Shoe Dog (31 page)

But it definitely registered.

And I didn't care for it.

At some point that night I phoned Hollister. He was devastated, too. There was raw anger in his voice. I was glad. I wanted people working for me who would feel that same burn, that same gut-punch rejection.

Happily, there were fewer such rejections all the time. At the close of fiscal 1976 we doubled our sales—$14 million. A startling number, which financial analysts noted, and wrote about. And yet we were still cash-poor. I kept borrowing every nickel I could, plowing it into growth, with the explicit or tacit blessing of people I trusted. Woodell, Strasser, Hayes.

In early 1976 the four of us had talked tentatively about going public, and tabled the idea. Now, at the close of 1976, we took up the idea again, more seriously. We analyzed the risks, weighed the cons, considered the pros. Again we decided: No.

Sure, sure, we said, we'd love to have that quick infusion of capital. Oh, the things we could do with that money! The factories we could lease! The talent we could hire! But going public would change our culture, make us beholden, make us corporate. That's not our play, we all agreed.

Weeks later, strapped for money again, our bank accounts at zero, we took another look at the idea.

And rejected it again.

Wanting to settle the matter once and for all, I put the subject at the top of the agenda for our biannual gathering, a retreat we'd taken to calling the Buttface.

JOHNSON COINED THE
phrase, we think. At one of our earliest retreats he muttered: “How many multimillion-dollar companies can you yell out, ‘Hey, Buttface,' and the entire management team turns around?” It got a laugh. And then it stuck. And then it became a key part of our vernacular. Buttface referred to both the retreat and the retreaters, and it not only captured the informal mood of those retreats, where no idea was too sacred to be mocked, and no person was too important to be ridiculed, it also summed up the company spirit, mission and ethos.

The first few Buttfaces took place at various Oregon resorts. Otter Crest. Salishan. Ultimately we came to prefer Sunriver, an idyllic spot in sunny central Oregon. Typically, Woodell and Johnson would fly out from the East Coast, and we'd all drive out to Sunriver late Friday. We'd reserve a bunch of cabins, seize a conference room, and spend two or three days shouting ourselves hoarse.

I can see myself so clearly at the head of a conference table, shouting, being shouted at—laughing until my voice was gone. The problems confronting us were grave, complex, seemingly insurmountable, made more so by the fact we were separated from each other by three thousand miles, at a time when communication wasn't easy or instant. And yet we were always laughing. Sometimes, after a really cathartic guffaw, I'd look around the table and feel overcome by emotion. Camaraderie, loyalty, gratitude. Even love. Surely love. But I also remember feeling shocked that
these
were the men I'd assembled. These were the founding fathers of a multimillion-dollar company that sold
athletic
shoes? A paralyzed guy, two morbidly obese guys, a chain-smoking guy? It was bracing to realize that, in this group, the one with whom I had the most in common was . . . Johnson. And yet, it was undeniable. While everyone else was laughing, rioting, he'd be the sane one, sitting quietly in the middle of the table reading a book.

The loudest voice at every Buttface always seemed to be Hayes.
And the craziest. Like his girth, his personality was ever expanding, adding new phobias and enthusiasms. For instance, by this time Hayes had developed a curious obsession with heavy equipment. Backhoes, bulldozers, cherry pickers, cranes, they fascinated him. They . . . turned him on, there's no other way to say it. At an early Buttface we were leaving a local bar when Hayes spied a bulldozer in the field behind the lodge. He discovered, to his astonishment, the keys had been left inside, so he hopped in and moved the earth all around the field, and in the parking lot, quitting only when he narrowly missed crushing several cars. Hayes on a bulldozer, I thought: As much as the swoosh,
that
might be our logo.

I always said that Woodell made the trains run on time, but it was Hayes who laid down the tracks. Hayes set up all the esoteric accounting systems without which the company would have ground to a halt. When we first went from manual to automated accounting, Hayes acquired the first primitive machines, and by constantly mending them, modifying them, or pounding them with his big hammy fists, he kept them uncannily accurate. When we first started doing business outside the United States, foreign currencies became a devilishly tricky problem, and Hayes set up an ingenious currency-­hedging system, which made the spread more reliable, more predictable.

