get a royalty share of the profits. After all, if you want an EGOT winner in your movie, you have to give her a good part. Said Convery in his interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “That third-act turn really came from the Jordan conversation, and him saying that the most important person in all this was his mom.”

There was also one character in the Air script who was removed, by Jordan’s request, to keep it more accurate to the true story: Designer Tinker Hatfield. “We had Tinker Hatfield as a character in the original script, but he didn’t really design Air Jordans until the Jordan 3,” Convery explained. “He was technically an employee of Nike at the time, and I just thought it would be fun to have Tinker Hatfield around. But Jordan was like, ‘Tinker wasn’t really involved in the first Jordan,’ so we took him out of the script.”

That said, despite all the work done on the script to make it accurate to Jordan’s experience with Nike, this is still a Hollywood movie, and there were still things changed and invented for the sake of telling an efficient, entertaining movie. That includes the details of the initial deal that Nike presented to Jordan. According to a 2022 Sports Illustrated piece, Jordan signed a five-year, $2.5 million deal with Nike in 1984, averaging out to $500,000 per year. In Air, in order to make Nike out to be even more of an underdog, it is repeatedly stated that the company can only afford $250,000 for a year-long deal, which was supposed to be spread out over multiple players. But in fact, in reality, Jordan was offered double the deal he is presented in Air.

Deloris Jordan’s role in negotiating her son’s deal was also played up, since, as stated earlier, Affleck needed to beef up the role in order to woo Davis for the part. But it was true that it was Jordan’s parents who convinced him to meet with Nike in the first place. In an interview with USA Today, Jordan said, “In all honesty, I never wore Nike shoes until I signed with Nike. I was a big Adidas, Converse guy coming out of college. Then actually my parents made me go out to (Nike’s headquarters) to hear their proposal.”

That said, the part in the film in which Sonny Vaccaro visits Deloris in North Carolina was invented. In fact, despite the movie’s premise, both Jordan and former Nike CEO Phil Knight say that Vaccaro wasn’t quite so instrumental to the Jordan signing as he likes to say that he is. “A lot of people want to take credit for signing Michael Jordan, most obviously Sonny Vaccaro,” Knight told USA Today. “On ESPN he said he was the key to the thing. Sonny helped, but he wasn’t the MVP in that process.” In that same interview, Jordan added, ““Prior to all of that, Sonny (Vaccaro) likes to take the credit. But it really wasn’t Sonny, it was actually George Raveling. George Raveling was with me on the 1984 Olympics team. He used to always try to talk to me, ‘You gotta go Nike, you gotta go Nike. You’ve got to try.’”

So even though Raveling was added to the Air script per Jordan’s request, it sounds like the former basketball coach played a much bigger role in Jordan’s decision than you see in the film. But, hey, that’s Hollywood for you.