Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  As the mounting questions began to swamp Bill’s secretarial support, he and Harris in 1966 knocked out an eighteen-page pamphlet. Its main points echoed various letters Bowerman had written: Don’t compete, build up slowly, keep it fun, and be good to your feet and joints. Demand for the pamphlet was so great that the following year Bill got jogger pal and Oregon vice president Jim Shea to help expand on it. The farsighted Barbara Bowerman insisted that the book be inclusive of women.

  Still quite thin at 127 pages, including the story of the New Zealand trip, the book was called Jogging. It had a bright red cover. It would sell a million copies. “The book,” Shea would say, “I regard as Bill and Barbara’s gift to Everyman. They really did help start it all.”

  After jogging caught on and millions took it up, after Dr. Ken Cooper’s book Aerobics confirmed and quantified the need for exercise, the old animosities toward it began to ebb. Society inched toward a tipping point where the old constraints on eccentric behavior—or at least this eccentric behavior—fell away. As Dr. Duncan MacDonald, who would break Steve Prefontaine’s American record in the 5000 meters, once put it, “The exact moment came when the drivers who wanted to run us off the road now had aunties or nieces who ran, and that fuzzed up the question of who was the enemy.”

  A great movement had been pent up. Exercise had been calling to us from our genes, from our childhoods, but not from our culture. Now it could. Frank Shorter would help, winning the Olympic marathon in 1972 and showing that Americans could master real distance the same as anyone else. That would begin not a jogging but a running boom and the phenomenon of mass marathons, such as those in New York and Boston, whose starting fields today number in the tens of thousands.

  But none of that could have come about without Bowerman’s bringing the flame back from New Zealand. Naturally, the first person he sent a copy of his book to was Lydiard, who opened it and roared. Bowerman had inscribed it:

  “To the Best Rootin’ Team in the World”—Bill Bowerman

  CHAPTER 17

  The Birth of BRS

  AFTER TAKING HIS OREGON DEGREE IN 1959, PHIL KNIGHT SPENT A YEAR ON active duty in the Army Reserves and then returned to Eugene for a time before heading to graduate school. The military’s kiss-ass/kick-ass command style left him with fresh appreciation for how his track coach exercised authority.

  “I worked up a little speech about what Bill meant to me,” Knight would say, “but when I went in to give it, I kind of choked getting it started. Somehow he grasped my intent and made it to me instead, a speech about what I had meant to the team and the University.”

  Then Bowerman delivered the final line: “Never underestimate yourself.” Knight would deem that moment “my true commencement ceremony.”

  He arrived at the Stanford Graduate School of Business not at all clear about what aspect of commerce might stir his competitive heart. His Oregon major had actually been journalism, a choice not unrelated to his father’s being publisher of the Oregon Journal, and Knight had written sports stories for the Oregon Daily Emerald. “One editor did a column saying all these great Oregon runners would run even better if they trained in a warm climate,” Knight would recall years later. “Bill had me write a counter story.” Knight upheld Bowerman’s view that the Oregon winter is just cold and wet enough to make a man out of you, but not so frigid that your lungs freeze and you can’t train. “I concluded,” Knight would say, “that all a bliss state like California does is spoil you.”

  Stanford, in the form of a small business class taught by Frank Shallenberger, would change his life. “Shallenberger started by defining the type of person who was an entrepreneur,” Knight would remember, “and I realized he was talking to me.” Shallenberger assigned the class to imagine a brand new business, describe its purpose, and create a marketing plan to make it competitive. Knight’s business-major classmates each had ten ideas before they were out the door; his own head remained vacant. Then, pondering in his room, he looked at a new box of Adidas, resented again how much they cost, and it hit him.

  “Being Bowerman’s guinea pig,” Knight would say, “I had naturally absorbed why Bill had to make our shoes. American running shoes were still made by offshoots of the tire companies, cheap and terrible. They cost five bucks and gave you blood blisters after five miles. Adidas was taking advantage. And at $30 a pair, Adidas was making a killing.”

