In the NBA, all roads lead to one man, whom you’ve probably never heard of: William Wesley a.k.a. Worldwide Wes the most connected, most discreet, most influential man on and off the court.
Auburn Hills, Michigan, November 2004. William Wesley, a middle-aged mortgage broker, runs onto the court to shield Ron Artest from a uniformed police officer wielding a can of pepper spray. Artest’s teammates are trading haymakers with fans; coaches and referees are struggling to restore order. The mortgage broker lunges forward and throws his hands in the cop’s face, and in the next instant, Pacers teammates Austin Croshere and Reggie Miller rush to restrain Artest. Through a tempest of tossed soda and popcorn, Wesley moves on to shepherding the Pacers’ Jermaine O’Neal on the court. Once in the tunnel, O’Neal breaks free, but Wesley wraps him in a bear hug and drags him to the locker room.
Two years later, when I ask Reggie Miller about Wesley’s presence on the court, he’ll say: “What the hell is he doing out there in the middle of all that? I mean, what is he doing? He has no business out there! He injects himself into the middle of everything!”
Others weren’t quite so surprised to see William Wesley—or Wes, as he’s known—in the middle of the fray. “At any given time, if you look at any sporting event, there’s a very good chance you’re going to see Wes,” says NBA analyst David Aldridge. Over the years, Wes has been spotted hugging Jerry Jones on the field after a Cowboys Super Bowl win, high-fiving University of Miami football players after a national championship win, and embracing Joe Dumars after the Pistons won the NBA Finals. He’s been spotted sitting next to Jay-Z at the NBA All-Star Game, with Nike czar Phil Knight at the Final Four, and trolling the sidelines of Team USA practices in Las Vegas and Japan. “People who really know Wes,” says superagent David Falk, Wes’s longtime friend, “know that he’s one of the two or three most powerful people in the sport.”
In his March 2005 ESPN “Page 2” column, the well-known basketball writer Scoop Jackson wrote, “I believe Phil Knight is the most powerful man in sports next to Wes Wesley.” Eight months after Jackson’s column, New Jersey-based basketball journalist Henry Abbott mounted an obsessive open-source investigation on his blog, TrueHoop, that brilliantly illustrated how, if you look closely at the various forces at work in basketball at every level of the sport—the AAU programs that funnel players to college programs, the agents looking to land players as early as NBA rules allow, the shoe companies, coaches, franchise owners, front-office executives, players—it eventually dawns on you that they have one thing in common: William Wesley.
So why have you never heard of him? Whenever I told journalists, players, agents, and NBA executives the subject of this article, the common reaction was an amused chuckle and then “Good luck.” Very few people, even Wes’s friends, are able to describe his role. Chicago Sun-Times writer Lacy Banks recalls his confusion upon meeting Wes twenty years ago: “I thought he worked for the Secret Service or the FBI or the CIA. Then I thought he was a pimp, providing players with chicks, or a loan shark or a bodyguard or a vice commissioner to the league.” The few people who know what Wes is really up to aren’t talking. And that’s the way Wes likes it.
*****
Many of the stories circulating about Wes are sensationalistic: He was a guest at Frank Sinatra’s funeral. He worked as an operative for his close friends Bill and Hillary Clinton. Spike Lee is planning a movie about his life. Of all the rumors, the movie seems to make the most sense, because the story of how William Sydney Wesley, the child of a middle-class family from southern New Jersey, turned himself into Worldwide Wes is such a perfect realization of the modern American dream—full of old-fashioned wheel-greasing, hustling, and social climbing—that it feels like it was written for the big screen.
The story begins in the early 1980s at Pro Shoes, a lunchbox-sized store in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, that serviced hoops stars from all over the Delaware River Valley—from local high school stars to 76ers like Darryl Dawkins and Doug Collins. William Wesley, age 16, was the preternaturally suave salesman who knew all about the clientele. He knew the pro players from TV, and he knew the high schoolers from bumping shoulders with them on the court—there was Leon Rose, the crafty point guard from Cherry Hill East, and those two juggernauts from Camden named Billy Thompson and Milt Wagner.
“Wes was my best friend,” Wagner says. “My whole career, he followed me everywhere I went.”
In 1981, Milt headed to Louisville, where he made three trips to the Final Four and won a national championship. In 1987, when Milt went on to the Los Angeles Lakers, Wes was there, too, taking it all in, learning that young men, as they make the transition from college to the NBA, have needs. “If a player needs a custom-clothing designer, Wes can help you with that,” Banks says. “Need a hairstylist who knows how to do complicated cornrows? Wes can do that.”
In 1989, Kenny Payne, one of Milt’s former Louisville teammates, introduced Wes to fellow 76er Rick Mahorn, who in turn gave Wes a job as the doorman at his Cherry Hill nightclub, a favorite bump-and-grind spot for Philly’s pro athletes. It wasn’t long before Wes was running the place.
Recalling that early period, 2 Live Crew frontman Luther Campbell tells me, “My claim to fame is that I took Wes on his first flight on a jet. We went to the NBA All-Star Game, we went to the University of Miami games, we went everywhere. We were at a Mike Tyson fight in Atlantic City, and Wes took me back into the casino vault! With the money! You only get to go back there if you’re an employee or you’re one of the boys. I said, ‘Oh, my God! Who the hell are you, Wes? What’d you do?’ And Wes said, ‘I just know everybody.’ ”
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