Knight, Phil

Shoe Dog

p.dedication – “For my grandchildren, so they will know”
p.next – “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. -Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”

Dawn

p.1 – “Though beautiful, Oregon struck some people as the kind of place where nothing big had ever happened, or was ever likely to.”
p.1 – “The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest men I ever knew, spoke of that trail often. It’s our birthright, he’d growl. Our character, our fate– our DNA. ‘The cowards never started,’ he’d tell me, ‘and the weak died along the way– that leaves us.’ "
p.2 – “My resume said I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a twenty-four-year-old man in full… So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid?”
p.3 – “Like all my friends I wanted to be successful. Unlike my friends I didn’t know what that meant. Money? Maybe. Wife? Kids? House? Sure, if I was lucky. These were the goals I was taught to aspire to, and part of me did aspire to them, instinctively. But deep down I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all… different.”
p.3 – “… I saw it all before me, exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play.”
p.3 – “There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life.”
p.3 – “At different times I’d fantasize about becoming a great novelist, a great journalist, a great statesman. But the ultimate dream was always to be a great athlete. Sadly, fate had made me good, not great.”
pp.3-4 – “Now, as I began to clip off one brisk six-minute mile after another, as the rising sun set fire to the lowest needles of the pines, I asked myself: What if there was a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing. The world was so overrun with war and pain and misery, the daily grind was so exhausting and often unjust– maybe the only answer, I thought, was to find some prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy, that seemed fun, that seemed a good fit, and chase it with an athlete’s single-minded dedication and purpose. Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines, adn I didn’t want that. More than anything, that was the thing I did not want. Which led, as always to my Crazy Idea. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I need to take one more look at my Crazy Idea. Maybe my Crazy Idea just might… work? Maybe. No, no, I thought, running faster, faster, running as if I were chasing someone and being chased all at the same time. It will work. By God I’ll make it work. No maybes about it.”
pp.4-5 – “Faces, numbers, decisions that once seemed pressing and irrevocable, they’re all gone. What remains, however, is this one comforting certainty, this one anchoring truth that will never go away. At twenty-four I did have a Crazy Idea, and somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst, and fears about the future, and doubts about myself, as all young men and women in their midtwenties are, I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long processional of crazy ideas. The things I loved most– books, sports, democracy, free enterprise– started as crazy ideas.”
p.5 – “The act itself becomes the destination. It’s not just that there’s no finish line; it’s that you define the finish line. Whatever pleasures or gains you derive from the act of running, you must find them within. It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself.”
p.5 – “So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy… just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where ’there’ is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.”

1962

p.9 – “Being a business buff, I knew that Japanese cameras had made deep cuts into the camera market which had once been dominated by Germans. Thus, I argued in my paper that Japanese running shoes might do the same thing. The idea interested me, then inspired me, then captivated me. It seemed so obvious, so simple, so potentially huge.”
pp.9-10 – “I’d spent weeks and weeks on that paper. I’d moved into the library, devoured everything I could find about importing and exporting, about starting a company. Finally, as required, I’d given a formal presentation of the paper to my classmates, who reacted with formal boredom. Not one asked a single question. They greeted my passion and intensity with labored sighs and vacant stares.”
p.10 – “The professor thought my Crazy Idea had merit: He gave me an A. But that was that. At least, that was supposed to be that. I’d never really stopped thinking about that paper.”
p.10 – “Before running a big race, you always want to walk the track.”
p.10 – “Before setting out on my own personal life voyage, I thought, let me first understand the greater voyage of humankind. Let me explore the grandest temples and churches and shrines, the holiest rivers and mountaintops. Let me feel the presence of… God?”
pp.10-11 – “Yes, I told myself, yes. For want of a better word, God. But first, I’d need my father’s approval. More, I’d need his cash.”
p.12 – “In many ways my father was a conventional Episcopalian, a believer in Jesus Christ. But he also worshipped another secret deity– respectability. Colonial house, beautiful wife, obedient kids, my father enjoyed having these things, but what he really cherished was his friends and neighbors knowing he had them.”
p.13 – “He said that he always regretted not traveling more when he was young. He said a trip might be just the finishing touch to my education. He said a lot of things, all of them focused more on the trip than the Crazy Idea, but I wasn’t about to correct him. I wasn’t about to complain, because in sum he was giving his blessing. And his cash.”
p.13 – “Only later did I realize with a spasm of guilt that my father’s lack of travel was an ulterior reason, perhaps the main reason I wanted to go. This trip, this Crazy Idea, would be one sure way of becoming someone other than him. Someone less respectable.”
p.15 – “And my mother, as I recall, said nothing. She rarely did. But there was something different about her silence this time. It equaled consent. Even pride.”
p.15 – “Long before approaching my father, I’d decided it would be good to have a companion for my trip, and that companion should be my Stanford classmate Carter. Though he’d been a hoops star at William Jewell College, Carter wasn’t your typical jock. He wore thick glasses and read books. Good books. He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to– equally important qualities in a friend. Essential in a travel companion.”
p.16 – “Finally we stopped at a liquor store and bought two discounted tickets on Standard Airlines to Honolulu. One-way, eighty bucks.”
p.18 – “If my shyness made me bad at selling encyclopedias, my nature made me despise it. I wasn’t built for heavy doses of rejection. I’d known this about myself since high school, freshman year, when I got cut from the baseball team. A small setback, in the grand scheme, but it knocked my sideways. It was my first real awareness that not everyone in this world will like us, or accept us, that we’re often cast aside at the very moment we most need to be included.”
p.19 – “I wasn’t a smooth talker. I wasn’t any kind of talker. Still, I knew numbers, and I knew the product: Dreyfus Funds. More, I knew how to speak the truth. People seemed to like that. I was quickly able to schedule a few meetings, adn to close a few sales. Inside a week I’d earned enough in commissions to pay my half of the rent for the next six months, with plenty left over for surfboard wax.”
p.20 – “And then, surprise, the world was spared. The crisis passed. The sky seemed to sigh with relief as the air turned suddenly crisper, calmer. A perfect Hawaiian autumn followed. Days of contentment and something close to bliss. Followed by a sharp restlessness. One night I set my beer on the bar and turned to Carter. ‘I think maybe the time has come to leave Shangri-La,’ I said.”
p.20 – “The last thing I wanted was to pack up and return to Oregon. But I couldn’t see traveling around the world alone, either. Go home, a faint inner voice told me. Get a normal job. Be a normal person. Then I heard another faint voice, equally emphatic. No, don’t go home. Keep going. Don’t stop. The next day I gave my two weeks’ notice at the boiler room. ‘Too bad, Buck,’ one of the bosses said, ‘you had a real future as a salesman.’ ‘God forbid,’ I muttered.”
p.21 – “Crazy Idea? Maybe I was, in fact, crazy.”
p.21 – “The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer; he sells the consumer to his product.”
p.21 – “Some three hundred thousand people were burned alive, instantly, four times the number died in Hiroshima.”
p.22 – “I took a cab there and the guys greeted me like family.”
p.23 – “I marveled at the concept of kensho, or satori– enlightenment that comes in a flash, a blinding pop.”
p.23 – “Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.”
p.23 – “Self is the bald-faced lie we tell ourselves daily, and happiness requires seeing through the lie, debunking it.”
p.23 – “Victory, Zen says, comes when we forget the self and the opponent, who are but two halves of one whole.”
p.23 – “Even the thought of emptiness is no longer there.”
p.24 – “I couldn’t look away. I watched and watched, asking myself, Is this what it’s all about? Really? I appreciated money as much as the next guy. But I wanted my life to be about so much more.”
p.25 – “In that case, the ex-GIs said, you’d better learn a few things about doing business with the Japanese.”
p.25 – " ‘The war situation hasn’t developed to Japan’s advantage.’ "
p.25 – “No one ever turns you down flat. No one ever says, straight out, no. But they don’t say yes, either. They speak in circles, sentences with no clear subject or object. Don’t be discouraged, but don’t be cocky. You might leave a man’s office thinking you’ve blown it, when in fact he’s ready to do a deal.”
p.26 – “Expect nothing, seek nothing, grasp nothing– the immortal Japanese poets wrote lines that seemed polished and polished until they gleamed like the blade of a samurai’s sword, or the stones of a mountain brook. Spotless.”
p.27 – “_You are capable. You are confident. You can do this. You can DO this. Then I went to the wrong place. I presented myself at the Onitsuka showroom, when in fact I was expected at the Onitsuka factory– across town. I hailed a taxi and raced there, frantic, arriving half an hour late.”
p.28 – “There is a primal urge to compare everything– life, business, adventures of all sorts– to a race. But the metaphor is often inadequate. It can take you only so far. Unable to remember what I’d wanted to say, or even why I was here, I took several quick breaths. Everything depended on my rising to this occasion. Everything. If I didn’t, if I muffed this, I’d be doomed to spend the rest of my days selling encyclopedias, or mutual funds, or some other junk I didn’t really care about. I’d be a disappointment to my parents, my school, my hometown. Myself.”
p.30 – “They asked me how big I thought the American shoe market was, how big it could be, and I told them that ultimately it could be $1 billion. To this day I’m not sure where that number came from. They leaned back, gazed at each other, astonished. Now, to my astonishment, they began pitching me.”
p.31 – “Also, I was crazed with loneliness, cut of from everything and everyone I knew.”
p.31 – “Even after I gave them all the money in my pockets, the cry never stopped.”
p.32 – “You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break.”
p.32 – “Standing before its placid face I asked, Why am I here? What is my purpose? I waited. Nothing. Or else the silence was my answer. I went to Vietnam, where streets were bristling with American soldiers, and thrumming with fear. Everyone knew that war was coming, and that it would be very ugly, very different. It would be a Lewis Carroll war, the kind in which a U.S. officer would declare: We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
pp.33-34 – “I went to Cairo, to the Giza plateau, and stood beside desert nomads and their silk-draped camels at the foot of the Great Sphinx, all of us squinting up into its eternally open eyes. The sun hammered down on my head, the same sun that hammered down on the thousands of men who built these pyramids, and the millions of visitors who came after. Not one of them was remembered, I thought. All is vanity, says the Bible. All is now, says Zen. All is dust, says the desert.”
p.34 – “I went to Jerusalem, to the rock where Abraham prepared to kill his son, where Muhammad began his heavenward ascent. The Koran says the rock wanted to join Muhammad, and tried to follow, but Muhammad pressed his foot to the rock and stopped it. His footprint is said to be still visible. Was he barefoot or wearing a shoe?”
p.35 – “My time was running out. Home was calling to me. I hurried to Paris, descended far belowground to the Pantheon, put my hand lightly on the crypts of Rousseau– and Voltaire. Love truth, but pardon error. I took a room in a seedy hotel, watched sheets of winter rain sluice the alley below my window, prayed at Notre Dame, got lost in the Louvre. I bought a few books at Shakespeare and Company, and I stood in the spot where Joyce slept, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
p.36 – “On my last day I sauntered up the Champs-Elysees, tracing the liberators’ path, thinking all the while of Patton. Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them waht to do and let them surprise you with their results.”
p.37 – “At last I flew to London. I went quickly to Buckingham Palace, Speakers’ Corner, Harrods. I granted myself a bit of extra time at Commons. Eyes closed, I conjured the great Churchill. You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory.. without victory, there is no survival. I wanted desperately to hop a bus to Stratford, to see Shakespeare’s house. (Elizabethan women wore a red silk rose on the toe of each shoe.) But I was out of time.”