  Knight proposed a new company that would import first-rate athletic shoes not from Germany but from Japan, where his research had shown skilled labor was far cheaper. The paper—“Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Have Done to German Cameras?”—sketched out a track-shoe distributorship in the Western states and projected sales to high school and college teams of up to 20,000 pairs a year.

  Shallenberger’s class was Knight’s “aha!” moment. He received his MBA in 1962, knowing both his nature and his direction. He promised his father, Bill, that he’d take a job with a Portland accounting firm, but first he sold his car, got a loan from that same father, and took a tour of the Far East.

  He went to Japan in the fall of 1962 and soaked in a furo (hot tub) of its thought and business practices. He visited the temples and gardens of Kyoto. “After I had been there a while,” Knight would say, “the love affair with the East began. I was quite taken with Japanese culture and its people.” He didn’t formally study Zen Buddhism, but found his developing aesthetic stirred by the spare simplicity of Japanese design.

  And on the Tokyo University track near the site where the 1964 Olympic stadium was rising, Knight contemplated the shoes on the fastest feet. They weren’t Adidas, but some looked pretty good. He canvassed the sporting goods stores of Tokyo and concluded, as he would put it, “that the best hope for US exports lay with Onitsuka Company.” Onitsuka made a brand called Tiger. Knight discovered their factory was in Kobe, a seaport near Osaka. “So I made a cold call on them.”

  This was in early 1963. On the train down, in the bar car, watching jovial men exchanging business cards, he realized with a jolt that if he wanted his overture to be taken seriously in this culture, he had to be seen not as a lone eagle but as part of a respected company. His eye traveled out the train window, across incomprehensible Japanese billboards, came back in and rested on the bottles of the different brands of beer that were arrayed above the bar. One was Suntory Blue Ribbon. He had another little “aha” moment.

  In Kobe, he found Onitsuka’s wooden factory buildings, asked to speak with someone in the export department, and was ushered into a conference room. After a short wait, a six-man team of Onitsuka executives crowded in. All bowed and shook hands. Knight said he’d been on the Oregon track team with Bill Dellinger and Dyrol Burleson, who were going to be winning medals in Tokyo in two years. Not only that, his Oregon coach, Bill Bowerman, had taught him track-shoe design. He proved his expertise by complimenting the quality of the Tiger models he’d seen in Tokyo.

  After he sensed the Onitsuka men had assessed him, with nods and glances, as a rather knowing gaijin, or foreigner, Knight blurted, “Why don’t I distribute Tiger shoes in the United States?” Silence and searching looks. The senior executive politely explained that their practice was to deal company to company; what might be the name of Knight’s firm? Knight hesitated not at all. “Why, Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland, Oregon,” he said. “Sorry I’m all out of cards. Boy, does your country ever eat up business cards.”

  “Ah so,” said the Onitsuka people and proceeded to show Knight their line.

  Onitsuka’s sales were almost all in Japan; in the United States they were selling only wrestling shoes at the time. The staff brought out pictures of new spikes and flats they hoped would fly in the American market. Knight said they looked great (one leather flat actually did) but he couldn’t place an order until he’d seen the actual shoes. The execs said they wouldn’t have them for weeks. Knight said he’d order samples then, made his exit, and continued his Asian tour. From Hong Kong, he w
rote his father and asked to borrow $37 for the samples.

  Later that year, Dick Miller, Knight’s best friend from the Oregon team, was living in Seattle and working for General Electric. “After he got back from Japan,” Miller would remember, “he was all excited. He said, ‘Hey, I’m in the shoe business. Look at these things. They’re called Tigers. I faked out the company. I’m the US distributor. Come in with me.’” Miller saw that despite Knight’s flippant language, he was serious about this venture. “‘How much will it take?’

  “‘Six hundred dollars each. Twelve hundred dollars total investment.’

  “I begged off,” Miller would say much, much later, his tone manfully, even gaily resistant to what might have been. “I’d just gotten married. I had to think for two.”