Despite our hijinks, despite our eccentricities, despite our physical limitations, I concluded in 1976 that we were a formidable team. (Years later a famous Harvard business professor studying Nike came to the same conclusion. “Normally,” he said, “if one manager at a company can think tactically
and
strategically, that company has a good future. But boy are you lucky: More than half the Buttfaces think that way!”)

Undoubtedly we looked, to any casual observer, like a sorry, motley crew, hopelessly mismatched. But in fact we were more alike than different, and that gave a coherence to our goals and our efforts. We were mostly Oregon guys, which was important. We had an
inborn need to prove ourselves, to show the world that we weren't hicks and hayseeds. And we were nearly all merciless self-loathers, which kept the egos in check. There was none of that smartest-guy-in-the-room foolishness. Hayes, Strasser, Woodell, Johnson, each would have been the smartest guy in any room, but none believed it of himself, or the next guy. Our meetings were defined by contempt, disdain, and heaps of abuse.

Oh, what abuse. We called each other terrible names. We rained down verbal blows. While floating ideas, and shooting down ideas, and hashing out threats to the company, the last thing we took into account was someone's feelings. Including mine. Especially mine. My fellow Buttfaces, my employees, called me Bucky the Bookkeeper, constantly. I never asked them to stop. I knew better. If you showed any weakness, any sentimentality, you were dead.

I remember a Buttface when Strasser decided we weren't being “aggressive” enough in our approach. Too many bean counters in this company, he said. “So before this meeting starts I want to interject something. I've prepared here a
counter
budget.” He waved a big binder. “This right here is what we should be doing with our money.”

Of course everyone wanted to see his numbers, but no one more than the numbers guy, Hayes. When we discovered that the numbers didn't add up, not one column, we started howling.

Strasser took it personally. “It's the essence I'm getting at,” he said. “Not the specifics. The
essence
.”

The howling grew louder. So Strasser picked up his binder and threw it against the wall. “Fuck all you guys,” he said. The binder burst open, pages flew everywhere, and the laughter was deafening. Even Strasser couldn't help himself. He had to join in.

Little wonder that Strasser's nickname was Rolling Thunder. Hayes, meanwhile, was Doomsday. Woodell was Weight. (As in Dead Weight.) Johnson was Four Factor, because he tended to exaggerate and therefore everything he said needed to be divided by four. No
one took it personally. The only thing truly not tolerated at a Buttface was a thin skin.

And sobriety. At day's end, when everybody had a scratchy throat from all the abusing and laughing and problem-solving, when our yellow legal pads were filled with ideas, solutions, quotations, and lists upon lists, we'd shift ground to the bar at the lodge and continue the meeting over drinks. Many drinks.

The bar was called the Owl's Nest. I love to close my eyes and remember us storming through the entrance, scattering all other patrons. Or making friends of them. We'd buy drinks for the house, then commandeer a corner and continue laying into each other about some problem or idea or harebrained scheme. Say the problem was midsoles not getting from Point A to Point B. Round and round we'd go, everyone speaking at once, a chorale of name-­calling and finger-pointing, all made louder, and funnier, and somehow clearer, by the booze. To anyone in the Owl's Nest, to anyone in the corporate world, it would have looked inefficient, inappropriate. Even scandalous. But before the bartender gave last call, we'd know full well
why
those midsoles weren't getting from Point A to Point B, and the person responsible would be contrite, and put on notice, and we'd have ourselves a creative solution.

The only person who didn't join us in these late-night revels was Johnson. He'd typically go for a head-clearing run, then retreat to his room and read in bed. I don't think he ever set foot in the Owl's Nest. Or knew where it was. We'd always have to spend the first part of the next morning updating him on what we'd decided in his absence.

