May 22, 2016
“If I tended to dwell on all the things I wasn’t, the reason was simple. Those were the things I knew best. I’d have found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or might become. 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”
May 22, 2016
“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, and I didn’t want that. More than anything, that was the thing I did not want.”
May 22, 2016
“Being a runner, I knew something about running shoes. 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.”
May 22, 2016
“ 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.”
May 22, 2016
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Buck. Okay.”
”
May 22, 2016
“The rest of the family wasn’t quite so supportive. When my grandmother got wind of my itinerary, one item in particular appalled her. “Japan!” she cried. “Why, Buck, it was only a few years ago the Japs were out to kill us! Don’t you remember? Pearl Harbor! The Japs tried to conquer the world! Some of them still don’t know they lost! They’re in hiding! They might take you prisoner, Buck. Gouge out your eyeballs. They’re known for that—your eyeballs.”
May 23, 2016
“An old Japanese woman behind the front desk bowed to me. I realized she wasn’t bowing, she was bent by age, like a tree that’s weathered many storms. Slowly she led me to my room, which was more a box. Tatami mat, lopsided table, nothing else. I didn’t care. I barely noticed that the tatami mat was wafer thin. I bowed to the bent old woman, bidding her good night. Oyasumi nasai. I curled up on the mat and passed out.”
May 23, 2016
“Guidebook and Minolta box camera in hand, I sought out the few landmarks that had survived the war, the oldest temples and shrines. I spent hours sitting on benches in walled gardens, reading about Japan’s dominant religions, Buddhism and Shinto. I marveled at the concept of kensho, or satori—enlightenment that comes in a flash, a blinding pop. Sort of like the bulb on my Minolta. I liked that. I wanted that.”
May 23, 2016
“But first I’d need to change my whole approach. I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, ”
May 23, 2016
“The next morning I laced up my running shoes and jogged to Tsukiji, the world’s largest fish market. ”
May 23, 2016
“Tosho all over again, with shrimp instead of stocks. I watched ancient fishermen spread their catches onto wooden carts and haggle with leather-faced merchants”
May 23, 2016
“The key,” they said, “is don’t be pushy. Don’t come on like the typical asshole American, the typical gaijin—rude, loud, aggressive, not taking no for an answer. The Japanese do not react well to the hard sell. Negotiations here tend to be soft, sinewy.”
May 23, 2016
“ 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. You might leave thinking you’ve closed a deal, when in fact you’ve just been rejected. You never know.”
May 23, 2016
“We passed through the accounting department. Everyone in the room, men and women, leaped from their chairs, and in unison bowed, a gesture of kei, respect for the American tycoon. I’d read that “tycoon” came from taikun, Japanese for “warlord.” I didn’t know how to acknowledge their kei. To bow or not bow, that is always the question in Japan. I gave a weak smile and a half bow, and kept moving.”
May 23, 2016
“And yet it also wasn’t there. Through their resilience, through their stoic acceptance of total defeat, and their heroic reconstruction of their nation, the Japanese had put the war cleanly behind them. Also, these executives in the conference room were young, like me, and you could see that they felt the war had nothing to do with them.”
May 23, 2016
“Mr. Miyazaki interrupted. “Mr. Knight—what company are you with?” he asked.
“Ah, yes, good question.”
Adrenaline surging through my blood, I felt the flight response, the longing to run and hide, which made me think of the safest place in the world. My parents’ house. The house had been built decades before, by people of means, people with much more money than my parents, and thus the architect had included servants’ quarters at the back of the house, and these quarters were my bedroom, which I’d filled with baseball cards, record albums, posters, books—all things holy. I’d also covered one wall with my blue ribbons from track, the one thing in my life of which I was unabashedly proud. And so? “Blue Ribbon,” I blurted. “Gentlemen, I represent Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland, Oregon.”
