Shoe Dog (5 page)

It was one of many blessings Athena bestowed. She also rewarded the dealmakers. In the
Oresteia
she says: “I admire . . . the eyes of persuasion.” She was, in a sense, the patron saint of negotiators.

I don't know how long I stood there, absorbing the energy and power of that epochal place. An hour? Three? I don't know how long after that day I discovered the Aristophanes play, set in the Temple of Nike, in which the warrior gives the king a gift—a pair of new shoes. I don't know when I figured out that the play was called
Knights
. I do know that as I turned to leave I noticed the temple's marble façade. Greek artisans had decorated it with several haunting carvings, including the most famous, in which the goddess inexplicably leans down . . . to adjust the strap of her shoe.

FEBRUARY 24, 1963.
My twenty-fifth birthday. I walked through the door on Claybourne Street, hair to my shoulders, beard three inches long. My mother let out a cry. My sisters blinked as if they didn't recognize me, or else hadn't realized I'd been gone. Hugs, shouts, bursts of laughter. My mother made me sit, poured me a cup of coffee. She wanted to hear everything. But I was exhausted. I set my suitcase and backpack in the hall and went to my room. I stared blearily at my blue ribbons. Mr. Knight, what is the name of your company?

I curled up on the bed and sleep came down like the curtain at La Scala.

An hour later I woke to my mother calling out, “Dinner!”

My father was home from work, and he embraced me as I came into the dining room. He, too, wanted to hear every detail. And I wanted to tell him.

But first I wanted to know one thing.

“Dad,” I said. “Did my shoes come?”

1963

M
y father invited all the neighbors over for coffee and cake and a special viewing of “Buck's slides.” Dutifully, I stood at the slide projector, savoring the darkness, listlessly clicking the advance button and describing the pyramids, the Temple of Nike, but I wasn't there. I was at the pyramids, I was at the Temple of Nike. I was wondering about my shoes.

Four months after the big meeting at Onitsuka, after I'd connected with those executives, and won them over, or so I thought—and still the shoes hadn't arrived. I fired off a letter.
Dear Sirs, Re our meeting of last fall, have you had a chance to ship the samples . . . ?
Then I took a few days off, to sleep, wash my clothes, catch up with friends.

I got a speedy reply from Onitsuka. “Shoes coming,” the letter said. “In just a little more days.”

I showed the letter to my father. He winced.
A little more days?
“Buck,” he said, chuckling, “that fifty bucks is long gone.”

MY NEW LOOK
—castaway hair, caveman beard—was too much for my mother and sisters. I'd catch them staring, frowning. I could hear them thinking: bum. So I shaved. Afterward I stood before the little mirror on my bureau in the servants' quarters and told myself, “It's official. You're back.”

And yet I wasn't. There was something about me that would never return.

My mother noticed it before anyone else. Over dinner one night she gave me a long, searching look. “You seem more . . . worldly.”

Worldly, I thought. Gosh.

UNTIL THE SHOES
arrived, whether or not the shoes ever arrived, I'd need to find some way to earn cash money. Before my trip I'd had that interview with Dean Witter. Maybe I could go back there. I ran it by my father, in the
TV
nook. He stretched out in his vinyl recliner and suggested I first go have a chat with his old friend Don Frisbee,
CEO
of Pacific Power & Light.

I knew Mr. Frisbee. In college I'd done a summer internship for him. I liked him, and I liked that he'd graduated from Harvard Business School. When it came to schools, I was a bit of a snob. Also, I marveled that he'd gone on, rather quickly, to become
CEO
of a New York Stock Exchange company.

I recall that he welcomed me warmly that spring day in 1963, that he gave me one of those double-handed handshakes and led me into his office, into a chair across from his desk. He settled into his big high-backed leather throne and raised his eyebrows. “So . . . what's on your mind?”

“Honestly, Mr. Frisbee, I don't know what to do . . . about . . . or with . . . a job . . . or career . . .”

Weakly, I added: “My life.”

I said I was thinking of going to Dean Witter. Or else maybe coming back to the electric company. Or else maybe working for some large corporation. The light from Mr. Frisbee's office window glinted off his rimless glasses and into my eyes. Like the sun off the Ganges. “Phil,” he said, “those are all bad ideas.”

“Sir?”

“I don't think you should do any of those things.”

“Oh.”

“Everyone, but everyone, changes jobs at least three times. So if you go to work for an investment firm now, you'll eventually leave, and then at your next job you'll have to start all over. If you go work for some big company, son, same deal. No, what you want to do, while you're young, is get your
CPA
. That, along with your MBA, will put a solid floor under your earnings. Then, when you change jobs, which you will, trust me, at least you'll maintain your salary level. You won't go backward.”

That sounded practical. I certainly didn't want to go backward.