In the Bicentennial Year alone we were struggling with a number of unusually stressful problems. We needed to find a larger warehouse on the East Coast. We needed to transfer our sales-­distribution center, from Holliston, Massachusetts, to a new forty-thousand-square-foot space in Greenland, New Hampshire, which was sure to be a logistical nightmare. We needed to hire an advertising agency to handle the increasing volume of print ads. We needed
to either fix or get shut of our underperforming factories. We needed to smooth out glitches in our Futures Program. We needed to hire a director of promotions. We needed to form a Pro Club, a sort of reward system for our top
NBA
stars, to cement their loyalty and keep them in the Nike fold. We needed to approve new products, like the Arsenal, a soccer-baseball cleat with leather upper and vinyl poly-foam tongue, and the Striker, a multipurpose cleat good for soccer, baseball, football, softball, and field hockey. And we needed to decide on a new logo. Aside from the swoosh, we had a lowercase script name,
nike
, which was problematic—too many people thought it was
like
, or
mike.
But it was too late in the day to change the name of the company, so making the letters more readable seemed a good idea. Denny Strickland, creative director at our advertising agency, had designed a block-lettered
NIKE
, all caps, and nested it inside a swoosh. We spent days considering it, debating it.

Above all, we needed to decide, once and for all, this “going public” question. In those earliest Buttfaces, a consensus began to form. If we couldn't sustain growth, we couldn't survive. And despite our fears, despite the risks and downsides, going public was the best way to sustain growth.

And yet, in the midst of those intense discussions, in the middle of one of the most trying years in the company's history, those Butt­face meetings were nothing but a joy. Of all those hours spent at Sunriver, not one minute felt like work. It was us against the world, and we felt damned sorry for the world. That is, when we weren't righteously pissed off at it. Each of us had been misunderstood, misjudged, dismissed. Shunned by bosses, spurned by luck, rejected by society, shortchanged by fate when looks and other natural graces were handed out. We'd each been forged by early failure. We'd each given ourselves to some quest, some attempt at validation or meaning, and fallen short.

Hayes couldn't become a partner because he was too fat.

Johnson couldn't cope in the so-called normal world of nine-to-five.

Strasser was an insurance lawyer who hated insurance—and lawyers.

Woodell lost all his youthful dreams in one fluke accident.

I got cut from the baseball team. And I got my heart broken.

I identified with the born loser in each Buttface, and vice versa, and I knew that together we could become winners. I still didn't know exactly what winning meant, other than not losing, but we seemed to be getting closer to a defining moment when that question would be settled, or at least more sharply defined. Maybe going public would be that moment.

Maybe going public would finally ensure that Nike would live on.

If I had any doubts about Blue Ribbon's management team in 1976, they were mainly about me. Was I doing right by the Buttfaces, giving them so little guidance? When they did well I'd shrug and deliver my highest praise: Not bad. When they erred I'd yell for a minute or two, then shake it off. None of the Buttfaces felt the least threatened by me—was that a good thing?
Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.
It was the right tack for Patton and his GIs. But did that make it right for a bunch of Buttfaces? I worried. Maybe I should be more hands-on. Maybe we should be more structured.

But then I'd think: Whatever I'm doing, it must be working, because mutinies are few. In fact, ever since Bork, no one had thrown a genuine tantrum, about anything, not even what they were paid, which is unheard of in any company, big or small. The Buttfaces knew I wasn't paying myself much, and they trusted that I was paying them what I could.

Clearly the Buttfaces liked the culture I'd created. I trusted them, wholly, and didn't look over their shoulders, and that bred a powerful two-way loyalty. My management style wouldn't have worked for people who wanted to be guided, every step, but this group found it liberating, empowering. I let them be, let them do, let them make their own mistakes, because that's how I'd always liked people to treat me.

At the end of a Buttface weekend, consumed with these and other thoughts, I'd drive back to Portland in a trance. Halfway there I'd come out of the trance and start thinking about Penny and the boys. The Buttfaces were like family, but every minute I spent with them was at the cost of my other family, my real family. The guilt was palpable. Often I'd walk into my house and Matthew and Travis would meet me at the door. “Where have you been?” they'd ask. “Daddy was with his friends,” I'd say, picking them up. They'd stare, confused. “But Mommy told us you were working.”