Mr. Miyazaki smiled. The other executives smiled. A murmur went around the table. Blueribbon, blueribbon, blueribbon. ”
May 23, 2016
“I went to Hong Kong and walked the mad, chaotic streets, horrified by the sight of legless, armless beggars, old men kneeling in filth, alongside pleading orphans. The old men were mute, but the children had a cry they repeated: Hey, rich man, hey, rich man, hey, rich man. Then they’d weep or slap the ground. Even after I gave them all the money in my pockets, the cry never stopped.”
May 23, 2016
“I went to the edge of the city, climbed to the top of Victoria Peak, gazed off into the distance at China. In college I’d read the analects of Confucius—The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones—and now I felt strongly that I’d never have a chance to move this particular mountain.”
May 23, 2016
“Of course, he was deeply flawed. But he knew that. You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break.
I wanted to book a night in his former suite. But I couldn’t afford it.
One day, I vowed. One day I shall return.”
May 23, 2016
“I dodged rickshaws, scooters, tuk-tuks, and elephants to reach Wat Phra Kaew, and one of the most sacred statues in Asia, an enormous six-hundred-year-old Buddha carved from a single hunk of jade. Standing before its placid face I asked, Why am I here? What is my purpose?”
May 23, 2016
“Days before Christmas, 1962, I went on to Calcutta, and rented a room the size of a coffin. No bed, no chair: there wasn’t enough space. Just a hammock suspended above a fizzing hole—the toilet. ”
May 23, 2016
“Within hours I fell ill. An airborne virus, probably, or food poisoning. For one whole day I believed that I wouldn’t make it. I knew that I was going to die.”
May 23, 2016
“I went back to India, spent New Year’s Eve wandering the streets of Bombay, weaving in and out among oxen and long-horned cows, feeling the start of an epic migraine—the noise and the smells, the colors and the glare. I went on to Kenya, and took a long bus ride deep into the bush. Giant ostriches tried to outrun the bus, and storks the size of pit bulls floated just outside the windows. Every time the driver stopped, in the middle of nowhere, to pick up a few Masai warriors, a baboon or two would try to board. The driver and warriors would then chase the baboons off with machetes. Before stepping off the bus, the baboons would always glance over their shoulders and give me a look of wounded pride. Sorry, old man, I thought. If it were up to me.”
May 23, 2016
“ went on to Istanbul, got wired on Turkish coffee, got lost on the twisty streets beside the Bosphorus. I stopped to sketch the glowing minarets, and toured the golden labyrinths of Topkapi Palace, home of the Ottoman sultans, where Muhammad’s sword is now kept.”
May 23, 2016
“I went to Rome, spent days hiding in small trattorias, scarfing mountains of pasta, gazing upon the most beautiful women, and shoes, I’d ever seen. (Romans in the age of the Caesars believed that putting on the right shoe before the left brought prosperity and good luck.)”
May 23, 2016
“Even the Sistine Chapel. Alone under Michelangelo’s ceiling, I was able to wallow in my disbelief. I read in my guidebook that Michelangelo was miserable while painting his masterpiece. His back and neck ached. Paint fell constantly into his hair and eyes. He couldn’t wait to be finished, he told friends. If even Michelangelo didn’t like his work, I thought, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
May 23, 2016
“On my last day I sauntered up the Champs-Élysées, tracing the liberators’ path, thinking all the while of Patton. Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”
May 23, 2016
“I tried to visit Dachau, but when I asked for directions people looked away, professing not to know. I went to Berlin and presented myself at Checkpoint Charlie. Flat-faced Russian guards in heavy topcoats examined my passport, patted me down, asked what business I had in communist East Berlin. “None,” I said. I was terrified that they’d somehow find out I’d attended Stanford. Just before I arrived two Stanford students had tried to smuggle a teenager out in a Volkswagen. They were still in prison.”
