William Wesley a.k.a. Worldwide Wes

Speaking of characters, I read about William Wesley in an article in GQ a while back, and if you are interested in sports at all, I highly recommend you read this article. It is really difficult to describe who William Wesley, but I’m going to borrow some from the GQ article:

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.

He is like this mystery man who is heavily connected in many facets of the NBA and can get anyone anything that they like, but he asks for nothing in return. If you look his name up, you will not find much information on him or anything concrete. It is all shrouded in myth. You know these types of people exist but most of them want something in return. Supposedly, Wes does not…and that is what makes him different…like I said…indescribable…