Phil Knight

Knight was a middle-distance runner at Oregon who wrote a Stanford business-school paper in 1962 arguing that Japanese running shoes could do to Adidas what Japanese cameras had done to German ones. He then went to Kobe, told the executives at Onitsuka that he represented an American distributor called Blue Ribbon Sports, and took an order. The company did not exist until he got home. His old coach Bill Bowerman put up half of the first thousand dollars, and for eight years Knight sold Tigers out of the boot of a Plymouth Valiant at track meets while keeping his day job as an accountant, because the shoe business could not pay him.

The decision that made Nike was forced rather than chosen. Onitsuka, suspicious that its distributor wanted more, began courting other American partners, and in 1971 Knight had a swoosh drawn for thirty-five dollars and a name picked from a dream one of his employees had, and shipped shoes under his own label before the split was final. The lawsuit that followed nearly ended the company; the verdict in 1974 that let Blue Ribbon keep its designs is the reason there is a Nike at all. What followed is the part everyone knows — the waffle sole, the Jordan contract Knight almost did not approve, and a demand-creation budget that outgrew the shoes it was supposed to sell.

The record has its darker passages. Through the 1990s Nike became the public face of sweatshop manufacturing, and Knight's 1998 speech admitting that the swoosh had become 'synonymous with slave wages' was the first time the company took the criticism as its own problem rather than a supplier's. He was also slow to hand over: the 2004 succession to an outsider lasted eighteen months, and the company reverted to insiders afterwards. Shoe Dog, his memoir, is unusually honest about how close the whole thing came to failing, and is the source most of this case leans on.