May 23, 2016
“But the guards waved me through. I walked a little ways and stopped at the corner of Marx-Engels-Platz. I looked around, all directions. Nothing. No trees, no stores, no life. I thought of all the poverty I’d seen in every corner of Asia. This was a different kind of poverty, more willful, somehow, more preventable. I saw three children playing in the street. I walked over, took their picture. Two boys and a girl, eight years old. The girl—red wool hat, pink coat—smiled directly at me. Will I ever forget her? Or her shoes? They were made of cardboard.”
May 29, 2016
“When President Kennedy was killed that November I asked for the day off. I wanted to sit in front of the TV with the rest of the nation and mourn. My boss, however, shook his head. Work first, mourn second. Consider the lilies of the field . . . they neither toil nor spin.”
May 29, 2016
“he said, “how long do you think you’re going to keep jackassing around with these shoes?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, Dad.”
May 29, 2016
“So I shouldn’t have been too surprised by my mother’s next move when my father accused me of jackassing around. Casually she opened her purse and took out seven dollars. “I’d like to purchase one pair of Limber Ups, please,” she said, loud enough for him to hear”
May 29, 2016
“Was it my mother’s way of digging at my father? A show of loyalty to her only son? An affirmation of her love of track? I don’t know. But no matter. It never failed to move me, the sight of her standing at the stove or the ”
May 29, 2016
“kitchen sink, cooking dinner or washing dishes in a pair of Japanese running shoes, size 6.”
May 29, 2016
“But these, he said, were merely his daytime drudgeries. On weekends he was following his heart, selling shoes. “No!” I said. “Adidas,” he said. “Screw Adidas,” I said, “you should work for me, help me sell these new Japanese running shoes.”
May 29, 2016
“I thought back on my running career at Oregon. I’d competed with, and against, men far better, faster, more physically gifted. Many were future Olympians. And yet I’d trained myself to forget this unhappy fact. 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 it’s 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 . . .”
May 29, 2016
“There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought. Signs along the upward path, written in many languages, said there would be nine stations before the summit, each offering food and a place to rest. Within two hours, however, I’d passed Station 3 several times. Did the Japanese count differently? Alarmed, I wondered if thirteen western states might actually mean three?”
May 29, 2016
“As we neared the summit, the path grew narrow. I mentioned that it reminded me of a trail I’d hiked in the Himalayas. Sarah and the boyfriend stared. Himalayas? Now she was really impressed. And he was really put out. As the summit came slowly into view, the climb became tricky, treacherous. She seized my hand. “The Japanese have a saying,” her boyfriend shouted over his shoulder, to us, to everyone. “A wise man climbs Fuji once. A fool climbs it twice.”
May 29, 2016
“
So in the late summer of 1965 I wrote and accepted Johnson’s offer to become the first full-time employee of Blue Ribbon. We negotiated his salary via the mail. He’d been making $460 a month as a social worker, but he said he could live on $400. I agreed. Reluctantly. It seemed exorbitant, but Johnson was so scattered, so flighty, and Blue Ribbon was so tenuous—one way or another I figured it was temporary.
As ever, the accountant in me saw the risk, the entrepreneur saw the possibility. So I split the difference and kept moving forward.”
May 29, 2016
“A one hundred percent increase in sales is troubling?” I asked.
“Your rate of growth is too fast for your equity,” he said.
“How can such a small company grow too fast? If a small company grows fast, it builds up its equity.”
“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.”
“You might as well tell a runner in a race that he’s running too fast.”
“Apples and oranges.”
Your head is full of apples and oranges, I wanted to say.”
May 29, 2016
“What sweet satisfaction it would have been to tell Wallace where he could shove his equity, then storm out and take my business elsewhere. But in 1965 there was no elsewhere. First National Bank was the only game in town and Wallace knew it. Oregon was smaller back then, and it had just two banks, First National and U.S. Bank. The latter had already turned me down. If I got thrown out of the former, I’d be done. (Today you can live in one state and bank in another, no problem, but banking regulations were much tighter in those days.”
May 29, 2016
“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 octopus’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.”
May 29, 2016
“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 bullets, and I tended to agree.”
