Scorecard

Remembering the Little People
The average NFL offensive lineman absorbs a lot of pain for little glory. Quite frequently, though, the league's leading men—quarterbacks, running backs and receivers—go out of their way to thank each member of their blue-collar supporting casts with heartfelt, and sometimes even expensive, gifts. Below is a recent sampling and two vintage examples:
Star	Gifts
Troy Aikman QB Dallas Cowboys	Handmade cowboy boots, two round-trip airline tickets to anywhere in the world
Jeff Hostetler QB Los Angeles Raiders	Set of Ping irons
Emmitt Smith RB Dallas Cowboys	Champagne (to everyone on the team), Rolex watches and gift certificates
Rick Mirer QB Seattle Seahawks	Luggage
Boomer Esiason QB New York Jets	Leather bomber jackets, designer sunglasses, dinner every Thursday during the season
Thurman Thomas RB Buffalo Bills	Engraved crystal bison statues
Jim Kelly QB Buffalo Bills	As much as $2,500 for a sackless victory
Drew Bledsoe QB New England Patriots	A bottle of Dom Perignon and a gift certificate to a big-and-tall men's store
Dan Marino QB Miami Dolphins	Isotoner gloves
O.J. Simpson RB Buffalo Bills	Gold bracelets for his NFL-record 2,003-yard season in 1973
John Riggins RB Washington Redskins	Engraved Mark V Weatherby .460 Magnum elephant guns in 1983

Of Shoes and Gumshoes

Relations between rival companies in the cutthroat, multimillion-dollar athletic-shoe business are strained even in the best of times. But now they are at an alltime low between industry leader Nike and Adidas America, the U.S. subsidiary of the world's No. 2 shoe company. The exodus of several Nike employees to Adidas America has resulted in an FBI investigation of industrial espionage, reportedly requested by Nike, as well as the reassignment within Nike of one of its key basketball executives, Howard White, who made his reputation by working with Michael Jordan.

At the center of the controversy is Sonny Vaccaro, who in 1990 left his position as head of college basketball promotions at Nike and has since taken over the basketball operation at Adidas America. There he joined two other former Nike executives, Rob Strasser, Adidas America's CEO until his death on Oct. 30, and Peter Moore, who took over for Strasser. Many other ex-Nike employees are with the Portland, Ore.-based Adidas America as well.

According to Vaccaro and other sources, a number of executives at Nike grew worried about the continuing close relationship between White and Vaccaro, who, says Vaccaro, talked by phone about once a month. Vaccaro has known White for 25 years. "Everybody talks to everybody in this business," says Vaccaro. "I'm not gonna stop talking to my friends."

Whether Nike's worried execs included its chairman, Phil Knight, is hard to say. He and White have long had a close relationship. But someone began worrying that White may have passed trade secrets to Vaccaro, and someone called in the Portland office of the FBI to investigate. In October two agents showed up at the office of still another former Nike executive, Fred Schreyer, who runs his own marketing and consulting firm in Portland, to ask questions about White. Schreyer assured the agents that he and White never traded secrets, either about design or contracts. White confirms that he, too, was interviewed by the FBI. In December, White was sent out of the office for two weeks on a baseball tour—reportedly an "involuntary leave," though White says it was nothing out of the ordinary—and when he returned he was reassigned to the new Jordan line, tentatively called Brand Jordan. "That's fine with me," says White. "I've always worked closest with Michael anyway."

White says he doesn't know if the reassignment would have occurred without the investigation and is philosophical about the whole situation. "I work for a large corporation," he says, "and sometimes things happen that are out of an individual's control. Maybe Mr. Knight became concerned about some things and had to find out. I don't think that he questioned my loyalty that much. If he did, it would've been bad. I feel comfortable continuing on here."

Troubled Waters

SI special contributor Robert H. Boyle comments on the Jan. 7 tanker accident that dumped 600,000 gallons of oil off the beaches of San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The oil spill fouling beaches in San Juan is just the latest in a series of tugboat-barge accidents that were predictable, given the negligence of the Coast Guard and the House Subcommittee on the Coast Guard and Navigation, chaired by the do-nothing Representative Billy Tauzin (D., La.). Both the Coast Guard and the House refuse to require that licensed pilots be on board domestic tugs towing barges of less than 10,000 tons gross weight in U.S. waters, no matter how hazardous the cargo. Consider a few of the disastrous results:

In September near Mobile, Ala., a captain lost at night in fog in unfamiliar waters crashed his barge into a bridge. Minutes later three locomotives and four passenger cars of the speeding Sunset Limited plunged off the bridge, killing 47 people, the worst disaster in Amtrak history. The Coast Guard admits that almost 800 barge-bridge accidents have occurred in the previous 10 years.