1963

pp.39-40 – “My new look– castaway hair, caveman beard– was too much for my mother and sisters. I’d catch them staring, frowning. I could hear them thinking: bum. So I shaved. Afterward I stood before the little mirror on my bureau in th servants’ quarters and told myself, ‘It’s official. You’re back.’ And yet I wasn’t. There was something about me that would never return. My mother noticed it before anyone else. Over dinner one night she gave me a long, searching look. ‘You seem more… worldly.’ Worldly, I thought. Gosh.”

1964

p.46 – “Bowerman spent his early days there, and compulsively returned. Part of his mind was always back in Fossil, which was funny, because there was something distinctly fossilized about him. Hard, brown, ancient, he possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness, a blend of grit and integrity and calcified stubbornness that was rare in Lyndon Johnson’s America. Today it’s all but extinct.”
pp.46-47 – “The most famous track coach in America, Bowerman never considered himself a track coach. He detested being called Coach. Given his background, his makeup, he naturally though of track as a means to an end. He called himself a ‘Professor of Competitive Responses,’ and his job, as he saw it, and often described it, was to get you ready for the struggles and competitions that lay ahead, far beyond Oregon.”
p.49 – “Eventually you came to a clearing with rosebushes, solitary trees, and a pleasant house, small but solid, with a stone face. Bowerman had built it with his bare hands. As I slipped my Valiant into park, I wondered how on earth he’d managed all that backbreaking labor by himself. The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
p.50 – “Amid the booming silence I kept my eyes on the road and mulled over Bowerman’s eccentric personality, which carried over to everything he did. He always went against the grain. Always. For example, he was the first college coach in America to emphasize rest, to place as much value on recovery as on work. But when eh worked you, brother, he worked you. Bowerman’s strategy for running the mile was simple. Set a fast pace for the first two laps, run the third as hard as you can, then triple your speed on the fourth. There was a Zen-like quality to this strategy, because it was impossible. And yet it worked. Bowerman coached more sub-four-minute milers than anybody, ever. I wasn’t one of them, however, and this day I wondered if I was going to fall short once again in that crucial final lap.”
p.52 – “Even with Bowerman’s kick-in, that was more than I had on hand. Again I put the touch on my father. This time he balked. He didn’t mind getting me started, but he didn’t want me coming back to him year after year. Besides, he’d thought this shoe thing was a lark. He hadn’t sent me to Oregon and Stanford to become a door-to-door shoe salesman, he said. ‘Jack-assing around,’ that what he called it. ‘Buck,’ he said, ‘how long do you think you’re going to keep jackassing aroudn with these shoes?’ "
pp.52-53 – “In many ways they were the classic case of opposites attracting. My mother, tall, stunning, a lover of the outdoors, was always seeking places to regain some lost inner peace. My father, small, average with thick rimless glasses to correct his 20-450 vision, was engaged in a daily, noisome battle to overcome his past, to become respectable, mainly through academics and hard work. Second in his law school class, he never tired of complaining about the one C on his transcript. (He felt the professor penalized him for his political beliefs.)”
p.53 – “Perhaps nothing ever revealed my mother’s true nature like the frequent drills she put me through. As a young girl she’d witnessed a house in her neighborhood burn to the ground; one of the people inside had been killed. So she often tied a rope to the post of my bed and made me use it to rappel out of my second-floor window. While she timed me. What must the neighbors have thought? What must I have thought? Probably this: Life is dangerous. And this: We must always be prepared. And this: My mother loves me.”
p.55 – “Days later came a letter from Mr. Miyazaki. Yes, he said, you can be the distributor for Onitsuka in the West. That was all I needed. To my father’s horror, and my mother’s subversive delight, I quit my job at the accounting firm, and all that spring I did nothing but sell shoes out of the trunk of my Valiant.”
pp.55-56 – “Driving back to Portland I’d puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves.”
p.56 – “Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.”
pp.56-57 – “On July 4, 1964, I sold out my first shipment. I wrote to Tiger and ordered nine hundred more. That would cost roughly three thousand dollars, which would wipe out my father’s petty cash, and patience. The Bank of Dad, he said, is now closed. He did agree, grudgingly, to give me a letter of guarantee, which I took down to the First National Bank of Oregon. On the strength of my father’s reputation, and nothing more, the bank approved the loan. My father’s vaunted respectability was finally paying dividends, at least for me.”
p.58 – “Life was good. Life was grand. I even had a sort of girlfriend, though I didn’t have much time for her. I was happy, maybe as happy as I’d ever been, and happiness can be dangerous. It dulls the senses. Thus, I wasn’t prepared for that dreadful letter.”
p.60 – “Fifty years later I can see us in that car. I can recall every detail. It was a bright, clear day, no humidity, temperature in the low eighties. Both of us, quietly watching the sunlight play across the windshield, said nothing. The silence between us was like the silence on the many days she drove me to meets. I was too busy fighting my nerves to talk, and she, better than anyone, understood. She respected the lines we draw around ourselves in crisis. Then, as we neared the airport, she broke the silence. ‘Just be yourself,’ she said. I looked out the window. Be myself. Really? Is that my best option? To study the self is to forget the self.”
p.61 – “People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice screaming, begging, ‘Not one more step!’ And when its’ not possible to forget it, you must negotiate with it. I thought over all the races in which my mind wanted one thing, and my body wanted another, those laps in which I’d had to tell my body, ‘Yes, you raise some excellent points, but let’s keep going anyway…’ Despite all my negotiations with that voice, the skill had never come naturally, and now I feared that I was out of practice. As the plane swooped down toward Haneda Airport I told myself that I’d need to summon the old skill quickly, or lose. I could not bear the thought of losing.”
p.63 – “Another fitful night. I got up several times, went to the window, watched the ships bobbing on Kobe’s dark purple bay. Beautiful place, I thought. Too bad all beauty is beyond me. The world is without beauty when you lose, and I was about to lose, big-time. I knew that in the morning Morimoto would tell me he was sorry, nothing personal, it was just business, but they were going with the Marlboro Man.”
p.64 – " ‘Everyone in the world wear athletic shoes all the time,’ he said. ‘I know this day come.’ He paused, looking around the table at each person, to see if they also knew. His gaze rested on me. He smiled. I smiled. He blinked twice. ‘You remind me of myself when I am young,’ he said softly. He stared into my eyes. One second. Two. Now he turned his gaze to Morimoto. ‘This about those thirteen western states?’ he said. “Yes,’ Morimoto said. ‘Hm,’ Onitsuka said. ‘Hmmmm.’ He narrowed his eyes, looked down. He seemed to be meditating. Again he looked up at me. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘all right. You have western states.’ "
p.67 – “She asked what brought me to Japan. I explained that I’d come to save my shoe company. ‘Your company?’ she said. Clearly she was thinking about the men in her family, founders of companies, captains of industry. Entrepreneurs. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘my company.’ ‘And did you… save it?’ she asked. ‘I did,’ I said. ‘All the boys back home are going to business school,’ she said, ‘and then they all plan to become bankers.’ She rolled her eyes, adding: ‘Everyone does the same thing– so boring.’ ‘Boredom scares me,’ I said. ‘Ah. That’s because you’re a rebel.’ I stopped climbing, stabbed my walking stick into the ground. Me– a rebel? My face grew warm.”
p.71 – “It wasn’t my imagination. She said she’d given it a lot of thought and she wasn’t sure we were right for each other. She wasn’t sure I was sophisticated enough for her. ‘Sophisticated,’ that was the word she used. Before I could protest, before I could negotiate, she hung up.”

