Shoe Dog (6 page)

Amid the booming silence I kept my eyes on the road and mulled over Bowerman's eccentric personality, which carried over to everything he did. He always went against the grain. Always. For example, he was the first college coach in America to emphasize rest, to place as much value on recovery as on work. But when he worked you, brother, he worked you. Bowerman's strategy for running the mile was simple. Set a fast pace for the first two laps, run the third as hard as you can, then triple your speed on the fourth. There was a Zen-like quality to this strategy, because it was impossible. And yet it worked. Bowerman coached more sub-four-minute milers than anybody, ever. I wasn't one of them, however, and this day I wondered if I was going to fall short once again in that crucial final lap.

We found Jaqua standing out on his porch. I'd met him before, at a track meet or two, but I'd never gotten a really good look at him. Though bespectacled, and sneaking up on middle age, he didn't square
with my idea of a lawyer. He was too sturdy, too well made. I learned later that he'd been a star tailback in high school, and one of the best hundred-meter men ever at Pomona College. He still had that telltale athletic power. It came right through his handshake. “Buckaroo,” he said, grabbing me by the arm and guiding me into his living room, “I was going to wear your shoes today but I got cow shit all over 'em!”

The day was typical for Oregon in January. Along with the spitting rain, a deep, wet cold permeated everything. We arranged ourselves on chairs around Jaqua's fireplace, the biggest fireplace I ever saw, big enough to roast an elk. Roaring flames were spinning around several logs the size of hydrants. From a side door came Jaqua's wife carrying a tray. Mugs of hot chocolate. She asked if I'd like whipped cream or marshmallows.
Neither, thank you, ma'am.
My voice was two octaves higher than normal. She tilted her head and gave me a pitying look.
Boy, they're going to skin you alive.

Jaqua took a sip, wiped the cream from his lips, and began. He talked a bit about Oregon track, and about Bowerman. He was wearing dirty blue jeans and a wrinkled flannel shirt, and I couldn't stop thinking how unlawyerly he looked.

Now Jaqua said he'd never seen Bowerman this pumped up about an idea. I liked the sound of that. “But,” he added, “fifty-fifty is not so hot for the Coach. He doesn't want to be in charge, and he doesn't want to be at loggerheads with you, ever. How about we make it fifty-one–forty-nine? We give you operating control?”

His whole demeanor was that of a man trying to help, to make this situation a win for everyone. I trusted him.

“Fine by me,” I said. “That . . . all?”

He nodded. “Deal?” he said. “Deal,” I said. We all shook hands, signed the papers, and I was now officially in a legal and binding partnership with Almighty Bowerman. Mrs. Jaqua asked if I'd care for more hot chocolate. Yes, please, ma'am. And do you have any marshmallows?

LATER THAT DAY
I wrote Onitsuka and asked if I could be the exclusive distributor of Tiger shoes in the western United States. Then I asked them to send three hundred pairs of Tigers, ASAP. At $3.33 a pair that was roughly $1,000 worth of shoes. Even with Bowerman's kick-in, that was more than I had on hand. Again I put the touch on my father. This time he balked. He didn't mind getting me started, but he didn't want me coming back to him year after year. Besides, he'd thought this shoe thing was a lark. He hadn't sent me to Oregon and Stanford to become a door-to-door shoe salesman, he said. “Jackassing around,” that's what he called it. “Buck,” he said, “how long do you think you're going to keep jackassing around with these shoes?”

I shrugged. “I don't know, Dad.”

I looked at my mother. As usual, she said nothing. She simply smiled, vaguely, prettily. I got my shyness from her, that was plain. I often wished I'd also gotten her looks.

The first time my father laid eyes on my mother, he thought she was a mannequin. He was walking by the only department store in Roseburg and there she was, standing in the window, modeling an evening gown. Realizing that she was flesh-and-blood, he went straight home and begged his sister to find out the name of that gorgeous gal in the window. His sister found out. That's Lota Hatfield, she said.

Eight months later my father made her Lota Knight.

