Shoe Dog (11 page)

THE FIRST THING
we did was go for a long, punishing run on the beach. Then we bought a pizza and brought it back to his apartment, which was your standard Divorced Guy Pad, only more so. Tiny, dark, sparse—it reminded me of some of the no-frills hostels where I'd stayed on my trip around the world.

Of course there were a few distinctly Johnsonian touches. Like shoes everywhere. I thought my apartment was filled with shoes, but Johnson basically lived inside a running shoe. Shoved into every nook and cranny, spread across every surface, were running shoes, and more running shoes, most in some state of deconstruction.

The few nooks and crannies that didn't hold shoes were filled with books, and more books, piled on homemade bookshelves, rough planks laid on cinder blocks. And Johnson didn't read trash. His
collection was mostly thick volumes of philosophy, religion, sociology, anthropology, and the classics of Western literature. I thought I loved to read; Johnson was next level.

What struck me most was the eerie violet light that suffused the whole place. Its source was a seventy-five-gallon saltwater fish tank. After clearing a place for me on the sofa, Johnson patted the tank and explained. Most newly divorced guys like to prowl singles bars, but Johnson spent his nights prowling under the Seal Beach pier, looking for rare fish. He captured them with something called a “slurp gun,” which he waved under my nose. It looked like a prototype for the first-ever vacuum cleaner. I asked how it worked. Just stick this nozzle into shallow water, he said, and suck up the fish into a plastic tube, then into a small chamber. Then shoot it into your bucket and schlep it home.

He'd managed to accumulate a wide variety of exotic creatures—seahorses, opal-eye perch—which he showed me with pride. He pointed out the jewel of his collection, a baby octopus he'd named Stretch. “Speaking of which,” Johnson said. “Feeding time.”

He reached into a paper sack and pulled out a live crab. “Come on, Stretch,” he said, dangling the crab over the tank. The octopus didn't stir. Johnson lowered the crab, legs wriggling, onto the tank's sand-strewn floor. Still no reaction from Stretch. “He dead?” I asked. “Watch,” Johnson said.

The crab danced left and right, panicking, seeking cover. There was none, however. And Stretch knew it. After a few minutes something emerged tentatively from Stretch's undercarriage. An antenna or tentacle. It unfurled toward the crab and lightly tapped its carapace. Yoo-hoo? “Stretch just injected poison in the crab,” Johnson said, grinning like a proud dad. We watched the crab slowly stop dancing, stop moving altogether. We watched Stretch gently wrap his antenna-tentacle around the crab and drag it back to his lair, a hole he'd dug into the sand beneath a big rock.

It was a morbid puppet show, a dark kabuki play, starring a wit
less victim and a micro-kraken—was it a sign, a metaphor for our dilemma? One living thing being eaten by another? This was nature, wet in tooth and claw, and I couldn't help wondering if it was also to be the story of Blue Ribbon and the Marlboro Man.

We spent the rest of the evening sitting at Johnson's kitchen table and going over the letter from his Long Island informant. He read it aloud, and then I read it silently, and then we debated what to do.

“Get thee to Japan,” Johnson said.

“What?”

“You gotta go,” he said. “Tell them about the work we've done. Demand your rights. Kill this Marlboro Man once and for all. Once he starts selling running shoes, once he really gets going, there will be no stopping him. Either we draw a line in the sand, right now, or it's over.”

I'd just come back from Japan, I said, and I didn't have the money to go again. I'd poured all my savings into Blue Ribbon, and I couldn't possibly ask Wallace for another loan. The thought nauseated me. Also, I didn't have time. Price Waterhouse allowed two weeks' vacation a year—unless you needed that two weeks for the Reserves, which I did. Then they gave you one extra week. Which I'd already used.

Above all, I told Johnson, “It's no use. The Marlboro Man's relationship with Onitsuka predates mine.”

Undaunted, Johnson pulled out his typewriter, the one he'd been using to torture me, and began drafting notes, ideas, lists, which we could then turn into a manifesto for me to deliver to the executives at Onitsuka. While Stretch finished off the crab, we munched our pizza and guzzled beer and plotted late into the night.