I hadn't majored in accounting, however. I needed nine more hours to even qualify to take the exam. So I quickly enrolled in three accounting classes at Portland State. “
More
school?” my father grumbled.

Worse, the school in question wasn't Stanford or Oregon. It was puny little Portland State.

I wasn't the only school snob in the family.

AFTER GETTING MY
nine hours I worked at an accounting firm, Lybrand, Ross Bros. & Montgomery. It was one of the Big Eight national firms, but its Portland branch office was small. One partner, three junior accountants. Suits me, I thought. Smallness meant the firm would be intimate, conducive to learning.

And it did start out that way. My first assignment was a Beaverton company, Reser's Fine Foods, and as the solo man on the job I got to spend quality time with the
CEO
, Al Reser, who was just three years older than me. I picked up some important lessons from him, and enjoyed my time poring over his books. But I was too overworked to fully enjoy it. The trouble with a small satellite branch within a big accounting firm is the workload. Whenever extra work came rolling in, there was no one to take up the slack. During the busy season, November through April, we found ourselves up to our ears,
logging twelve-hour days, six days a week, which didn't leave much time to learn.

Also, we were watched. Closely. Our minutes were counted, to the second. When President Kennedy was killed that November I asked for the day off. I wanted to sit in front of the
TV
with the rest of the nation and mourn. My boss, however, shook his head. Work first, mourn second.
Consider the lilies of the field . . . they neither toil nor spin.

I had two consolations. One was money. I was earning five hundred dollars a month, which enabled me to buy a new car. I couldn't justify another
MG
, so I bought a Plymouth Valiant. Reliable, but with some pizzazz. And a dash of color. The salesman called it sea-foam green. My friends called it vomit green.

It was actually the green of newly minted money.

My other consolation was lunch. Each day at noon I'd walk down the street to the local travel agency and stand like Walter Mitty before the posters in the window. Switzerland. Tahiti. Moscow. Bali. I'd grab a brochure and leaf through it while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a bench in the park. I'd ask the pigeons: Can you believe it was only a year ago that I was surfing Waikiki? Eating water buffalo stew after an early morning hike in the Himalayas?

Are the best moments of my life behind me?

Was my trip around the world . . . my peak?

The pigeons were less responsive than the statue at Wat Phra Kaew.

This is how I spent 1963. Quizzing pigeons. Polishing my Valiant. Writing letters.

Dear Carter, Did you ever leave Shangri-La? I'm an accountant now and giving some thought to blowing my brains out.

1964

T
he notice arrived right around Christmas, so I must have driven down to the waterfront warehouse the first week of 1964. I don't recall exactly. I know it was early morning. I can see myself getting there before the clerks unlocked the doors.

I handed them the notice and they went into the back and returned with a large box covered in Japanese writing.

I raced home, scurried down to the basement, ripped open the box. Twelve pairs of shoes, creamy white, with blue stripes down the sides. God, they were beautiful. They were more than beautiful. I'd seen nothing in Florence or Paris that surpassed them. I wanted to put them on marble pedestals, or in gilt-edged frames. I held them up to the light, caressed them as sacred objects, the way a writer might treat a new set of notebooks, or a baseball player a rack of bats.

Then I sent two pairs to my old track coach at Oregon, Bill Bowerman.

I did so without a second thought, since it was Bowerman who'd first made me think, really
think
, about what people put on their feet. Bowerman was a genius coach, a master motivator, a natural leader of young men, and there was one piece of gear he deemed crucial to their development. Shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shod.

In the four years I'd run for him at Oregon, Bowerman was con
stantly sneaking into our lockers and stealing our footwear. He'd spend days tearing them apart, stitching them back up, then hand them back with some minor modification, which made us either run like deer or bleed. Regardless of the results, he never stopped. He was determined to find new ways of bolstering the instep, cushioning the midsole, building out more room for the forefoot. He always had some new design, some new scheme to make our shoes sleeker, softer, lighter. Especially lighter. One ounce sliced off a pair of shoes, he said, is equivalent to 55 pounds over one mile. He wasn't kidding. His math was solid. You take the average man's stride of six feet, spread it out over a mile (5,280 feet), you get 880 steps. Remove one ounce from each step—that's 55 pounds on the button. Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated to less burden, which meant more energy, which meant more speed. And speed equaled winning. Bowerman didn't like to lose. (I got it from him.) Thus lightness was his constant goal.

Goal is putting it kindly. In quest of lightness he was willing to try anything. Animal, vegetable, mineral, any material was eligible if it might improve on the standard shoe leather of the day. That sometimes meant kangaroo skin. Other times, cod. You haven't lived until you've competed against the fastest runners in the world wearing shoes made of cod.

There were four or five of us on the track team who were Bowerman's podiatry guinea pigs, but I was his pet project. Something about my feet spoke to him. Something about my stride. Also, I afforded a wide margin of error. I wasn't the best on the team, not by a long shot, so he could afford to make mistakes on me. With my more talented teammates he didn't dare take undue chances.

