Shoe Dog (32 page)

It was around this time, as Nike rolled out its first children's shoes, Wally Waffle and Robbie Road Racer, that Matthew announced he would never wear Nikes so long as he lived. His way of expressing anger about my absences, as well as other frustrations. Penny tried to make him understand that Daddy wasn't absent by choice. Daddy was trying to build something. Daddy was trying to ensure that he and Travis would one day be able to attend college.

I didn't even bother to explain. I told myself it didn't matter what I said. Matthew never understood, and Travis always understood—they seemed born with these unvarying default positions. Matthew seemed to harbor some innate resentment toward me, while Travis seemed congenitally devoted. What difference would a few more words make? What difference would a few more hours make?

My fatherhood style, my management style. I was forever questioning, Is it good—or merely good enough?

Time and again I'd vow to change. Time and again I'd tell myself:
I will
spend more time with the boys.
Time and again I'd keep that promise—for a while. Then I'd fall back to my former routine, the only way I knew. Not hands-off. But not hands-on.

This might have been the one problem I couldn't solve by brainstorming with my fellow Buttfaces. Vastly trickier than how to get midsoles from Point A to Point B was the question of Son A and Son B, how to keep them happy, while keeping Son C, Nike, afloat.

1977

H
is name was M. Frank Rudy, he was a former aerospace engineer, and he was a true original. One look at him told you he was a nutty professor, though it wasn't until years later that I learned the full extent of his nuttiness. (He kept a meticulous diary of his sex life and bowel movements.) He had a business partner, Bob Bogert, another brainiac, and they had a Crazy Idea, and together they were going to pitch us—that's the sum total of what I knew that morning in March 1977 as we settled around the conference table. I wasn't even sure how these guys reached us, or how they'd arranged this meeting.

“Okay, fellas,” I said, “what've you got?”

It was a beautiful day, I remember. The light outside the room was a buttery pale yellow, and the sky was blue for the first time in months, so I was distracted, a little spring feverish, as Rudy leaned his weight on the edge of the conference table and smiled. “Mr. Knight, we've come up with a way to inject . . .
air . . .
into a running shoe.”

I frowned and dropped my pencil. “Why?” I said.

“For greater cushioning,” he said. “For greater support. For the ride of a
lifetime
.”

I stared. “You're kidding me, right?”

I'd heard a lot of silliness from a lot of different people in the shoe business, but this. Oh. Brother.

Rudy handed me a pair of soles that looked as if they'd been teleported from the twenty-second century. Big, clunky, they were
clear thick plastic and inside were—bubbles? I turned them over. “Bubbles?” I said.

“Pressurized air bags,” he said.

I set down the soles and gave Rudy a closer look, a full head-to-toe. Six-three, lanky, with unruly dark hair, bottle-bottom glasses, a lopsided grin, and a severe vitamin D deficiency, I thought. Not enough sunshine. Or else a long-lost member of the Addams Family.

He saw me appraising him, saw my skepticism, and wasn't the least fazed. He walked to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and began writing numbers, symbols, equations. He explained at some length why an air shoe would work, why it would never go flat, why it was the Next Big Thing. When he finished I stared at the blackboard. As a trained accountant I'd spent a good part of my life looking at blackboards, but this Rudy fella's scribbles were something else. Indecipherable.

Humans have been wearing shoes since the Ice Age, I said, and the underlying design hasn't changed all that much in forty thousand years. There hadn't really been a breakthrough since the late 1800s, when cobblers started lasting left and right shoes differently, and rubber companies started making soles. It didn't seem all too likely that, at this late date in history, something so new, so revolutionary, was going to be dreamed up. “Air shoes” sounded to me like jet packs and moving sidewalks. Comic book stuff.

Rudy still wasn't discouraged. He kept at it, unflappable, earnest. Finally he shrugged and said that he understood. He'd tried to pitch Adidas and they'd been skeptical, too. Abracadabra. That was all I needed to hear.

I asked if I could fit his air soles into my running shoes and give them a try. “They don't have a moderator,” he said. “They'd be loose and wobbly.”

“I don't care about that,” I said.

I squeezed the soles into my shoes, slipped the shoes back on, laced them up. Not bad, I said, bouncing up and down.

I went for a six-mile run. They were indeed unstable. But they were also one heck of a ride.

I ran back to the office. Still covered with sweat, I ran straight up to Strasser and told him: “I think we might have something here.”

THAT NIGHT STRASSER
and I went to dinner with Rudy and Bogert. Rudy explained more of the science behind the air soles, and this second time around it started to make sense. I told him there was a possibility we could do business. Then I turned it over to Strasser to close.