May 30, 2016
“It occurred to me also that I had high value for Kitami. I wasn’t a big client, but I wasn’t small, either. Location is everything. I was selling shoes in America, a market vital to the future of Onitsuka. Maybe, just maybe, Kitami didn’t want to lose me just yet. Maybe he wanted to hold on to me until they’d transitioned to the Marlboro Man. I was an asset, I was a credit, for the moment, which meant I might be holding better cards than I thought.”
May 31, 2016
“When I wasn’t at Price Waterhouse, making the rent, I’d be at Blue Ribbon, and vice versa. I could shower at the gym.
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.”
May 31, 2016
“I asked if she was seeing anyone. She confessed that she was. But the boy—well, she said, he was just a boy. All the boys she dated, she said, were just that—boys. They talked about sports and cars. (I was smart enough not to confess that I loved both.) “But you,” she said, “you’ve seen the world. And now you’re putting everything on the line to create this company . . .”
May 31, 2016
“But I never once felt nervous, never asked myself with that typical male remorse, Oh, God, what have I done? The months of dating and getting to know Penny had been the happiest of my life, and now I would have the chance to perpetuate that happiness. That’s how I saw it. Basic as Accounting 101. Assets equal liabilities plus equity.”
June 1, 2016
“Toward the end of the picnic I sat on the sand and looked out across the Pacific Ocean. I was living two separate lives, both wonderful, both merging. Back home I was part of a team, me and Woodell and Johnson—and now Penny. 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.”
June 1, 2016
“In the 1960s bicycles were exorbitantly expensive in Japan.
Kitami now joined us. I noticed that Fujimoto got up right away and walked off.
I mentioned to Kitami that Fujimoto had learned his English from GIs, and Kitami said with pride that he’d learned his English all by himself, from a record. I congratulated him, and said I hoped one day to be as fluent in Japanese as he was in English. Then I mentioned that I was getting married soon. I told him a bit about Penny, and he congratulated me and wished me luck. “When is wedding?” he asked. “September,” I said. “Ah,” he said, “I will be in America one month after, when Mr. Onitsuka and I attend Olympics in Mexico City. We might visit Los Angeles.”
He invited me to fly down, have dinner with them. I said I’d be delighted.
The next day I returned to the United States, and one of the first things I did after landing was put fifty dollars in an envelope and airmail it to Fujimoto. On the card I wrote: “For a new bicycle, my friend.”
June 1, 2016
“Weeks later an envelope arrived from Fujimoto. My fifty dollars, folded inside a note explaining that he’d asked his superiors if he ”
June 1, 2016
“could keep the money, and they’d said no.
There was a PS: “If you send my house, I can keep.”
So I did.
And thus another life-altering partnership was born.”
June 1, 2016
“n the Wall Street Journal, touting Blue Ribbon as one of the dynamic young companies among its clients. The ad featured a photo of Bowerman and me . . . staring at a shoe. Not as if we were shoe innovators; more as if we’d never seen a shoe before. We looked like morons. It was embarrassing.
In some of our ads the model was none other than Johnson. See Johnson rocking a blue tracksuit. See Johnson waving a javelin. When it came 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.”
June 16, 2016
“I was starting to have the same inklings. I’d gotten a sense from Kitami’s last few wires and letters that he might not be the man he’d seemed, and that he wasn’t the fan of Blue Ribbon he’d appeared to be when I was last in Japan. I had a bad feeling in my bones. Maybe he was getting ready to jack up our prices. I mentioned this to Bowerman, and told him I was taking measures to protect us. Before hanging up I boasted that, though I didn’t have enough cash or cachet to pay athletes, I did have enough to buy someone at Onitsuka. I had a man on the inside, I said, a man acting as my eyes and ears and keeping tabs on Kitam”
June 16, 2016
“n Japan you couldn’t predict what either your competition or your partner might do. I’d given up trying. Instead, I wrote, “I’ve taken what I think is a big step to keep us informed. I’ve hired a spy. He works full-time in the Onitsuka Export Department. Without going into a lengthy discussion of why I will just tell you that I feel he is trustworthy.”