1965

p.74 – “Every time a thought crossed Johnson’s mind, seemingly, he wrote it down and stuck it into an envelope. He wrote to tell me how many Tigers he’d sold that week. He wrote to tell me how many Tigers he’d sold that day. He wrote to tell me who’d worn Tigers at which high school meet and in what place they’d finished. He wrote to say that he wanted to expand his sales territory beyond California, to include Arizona, and possibly New Mexico. He wrote to suggest that we open a retail store in Los Angeles. He wrote to tell me that he was considering placing ads in running magazines and what did I think? He wrote to inform me that he’d placed those ads in running magazines and the response was good. He wrote to ask why I hadn’t answered any of his previous letters. He wrote to plead for encouragement. He wrote to complain that I hadn’t responded to his previous plea for encouragement.”
p.77 – “As ever, the accountant in me saw the risk, the entrepreneur saw the possibility. So I split the difference and kept moving forward.”
p.77 – " ‘It’s all the same principle, regardless of size,’ he said. ‘Growth off your balance sheet is dangerous.’ ‘Life is growth,’ I said. ‘Business is growth. You grow or you die.’ ‘That’s not how we see it.’ "
p.81 – “While auditing these companies, digging into their guts, taking them apart and putting them back together, I was also learning how they survived, or didn’t. How they sold things, or didn’t. How they got into trouble, how they got out. I took careful notes about what made companies tick, what made them fail. Again and again I learned that lack of equity was a leading cause of failure.”
p.82 – “Day after day I watched Hayes do something I’d never thought possible: He made accounting an art. Which meant he, and I, and all of us, were artists. It was a wonderful thought, an ennobling thought, one that would have never occurred to me. Intellectually I always knew that numbers were beautiful. On some level I understood that numbers represented a secret code, that behind every row of numbers lay ethereal Platonic forms. My accounting classes had taught me that, sort of. As had sports. Running track gives you a fierce respect for numbers, because you are what your numbers say you are, nothing more, nothing less. If I posted a bad time in a race, there might have been reasons– injury, fatigue, broken heart– but no one cared. My numbers, in the end, were all that anyone would remember. I’d lived this reality, but Hayes the artist made me feel it.”
p.86 – “Mr. Onitsuka also told Bowerman that the inspiration for the unique soles on Tigers had come to him while eating sushi. Looking down at his wooden platter, at the underside of an octupus’s leg, he thought a similar suction cup might work on the sole of a runner’s flat. Bowerman filed that away. Inspiration, he learned, can come from quotidian things. Things you might eat. Or find lying around the house.”
p.88 – “Bowerman was forever griping that people make the mistake of thinking only elite Olympians are athletes. But everyone’s an athlete, he said. If you have a body, you’re an athlete. Now he was determined to get this point across to a larger audience. The reading public. ‘Sounds interesting,’ I said, but I thought my old coach had popped a screw. Who in heck would want to read a book about jogging?”

1966

p.90 – “I look back now and wonder if I was truly being myself, or if I was emulating Bowerman, or my father, or both. Was I adopting their man-of-few-words demeanor? Was I maybe modeling all the men I admired? At the time I was reading everything I could get my hands on about generals, samurai, shoguns, along with biographies of my three main heroes– Churchill, Kennedy, and Tolstoy. I had no love of violence, but I was fascinated by leadership, or lack thereof, under extreme conditions. War is the most extreme of conditions. But business has its warlike parallels. Someone somewhere once said that business is war without the bullets, and I tended to agree.”
pp.90-91 – “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”
p.94 – “If Blue Ribbon went bust, I’d have no money, and I’d be crushed. But I’d also have some valuable wisdom, which I could apply to the next business. Wisdom seemed an intangible asset, but an asset all the same, one that justified the risk. Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks– marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling– seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.”
p.101 – “I tried to be nonchalant as I signed the papers and placed an order for five thousand more shoes, which would cost twenty thousand dollars I didn’t have. Kitami said he’d ship them to my East Coast office, which I also didn’t have.”