I'd hired Strasser for his legal mind, but by 1977 I'd discovered his true talent. Negotiating. The first few times I asked him to work out a contract with sports agents, the toughest negotiators in the world, he more than held his own. I was amazed. So were the agents. Every time, Strasser walked away with more than we'd ever hoped. No one scared him, no one matched him in a clash of wills. By 1977 I was sending him into every negotiation with total confidence, as if I were sending in the Eighty-Second Airborne.

His secret, I think, was that he just didn't care what he said or how he said it or how it went over. He was totally honest, a radical tactic in any negotiation. I recall one tug-of-war Strasser had over Elvin Hayes, the Washington Bullets all-star, whom we badly wanted to sign again. Elvin's agent told Strasser, “You should give Elvin your whole damn company!”

Strasser yawned. “You want it? Help yourself. We've got ten grand in the bank.

“Final offer, take it or leave it.”

The agent took it.

Now, seeing great potential in these “air soles,” Strasser offered Rudy ten cents for every pair of soles that we sold, and Rudy demanded twenty, and after weeks of haggling they settled somewhere in the middle. We then shipped Rudy and his partner back to Ex
eter, which was becoming our de facto Research and Development Department.

Of course, when Johnson met Rudy, he did exactly what I'd done. He slipped some air soles into his running shoes and trotted six brisk miles, after which he phoned me. “This could be huge,” he said.

“That's what I thought,” I said.

But Johnson worried that the bubble would cause friction. His foot felt hot, he said. He had the start of a blister. He suggested putting air in the midsole as well, to level out the ride. “Don't tell me,” I said, “tell your new roommate, Mr. Rudy.”

FRESH OFF HIS
successful closing with Rudy, we gave Strasser another critical assignment. Sign college basketball coaches. Nike had a solid stable of
NBA
players, and sales of basketball shoes were rising briskly, but we had virtually no college teams. Not even the University of Oregon. Unthinkable.

The coach, Dick Harter, told us in 1975 that he'd left the decision up to his players, and the team vote was 6–6. So the team stayed with Converse.

The next year the team voted for Nike, 9–3, but Harter said it was still too close, so he was staying with Converse.

What the?

I told Hollister to lobby the players steadily over the next twelve months. Which he did. And the 1977 vote was 12–0 for Nike.

The next day I met Harter in Jaqua's office, and he told us he still wasn't ready to sign.

Why not?

“Where's my twenty-five hundred dollars?” he said.

“Ah,” I said. “Now I get it.”

I mailed Harter a check. At last my Ducks would wear Nikes on the hardboards.

At almost this same odd moment in time, a second strange shoe
inventor showed up on our doorstep. His name was Sonny Vaccaro, and he was just as unique as Frank Rudy. Short, round, with constantly darting eyes, he spoke in a soupy voice with an Americanized Italian accent, or an Italianized American accent, I couldn't place it. He was a shoe dog, for sure, but a shoe dog straight out of
The Godfather
. When he first arrived at Nike he carried with him several shoes of his own invention, which set off gales of laughter around the conference room. The guy was no Rudy. And yet in the course of conversation he claimed to be chummy with every college basketball coach in the country. Somehow, years before, he'd founded a popular high school all-star game, the Dapper Dan Classic, and it was a big hit, and through it he'd gotten to know all the coaching royalty.

“Okay,” I told him, “you're hired. You and Strasser hit the road, go out and see if you can crack that college basketball market.”

All the great basketball schools—
UCLA
, Indiana, North Carolina, and so on—had long-standing deals with Adidas or Converse. So who was left? And what could we offer? We hurriedly dreamed up an “Advisory Board,” another version of our Pro Club, our
NBA
reward system—but it was small beer. I fully expected Strasser and Vaccaro to fail. And I expected to see neither of them for a year, at least.

One month later Strasser was standing in my office, beaming. And shouting. And ticking off names. Eddie Sutton, Arkansas! Abe Lemmons, Texas! Jerry Tarkanian,
UNLV
! Frank McGuire, South Carolina! (I leaped out of my chair. McGuire was a legend: He'd defeated Wilt Chamberlain's Kansas team to win the national championship for North Carolina.) We hit pay dirt, Strasser said.

Plus, almost as a throw-in, he mentioned two under-the-radar youngsters: Jim Valvano at Iona and John Thompson at Georgetown.

(A year or two later he did the same thing with college football coaches, landing all the greats, including Vince Dooley and his national champion Georgia Bulldogs. Herschel Walker in Nikes—yes.)

