William Wesley "World Wide Wes"

clutch citizen · Jun 25, 2010

He was quoted in a yahoo article saying LeBron and Bosh are headed to Chicago. Done deal when able.

I researched his name for reliability record, then got all sorts of mystery articles.

Who is this guy, and why was/is he so influential in major NBA superstars? From LeBron to Jordan, he seems to be the mobster that they have to respect

Who is World Wide Wes?

Treeza · Jun 25, 2010

dharocks · Jun 25, 2010

This is from the "NBA Player X" Blog on ESPN. I'm not really sure what the policy is on posting insider articles, so I'm just gonna quote the first couple of paragraphs.

Who is the most powerful person in the NBA? David Stern? No. LeBron James? No. Kobe Bryant? Nope. It's Wes Wesley. Most fans don't know who he is. Most players, agents and GMs can't figure out who he works for. (More on that in a minute.) But we all know this: Wes is the greatest connector of players, coaches, GMs, agents, celebrities and big-time sponsors in sports. Need tickets to a Jay-Z concert, a new sneaker deal or the phone number of a general manager, he's your man. There's a reason we call him Uncle Wes.

The first time I met him I was in college, and I was like, "Who is this guy?" He was advising a teammate, which made me skeptical. Then I noticed he had his name on his Jordans, which was pretty cool. I'd never seen that before on anyone who wasn't in the NBA, so I knew Wes was legit.

After I got into the league I ran into him again because he was friends with a guy on my team. He took me to dinner and told me if I ever needed anything to just call. Right away I knew he was different from the other sketchy dudes hanging around because he didn't ask me for anything. Years later, the man has hooked me up with everything from sports drink endorsements to grooming commercials. When I wanted a new sneaker deal, Wes was my first call. My agent may have negotiated the contract, but Wes made it happen. And he's never asked for a dime, ever. Nobody really knows who pays him. I'm good friends with him, and I still don't know.
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http://insider.espn.go.com/insider/blog/_/name/player_x/id/5064996

tierre_brown · Jun 25, 2010

Supposedly he was a mortgage lender, and the reason he's in with all the athletes is because he "speaks their language." When athletes come into money, there's a lot of vultures trying to take advantage of them, and WWW makes sure that they aren't taken advantage of (especially when it comes to buying housing). Apparently he (used to) just give(s) advice to the athletes, but now he's an agent (not for the players, but for coaches. I want to say he's Tom Thibodeau's agent) and very influential. He helped turn MJ into the marketing machine that he is now, apparently; MJ was really rough around the edges (still is) and WWW managed to polish him up and make him marketable.

All this was on an interview with some biographer or something a couple days ago on 790, I think; don't remember exactly, but these were the things that I remembered off the top of my head. It was an extremely interesting interview and definitely worth hearing if I can find it

A good intro article from 2007: http://www.gq.com/sports/profiles/200706/william-wesley-worldwide-wes-nba-basketball

Luckyazn · Jun 25, 2010

Franchise3 · Jun 25, 2010

The man behind the curtain...The puppet master pulling the strings...Cloak and dagger...NBA Illuminati...

It's probably best that you forget you ever heard the name "World Wide Wes" and stop asking questions. It may lead you down a road that you don't want to be on.

William Wesley may be the most influential person in the NBA, despite the fact that what he does within the league is completely ambiguous.

Louisville Coach Rick Pitino describes him in the linked segment as: “A connector.”

Bill Simmons describes him as: “The renowned NBA power broker who’s really a cross between Confucius, a benevolent uncle and The Wolf in “Pulp Fiction” to assorted NBA superstars and up-and-coming stars.”

Dennis Rodman describes him in the video as: “A self-entrepreneur. And no one knows what he’s delivering. No one knows what he’s doing. No one knows what he’s got.”

http://www.sportsgrid.com/nba/world-wide-wes-lebrons-advisor-and-the-most-powerful-guy-in-the-nba/
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reckonerone42 · Jun 25, 2010

A long read, but well worth it if you've got the time. Here's a snippet. The guy just seems a little too shady to me.

http://www.gq.com/sports/profiles/200706/william-wesley-worldwide-wes-nba-basketball

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
BY ALEX FRENCH
July 2007

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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Pete Chilcutt · Jun 25, 2010

I hate to think that this guy can control so many team's destiny.

I really want Bosh to be a Rocket, and if this guy actually does have any credibility or leverage with these players, then that just sucks...

Trip · Jun 25, 2010

There was an article posted on ESPN's Truehoop blog a couple days ago that put in detail the mystery surrounding this fellow. All I seem to get is he's this sort of advisor to NBA players, similar to what Sonny Vaccaro is for high school kids.

http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/16874/william-wesley-in-the-spotlight

Hayesfan · Jun 25, 2010

he's coach cal's best bud

leebigez · Jun 25, 2010

Wes is a cool dude, i've met him once or twice. He's kinda like forrest gump in terms of being everywhere. Guys trust him because he just gives straight talk. Clinton has kicked it with wes a few times and you can find photos with them together. Wes has the ear of alot of dudes, but he doesn't tell them to do crazy stuff. Wes is cool.

Asian Sensation · Jun 25, 2010

leebigez said:

Wes is a cool dude, i've met him once or twice. He's kinda like forrest gump in terms of being everywhere. Guys trust him because he just gives straight talk. Clinton has kicked it with wes a few times and you can find photos with them together. Wes has the ear of alot of dudes, but he doesn't tell them to do crazy stuff. Wes is cool.
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cool story, bro.

WhoMikeJames · Jun 26, 2010

Drug dealer?

KellyDwyer · Jun 26, 2010

Never heard of him.

wreck · Jun 26, 2010

KellyDwyer said:

Never heard of him.
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and thats the way they like it

ubigred · Jun 26, 2010

WhoMikeJames said:

Drug dealer?
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Wow. Idiot post.

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William Wesley "World Wide Wes"

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