BACK IN OREGON
the next afternoon, I went straight in to see the office manager at Price Waterhouse. “I've got to have two weeks off,” I said, “right now.”

He looked up from the papers on his desk and glared at me, and for one hellishly long moment I thought I was going to be fired. Instead, he cleared his throat and mumbled something . . . odd. I couldn't make out every word but he seemed to think . . . from my intensity, my vagueness . . .
I'd gotten someone pregnant
.

I took a step back and started to protest, then shut my mouth. Let the man think what he wants. So long as he gives me the time.

Running a hand through his thinning hair, he finally sighed and said: “Go. Good luck. Hope it all works out.”

I PUT THE
airfare on my credit card. Twelve months to pay. And unlike my last visit to Japan, this time I wired ahead. I told the executives at Onitsuka that I was coming, and that I wanted a meeting.

They wired back: Come ahead.

But their wire went on to say that I wouldn't be meeting with Morimoto. He was either fired or dead. There was a new export manager, the wire said.

His name was Kitami.

KISHIKAN
. Japanese for déjà vu. Again I found myself boarding a flight for Japan. Again I found myself underlining and memorizing my copy of
How to Do Business with the Japanese.
Again I found myself taking the train to Kobe, checking into the Newport, pacing in my room.

At zero hour I took a cab over to Onitsuka. I expected that we'd go into the old conference room, but no, they'd done some remodeling since my last visit. New conference room, they said. Sleeker, bigger, it had leather chairs instead of the old cloth ones, and a much longer table. More impressive, but less familiar. I felt disoriented, intimidated. It was like prepping for a meet at Oregon State and
learning at the last minute that it had been moved to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

A man walked into the conference room and extended his hand. Kitami. His black shoes were brightly polished, his hair equally polished. Jet black, swept straight back, not a strand out of place. He was a great contrast to Morimoto, who always looked as if he'd dressed blindfolded. I was put off by Kitami's veneer, but suddenly he gave me a warm, ready smile, and encouraged me to sit, relax, tell him why I'd come, and now I got the distinct sense that, despite his slick appearance, he wasn't altogether sure of himself. He was in a brand-new job, after all. He didn't yet have much—equity. The word sprang to mind.

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.

Kitami spoke more English than his predecessors, but with a thicker accent. My ear needed a few minutes to adjust as we chatted about my flight, the weather, sales. All the while other executives were filing in, joining us at the conference table. At last Kitami leaned back.
“Hai
 . . .
”
He waited. “Mr. Onitsuka?” I asked. “Mr. Onitsuka will not be able to join us today,” he said.

Damn. I was hoping to draw upon Mr. Onitsuka's fondness for me, not to mention his bond with Bowerman. But no. Alone, without allies, trapped in the unfamiliar conference room, I plunged ahead.

I told Kitami and the other executives that Blue Ribbon had done a remarkable job thus far. We'd sold out every order, while developing a robust customer base, and we expected this solid growth to continue. We had forty-four thousand dollars in sales for 1966, and projected to have eighty-four thousand dollars in 1967. I described our new store in Santa Monica, and laid out plans for other stores—
for a big future. Then I leaned in. “We would very much like to be the exclusive U.S. distributor for Tiger's track-and-field line,” I said. “And I think it is very much in Tiger's interest that we become that.”

I didn't even mention the Marlboro Man.

I looked around the table. Grim faces. None grimmer than Kitami's. He said in a few terse words that this would not be possible. Onitsuka wanted for its U.S. distributor someone bigger, more established, a firm that could handle the workload. A firm with offices on the East Coast.

“But, but,” I spluttered, “Blue Ribbon
does
have offices on the East Coast.”

Kitami rocked back in his chair. “Oh?”

“Yes,” I said, “we're on the East Coast, the West Coast, and soon we may be in the Midwest. We can handle national distribution, no question.” I looked around the table. The grim faces were becoming less grim.

“Well,” Kitami said, “this change things.”

He assured me that they would give my proposal careful consideration. So.
Hai
. Meeting adjourned.

I walked back to my hotel and spent a second night pacing. First thing the next morning I received a call summoning me back to Onitsuka, where Kitami awarded me exclusive distribution rights for the United States.

