“I always believed the kids got the shaft,” Sonny Vaccaro said. “The N.C.A.A. would never allow the kids to have anything.”
It was a sunny afternoon in 2013, just about a year before the O’Bannon trial was set to begin, which of course would result in the N.C.A.A. being found in violation of the United States’ antitrust laws. Vaccaro, who’d had the original idea for the O’Bannon lawsuit, was sitting in the dining room of his small home in Pebble Beach, Calif. It was cluttered with boxes, the detritus of his long career as a sports marketer and more recently as the country’s most outspoken critic of the N.