1967

p.105 – “There are team players, I thought, and then there are team players, and then there’s Johnson.”
pp.107-108 – “I made my counteroffer. I would give Johnson a fifty-dollar raise. Owen stared. It was a fierce, tough stare, honed during many intense negotiations. A lot of Dictaphones had moved out the door after that stare. He was waiting for me to bend, to up my offer, but for once in my life I had leverage, because I had nothing left to give. ‘Take it or leave it’ is like four of a kind. Hard to beat. Finally Owen turned to his son. I think we both knew from the start that Johnson would be the one to settle this, and I saw in Johnson’s face that two contrary desires were fighting for his heart. He didn’t want to accept my offer. But he didn’t want to quit. He loved Blue Ribbon. He needed Blue Ribbon. He saw Blue Ribbon as the one place in the world where he fit, an alternative to the corporate quicksand that had swallowed most of our schoolmates and friends, most of our generation. He’d complained a million times about my lack of communication, but in fact my laissez-faire management style had fostered him, unleashed him. He wasn’t likely to find that kind of autonomy anywhere else. After several seconds he reached out his hand. ‘Deal,’ he said. ‘Deal,’ I said, shaking it. We sealed our new agreement with a six-mile run. As I remember, I won.”
p.109 – “I’d never been so at a loss for words, and I’d spent half my life tongue-tied. What does one say to a track star who suddenly can’t move his legs?”
p.113 – “Here I was, chasing Adidas, but in a way I was still chasing Bowerman, seeking his approval, and as always it seemed highly unlikely in late 1967 that I’d ever catch either one.”
p.115 – “At an office thrift store we bought three battered desks, one for me, one for Woodell, one for ’the next person stupid enough to work for us.’ I also built a corkboard wall, to which I pinned different Tiger models, borrowing some of Johnson’s decor ideas in Santa Monica. In a far corner I set up a small sitting area for customers to try on shoes.”
p.115 – “But I told myself that living in your office is the act of a crazy person. And then I got a letter from Johnson saying he was living in his new office.”

1968

p.117 – “I wanted to dedicate every minute of every day to Blue Ribbon. I’d never been a multitasker, and I didn’t see any reason to start now. I wanted to be present, always. I wanted to focus constantly on the one task that really mattered. If my life was to be all work and no play, I wanted my work to be play. I wanted my wanted to quit Price Waterhouse. Not that I hated it; it just wasn’t me. I wanted what everyone wants. To be me, full-time. But it wasn’t possible. Blue Ribbon simply couldn’t support me. Though the company was on track to double sales for a fifth straight year, it still couldn’t justify a salary for its cofounder. So I decided to compromise, find a different day job, one that would pay my bills but require fewer hours, leaving me more time for my passion. The only job I could think of that fit this criterion was teaching. I applied to Portland State University, and got a job as an assistant professor, at seven hundred dollars a month.”
p.118 – “As part of my formal severing, I had to go in and talk to the boss, a senior partner with the Dickensian name of Curly LeClerc. He was polite, even-handed, smooth, playing a one-act drama he’d played a hundred times– the exit interview. He asked what I was going to do instead of working for one of the finest accounting firms in the world. I said that I’d started my own business and was hoping it might take off, and in the meantime I was going to teach accounting. He stared. I’d gone off script. Way off. ‘Why the hell would you do something like that?’ Lastly, the really difficult exit interview. I told my father. He, too, stared. Bad enough I was still jackassing around with shoes, he said, but now… this. Teaching wasn’t respectable. Teaching at Portland State aws downright disrespectable. ‘What am I going to tell my friends?’ he asked.”
p.122 – “It wasn’t just the quality of Miss Parks’s work that we found so valuable. It was the blithe spirit in which she did it. From Day One, she was all in. She grasped what we were trying to do, what we were trying to build here. She felt that Blue Ribbon was unique, that it might become something special, and she wanted to do what she could to help. Which proved to be a lot.”
p.124 – “We strolled past the lions and tigers. I told her that I flat-out didn’t want to work for someone else. I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.”
pp.128-129 – “Dot stirred into her coffee, drummed her fingers on teh table. She had an odd look on her face, a look of fear, and frustration. She hadn’t found herself involved in many negotiations, and she didn’t know that the basic rule of negotiation is to know what you want, what you need to walk away with in order to be whole. So she got flummoxed and instantly folded. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay.’ "
p.130 – “Not until I left for Japan, not until I kissed my fiancee good-bye and promised to write as soon as I got there, did the full reality, with all its dimensions and contours, hit me. I had more than a fiancee, a lover, a friend. I had a partner. In the past I’d told myself Bowerman was my partner, and to some extent Johnson. But this thing with Penny was unique, unprecedented. This alliance was life-altering. It still didn’t make me nervous, it just made me more mindful. I’d never before said good-bye to a true partner, and it felt massively different. Imagine that, I thought. The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.”
p.132 – “Here in Japan I was part of a team, me and Kitami and all the good people of Onitsuka. By nature I was a loner, but since childhood I’d thrived in team sports. My psyche was in true harmony when I had a mix of alone time and team time. Exactly what I had now.”
p.134 – “…, ‘Second time I’ve seen you this nervous.’ We laughed, and reminisced, for the millionth time, about that day at Stanford when I’d given my presentation to my entrepreneurship class. Today, I thought, is similar. Once again I’m telling a roomful of people that something is possible, that something can be successful, when in fact I don’t really know. I’m speaking from theory, faith, and bluster, like every groom. And every bride. It would be up to me and Penny to prove the truth of what we said that day.”

1969

p.138 – “When it cam to advertising, our approach was primitive and slapdash. We were making it up as we went along, learning on the fly, and it showed. In one ad– for the Tiger marathon flat, I think– we referred to the new fabric as ‘swooshfiber.’ To this day none of us remembers who first came up with the word, or what it meant. But it sounded good.”
p.139 – “They were still being condemned for it. But Bowerman, as I fully expected, supported them. Bowerman supported all runners.”
p.142 – “I think I must have known, on some level, that hte memo was a mistake, a terribly stupid thing to do. And that I would live to regret it. I think I knew. But I often found myself as perplexing as Japanese business practices.”
p.143 – “For instance, she was learning that I spent a fair portion of each day lost in my own thoughts, tumbling down mental wormholes, trying to solve some problem or construct some plan. I often didn’t hear what she said, and if I did hear I didn’t remember it minutes later.”
pp.143-144 – “She was learning that I wasn’t housebroken. I left the toilet seat up, left my clothes where they fell, left food on the counter. I was effectively helpless. I couldn’t cook, or clean, or do even the simplest things for myself, because I’d been spoiled rotten by my mother and sisters. All those years in the servants’ quarters, I’d essentially had servants.
p.145 – “Leaning back in my recliner each night, staring at the ceiling, I tried to settle myself. I told myself: Life is growth. You grow or you die.”
p.147 – “No matter what happened, he’d never lose his composure. Even at his most vulnerable, with me balancing him precariously at the top of some dark flight of stairs, he’d never lose touche with his essential philosophy: Don’t you dare feel sorry for me. I’m here to kill you.”
p.147 – “Woodell and I were very different, and yet our friendship was based on a selfsame approach to work. Each of us found pleasure, whenever possible, in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind. And each of us recognized that this small task of finding a bigger office meant we were succeeding. We were making a go of this thing called Blue Ribbon, which spoke to a deep desire, in each of us, to win. Or at least not lose.”

1970

p.160 – “More than once, over my first cup of coffee in the morning, or while trying to fall asleep at night, I’d tell myself: Maybe I’m a fool? Maybe this whole damn shoe thing is a fool’s errand? Maybe, I thought. Maybe.”
p.164 – “Yes, I thought. Confidence. More than equity, more than liquidity, that’s what a man needs. I wished I had more. I wished I could borrow some. But confidence was cash. You had to have some to get some. And people were loathe to give it to you.”