He gave me a three-year contract.

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.

I promised to wire him the exact address.

ON THE FLIGHT
home I looked out the window at the clouds above the Pacific Ocean and thought back to sitting atop Mount Fuji. I
wondered how Sarah would feel about me now, after this coup. I wondered how the Marlboro Man would feel when he got word from Onitsuka that he was toast.

I stowed away my copy of
How to Do Business with the Japanese.
My carry-on was stuffed with souvenirs. Kimonos for my mother and sisters and Mom Hatfield, a tiny samurai sword to hang above my desk. And my crowning glory—a small Japanese
TV
. Spoils of war, I thought, smiling. But somewhere over the Pacific the full weight of my “victory” came over me. I imagined the look on Wallace's face when I asked him to cover this gigantic new order. If he said no,
when
he said no, what then?

On the other hand, if he said yes, how was I going to open an office on the East Coast? And how was I going to do it before those shoes arrived? And who was I going to get to run it?

I stared at the curved, glowing horizon. There was only one person on the planet rootless enough, energetic enough, gung-ho enough, crazy enough, to pick up and move to the East Coast, on a moment's notice, and get there before the shoes did.

I wondered how Stretch was going to like the Atlantic Ocean.

1967

I
didn't handle it well. Not well at all.

Knowing what his reaction would be, and dreading it, I put off telling Johnson the whole story. I shot him a quick note, saying the meeting with Onitsuka had gone fine, telling him I'd secured national distribution rights. But I left it at that. I think I must have held out hope, in the back of my mind, that I might be able to hire someone else to go east. Or that Wallace would blow the whole plan up.

And in fact I did hire someone else. A former distance runner, of course. But he changed his mind, backed out, just days after agreeing to go. So, frustrated, distracted, mired in a cycle of anxiety and procrastination, I turned to the much simpler problem of finding someone to replace Johnson at the store in Santa Monica. I asked John Bork, a high school track coach in Los Angeles, a friend of a friend. He jumped at the chance. He couldn't have been more eager.

How could I have known he'd be quite so eager? The next morning he appeared at Johnson's store and announced that he was the new boss. “The new—
what
?” Johnson said.

“I've been hired to take over for you when you go back east,” Bork said.

“When I go—
where
?” Johnson said, reaching for the phone.

I didn't handle that conversation well, either. I told Johnson that, haha, hey, man, I was
just
about to call you. I said I was sorry he'd
heard the news that way, how awkward, and I explained that I'd been forced to lie to Onitsuka and claim we already had an office on the East Coast. Thus, we were in one heck of a jam. The shoes would soon be on the water, an enormous shipment steaming for New York, and no one but Johnson could handle the task of claiming those shoes and setting up an office. The fate of Blue Ribbon rested on his shoulders.

Johnson was flabbergasted. Then furious. Then freaked. All in the space of one minute. So I got on a plane and flew down to visit him at his store.

HE DIDN'T
WANT
to live on the East Coast, he told me. He loved California. He'd lived in California all his life. He could go running year-round in California, and running, as I knew, was all to Johnson. How was he supposed to go running during those bitter cold winters back east? On and on it went.

All at once his manner changed. We were standing in the middle of his store, his sneaker sanctuary, and in a barely audible mumble he acknowledged that this was a make-or-break moment for Blue Ribbon, in which he was heavily invested, financially, emotionally, spiritually. He acknowledged that there was no one else who could set up an East Coast office. He delivered himself of a long, rambling, semi-internal monologue, saying that the Santa Monica store practically ran itself, so he could train his replacement in one day, and he'd already set up a store in a remote location once, so he could do it again, fast, and we needed it done fast, with the shoes on the water and back-to-school orders about to roll in, and then he looked off and asked the walls or the shoes or the Great Spirit why he shouldn't just shut up and do it, do whatever I asked, and be down-on-his-knees grateful for the damn opportunity, when anyone could see that he was—he searched for the exact words—“a talentless fuck.”

I might have said something like, “Oh no you're not. Don't be so
hard on yourself.” I might have. But I didn't. I kept my mouth shut and waited.