June 16, 2016
“This spy may seem somewhat unethical to you, but the spy system is ingrained and completely accepted in Japanese business circles. They actually have schools for industrial spies, much as we have schools for typists and stenographers.”
I can’t imagine what made me use the word “spy” so wantonly, so boldly, other than the fact that James Bond was all the rage just then. Nor can I understand why, when I was revealing so much, I didn’t reveal the spy’s name. It was Fujimoto, whose bicycle I’d replaced.
I think I must have known, on some level, that the 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.”
June 4, 2016
“I got into the habit every night of phoning my father from my recliner. He’d always be in his recliner, too, and together, recliner to recliner, we’d hash out the latest threat confronting Blue Ribbon. He no longer saw my business as a waste of my time, apparently. Though he didn’t say so explicitly, he did seem to find the problems I faced “interesting,” and “challenging,” which amounted to the same thing.”
June 4, 2016
“IN THE SPRING of 1969 Penny began to complain of feeling poorly in the mornings. Food didn’t sit well. By midday she was often a little wobbly around the office. She went to the doctor—the same doctor who’d delivered her—and discovered she was pregnant.
We were both overjoyed. But we also faced a whole new learning curve.
Our cozy apartment was now completely inappropriate. We’d have to buy a house, of course. But could we afford a house? I’d just started to pay myself a salary. And in which part of town should we buy? Where were the best schools? And how was I supposed to research real estate prices and schools, plus all the other things that go into buying a house, while running a start-up company? Was it even feasible to run a start-up company while starting a family? Should I go back to accounting, or teaching, or something more stable?
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.”
June 4, 2016
“WOODELL AND I eventually found a promising office, in Tigard, south of downtown Portland. It wasn’t a whole office building—we couldn’t afford that—but a corner of one floor. The rest was occupied by the Horace Mann Insurance Company. Inviting, almost plush, it was a dramatic step up, and yet I hesitated. There had been a curious logic in our being next door to a honky-tonk. But an insurance company? With carpeted halls and water coolers and men in tailored suits? The atmosphere was so button-down, so corporate. Our surroundings, I felt, had much to do with our spirit, and our spirit was a big part of our success, and I worried how our spirit might change if we were suddenly sharing space with a bunch of Organization Men and automatons.”
June 8, 2016
“Waiting for Kitami to return, I had the strangest thought. I recalled all the times I’d volunteered with the Boy Scouts, all the times I’d sat on Eagle Scout review boards, handing out merit badges for honor and integrity. Two or three weekends a year I’d question pink-cheeked boys about their probity, their honesty, and now I was stealing documents from another man’s briefcase? I was headed down a dark path. No telling where it might lead. Wherever, there was no getting around one immediate consequence of my actions. I’d have to recuse myself from the next review board.”
June 8, 2016
“Back when the Bowermans attended the 1964 Olympics in Japan, Mrs. Bowerman had fallen in love with nashi pears, which are like small green apples, only sweeter. They don’t grow in the United States, so she smuggled a few seeds home in her purse and planted them in her garden. Every few years, she told Kitami, when the nashis bloomed, they refreshed her love of all things Japanese. He seemed quite beguiled by this story. “Och!” Bowerman said, exasperated. “Japples!”
June 12, 2016
“He sang it louder. O sole mio, sta nfronte a te! O sole, o sole mio, sta nfronte a te!
A Japanese businessman, strumming a Western guitar, singing an Italian ballad, in the voice of an Irish tenor. It was surreal, then a few miles past surreal, and it didn’t stop. I’d never known there were so many verses to “O Sole Mio.”
June 12, 2016
“I pondered. I still held out some hope that Onitsuka would come to its senses. And I worried about a paragraph in our written agreement that forbade me from importing other brands of track-and-field shoes. “Maybe down the road,” I said.
Sumeragi nodded. All in good time.”