  In December 1963, Knight was living in Portland and making $500 a month working for the accounting firm that would become Coopers and Lybrand. At last, a box of Tiger shoe samples cleared customs. “Twelve pairs for fifty dollars,” Knight would recall. On January 20, 1964, Knight sent Bowerman two pairs of, as he wrote, “the hot new shoes coming out of Japan. The spike [shoe] weighs just under six ounces, which compares favorably with Adidas. If you feel the shoes are of reasonable quality, you could probably save a little money since I wouldn’t make a profit on shoes I sold to you. Costs I think $4.50 on the flat and $7 on the spike.”

  Bowerman ran his fingers in and out of the shoes and was struck by their width. “The Japanese made them as fat as banjos,” he said later, “but the leather was good, the construction was good. The potential was there, if they could use an American last.” (As Knight would remember it, Onitsuka had made the samples on a version of an American last. “It was much narrower than their shoes for the Japanese market. But they were still a bit wide.”)

  On January 22, Bill wrote back: “I like the looks of your Tiger shoe. I’ve heard of these, but have never been able to get hold of a pair. If you can set up some kind of contractual agreement with these people, for goodness sakes, do it.” Bill was already tinkering in his mind. “I have some ideas on a flat,” he added. “I’ll pass on some of my ideas to you, but, of course, I’ll expect you to make some kind of an arrangement with cutting your old coach in, too.”

  Knight cut him in that very week, when Bowerman brought the Oregon team up to the Portland Indoor meet. Buck shared our soup, toast, and tea and honey prerace meal at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. When San Romani groused for the tenth time about the meagerness of our spread, Bowerman said, for the hundredth time, “A hungry tiger hunts best.” Then he and Knight went up to his room to talk Tiger business.

  An hour later they shook hands on a partnership. Bill would test and design the shoes and, if they deserved it, pitch them to other coaches. Buck, by virtue of a fifty-one to forty-nine percent division of voting control, would run the company. A few days later, with Barbara Bowerman and Robin and John Jaqua as witnesses (and with the Jaqua mantel steadying the papers), they signed their first written agreement, becoming jointly and severally responsible for a new entity, Blue Ribbon Sports. Their original investment was a little less than Knight had offered Miller, $500 each.

  “I always felt a very personal connection to the birth of Nike,” Barbara Bowerman would say, “because our original five hundred dollars came from a small savings account I had accumulated.” The existence of this account she had hidden from Bill until then, she would say, because “I was well aware that he believed, ‘If you have money, spend it; if you don’t, do without.’”

  Bowerman’s hopes for the venture were high, as John Jaqua would attest. Over the years, Bill had approached shoemakers Spaulding and Rawlings with offers to show them how to make a track shoe, to no avail. “He knew Buck was bright,” Jaqua would say, “and he knew if this worked out he could finally get some say in some actual shoes.”

  On January 30, Knight wrote his coach the good news: “With a hearty ichi ban Blue Ribbon Sports got off the ground on Monday with an order for 300 pairs of shoes.” He added that with import duties, the shoes would cost a total of $4.06 per pair.

  Then, with their deal barely a week old, Knight proposed to renegotiate. Under his signature he wrote in neat longhand, “P.S. I forgot to make it part of the original agreement, but I think it ought to be made explicit: There will be no pissing on partners in the shower.”

  Bowerman’s joy in confounding his athletes extended, famously, to this: A team member would be in the Mac Court showers, which had six or eight nozzles along each wall, soaping his hair, eyes shut, and feel a warmth on his leg that didn’t seem to be coming from the direction of the main stream. He’d rinse his eyes, turn, and there would be Bill’s beatific smile. Bowerman didn’t have to do this often before word got around. Athletes were wary in his presence anyway; in the shower they had to be on high alert.

  Bill’s proclivity to pee on legs was, of course, part of his ongoing character studies. Originating a new company, with the mutual trust it demands, required that he feel he’d tested Phil Knight.

  And he had. Dick Miller would recall that Bill got Knight three times: “That’s gotta be the record.” As Miller would tell the tale, Knight tried to get even. “He found this trick gun where you flex your stomach muscles and it fires a blank cartridge. I went into Bill’s office first, to distract him, but Buck was so excited he blew it up on the way in, down the hall!”

