Shoe Dog (21 page)

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

E
verything depended on Chicago. Our every thought, our every conversation at the start of 1972, began and ended with Chicago, because Chicago was the site of the National Sporting Goods Association Show.

Chicago was important every year. The sporting goods show was where sales reps from across the nation got their first look at all the new athletic products, from all the different companies, and voted up or down, via the sizes of their orders. But this 1972 show was going to be more than important. It was going to be our Super Bowl and our Olympics and our Bar Mitzvah, because it was where we'd decided to introduce the world to Nike. If sales reps liked our new shoe, we'd live to see another year. If not, we wouldn't be back for the 1973 show.

Onitsuka, meanwhile, was eyeing Chicago, too. Days before the start of the show, without a word to me, Onitsuka gave the Japanese press an announcement trumpeting their “acquisition” of Blue Ribbon. The announcement set off shock waves everywhere, but especially at Nissho. Sumeragi wrote me, asking, in essence, “What the—?”

In my impassioned two-page reply I told him that I had nothing to do with Onitsuka's announcement. I assured him that Onitsuka was trying to bully us into selling, but they were our past, and Nissho, like Nike, was our future. In closing I confessed to Sumeragi that I
hadn't yet mentioned any of this to Onitsuka, so mum's the word. “I ask that you keep the above information in strict confidence for obvious reasons. In order to maintain our present distribution system for future Nike sales, it's important that we have about one or two more months of shipments from Onitsuka, and if these shipments were cut off it would be very harmful.”

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.

Right before we all left for Chicago, a wire came from Kitami. He'd thought up a name for “our” new company. The Tiger Shoe Company. He wanted me to unveil it in Chicago. I wired back that the name was beautiful, lyrical, sheer poetry—but alas it was too late to unveil anything at the show. All the signs and promotional literature had been printed already.

ON DAY ONE
of the show I walked into the convention center and found Johnson and Woodell already busy arranging our booth. They'd stacked the new Tigers in neat rows, and now they were stacking the new Nikes in pyramids of orange shoe boxes. In those days shoe boxes were either white or blue, period, but I'd wanted something that would stand out, that would pop on the shelves of sporting goods stores. So I'd asked Nippon Rubber for boxes of bright neon orange, figuring it was the boldest color in the rainbow. Johnson and Woodell loved the orange, and loved the lowercase “nike,” lettered in white on the side of the box. But as they opened the boxes and examined the shoes themselves, both men were shaken up.

These shoes, the first wave produced by Nippon Rubber, didn't
have the quality of Tigers, nor of the samples we'd seen earlier. The leather was shiny, and not in a good way. The Wet-Flyte looked literally wet, as if covered with cheap paint or lacquer that hadn't dried. The upper was coated with polyurethane, but apparently Nippon was no more proficient than Bowerman at working with that tricky, mercurial substance. The logo on the side, Carolyn's wing-whoosh thingamajig, which we'd taken to calling a swoosh, was crooked.

I sat down and put my head in my hands. I looked at our orange pyramids. My mind went to the pyramids of Giza. Only ten years before I'd been there, riding a camel like Lawrence of Arabia across the sands, free as a man could be. Now I was in Chicago, saddled with debt, head of a teetering shoe company, rolling out a new brand with shoddy workmanship and crooked swooshes. All is vanity.

I gazed around the convention center, at the thousands of sales reps swarming the booths, the
other
booths. I heard them oohing and aahing at all the other shoes being introduced for the first time. I was that boy at the science fair who didn't work hard enough on his project, who didn't start until the night before. The other kids had built erupting volcanoes, and lightning machines, and all I had was a mobile of the solar system made with mothballs stuck to my mother's coat hangers.

Darn it, this was no time to be introducing flawed shoes. Worse, we had to push these flawed shoes on people who weren't our kind of people. They were
salesmen
. They talked like salesmen, walked like salesmen, and they dressed like salesmen—tight polyester shirts, Sansabelt slacks. They were extroverts, we were introverts. They didn't get us, we didn't get them, and yet our future depended on them. And now we'd have to persuade them somehow that this Nike thing was worth their time and trust—and money.

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.”

Each gave a resigned shake of the head.
What choice do we have?

We looked out, and here they came, a mob of salesmen, walking like zombies toward our booth. They picked up the Nikes, held them to the light. They touched the swoosh. One said to another, “The hell is this?” “Hell if I know,” said the other.

They started to barrage us with questions.
Hey—what IS this?

That's a Nike.

The hell's a Nike?

It's the Greek goddess of victory.

Greek what now?

Goddess of vic—

And what's THIS?

That's a swoosh.

The hell's a swoosh?

The answer flew out of me: It's the sound of someone going past you.

They liked that. Oh, they liked it a whole lot.

They gave us business. They actually
placed orders
with us. By the end of the day we'd exceeded our grandest expectations. We were one of the smash hits of the show. At least, that's how I saw it.

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?”

Woodell laughed. Johnson laughed. I laughed and tried not to think about my many half truths and untruths with Onitsuka.