At the time my father was on his way to becoming an established lawyer, on his way to escaping the terrible poverty that defined his childhood. He was twenty-eight years old. My mother, who had just turned twenty-one, had grown up even poorer than he had. (Her father was a railroad conductor.) Poverty was one of the few things they had in common.

In many ways they were the classic case of opposites attracting. My mother, tall, stunning, a lover of the outdoors, was always seeking places to regain some lost inner peace. My father, small, average with thick rimless glasses to correct his 20-450 vision, was engaged in a
daily, noisome battle to overcome his past, to become respectable, mainly through academics and hard work. Second in his law school class, he never tired of complaining about the one C on his transcript. (He felt the professor penalized him for his political beliefs.)

When their diametrically opposed personalities caused problems, my parents would fall back on the thing they had most deeply in common, their belief that family comes first. When that consensus didn't work, there were difficult days. And nights. My father turned to drink. My mother turned to stone.

Her façade could be deceiving, however. Dangerously so. People assumed from her silence that she was meek, and she'd often remind them, in startling ways, that she was not. For instance, there was the time my father refused to cut back on his salt, despite a doctor's warnings that his blood pressure was up. My mother simply filled all the saltshakers in the house with powdered milk. And there was the day my sisters and I were bickering and clamoring for lunch, despite her pleas for quiet. My mother suddenly let out a savage scream and hurled an egg salad sandwich against the wall. She then walked out of the house, across the lawn, and disappeared. I'll never forget the sight of that egg salad slowly dripping down the wall while my mother's sundress dissolved in the distant trees.

Perhaps nothing ever revealed my mother's true nature like the frequent drills she put me through. As a young girl she'd witnessed a house in her neighborhood burn to the ground; one of the people inside had been killed. So she often tied a rope to the post of my bed and made me use it to rappel out of my second-floor window. While she timed me. What must the neighbors have thought? What must I have thought? Probably this: Life is dangerous. And this: We must always be prepared.

And this: My mother loves me.

When I was twelve, Les Steers and his family moved in across the street, next to my best friend Jackie Emory. One day Mr. Steers set up a high-jump course in Jackie's backyard, and Jackie and I did
battle. Each of us maxed out at four feet six inches. “Maybe one of you will break the world record one day,” Mr. Steers said. (I learned later that the world record at that time, six feet eleven inches, belonged to Mr. Steers.)

Out of nowhere my mother appeared. (She was wearing gardening slacks and a summery blouse.) Uh-oh, I thought, we're in trouble. She looked over the scene, looked at me and Jackie. Looked at Mr. Steers. “Move the bar up,” she said.

She slipped off her shoes, toed her mark, and burst forward, clearing five feet easily.

I don't know if I ever loved her more.

In the moment I thought she was cool. Soon after, I realized she was also a closet track-ophile.

It happened my sophomore year. I developed a painful wart on the bottom of my foot. The podiatrist recommended surgery, which would mean a lost season of track. My mother had two words for that podiatrist. “Un. Acceptable.” She marched down to the drugstore and bought a vial of wart remover, which she applied each day to my foot. Then, every two weeks, she took a carving knife and pared away a sliver of the wart, until it was all gone. That spring I posted the best times of my life.

So I shouldn't have been too surprised by my mother's next move when my father accused me of jackassing around. Casually she opened her purse and took out seven dollars. “I'd like to purchase one pair of Limber Ups, please,” she said, loud enough for him to hear.

Was it my mother's way of digging at my father? A show of loyalty to her only son? An affirmation of her love of track? I don't know. But no matter. It never failed to move me, the sight of her standing at the stove or the kitchen sink, cooking dinner or washing dishes in a pair of Japanese running shoes, size 6.

PROBABLY BECAUSE HE
didn't want any trouble with my mother, my father loaned me the thousand bucks. This time the shoes came right away.