1971

p.175 – “He said yet again that he was disappointed in the performance of Blue Ribbon. This time, however, he said he had a solution. ‘Shoot,’ I said. ‘Sell us your company.’ He said it so very softly. The thought crossed my mind that some of the hardest things ever said in our lifetimes are said softly. ‘Excuse me?’ I said. ‘Onitsuka Co. Ltd. will buy controlling interest in Blue Ribbon, fifty-one percent. It is best deal for your company. And you. You would be wise to accept.’ A takeover. A hostile freaking takeover. I looked at the ceiling. You gotta be kidding, I thought. Of all the arrogant, underhanded, ungrateful, bullying– ‘And if we do not?’ ‘We will have no choice but to set up superior distributors.’ ‘Superior. Uh-huh. I see. And what about our written agreement?’ He shrugged. So much for agreements.”
p.181 – “For her many hours of work, we gave Carolyn our deepest thanks and a check for thirty-five dollars, then sent her on her way.”
p.184 – " ‘What’d you decide?’ Woodell asked me at the end of the day. ‘Nike,’ I mumbled. ‘Hm,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’ll grow on us,’ he said. Maybe.”
p.186 – “I’d never heard of Senter, but Sumeragi assured me the mans was a genuine, head-to-toe shoe dog. I’d heard this phrase a few times. Shoe dogs were people who devoted themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying, or designing of shoes. Lifers used the phrase cheerfully to describe other lifers, men and women who had toiled so long and hard in the shoe trade, they thought and talked about nothing else.”
p.190 – “It got worse. As we made our way across Japan he was brusque, boorish, strutting, swaggering, condescending to everyone we met. He embarrassed me, embarrassed all Americans. Now and then Sumeragi and I exchanged pained looks. We wanted desperately to scold Sole Jr., to leave him– but we needed his father’s contacts. We needed this horrid brat to show us where the factories were.”
p.192 – “It was dark as I walked out of the office building, into the crowded Tokyo street. A feeling came over me, unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I felt spent, but proud. I felt drained, but exhilarated. I felt everything I ever hoped to feel after a day’s work. I felt like an artist, a creator. I looked back over my shoulder, took one last look at Nissho’s offices. Under my breath I said, ‘We made this.’ "
pp.193-194 – “I went to the door of the ladies’ room and cracked it open. ‘Penny?’ ‘I’m frozen,’ she said. ‘What?’ ‘I’m on the floor of the ladies’ room… and I am frozen.’ I went in and found her on the cold tiles, lying on her side, ladies stepping over and around her. She was having a panic attack. And severe leg cramps. The long flight, the chaos at the airport, the months of stress about Kitami– it was too much for her. I spoke calmly, told her everything would be fine, and gradually she unclenched. I helped her to her feet, guided her upstairs, and asked the hotel to send up a masseuse. As she lay on the bed, a cold washcloth on her forehead, I was worried, but a little bit grateful. I’d been on the edge of panic for weeks. Months. The sight of Penny in this state gave me a shot of adrenaline. One of us had to keep it together, for the sake of Matthew. This time it would have to be me.”
p.197 – “Bowerman phoned me, excited, and told me about his experiment. He wanted me to send a sample of his waffle-soled shoes to one of my new factories. Of course, I said. I’d send it right away– to Nippon Rubber. I look back over the decades and see him toiling in his workshop, Mrs. Bowerman carefully helping, and I get goosebumps. He was Edison in Menlo Park, Da Vinci in Florence, Tesla in Wardenclyffe. Divinely inspired. I wonder if he knew, if he had any clue, that he was the Daedalus of sneakers, that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations. I wonder if he could conceive in that moment all that he’d done. All that would follow. I know I couldn’t.”

1972

pp.201-202 – “I was on the verge of losing it, right on the verge. Then I saw that Johnson and Woodell were already losing it, and I realized that I couldn’t afford to. Like Penny, they beat me to the panic attack punch. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘fellas, this is the worst the shoes will ever be. They’ll get better. So if we can just sell these… we’ll be on our way.’ "
p.203 – " ‘We’ve been doing business with you Blue Ribbon guys for years,’ he said, ‘and we know that you guys tell the truth. Everyone else bullshits, you guys always shoot straight. So if you say this new shoe, this Nike, is worth a shot, we believe.’ "
p.207 – “I looked down the table. Everyone was sinking, slumping forward. I looked at Johnson. He was staring at the papers before him, and there was something in his handsom face, some quality I’d never seen there before. Surrender. Like everyone else in the room, he was giving up. The nation’s economy was in the tank, a recession was under way. Gas lines, political gridlock, rising unemployment, Nixon being Nixon– Vietnam. It seemed like the end times. Everyone in the room had already been worrying about how they were going to make the rent, pay the light bill. Now this.”
p.208 – " ‘It’s time we faced facts: If we’re going to succeed, or fail, we should do so on our own terms, with our own ideas– our own brand. We posted two million in sales last year… none of which had anything to do with Onitsuka. That number was a testament to our ingenuity and hard work. Let’s not look at this as a crisis. Let’s look at this as our liberation. Our Independence Day.’ "
p.208 – " ‘Ach,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’ But I reminded him: I just told the truth. As he had in Chicago. Telling the truth, I said. Who knew?”
p.210 – “No matter the sport– no matter the human endeavor, really– total effort will win people’s hearts.”
p.212 – “I told myself, Don’t forget this. Do not forget. I told myself there was much to be learned from such a display of passion, whether you were running a mile or a company.”
p.212 – “This, I decided, this is what sports are, what they can do. Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.”
p.213 – “And then it began. In the second week of the Olympic Games, a squad of eight masked gunmen scaled a back wall of the Olympic village and kidnapped eleven Israeli athletes. IN our Tigard office we set up a TV and no one did a lick of work. We watched and watched, day after day, saying little, often holding our hands over our mouths. When the terrible denouement came, when the news broke that all the athletes were dead, their bodies strewn on a blood-spattered tarmac at the airport, it recalled the deaths of both Kennedys, and of Dr. King, and of the students at Kent State University, and of all the tens of thousands of boys in Vietnam. Ours was a difficult, death-drenched age, and at least once every day you were forced to ask yourself: What’s the point?”

1973

p.220 – “Save something, Bowerman kept pleading. But of course Pre refused. I’m all-out, all the time, he said. In their relationship I saw a mirror of my relationship with banks. Pre didn’t see the sense in going slow– ever. Go fast or die. I couldn’t fault him. I was on his side. Even against our coach.”
p.225 – “Around the close of 1972 each man handed his house keys to the other, and now in early 1973 they switched places. Talk about team players. It was an enormous sacrifice, and I was deeply grateful. But in keeping with my personality, and Blue Ribbon tradition, I expressed no gratitude. I spoke not a word of thanks or praise. In fact, in several office memos I referred to the switch as ‘Operation Dummy Reversal.’ "
p.227 – “They were placated, mildly. But I left Eugene that day knowing they had a low opinion of me, and Nike. I also left thinking I’d never, ever, ever take this company public. If thirty people could cause this kind of acid stomach, I couldn’t imagine being answerable to thousands of stockholders.”
p.228 – “At the close of those difficult days, it was my nightly six-mile run that saved my life. And this it was my brief time with Matthew and Penny that preserved my sanity. I’d always try to find the time and energy to tell Matthew his bedtime story. Thomas Jefferson was toiling to write teh Declaration of Independence, you see, struggling to find the words, when little Matt History brought him a new quill pen and the words seemed to magically flow…”
p.229 – “Bowerman spent quite a bit of time with Matthew, and he told me not to worry. I like his spirit, he said. The world needs more rebels.”
p.231 – “Intelligence like Strasser’s, however, couldn’t be hidden for long. He was one of the greatest thinkers I ever met. Debater, negotiator, talker, seeker– his mind was always whirring, trying to understand. And to conquer. He saw life as a battle and found confirmation for this view in books. Like me, he read compulsively about war.”
p.233 – “He had superb talent for underplaying the bad, and underplaying the good, for simply being in the moment. For instance, after the dummy reversal, Woodell occupied an office that was hardly deluxe. It sat on the top floor of an old shoe factory, and a water tower directly overhead was caked with century’s worth of pigeon poop. Plus, the ceiling beams were gapped, adn the building shook every time the die cutters stamped out the uppers. In other words, throughout the day a steady rain of pigeon poop would simply dust himself off, casually clear his desk with the side of his hand, and continue with his work.”
p.233 – “We’d traded Onitsuka’s capricious delays for a new set of delays, caused by demand. The factories and Nissho were doing their jobs, we were now getting what we ordered, on time and intact, but the booming marketplace created new pressures, making it harder to correctly allocate what we got.”

