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 ecutives, 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 ecutives 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.