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...
...The few people who know what Wes is really up to aren’t talking. And that’s the way Wes likes it.
*****
...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.
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https://www.gq.com/sports/profiles/200706/william-wesley-worldwide-wes-nba-basketball#ixzz15MaMekqW
if ya know what i mean