1974

p.250 – “I opened by telling Strasser that it was all a foregone conclusion, really. ‘You’re one of us,’ I said. One of us. He knew what those words meant. We were the kind of people who simply couldn’t put up with corporate nonsense. We were the kind of people who wanted our work to be play. But meaningful play. We were trying to slay Goliath, and though Strasser was bigger than two Goliaths, at heart he was an utter David. We were trying to create a brand, I said, but also a culture. We were fighting against conformity, against boringness, against drudgery. More than a product, we were trying to sell an idea– a spirit. I don’t know if I ever fully understood who we were and what we were doing until I heard myself saying it all that day to Strasser.”
p.253 – “Later, while Johnson and I were on a run, he asked me how we were going to pay a quarter of a million dollars for a factory when we could barely pay for Giampietro’s steak. I told him calmly– in fact with the calm of a madman– that I was going to have Nissho pay for it. ‘Why on earth is Nissho going to give you money to run a factory?’ he asked. ‘Simple,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to tell them.’ I stopped running, put my hands on my knees, and told Johnson, furthermore, that I was going to need him to run that factory. His mouth opened, then shut. Just one year ago I’d asked him to move across the country to Oregon. Now I wanted him to move back east again? To work in close proximity to Giampietro? And Woodell? With whom he had a very… complicated… rapport? ‘Craziest thing I’ve ever heard,’ he said. ‘Never mind the inconvenience, never mind the insanity of schlepping all the way back to the East Coast, what do I know about running a factory? I’d be in completely over my head.’ I laughed. I laughed and laughed. ‘Over your head?’ I said. ‘Over your head! We’re all in over our heads! Way over!’ He moaned. He sounded like a car trying to start on a cold morning. I waited. Just give a second, I thought. He denied, fumed, bargained, got depressed, then accepted. The Five Stages of Jeff. At last he let out a long sigh and said he knew this was a big job, and, like me, he didn’t trust anyone else to handle it. He said he knew that, when it came to Blue Ribbon, each of us was willing to do whatever was necessary to win, and if ‘whatever was necessary’ fell outside our area of expertise, hey, as Giampietro would say, ‘No fucking problem.’ He didn’t know anything about running a factory, but he was willing to try. To learn. Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company. Not that any of thought we wouldn’t fail; in fact we had every expectation that we would. But when we did fail, we had faith that we’d do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it. Johnson frowned, nodded. Okay, he said. Deal. And so, as we entered the final days of 1974, Johnson was firmly ensconced in Exeter, and often, late at night, thinking of him back there, I’d smile and say under my breath: Godspeed, old friend. You’re Giampietro’s problem now.”

1975

p.258 – “To most observers this would’ve seemed a brazenly reckless, dangerous way of doing business, but I believed the demand for our shoes was always greater than our annual sales. Besides, eight of every ten orders were solid gold, guaranteed, thanks to our Futures program. Full speed ahead. Others might have argued that we didn’t need to fear Nissho. The company was our ally, after all. We were making them money, how mad could they get? Also, I had a strong personal relationship with Sumeragi. But suddenly in 1975 Sumeragi was no longer running things. Our account had grown too big for him; our credit was no longer his call alone.”
p.260 – “Holland acknowledged as much. ‘Sure, boys, I get it,’ he’d say with a nod. As long as we were upfront with him, as long as we were transparent, he could work with us.”
p.260 – " ‘Son of a bitch,’ Hayes said, ‘if you look at our cash flow over the next six months, we’re in good shape. It’s just this one payment to Nissho that’s screwing up everything.”
p.261 – “Two days later Johnson was in his new office at the Exeter factory, doing paperwork, when a mob of angry workers suddenly appeared at his door. Their paychecks had bounced, they said. They wanted answers. Johnson, of course, had no answers to give. He implored them to hold on, there must be some mistake. He phoned Oregon, reached Fields, and told her what was happening. He expected her to say it was all a big misunderstanding, an accounting error. Instead she whispered, ‘Oooh, shit.’ Then hung up on him.”
p.265 – “She had faith. She was completely ready for whatever may come. She even managed to turn in. Not me. I sat up all night, playing out a hundred different scenarios, castigating myself for taking such a risk. When I finally crawled into bed, my mind wouldn’t stop. Lying in the dark I thought over and over: Am I going to jail? Me? Jail?”
p.265 – “Then I went into the den and researched the homestead laws. I was relieved to learn that the Feds couldn’t take the house. They could take everything else, but not this little sixteen-hundred-square-foot sanctuary. I sighed, but the relief didn’t last. I started thinking about my life. I scrolled back years, questioning every decision I’d ever made that led to this point. If only I’d been better at selling encyclopedias, I thought. Everything would be different.”
p.267 – “We talked about hiding the factory from them. But everyone around the table agreed that we needed to play this one straight. As in the Onitsuka trial, full disclosure, total transparency, was the only course. It made sense, strategically and morally.”
p.268 – “United Sporting Goods had also been playing the float. Already feeling a splitting headache coming on, I walked back into the conference room. I could smell it in the air. We’d reached that fateful moment. Leaning over the books, Ito realized what he was looking at and did a slow double-take. Exeter. Secret factory. Then I saw the realization dawn that he was the sucker who’d paid for it. He looked up at me and pushed his head forward on his neck, as if to say: Really? I nodded. And then… he smiled. It was only a half smile, a mohair sweater smile, but it meant everything. I gave him a weak half smile in return, and in that brief wordless exchange countless fates and futures were decided.”
pp.272-273 – “Ito swiveled in his chair, took them all in with a subzero gaze. ‘There is one more thing,’ he said. ‘I believe your bank has been negotiating in San Francisco to become one of Nissho’s banks?’ ‘That’s right,’ Holland said. ‘Ah. I must tell you that it will be a waste of your time to pursue those negotiations any further.’ ‘Are you sure?’ Holland asked. ‘I am quite sure.’… They’d treated a good customer shabbily, and they didn’t want to have to answer for their actions. We would never hear of them, or him, again. I looked at the suits on either side of Holland. ‘Gentelmen,’ I said, standing. Gentlemen. Sometimes that’s Business-ese for: Take your FBI and shove it.”
p.273 – “He straightened his tie. ‘Such stupidity,’ he said. At first I thought he was talking about me. Then I realized he meant the bank. ‘I do not like stupidity,’ he said. ‘People pay too much attention to numbers.’ "

