Each night on MSNBC's "Countdown," anchor Keith Olbermann designates someone as the "Worst Person in the World,' an "honor" usually reserved for people on the other side of the ideological table from him.

Now, while I don't have Olbermann's fancy-schmancy suits, or his big-time television contract or even his book deal, I can spot the "worst" person in the sports world, and he's on his way here.

That would be former shoe shill Sonny Vaccaro, who has done more to corrode the amateur basketball world, from high school recruiting to college coaching and beyond, than anyone else.

Vaccaro, who spent 30 years pushing kids and coaches through sponsorship of AAU teams, summer camps and tournaments, to whichever shoe company he had sold his soul, whether it be Nike, adidas or Reebok, left Reebok this year, as some of the sport's bigger names have moved to try to regain control of the process.

Rather than slither into oblivion, Vaccaro is speaking at law schools, trying to encourage students to overturn the NBA rule that U.S.-born players have to wait a year after high school to enter the NBA, as well as challenging the NCAA's hold on the image of players from when they were college students. He is scheduled to speak locally at Maryland tomorrow.

Look, what Vaccaro aims to do, in some cases, isn't entirely wrong. One can reasonably argue that a high school graduate, who can join the military and vote, should be able to decide for himself if he wants to pursue a professional basketball career when he wants to. And colleges shouldn't be able to sell a former player's jersey, a la Juan Dixon's Maryland uniform, forever without, at some point, letting the player himself have a cut.

That said, the right thing done for the wrong reasons is still wrong, and no one has been more self-serving than Vaccaro, whose actions over the past three decades have helped to pervert the high school basketball scene, and he's done what he's done without any level of remorse for the outcome.

And it wasn't just basketball. Vaccaro reportedly signed former tennis player Anna Kournikova to a shoe deal when she was 12. His response last Friday when a Yale student asked him about the propriety of signing someone so young was, "Too young? What the hell is too young? What about child actors?"

According to Sports Illustrated's Luke Winn, Vaccaro said, "Everything I ever did was to promote the individual." That sentence alone explains the mess that high school and college athletics have become. For that reason, Sonny Vaccaro should rightfully hang his head in shame.

That is, if he had any.