As a freshman, as a sophomore, as a junior, I lost count of how many races I ran in flats or spikes modified by Bowerman. By my senior year he was making all my shoes from scratch.

Naturally I believed this new Tiger, this funny little shoe from
Japan that had taken more than a full year to reach me, would intrigue my old coach. Of course, it wasn't as light as his cod shoes. But it had potential: the Japanese were promising to improve it. Better yet, it was inexpensive. I knew this would appeal to Bowerman's innate frugality.

Even the shoe's name struck me as something Bowerman might flip for. He usually called his runners “Men of Oregon,” but every once in a while he'd exhort us to be “tigers.” I can see him pacing the locker room, telling us before a race, “Be
TIGERS
out there!” (If you weren't a tiger, he'd often call you a “hamburger.”) Now and then, when we complained about our skimpy prerace meal, he'd growl: “A tiger hunts best when he's hungry.”

With any luck, I thought, Coach will order a few pairs of Tigers for his tigers.

But whether or not he placed an order, impressing Bowerman would be enough. That alone would constitute success for my fledgling company.

It's possible that everything I did in those days was motivated by some deep yearning to impress, to please, Bowerman. Besides my father there was no man whose approval I craved more, and besides my father there was no man who gave it less often. Frugality carried over to every part of the coach's makeup. He weighed and hoarded words of praise, like uncut diamonds.

After you'd won a race, if you were lucky, Bowerman
might
say: “Nice race.” (In fact, that's precisely what he said to one of his milers after the young man became one of the very first to crack the mythical four-minute mark in the United States.) More likely Bowerman would say nothing. He'd stand before you in his tweed blazer and ratty sweater vest, his string tie blowing in the wind, his battered ball cap pulled low, and nod once. Maybe stare. Those ice-blue eyes, which missed nothing, gave nothing. Everyone talked about Bowerman's dashing good looks, his retro crew cut, his ramrod posture and planed jawline, but what always got
me
was that gaze of pure violet blue.

It got me on Day One. From the moment I arrived at the University of Oregon, in August 1955, I loved Bowerman. And feared him. And neither of these initial impulses ever went away, they were always there between us. I never stopped loving the man, and I never found a way to shed the old fear. Sometimes the fear was less, sometimes more, sometimes it went right down to my shoes, which he'd probably cobbled with his bare hands. Love and fear—the same binary emotions governed the dynamic between me and my father. I wondered sometimes if it was mere coincidence that Bowerman and my father—both cryptic, both alpha, both inscrutable—were both named Bill.

And yet the two men were driven by different demons. My father, the son of a butcher, was always chasing respectability, whereas Bowerman, whose father had been governor of Oregon, didn't give a darn for respectability. He was also the grandson of legendary pioneers, men and women who'd walked the full length of the Oregon Trail. When they stopped walking they founded a tiny town in eastern Oregon, which they called Fossil. Bowerman spent his early days there, and compulsively returned. Part of his mind was always back in Fossil, which was funny, because there was something distinctly fossilized about him. Hard, brown, ancient, he possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness, a blend of grit and integrity and calcified stubbornness that was rare in Lyndon Johnson's America. Today it's all but extinct.

He was a war hero, too. Of course he was. As a major in the Tenth Mountain Division, stationed high in the Italian Alps, Bowerman had shot at men, and plenty had shot back. (His aura was so intimidating, I don't recall anyone ever asking if he'd actually killed a man.) In case you were tempted to overlook the war and the Tenth Mountain Division and their central role in his psyche, Bowerman always carried a battered leather briefcase with a Roman numeral X engraved in gold on the side.

The most famous track coach in America, Bowerman never
considered himself a track coach. He detested being called Coach. Given his background, his makeup, he naturally thought of track as a means to an end. He called himself a “Professor of Competitive Responses,” and his job, as he saw it, and often described it, was to get you ready for the struggles and competitions that lay ahead, far beyond Oregon.

Despite this lofty mission, or perhaps because of it, the facilities at Oregon were Spartan. Dank wooden walls, lockers that hadn't been painted in decades. The lockers had no door, just slats to separate your stuff from the next guy's. We hung our clothes on nails.
Rusty
nails. We sometimes ran without socks. Complaining never crossed our minds. We saw our coach as a general, to be obeyed quickly and blindly. In my mind he was Patton with a stopwatch.

That is, when he wasn't a god.

Like all the ancient gods, Bowerman lived on a mountaintop. His majestic ranch sat on a peak high above the campus. And when reposing on his private Olympus, he could be vengeful as the gods. One story, told to me by a teammate, brought this fact pointedly home.