  Did the peeing guarantee an effective partnership? No, but the peeing and practical jokes were inextricable from Bowerman’s competitive ethos. He knew Knight would give the new venture the ceaselessness of a runner and the “top this” attitude of a prankster. Knight, for his part, knew he’d passed Bill’s tests. “If someone else had sent those shoes,” Knight would say, “Bill wouldn’t have said the same thing about cutting him in.”

  Despite all the high hopes, Knight didn’t quit his CPA job. He traveled to track meets and high schools in his spare time, selling Tigers out of the back of his green Plymouth Valiant. “Using a two-dollar commission, they really sold,” he would remember. “We had no capital but we grew.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Tokyo

  THE TWO BRS PARTNERS SPENT 1964 IN THEIR RESPECTIVE PURSUITS—KNIGHT promoting Tigers at track meets, Bowerman readying his tigers for the big meets that would culminate in the Tokyo Games in October. Following their spectacular 1962 season, Bowerman’s Ducks hadn’t quite lived up to Tex Maule’s prediction in Sports Illustrated that Oregon would “very likely dominate US collegiate track and field for the next decade.”

  Misfortune struck in December 1962, at the Commonwealth Games in Perth, Australia. Bowerman, who had been packing for the trip to New Zealand, got a call from the Canadian track coach about sprinter Harry Jerome: “Harry’s quadriceps in one thigh had severed the tendon that attached them to the knee bone. The muscles rolled up like a window shade into a big bulging knot at the top of his thigh.”

  Shot-putter Dave Steen, who had also made the Canadian team, went to see Jerome in the Perth hospital. “I could feel the hole in his leg. Harry was devastated,” Steen would remember. “Hands down, he was going to win that race. It was his return to international racing after pulling a hamstring in Rome.” Jerome was flown back to Canada and within thirty-six hours had undergone an operation to repair the damage. He returned to school in February, but faced a full year of rehabilitation before it would be known if he could run again.

  That year in the big meets, without Jerome, the rest of the team seemed almost to sympathetically sicken, nowhere more so than at the 1963 NCAA Championships in Albuquerque. There were no Oregon individual champions, though Steen took second in the shot to the haystack-shaped Gary Gubner of New York University with 61 feet 111⁄4 inches.

  Dave Steen eventually reached a rare understanding with Bowerman. In the fall of 1959, Steen had come to Oregon a 48-foot shot-putter. By early 1963, he had taken the school record from 52 feet to the verge of 60. “Bill was an excellent teacher of the throws, technically,” Steen would r
ecall. “I did both shot and discus, and many were the mornings when he’d change out of the suit he’d worn to teach his classes, get into old clothes, and we’d spend an hour in the old indoor field-house area, mastering one element at a time. ‘You can only think of one thing at a time,’ he’d say. I thought that just meant me, but later I found it applied to most people.”

  To augment his weight training, Steen had the habit of crouching and straining isometrically against the tops of doorways. Eventually all the steel door frames in the athletic department were bent, their plaster cracking. Athletic director Leo Harris complained to Bowerman and Bill agreed to pay for their repair out of his track budget, but on the condition that the door frames would be strong enough to withstand Steen’s isometrics.

  Harris called in the carpenters—and the welders. When the workmen were finished, Steen happened by and heard one say, “Well, that’s the last door frame Dave Steen ever bends.” Steen paid a visit later and bent three new ones. Harris came to Bill again. “I’ll fix them, I’ll fix them,” Bowerman said, “but not until Steen graduates.”

  Steen was grateful for that—and for the way Bill allowed the throwers to get attention. To preserve the infield for football, most colleges relegated the permanent concrete throwing circles to somewhere on the far side of fences—which meant nobody could see them. Bill invented the portable steel throwing circle. “On meet days,” Steen would recall, “a tractor would bring out our four-hundred-pound discus and shot circles, drop them on the Hayward Field grass before 8,000 people, and we’d be just as much a part of the show as the milers.”