April 1964. I rented a truck, drove down to the warehouse district, and the customs clerk handed over ten enormous cartons. Again I hurried home, carried the cartons down to the basement, ripped them open. Each carton held thirty pairs of Tigers, and each pair was wrapped in cellophane. (Shoe boxes would have been too costly.) Within minutes the basement was filled with shoes. I admired them, studied them, played with them, rolled around on top of them. Then I stacked them out of the way, arranging them neatly around the furnace and under the Ping-Pong table, as far as possible from the washer and dryer, so my mother could still do laundry. Lastly I tried on a pair. I ran circles around the basement. I jumped for joy.

Days later came a letter from Mr. Miyazaki. Yes, he said,
you
can be the distributor for Onitsuka in the West.

That was all I needed. To my father's horror, and my mother's subversive delight, I quit my job at the accounting firm, and all that spring I did nothing but sell shoes out of the trunk of my Valiant.

MY SALES STRATEGY
was simple, and I thought rather brilliant. After being rejected by a couple of sporting goods stores (“Kid, what this world does not need is another track shoe!”), I drove all over the Pacific Northwest, to various track meets. Between races I'd chat up the coaches, the runners, the fans, and show them my wares. The response was always the same. I couldn't write orders fast enough.

Driving back to Portland I'd puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I'd been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I'd despised it to boot. I'd been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I'd felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn't selling. I
believed
in running. I believed that if people got out
and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves.

Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.

Sometimes people wanted my shoes so badly that they'd write me, or phone me, saying they'd heard about the new Tigers and just had to have a pair, could I please send them,
COD
? Without my even trying, my mail order business was born.

Sometimes people would simply show up at my parents' house. Every few nights the doorbell would ring, and my father, grumbling, would get up from his vinyl recliner and turn down the
TV
and wonder who in the world. There on the porch would be some skinny kid with oddly muscular legs, shifty-eyed and twitchy, like a junky looking to score. “Buck here?” the kid would say. My father would call through the kitchen to my room in the servants' quarters. I'd come out, invite the kid in, show him over to the sofa, then kneel before him and measure his foot. My father, hands jammed into his pockets, would watch the whole transaction, incredulous.

Most people who came to the house had found me through word of mouth. Friend of a friend. But a few found me through my first attempt at advertising—a handout I'd designed and produced at a local print shop. Along the top, in big type, it said:
Best news in flats! Japan challenges European track shoe domination!
The handout then went on to explain:
Low Japanese labor costs make it possible for an exciting new firm to offer these shoes at the low low price of $6.95
. Along the bottom was my address and phone number. I nailed them up all over Portland.

On July 4, 1964, I sold out my first shipment. I wrote to Tiger and ordered nine hundred more. That would cost roughly three thousand dollars, which would wipe out my father's petty cash, and patience. The Bank of Dad, he said, is now closed. He did agree, grudgingly, to give me a letter of guarantee, which I took down to the First National Bank of Oregon. On the strength of my father's rep
utation, and nothing more, the bank approved the loan. My father's vaunted respectability was finally paying dividends, at least for me.

I HAD A
venerable partner, a legitimate bank, and a product that was selling itself. I was on a roll.

In fact, the shoes sold so well, I decided to hire another salesman. Maybe two. In California.

The problem was, how to get to California? I certainly couldn't afford airfare. And I didn't have time to drive. So every other weekend I'd load a duffel bag with Tigers, put on my crispest army uniform, and head out to the local air base. Seeing the uniform, the MPs would wave me onto the next military transport to San Francisco or Los Angeles, no questions asked. When I went to Los Angeles I'd save even more money by crashing with Chuck Cale, a friend from Stanford. A good friend. When I'd presented my running-shoe paper to my entrepreneurship class, Cale showed up, for moral support.

During one of those Los Angeles weekends I attended a meet at Occidental College. As always, I stood on the infield grass, letting the shoes do their magic. Suddenly a guy sauntered up and held out his hand. Twinkly eyes, handsome face. In fact, very handsome—though also sad. Despite the enameled calm of his expression, there was something sorrowful, almost tragic, around the eyes. Also, something vaguely familiar. “Phil,” he said. “Yes?” I said. “Jeff Johnson,” he said.