Apparently there was a truck driver who often dared to disturb the peace on Bowerman Mountain. He took turns too fast, and frequently knocked over Bowerman's mailbox. Bowerman scolded the trucker, threatened to punch him in the nose, and so forth, but the trucker paid no heed. He drove as he pleased, day after day. So Bowerman rigged the mailbox with explosives. Next time the trucker knocked it over—boom. When the smoke cleared, the trucker found his truck in pieces, its tires reduced to ribbons. He never again touched Bowerman's mailbox.

A man like that—you didn't want to get on his wrong side. Especially if you were a gangly middle-distance runner from the Portland suburbs. I always tiptoed around Bowerman. Even so, he'd often lose patience with me, though I remember only one time when he got really sore.

I was a sophomore, being worn down by my schedule. Class all morning, practice all afternoon, homework all night. One day, fearing that I was coming down with the flu, I stopped by Bowerman's office to say that I wouldn't be able to practice that afternoon. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Who's the coach of this team?”

“You are.”

“Well, as coach of this team I'm telling you to get your ass out there. And by the way . . . we're going to have a time trial today.”

I was close to tears. But I held it together, channeled all my emotion into my run, and posted one of my best times of the year. As I walked off the track I glowered at Bowerman.
Happy now, you son of a—?
He looked at me, checked his stopwatch, looked at me again, nodded. He'd tested me. He'd broken me down and remade me, just like a pair of shoes. And I'd held up. Thereafter, I was truly one of his Men of Oregon. From that day on, I was a tiger.

I heard back right away from Bowerman. He wrote to say he was coming to Portland the following week, for the Oregon Indoor. He invited me to lunch at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, where the team would be staying.

January 25, 1964. I was terribly nervous as the waitress showed us to our table. I recall that Bowerman ordered a hamburger, and I said croakily: “Make it two.”

We spent a few minutes catching up. I told Bowerman about my trip around the world. Kobe, Jordan, the Temple of Nike. Bowerman was especially interested in my time in Italy, which, despite his brushes with death, he remembered fondly.

At last he came to the point. “Those Japanese shoes,” he said. “They're pretty good. How about letting me in on the deal?”

I looked at him. In? Deal? It took me a moment to absorb and understand what he was saying. He didn't merely want to buy a dozen Tigers for his team, he wanted to become—my partner? Had God spoken from the whirlwind and asked to be my partner, I wouldn't have been more surprised. I stammered, and stuttered, and said yes.

I put out my hand.

But then I pulled it back. “What kind of partnership did you have in mind?” I asked.

I was daring to negotiate with God. I couldn't believe my nerve. Nor could Bowerman. He looked bemused. “Fifty-fifty,” he said.

“Well, you'll have to put up half the money.”

“Of course.”

“I figure the first order will be for a thousand dollars. Your half will be five hundred.”

“I'm good for that.”

When the waitress dropped off the check for the two hamburgers, we split that, too. Fifty-fifty.

I REMEMBER IT
as the next day, or maybe sometime in the next few days or weeks, and yet all the documents contradict my memory. Letters, diaries, appointment books—they all definitively show it taking place much later. But I remember what I remember, and there must be a reason why I remember it the way I do. As we left the restaurant that day, I can
see
Bowerman putting on his ball cap, I can
see
him straightening his string tie, I can
hear
him saying: “I'll need you to meet my lawyer, John Jaqua. He can help us get this in writing.”

Either way. Days later, weeks later, years later, the meeting happened like this.

I pulled up to Bowerman's stone fortress and marveled, as I always did, at the setting. Remote. Not many folks made it out there. Along Coburg Road to Mackenzie Drive until you found a winding dirt lane that went a couple miles up the hills into the woods. Eventually you came to a clearing with rosebushes, solitary trees, and a pleasant house, small but solid, with a stone face. Bowerman had built it with his bare hands. As I slipped my Valiant into park, I wondered how on earth he'd managed all that backbreaking labor by himself.
The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

Wrapped around the house was a wide wooden porch, with several camp chairs—he'd built that by himself, too. It afforded sweeping views of the McKenzie River, and it wouldn't have taken much convincing to have me believing Bowerman had laid the river between its banks as well.

Now I saw Bowerman standing on the porch. He squinted and strode down the steps toward my car. I don't remember a lot of small talk as he got in. I just slammed it into drive and set a course for his lawyer's house.

Besides being Bowerman's lawyer and best friend, Jaqua was his next-door neighbor. He owned fifteen hundred acres at the base of Bowerman's mountain, prime bottomland right on the McKenzie. Driving there, I couldn't imagine how this was going to be good for me. I got along fine with Bowerman, sure, and we had ourselves a deal, but lawyers always messed things up. Lawyers specialized in messing things up. And best friend–lawyers . . . ?

Bowerman, meanwhile, was doing nothing to put my mind at ease. He sat ramrod straight and watched the scenery.