We rushed out a press release, announcing that Nike had these schools under contract. Alas, the press release had a bad typo. Iona was
spelled “Iowa.” Lute Olson, coach at Iowa, phoned immediately. He was irate. We apologized and said we'd send a correction the next day.

He got quiet. “Well now wait wait,” he said, “what's this
Advisory Board
anyway . . . ?”

The Harter Rule, in full effect.

OTHER ENDORSEMENTS WERE
a greater struggle. Our tennis effort had started so promisingly, with Nastase, but then we'd hit that speed-bump with Connors, and now Nastase was dumping us. Adidas had offered him one hundred thousand dollars a year, including shoes, clothes, and rackets. We had the right to match, but it was out of the question. “Fiscally irresponsible,” I said to Nasty's agent, and everyone else who would listen. “No one will ever see a sports endorsement deal that big ever again!”

So there we were in 1977 without a horse in tennis. We quickly hired a local pro to be a consultant, and that summer he and I went to Wimbledon. On our first day in London we met with a group of American tennis officials. “We've got some great young players,” they said. “Elliot Telscher may be the best. Gottfried is also outstanding. Whatever you do, just stay away from the kid playing out on Court 14.”

“Why?”

“He's a hothead.”

I went straight to Court 14. And fell madly, hopelessly in love with a frizzy-haired high schooler from New York City named John McEnroe.

AT THE SAME
time we were signing deals with athletes and coaches and nutty professors, we were coming out with the
LD
1000, a running shoe that featured a dramatically flared heel. The heel flared so much, in fact, that from certain angles it looked like a water ski.
The theory was that a flared heel would lessen torque on the leg and reduce pressure on the knee, thus lowering the risk of tendinitis and other running-related maladies. Bowerman designed it, with heavy input from Vixie the podiatrist. Customers loved it.

At first. Then came the issues. If a runner didn't land just right, the flared heel could cause pronation, knee problems, or worse. We issued a recall and braced ourselves for a public backlash—but it never came. On the contrary, we heard nothing but gratitude. No other shoe company was trying new things, so our efforts, successful or not, were seen as noble. All innovation was hailed as progressive, forward-thinking. Just as failure didn't deter us, it didn't seem to diminish the loyalty of our customers.

Bowerman, however, got very down on himself. I tried to console him by reminding him that there was no Nike without him, so he should continue to invent, create, fearlessly. The
LD
1000 was like a literary genius's novel that didn't quite come together. It happened to the best of them. No reason to stop writing.

My pep talks didn't work. And then I made the mistake of mentioning the air sole we had in development. I told Bowerman about Rudy's oxygenated innovation, and Bowerman scoffed. “Pff—air shoes. That'll never work, Buck.”

He sounded a bit—jealous?

I considered it a good sign. His competitive juices were already flowing again.

MANY AFTERNOONS I'D
sit around the office with Strasser, trying to figure out why some lines were selling and some not, which led to broader discussions of what people thought of us, and why. We didn't have focus groups, or market research—we couldn't afford them—so we tried to intuit, divine, read tea leaves. Clearly people liked the look of our shoes, we agreed. Clearly they liked our story: Oregon firm founded by running geeks. Clearly they liked what wearing a
pair of Nikes said about them. We were more than a brand; we were a statement.

Some of the credit went to Hollywood. We had a guy out there giving Nikes to stars, all kinds of stars, big, little, rising, fading. Every time I turned on the
TV
our shoes were on a character in some hit show—
Starsky & Hutch
,
The Six Million Dollar Man, The Incredible Hulk
. Somehow, our Hollywood liaison got a pair of Senorita Cortezes into the hands of Farrah Fawcett, who wore them in a 1977 episode of
Charlie's Angels.
That was all it took. One quick shot of Farrah in Nikes and every store in the nation was sold out of Senorita Cortezes by noon the next day. Soon the cheerleaders at
UCLA
and
USC
were jumping and leaping in what was commonly called the Farrah Shoe.

All of which meant more demand . . . and more problems meeting demand. Our manufacturing base was broader. Besides Japan, we now had several factories in Taiwan and two smaller factories in Korea, plus Puerto Rico and Exeter, but still we couldn't keep up. Also, the more factories we brought online, the more strain it put on our cash.

Occasionally our problems had nothing to do with cash. In Korea, for instance, the five biggest factories were so massive, and the competition among them so cutthroat, we knew we were going to get knocked off soon. Sure enough, one day I received in the mail a perfect replica of our Nike Bruin, including the trademark swoosh. Imitation is flattery, but knockoff is theft, and this theft was diabolical. The detail and workmanship, without any input from our people, was startlingly good. I wrote the president of the factory and demanded he cease and desist or I'd have him thrown in jail for a hundred years.