And waited.

“Okay,” he said, at last, “I'll go.”

“Great. That's great. Terrific. Thank you.”

“But
where
?”

“Where what?”

“Do you want me to go?”

“Ah. Yes. Well. Anywhere on the East Coast with a port. Just don't go to Portland, Maine.”

“Why?”

“A company based in two different Portlands? That'll confuse the heck out of the Japanese.”

We hashed it out some more and finally decided New York and Boston were the most logical places. Especially Boston. “It's where most of our orders are coming from,” one of us said.

“Okay,” he said. “Boston, here I come.”

Then I handed him a bunch of travel brochures for Boston, playing up the fall foliage angle. A little heavy-handed, but I was desperate.

He asked how I happened to have these brochures on me, and I told him I knew he'd make the right decision.

He laughed.

The forgiveness Johnson showed me, the overall good nature he demonstrated, filled me with gratitude, and a new fondness for the man. And perhaps a deeper loyalty. I regretted my treatment of him. All those unanswered letters. There are team players, I thought, and then there are team players, and then there's Johnson.

AND THEN HE
threatened to quit.

Via letter, of course. “I think I have been responsible for what success we have had so far,” he wrote. “And any success that will be coming in for the next two years at least.”

Therefore, he gave me a two-part ultimatum.

1. Make him a full partner in Blue Ribbon.

2. Raise his salary to six hundred dollars a month, plus a third of all profits beyond the first six thousand pairs of shoes sold.

Or else, he said, good-bye.

I phoned Bowerman and told him that Full-time Employee Number One was staging a mutiny. Bowerman listened quietly, considered all the angles, weighed the pros and cons, then rendered his verdict. “Fuck him.”

I said I wasn't sure “fucking him” was the best strategy. Maybe there was some middle way of mollifying Johnson, of giving him a stake in the company. But as we talked about it in greater detail, the math just didn't pencil out. Neither Bowerman nor I wanted to surrender any portion of our stake, so Johnson's ultimatum, even if I'd wanted to accept it, was a nonstarter.

I flew to Palo Alto, where Johnson was visiting his parents, and asked for a sit-down. Johnson said he wanted his father, Owen, to join us. The meeting took place at Owen's office, and I was immediately stunned by the similarities between father and son. They looked alike, sounded alike, even had many of the same mannerisms. The similarities ended there, however. From the start Owen was loud, aggressive, and I could see that he'd been the instigator behind this mutiny.

By trade Owen was a salesman. He sold voice recording equipment, like Dictaphones, and he was darned good at it. For him, as with most salesmen, life was one long negotiation, which he relished. In other words, he was my complete opposite. Here we go, I thought. Yet another shootout with a consummate negotiator. When will it end?

Before getting down to brass tacks, Owen first wanted to tell me a story. Salesmen always do. Since I was an accountant, he said, he
was reminded of an accountant he'd met recently who had a topless dancer for a client. The story, I believe, revolved around whether the dancer's silicone implants were deductible. At the punch line I laughed, to be polite, then gripped the arms of my chair and waited for Owen to stop laughing and make his opening move.

He began by citing all the things his son had done for Blue Ribbon. He insisted that his son was the main reason Blue Ribbon still existed. I nodded, let him talk himself out, and resisted the urge to make eye contact with Johnson, who sat off to the side. I wondered if they'd rehearsed all this, the way Johnson and I rehearsed my pitch before my last trip to Japan. When Owen finished, when he said that, given the facts, his son obviously should be a full partner in Blue Ribbon, I cleared my throat and conceded that Johnson was a dynamo, that his work had been vital and invaluable. But then I dropped the hammer. “The truth of the matter is, we have forty thousand dollars in sales, and more than that in debt, so there's simply nothing to divvy up here, fellas. We're fighting over slices of a pie that doesn't exist.”

Moreover, I told Owen that Bowerman was unwilling to sell any of his stake in Blue Ribbon, and therefore I couldn't sell any of mine. If I did I'd be surrendering majority control of the thing I'd created. That wasn't feasible.

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.

