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Sports-Marketing Studies: Sports marketing, already a big business, is going to get bigger. And Newport Beach-based resident James Warsaw, a 1969 graduate of the University of Oregon, thinks it’s about time someone starts to study the phenomenon.

So Warsaw recently pledged $250,000 to the University of Oregon--and promised to raise an equal amount--to create a center to study sports marketing and promotion. Warsaw, 46, hopes that the James H. Warsaw Sports Marketing Center will eventually have a $1-million endowment.

Warsaw’s father, David, opened a small, professional sports-product licensing business in Chicago during the Depression. Sports Specialties moved to Los Angeles in 1958 and, in 1969, the Warsaw family began to specialize in baseball caps.

The Warsaws sold their stake in the company, which eventually became the nation’s largest licensed sports-cap producer, to Nike Inc. in June in a deal valued at more than $50 million.

But the brothers sued Nike in November for breach of promise. The suit alleges that the world-famous shoe company broke a promise to let the brothers run a new Licensed Sports Specialty Products unit that would use famous athletes to market Nike’s new products. Nike has declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Warsaw believes the center could focus on both business and social questions facing the sports-marketing industry. On his list of proposed study topics: whether professional athletes have an obligation to serve as role models for youths and if colleges can fund women’s sports without destroying men’s sports.

“One of my dreams,” Warsaw said, is “that greed and short-term solutions to problems in my industry could be curtailed, and that people’s interests would have long-term justifications and support with integrity and excellence.”