June 12, 2016
“Six months previously I would never have done this. Things were different now. Onitsuka had already broken the spirit of our deal, and my spirit, so I pulled the cap off my pen and signed the contract. I signed the heck out of that Canada contract. Then I went out for Mexican food.”
June 12, 2016
“THE DAY OF decision arrived. Canada had already started producing the shoes, and samples were ready to go in Japan, but before anything could be shipped, we needed to choose a name. Also, we had magazine ads slated to run, to coincide with the shipments, and we needed to tell the graphic artists what name to put in the ads. Finally, we needed to file paperwork with the U.S. Patent Office.
Woodell wheeled into my office. “Time’s up,” he said.
I rubbed my eyes. “I know.”
“What’s it going to be?”
“I don’t know.”
My head was splitting. By now the names had all run together into one mind-melting glob. Falconbengaldimensionsix.
“There is . . . one more suggestion,” Woodell said.”
June 12, 2016
“From who?”
“Johnson phoned first thing this morning,” he said. “Apparently a new name came to him in a dream last night.”
I rolled my eyes. “A dream?”
“He’s serious,” Woodell said.
“He’s always serious.”
“He says he sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night and saw the name before him,” Woodell said.
“What is it?” I asked, bracing myself.
“Nike.”
“Huh?”
“Nike.”
“Spell it.”
“N-I-K-E,” Woodell said.
I wrote it on a yellow legal pad.
The Greek goddess of victory. The Acropolis. The Parthenon. The Temple. I thought back. Briefly. Fleetingly.”
June 12, 2016
“A lot of things were rolling around in my head, consciously, unconsciously. First, Johnson had pointed out that seemingly all iconic brands—Clorox, Kleenex, Xerox—have short names. Two syllables or less. And they always have a strong sound in the name, a letter like “K” or “X,” that sticks in the mind. That all made sense. And that all described Nike.”
June 16, 2016
“Which brought me back to the idea of a public offering. I didn’t think I could withstand the disappointment of a second failed offering, so I plotted with Hayes to ensure that this one would work. We decided that the first offering hadn’t been aggressive enough. We hadn’t sold ourselves. This time we hired a hard-driving salesman.
Also, this time we decided not to sell stocks, but convertible debentures.
If business truly is war without bullets, then debentures are war bonds. The public loans you money, and in exchange you give them quasi-stock in your . . . cause. The stock is quasi because debenture holders are strongly encouraged, and incentivized, to hold their shares for five years. After that, they can convert the shares to common stock or get their money back with interest.”
June 16, 2016
“Nissho said they could help. They were only too happy to help. They were beefing up their commodities department, so Sumeragi had a wealth of information about factories around the world. He’d also recently hired a consultant, a bona fide shoe wizard, who’d been a disciple of Jonas Senter.
I’d never heard of Senter, but Sumeragi assured me the man was a genuine, head-to-toe shoe dog. I’d heard this phrase a few times. ”
June 16, 2016
“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. It was an all-consuming mania, a recognizable psychological disorder, to care so much about insoles and outsoles, linings and welts, rivets and vamps. But I understood. The average person takes seventy-five hundred steps a day, 274 million steps over the course of a long life, the equivalent of six times around the globe—shoe dogs, it seemed to me, simply wanted to be part of that journey. Shoes were their way of connecting with humanity. What better way of connecting, shoe dogs thought, than by refining the hinge that joins each person to the world’s surface?”
June 20, 2016
“I stammered through my presentation, but Chuck still managed to quickly get the drift. He boiled my complicated situation down to a compelling précis. “If the Japanese trading company understands the rules from the first day,” he said, “they will be the best partners you’ll ever have.”
Reassured, emboldened, I went back to Sumeragi and told him the rules. “No equity in my company. Ever.”