WITH JOHNSON ON
the East Coast, and Bork taking over his store, I was awash in employees. And then I got a call from Bowerman asking me to add yet
another
. One of his former track guys—Geoff Hollister.

I took Hollister out for a hamburger, and we got along fine, but he cinched the deal by not even flinching when I reached into my pocket and found I didn't have any money to pay for lunch. So I hired him to go around the state selling Tigers, thereby making him Full-time Employee Number Three.

Soon Bowerman phoned again. He wanted me to hire
another
person. Quadrupling my staff in the span of a few months? Did my old coach think I was General Motors? I might have balked, but then Bowerman said the job candidate's name.

Bob Woodell.

I knew the name, of course. Everyone in Oregon knew the name. Woodell had been a standout on Bowerman's 1965 team. Not quite a star, but a gritty and inspiring competitor. With Oregon defending its second national championship in three years, Woodell had come out of nowhere and won the long jump against vaunted
UCLA
. I'd been there, I'd watched him do it, and I'd gone away mighty impressed.

The next day there had been a bulletin on
TV
. An accident at
Oregon's Mother's Day Celebrations. Woodell and twenty of his frat brothers were hoisting a float down to the Millrace, a stream that wound through campus. They were trying to flip it over and someone lost their footing. Then someone lost their hold. Someone else let go. Someone screamed, everyone ran. The float collapsed, trapping Woodell underneath, crushing his first lumbar vertebra. There seemed little hope of his walking again.

Bowerman had held a twilight meet at Hayward Field to raise money for Woodell's medical expenses. Now he faced the task of finding something for Woodell to do. At present, he said, the poor guy was sitting around his parents' house in a wheelchair, staring at the walls. Woodell had made tentative inquiries about being Bowerman's assistant coach, but Bowerman said to me: “I just don't think that's going to work, Buck. Maybe he could do something for Blue Ribbon.”

I hung up and dialed Woodell. I nearly said how sorry I was about his accident, but I caught myself. I wasn't sure that was the right thing to say. In my mind I ran through another half dozen things, each of which seemed wrong. 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? I decided to keep it strictly business. I explained that Bowerman had recommended Woodell and said I might have a job for him with my new shoe company. I suggested we get together for lunch. Sure thing, he said.

We met the next day at a sandwich shop in downtown Beaverton, a suburb north of Portland. Woodell drove there himself; he'd already mastered a special car, a Mercury Cougar with hand controls. In fact, he was early. I was fifteen minutes late.

If not for his wheelchair, I don't know that I'd have recognized Woodell when I first walked in. I'd seen him once in person, and several times on
TV
, but after his many ordeals and surgeries he was shockingly thinner. He'd lost sixty pounds, and his naturally sharp features were now drawn with a much finer pencil. His hair, however, was still jet black, and still grew in remarkably tight curls.
He looked like a bust or frieze of Hermes I'd seen somewhere in the Greek countryside. His eyes were black, too, and they shone with a steeliness, a shrewdness—maybe a sadness. Not unlike Johnson's. Whatever it was, it was mesmerizing, and endearing. I regretted being late.

Lunch was supposed to be a job interview, but the interview part was a formality, we both knew. Men of Oregon take care of their own. Fortunately, loyalty aside, we hit it off. We made each other laugh, mostly about Bowerman. We reminisced about the many ways he tortured runners, ostensibly to instill toughness, like heating a key on a stove and pressing it against their naked flesh in the sauna. We'd both fallen victim. Before long I felt that I'd have given Woodell a job even if he'd been a stranger. Gladly. He was my kind of people. I wasn't certain what Blue Ribbon was, or if it would ever become a thing at all, but whatever it was or might become, I hoped it would have something of this man's spirit.

I offered him a position opening our second retail store, in Eugene, off the campus, at a monthly salary of four hundred dollars. He didn't negotiate, thank goodness. If he'd asked for four thousand a month, I might have found a way.

“Deal?” I said. “Deal,” he said. He reached out, shook my hand. He still had the strong grip of an athlete.

The waitress brought the check and I told Woodell grandly that lunch was on me. I pulled out my wallet and found that it was empty. I asked Blue Ribbon's Full-time Employee Number Four if he could float me. Just till payday.