1976

p.281 – “Like most companies, we had role models. Sony, for instance. Sony was the Apple of its day. Profitable, innovative, efficient– and it treated it workers well. When pressed, I often said I wanted to be like Sony. At root, however, I still aimed and hoped for something bigger, and vaguer.”
p.281 – “Several times, in those first months of 1976, I huddled with Hayes and Woodell and Strasser, and over sandwiches and sodas we’d kick around this question of ultimate goals. This question of winning and losing. Money wasn’t our aim, we agreed. Money wasn’t our end game. But whatever our aim or end, money was the only means to get there. More money than we had on hand.”
p.283 – “As is always the case, teh process turned out to be more complicated than it first appeared. First State Bank and teh Small Business Administration required that Bowerman and I, as majority shareholders, both personally guarantee the loan. We’d done that at First National and at Bank of California, so I didn’t see a problem. I was in hock up to my neck, what was one more guarantee? Bowerman, however, balked. Retired, living on a fixed income, dispirited after the traumas of the last few years, and greatly weakened by the death of Pre, he didn’t want any more risk. He feared losing his mountain.”
p.285 – “I remembered that the best way to reinforce your knowledge of a subject is to share it, so we both benefited from my transferring everything I knew about Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan to Gorman’s brain.”
p.294 – “Now we all turned to Bowerman, who was pacing, or trying to. There was no room. The office was dark, but I could still tell that my old coach’s face was turning red. ‘Well… we didn’t get them on time!’ he shouted, and the tines of the rakes trembled. This wasn’t about uppers and outer soles. This was about retirement. And time. Like Pre, time wouldn’t listen to Bowerman. Time wouldn’t slow down. ‘I’m not going to put up with this bullshit anymore,’ he huffed, and stormed out, leaving the door swinging open. I looked at Johnson and Vixie and Hollister. They all looked at me. It didn’t matter if Bowerman was right or wrong, we’d just have to find a way to make him feel needed and useful. If Bowerman isn’t happy, I said, Nike isn’t happy.”
p.296 – “I no longer simply made Nikes; Nikes were making me. If I saw an athlete choose another shoe, if I saw anyone choose another shoe, it wasn’t just a rejection of the brand alone, but of me. I told myself to be reasonable, not everyone in the world was going to wear Nike. And I won’t say that I became upset every time I saw someone walking down the street in a running shoe that wasn’t mine. But it definitely registered. And I didn’t care for it. At some point that night I phoned Hollister. He was devastated, too. There was raw anger in his voice. I was glad. I wanted people working for me who would feel that same burn, that same gut-punch rejection.”
p.297 – “I can see myself so clearly at the head of a conference table, shouting, being shouted at– laughing until my voice was gone. The problems confronting us were grave, complex, seemingly insurmountable, made more so by the fact we were separated from each other by three thousand miles, at a time when communication wasn’t easy or instant. And yet we were always laughing. Sometimes, after a really cathartic guffaw, I’d look around the table and feel overcome by emotion. Camaraderie, loyalty, gratitude. Even love. Surely love. But I also remember feeling shocked that these were the men I’d assembled. These were the founding fathers of a multimillion-dollar company that sold athletic shoes? A paralyzed guy, two morbidly obese guys, a chain-smoking guy? It was bracing to realize that, in this group, the one with whom I had the most in common was… Johnson. And yet, it was undeniable. While everyone else was laughing, rioting, he’d be the sane one, sitting quietly in the middle of the table reading a book.”
p.298 – " ‘Normally,’ he said, ‘if one manager at a company can think tactically and strategically, that company has a good future. But boy are you lucky: More than half the Buttfaces think that way!’ "
pp.298-299 – “Undoubtedly we looked, to any casual observer, like a sorry, motley crew, hopelessly mismatched. But in fact we were more alike than different, and that gave a coherence to our goals and our efforts. We were mostly Oregon guys, which was important. We had an inborn need to prove ourselves, to show the world that we weren’t hicks and hayseeds. And we were nearly all merciless self-loathers, which kept the egos in check. There was none of that smartest-guy-in-the-room foolishness. Hayes, Strasser, Woodell, Johnson, each would have been the smartest guy in any room, but none believed it of himself, or the next guy. Our meetings were defined by contempt, disdain, and heaps of abuse.”
p.301 – “It was us against the world, and we felt damned sorry for the world. That is, when we weren’t righteously pissed off at it. Each of us had been misunderstood, misjudged, dismissed. Shunned by bosses, spurned by luck, rejected by society, short-changed by fate when looks and other natural graces were handed out. We’d each been forged by early failure. We’d each given ourselves to some quest, some attempt at validation or meaning, and fallen short.”
p.302 – “Maybe going public would finally ensure that Nike would live on. If I had any doubts about Blue Ribbon’s management team in 1976, they were mainly about me. Was I doing right by the Buttfaces, giving them so little guidance? When they did well I’d shrug adn deliver my highest praise: Not bad. When they erred I’d yell for a minute or two, then shake it off. None of the Buttfaces felt the least threatened by me– was that a good thing? Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. It was the right tack for Patton and his GIs. But did that make it right for a bunch of Buttfaces? I worried. Maybe I should be more hands-on. Maybe we should be more structured.”
p.302 – “Clearly the Buttfaces liked the culture I’d created. I trusted them, wholly, and didn’t look over their shoulders, and that bred a powerful two-way loyalty. My management style wouldn’t have worked for people who wanted to be guided, every step, but this group found it liberating, empowering. I let them be, let them do, let them make their own mistakes, because that’s how I’d always liked people to treat me.”
p.303 – “My fatherhood style, my management style. I was forever questioning, Is it good– or merely good enough? Time and again I’d vow to change. Time and again I’d tell myself: I will spend more time with the boys. Time and again I’d keep that promise– for a while. Then I’d fall back to my former routine, the only way I knew. Not hands-off. But not hands-on.”

1977

p.307 – “I’d hired Strasser for his legal mind, but by 1977 I’d discovered his true talent. Negotiating. The first few times I asked him to work out a contract with sports agents, the toughest negotiators in the world, he more than held his own. I was amazed. So were the agents. Every time, Strasser walked away with more than we’d ever hoped. No one scared him, no one matched him in a clash of wills. By 1977 I was sending him into every negotiation with total confidence, as if I were sending in the Eighty-Second Airborne.”
p.311 – “We issued a recall and braced ourselves for a public backlash– but it never came. On the contrary, we heard nothing but gratitude. No other shoe company was trying new things, so our efforts, successful or not, were seen as noble. All innovation was hailed as progressive, forward-thinking. Just as failure didn’t deter us, it didn’t seem to diminsh the loyalty of our customers.”
p.313 – " ‘There is no finish line.’ "
p.313 – " ‘Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.’ "

1978

p.323 – “Dark, wiry, sarcastic, bespectacled, he possessed an uncommonly deep, plummy baritone, like Darth Vader with a head cold. Overall he gave the impression of a man with a plan, and the plan didn’t include surrender or sleep.”
p.324 – “Some inside Nike worried about Werschkul’s seriousness, fearing it bordered on obsession. Fine by me, I thought. Obsessives were hte only ones for the job. The only ones for me. Some questioned his stability. But when it came to stability, I asked, who among us will throw the first stone?”
p.327 – “But instead of cherishing how far we’d come, I saw only how far we had to go. My window looked onto a beautiful stand of pines, and I definitely couldn’t see the forest for the trees. I didn’t understand what was happening, in the moment, but now I do. The years of stress were taking their toll. When you see only problems, you’re not seeing clearly. At just the moment I needed to be my sharpest, I was approaching burnout.”
p.328 – “We needed to hire people with sharp minds, that was our priority, and accountants and lawyers had at least proved that they could master a difficult subject. And pass a big test. Most had also demonstrated basic competence. When you hired an accountant, you knew he or she could count. When you hired a lawyer, you knew he or she could talk. When you hired a marketing expert, or product developer, what did you know? Nothing. You couldn’t predict what he or she could do, or if he or she could do anything. And the typical business school graduate? He or she didn’t want to start out with a bag selling shoes. Plus, they all had zero experience, so you were simply rolling the dice based on how well they did in an interview. We didn’t have enough margin for error to roll the dice on anyone.”
p.331 – “Everyone flew out to Hawaii for the launch, which turned into a drunken bacchanal, and a mock coronation of Strasser. I was transitioning him from legal to marketing, moving him out of his comfort zone, as I liked to do with everyone now and then, to prevent them from growing stale. Tailwind was Strasser’s first big project, so he felt like Midas. ‘Nailed it,’ he kept saying, and who could begrudge him a bit of chest-thumping.”
p.333 – “Industy watchers pointed to our new factories, and our sales, and said we were unstoppable. Few imagined we were broke. Or that our head of marketing was wallowing in a depression. Or that our founder and president was sitting in a giant baseball mitt with a long face. The burnout spread around the office like mono. And while we were all burning out, our man in Washington was flaming out.”
p.334 – “I knew right then that I’d have to start flying back to Washington, D.C., take on this fight myself. There was no other way. And maybe it would cure my burnout. Maybe the cure for any burnout, I thought, is to just work harder.”