GOOD NEWS TRAVELS
fast. Bad news travels faster than Grelle and Prefontaine. On a rocket. Two weeks after Chicago, Kitami walked into my office. No advance notice. No heads-up. And he cut right to the car chase. “What is this, this . . . thing,” he demanded, “this . . . NEE-kay?”

I made my face blank. “Nike? Oh. It's nothing. It's a sideline we've developed, to hedge our bets, in case Onitsuka does as threatened and yanks the rug out from under us.”

The answer disarmed him. As it should have. I'd rehearsed it for weeks. It was so reasonable and logical that Kitami didn't know how to respond. He'd come spoiling for a fight, and I'd countered his bull rush with a rope-a-dope.

He demanded to know who made the new shoes. I told him they were made by different factories in Japan. He demanded to know how many Nikes we'd ordered. A few thousand, I said.

He gave an “Ooh.” I wasn't sure what that meant.

I didn't mention that two members of my scrappy hometown Portland Trail Blazers had just worn Nikes during a rout of the New York Knicks, 133–86. The
Oregonian
had recently run a photo of Geoff Petrie driving past a Knick (Phil Jackson, by name), and visible on Petrie's shoes was a swoosh. (We'd just made a deal with a couple of other Blazers to supply them with
shoes, too.) Good thing the
Oregonian
didn't have a wide circulation in Kobe.

Kitami asked if the new Nike was in stores. Of course not, I lied. Or fibbed. He asked when I was going to sign his papers and sell him my company. I told him my partner still hadn't decided.

End of meeting. He buttoned and unbuttoned the coat of his suit and said he had other business in California. But he'd be back. He marched out of my office and I immediately reached for the phone. I dialed our retail store in Los Angeles. Bork answered. “John, our old friend Kitami is coming to town! I'm sure he'll come by your store! Hide the Nikes!”

“Huh?”

“He knows about Nike, but I told him it isn't in stores!”

“What you're asking of me,” Bork said, “I don't know.”

He sounded frightened. And irritated. He didn't want to do anything dishonest, he said. “I'm asking you to stash a few pairs of shoes,” I cried, then slammed down the phone.

Sure enough, Kitami showed up that afternoon. He confronted Bork, badgered him with questions, shook him down like a cop with a shaky witness. Bork played dumb—or so he told me later.

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.

Bork phoned me after Kitami left. “Jig's up,” he said. “What happened?” I asked. “Kitami forced his way into the stockroom—it's over, Phil.”

I hung up, slumped in my chair. “Well,” I said, out loud, to no one, “I guess we're going to find out if we can exist without Tiger.”

We found out something else, too.

Soon after that day, Bork quit. Actually, I don't remember if he
quit or Woodell fired him. Either way, not long after
that
, we heard Bork had a new job.

Working for Kitami.

I SPENT DAYS
and days staring into space, gazing out windows, waiting for Kitami to play his next card. I also watched a lot of
TV
. The nation, the world, was agog at the sudden opening of relations between the United States and China. President Nixon was in Beijing, shaking hands with Mao Zedong, an event nearly on a par with the moon landing. I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime, a U.S. president in the Forbidden City, touching the Great Wall. I thought of my time in Hong Kong. I'd been so close to China, and yet so far. I thought I'd never have another chance. But now I thought, One day? Maybe?

Maybe.

At last Kitami made his move. He returned to Oregon and asked for a meeting, at which he requested that Bowerman be present. To make that easier for Bowerman, I suggested Jaqua's office down in Eugene as the site.

When the day came, as we were all filing into the conference room, Jaqua grabbed my arm and whispered, “Whatever he says, you say nothing.” I nodded.

On one side of the conference table were Jaqua, Bowerman, and I. On the other side were Kitami and his lawyer, a local guy, who didn't look like he wanted to be there. Plus, Iwano was back. I thought he might have half-smiled at me, before remembering that this wasn't a social call.

Jaqua's conference room was bigger than ours in Tigard, but that day it felt like a dollhouse. Kitami had asked for the meeting, so he kicked it off. And he didn't beat around the bonsai tree. He handed Jaqua a letter. Effective immediately, our contract with Onitsuka was null and void. He looked at me, then back to Jaqua. “Very very regret,” he said.

Furthermore, insult to injury, he was billing us $17,000, which he claimed we owed for shoes delivered. To be exact, he demanded $16,637.13.

Jaqua pushed the letter aside and said that if Kitami dared to pursue this reckless course, if he insisted on cutting us off, we'd sue.

“You cause this,” Kitami said. Blue Ribbon had breached its contract with Onitsuka by making Nike shoes, he said, and he was at a loss to understand why we'd ruined such a profitable relationship, why we'd launched this, this, this—
Nike
. That was more than I could bear. “I'll tell you why—” I blurted. Jaqua turned on me and shouted: “Shut up, Buck!”

Jaqua then told Kitami that he hoped something could still be worked out. A lawsuit would be highly damaging to both companies. Peace was prosperity. But Kitami was in no mood for peace. He stood, motioned to his lawyer and Iwano to follow. When he got to the door, he stopped. His face changed. 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.