June 20, 2016
“Walking through those museum rooms . . . I couldn’t take it all in. I couldn’t process it. Mannequins dressed in singed clothes. Clumps of scorched, irradiated—jewelry? Cookware? I couldn’t tell. Photos that took me to a place far beyond emotion. I stood in horror before a child’s liquefied tricycle. I stood, open-mouthed, before the blackened skeleton of a building, where people had loved and worked and laughed, until. I tried to feel and hear the moment of impact.
I felt sick at heart as I turned a corner and came upon a scorched shoe, under glass, the footprint of its owner still visible.”
June 20, 2016
“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.”
June 20, 2016
“At last the only thing to do was think up names for the different models. I was panicked. I’d done such a poor job thinking up a name for my new brand—
Dimension Six? Everyone at Blue Ribbon still mocked me. I’d only gone with Nike because I was out of time, and because I’d trusted Johnson’s savant-like nature. Now I was on my own, in an empty office building in downtown Tokyo. I’d have to trust myself.
I held up the tennis shoe. I decided to call it . . . the Wimbledon.”
June 20, 2016
“Mr. Onitsuka even offered a car and driver to take Penny and me around and show us Kobe. I accepted. Then Kitami invited us to dinner that night. Again I reluctantly said yes.
Fujimoto came along, which added an extra layer of complexity. I looked around the table and thought: my bride, my enemy, my spy. ”
June 20, 2016
“At sunrise I heard Fujimoto get up, cough, and stretch. He went to the bathroom, ran the water, brushed his teeth. Then he put on his clothes from the night before and slipped out. I fell back asleep but a short while later Penny went to the bathroom and when she came back to bed she was—laughing? I rolled over. Nope, she was crying. She looked as if she was on the verge of another panic attack. “He used . . . ,” she rasped. “What?” I said. She buried her head in the pillows. “He used . . . my toothbrush.”
June 20, 2016
“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”
July 2, 2016
“I felt like a married man caught in a tawdry love triangle. I was assuring my lover, Nissho, that it was only a matter of time before I divorced my spouse, Onitsuka. Meanwhile, I was encouraging Onitsuka to think of me as a loving and devoted husband. “I do not like this way of doing business,” I wrote Sumeragi, “but I feel it was thrust upon us by a company with the worst possible intentions.” We’ll be together soon, darling. Just have patience.”
July 2, 2016
“Johnson, as usual, wasn’t happy. Ever the perfectionist. “The irregularities of this whole situation,” he said, left him dumbfounded. That was his phrase, the irregularities of this whole situation. I begged him to take his dumbfoundedness and irregularity elsewhere, leave well enough alone. But he just couldn’t. He walked over and button-holed one of his biggest accounts and demanded to know what was going on. “Whaddya mean?” the man said. “I mean,” Johnson said, “we show up with this new Nike, and it’s totally untested, and frankly it’s not even all that good—and you guys are buying it. What gives?”
The man laughed. “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.”
Johnson came back to the booth, scratching his head. “Telling the truth,” he said. “Who knew?”
July 2, 2016
“Kitami asked to use the bathroom. A ploy, of course. He knew the bathroom was somewhere in the back, and he needed an excuse to snoop back there. Bork didn’t see the ploy, or didn’t care to. Moments later Kitami was standing in the stockroom, under a bare lightbulb, glowering at hundreds of orange shoe boxes. Nike, Nike, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.”
July 2, 2016
“ He was about to say something conciliatory. He was preparing to offer an olive branch. I felt myself softening toward him. “Onitsuka,” he said, “like to continue use Mr. Bowerman . . . as consultant.”
I pulled on my ear. Surely I hadn’t heard him correctly. Bowerman shook his head and turned to Jaqua, who said that Bowerman would henceforth consider Kitami a competitor, aka a sworn enemy, and would help him in no way whatsoever.”
July 2, 2016
“No more working for someone else. Onitsuka has been holding us down for years. Their late deliveries, their mixed-up orders, their refusal to hear and implement our design ideas—who among us isn’t sick of dealing with all that? 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.”
Notes From: Phil Knight. “Shoe Dog.” iBooks.