1979

p.336 – “I found it hard to believe this… man… was speaking for the U.S. government, but I didn’t say that. ‘I find it hard to believe that the U.S. government would want to stifle free enterprise,’ I said. ‘That the U.S. government would want to be a party to this kind of deceit and trickery. That the U.S government, my government, would want to bully a little company in Oregon. Sir, with all respect, I’ve been all over the world, I’ve seen corrupt governments in undeveloped countries act this way. I’ve seen thugs push around businesses, with arrogance, with impunity, and I can’t believe my own government would behave in such a fashion.’ "

1980

p.343 – “He was making decent money, doing good work, but bored stiff. He wasn’t having any fun, and he didn’t feel he was accomplishing anything real.”
p.345 – “We sat back, waited. We knew it wouldn’t take long, and indeed it didn’t. The bureau-kraken cracked up. He threatened to go nuclear, whatever that meant. It didn’t matter. He didn’t matter. His bosses, and his bosses’ bosses, didn’t want this fight anymore. Our competitors, and their accomplices in the government, realized that they’d underestimated our will. Immediately they initiated settlement talks.”
p.347 – “I told Carole Fields to cut the check. She brought it to me for my signature. We looked at each other and of course we were both thinking about the time I’d written that check for $1 million, which I couldn’t cover. Now I was writing a check for $9 million, and there was no way it was going to bounce. I looked at the signature line. ‘Nine million,’ I whispered. I could still remember selling my 1960 MG with racing tires and a win cam for eleven hundred dollars. Like yesterday. Lead me from the unreal to the real.”
p.352 – “The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher– and none of us wavered in the belief that ‘stakes’ didn’t mean ‘money.’ For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood.”
p.353 – “I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is– you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me.”
p.355 – “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.”
p.356 – “A strange sentimentality was stealing over us. On the airplanes, in the hotel bars, we talked about our salad days. His endless letters. Please send encouraging words. My silence. We talked about the name Nike coming to him in a dream. We talked about Stretch, and Giampietro, and the Marlboro Man, and all the different times I’d jerked him back and forth across the country. We talked about the day he was almost strung up by his Exeter employees, when their paychecks had bounced. ‘After all that,’ Johnson said one day in the back of a town car, headed to the next meeting, ‘and now we’re the toasts of Wall Street.’ "
p.358 – " ‘Gentlemen, twenty-two is our number.’ Hayes stared at me. I stared at the speaker. Cracking silence. We could hear heavy breaths, pops, scrapes. Papers being shuffled I closed my eyes and let all that white noise wash over me. I relived every negotiation in my life to that point. So, Dad, you remember that Crazy Idea I had at Stanford…? Gentlemen, I represent Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland, Oregon. You see, Dot, I love Penny. And Penny loves me. And if things continue in this vein, I see us building a life together. ‘I’m sorry,’ the loud voice said angrily. ‘We’ll have to call you back.’ "
p.359 – “Fantasy numbers. Numbers that meant nothing. I never knew that numbers could mean so much, and so little, at the same time.”
pp.359-360 – “I asked myself: What are you feeling? It wasn’t joy. It wasn’t relief. If I felt anything, it was… regret? Good God, I thought. Yes. Regret. Because I honestly wished I could do it all over again. I fell asleep for a few hours. When I woke it was cold and rainy. I went to the window. The trees were dripping water. Everything was mist and fog. The world was the same as it had been the day before, as it had always been. Nothing had changed, least of all me. And yet I was worth $178 million. I showered, ate breakfast, drove to work. I was at my desk before anyone else.”

Night

p.362 – “We shake hands, all around, and talk mostly about Palm Springs. Isn’t this place lovely? Isn’t it wonderful to get out of the cold? We talk about families, business, sports. I hear someone behind us whisper, ‘Hey, look, Buffett and Gates– who’s that other guy?’ I smile. As it should be.”
p.363 – “I’m apt to spend long stretches of the day walking around in my childhood. For some reason I think a lot about my grandfather, Bump Knight. He had nothing, less than nothing. And yet he managed to scrimp and save and buy a brand-new Model T, in which he moved his wife and five kids from Winnebago, Minnesota, all the way to Colorado, then on to Oregon. He told me that he didn’t bother to get his driver’s license, eh just up and went. Descending the Rockies in that rattling, shuddering piece of tin, he repeatedly scoled it. ‘Whoa, WHOA, you sone of a bitch!’ I heard this story so many times from him, and from aunts and uncles and cousins, I feel as though I was there. In a way, I was.”
pp.365-366 – “It wasn’t much of a chance. [Lebron James] was pretty close to a sure thing. But taking a chance on people– he’s right. You could argue that’s what it’s all been about.”
p.368 – “Penny and I were at the movies when we found out. We’d gone to the five o’clock showing of Shrek 2. In the middle of the movie we turned and saw Travis standing in the aisle. Travis. Travis? He was whispering to us in the dark. ‘You guys need to come with me.’ We walked up the aisle, out of the theater, from the darkness to light. As we emerged he said, ‘I just got a phone call from El Salvador…’ Penny fell to the floor. Travis helped her up. He put his arm around his mother and I staggered away, to the end of the hallway, tears streaming. I recall seven strange unbidden words running through my head, over and over, like a fragment of some poem: So this is the way it ends.”
p.368 – “Every Nike athlete wrote, emailed, phoned. Every single one. But the first was Tiger. His call came in at 7:30 a.m. I will never, ever forget. And I will not stand for a bad word spoken about Tiger in my presence.”
p.369 – “They were having a light workout, in the middle of Ronaldo Field, when someone turned and saw Alberto on the ground, gasping for air. A heart attack. He was legally dead for fourteen minutes, until paramedics revived him and rushed him to St. Vincent’s.”
p.369 – “In their house on Claybourne Street, the tension was concealed, and calm and reason almost always prevailed, because of their love for us. Love wasn’t spoken, or shown, but it was there, always. My sisters and I grew up knowing that both parents, different as they were from each other, and from us, cared. That’s their legacy. That’s their lasting victory.”
p.370 – " ‘If something happens to me,’ he said, ‘promise me you’ll take care of Galen.’ His athlete. Teh one he’d been training. Who was just like a son to him. I got it. Oh, how I got it. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Of course. Galen. Consider it done.’ "
p.370 – “I walked out of the room, barely hearing the beeping machines, the laughing nurses, the patient groaning down the hall. I thought of that phrase, ‘It’s just business.’ It’s never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.”
p.370 – “We laughed, cheered, clinked glasses, and something passed between us, the same thing that passes between me and most of the athletes I work with. A transference, a camaraderie, a sort of connection. It’s brief, but it nearly always happens, and I know it’s part of what I was searching for when I went around the world in 1962. To study the self is to forget the self. Mi casa, su casa. Oneness– in some way, shape, or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking.”
p.372 – “Of course my handling of the crisis only made it worse. Angry, hurt, I often reacted with self-righteousness, petulance, anger. On some level I knew my reaction was toxic, counterproductive, but I couldn’t stop myself. It’s just not easy to remain even-keeled when you wake up one day, thinking you’re creating jobs and helping poor countries modernize and enabling athletes to achieve greatness, only to find yourself being burned in effigy outside the flagship retail store in your own hometown.”
p.373 – “We told ourselves: We must do better. Then we told the world: Just watch. We’ll make our factories shining examples.”
p.374 – “Another thing I often heard from those same professors was the old maxim: ‘When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will.’ Though I’ve been known to call business war without bullets, it’s actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity. That’s why, haunted as I was by the Vietnam War, I always vowed that someday Nike would have a a factory in or near Saigon.”