Buck Naked: The Adventures of Nike’s Creator

At the time Phil sat down with me for this interview, I couldn’t help thinking about statistics. 

With the two of us alone in the room, the average net worth was something like $3.5 billion.  – JDW

Behind every champion is the willingness to risk defeat at the hope of claiming victory. The willingness to try new things and accept new challenges. If you’re driven to becoming the best that you can be, now is the time to follow your dream to Nike. – from a Nike employment ad in The Sunday Oregonian.
They called him “The White Mole” and now he is the most powerful man in sports. He borrowed $37 from his father to buy his first shoe samples and today he is a multi-billionaire.
He has amassed the greatest fortune ever from athletics and he doesn’t like to talk about his money. He changed the face of entertainment, of culture, and he won’t talk about his power. Which is not to say he doesn’t like money and power. It’s just that affluence and influence are not his finish line.
The Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Nike, Inc., hates talking about all that media trash, so we talked sports. We sat in a conference room on the company’s stupifyingly marvelous Beaverton campus, which is, quite simply, a work of art. It must be noted: the NBA’s Chicago Bulls were practicing in the company gymnasium.
Old friends call him, “Buck.” Buck loves to win and he hates to lose. Hates to lose. We talked about why he loves to win so much.
“The best thing in sports is winning,” Buck says, “and the second best thing is losing.” Nike is about having fun. And losing is no fun. Winning, winning is fun. Philip H. Knight spent too much time of his youth watching the behinds of faster boys disappear, fading into the distance.
Winning fuels the man. Nike is his revenge.

He wore Converse sneakers as a kid. His first pair of track shoes were emblazoned with three stripes. And the Nike legend goes like this. In the Beginning, there was Knight. Knight ran the mile for the Fighting Ducks, the Mighty Men of Oregon. Gang Green. His personal best rests forever at 4:10.
And Knight wrote a term paper at the Stanford School of Business for Professor Frank Shallenberger, on the subject of starting a small business. Buck received an “A” for suggesting athletic shoes could be designed in America, produced in Asia at low cost and imported into the United States. Where they could be sold at prices lower than the most popular athletic shoes of the time, made in West Germany.
Knight went to Japan, hiked Mt. Fuji, a trek the Japanese believe makes one wiser, and visited the Onitsuka shoe factory in Kobe where sneakers were made. In February, 1964, Buck took his first order of Tiger shoes. His new company, Blue Ribbon Sports, did $20,000 worth of business that first year, showing a $3,240 profit.
Headquartered in his mother’s laundry room, selling shoes part-time out of the back of a station wagon to athletes at track meets, Buck finally quit his day job as a CPA cum university teacher in 1969. He was the best salesman Tiger ever had. By 1971, Buck’s business booming, the partnership dissolved.
Knight was forced to create a new shoe line, one named after the winged Greek goddess of victory. Nike: a perfect brand name and a fortuitous symbol. Nike’s annual sales approach $4.5 billion. That’s a lot of winning.
The fifty-six-year-old Knight claims he never did a crazy thing in his life until he founded Nike. Buck is not Nike, but everything Nike is reflects the man. Behind those dark glasses, Knight is a visionary. The man can see a long way off.
“This is one weird scientist,” Michael “Air” Jordan once said.
Jeff Johnson, Nike’s first employee, remembers Knight as normal as the next guy. “I never gave much credence to the weird stories,” Johnson offers, “because weird had to be just a disguise he was hiding behind.”
“The guy’s weird. He’s strange,” offers Nelson Farris, Nike’s Director of Corporate Education. “He is truly brilliant and every brilliant guy has his quirky side.”
Knight has been called exceptionally private, reclusive, shy, enigmatic, spacey. He is a thinker. He is a big sports fan. The hour we spent together he laughed and laughed and laughed.
If I was him, I’d be laughing, too.
I hold the man in the highest respect. Knight is a stand-up guy with a deeply sentimental streak and a defiant empathy for the underdog. He is neither bully nor anyone to mess with. Loyal. Buck has long been a hero of mine.
And you can tell a lot about a man by looking at his heroes.
Bill Bowerman, legendary educator at the University of Oregon where Knight toiled on the hamburger squad, is the co-founder of Nike. The two men shook hands and each chipped in $500 for the first shipment of a thousand pairs of Tiger Shoes.
Bowerman brought jogging to America. And Nike’s address is One Bowerman Drive.
“Bowerman was the best track coach who ever lived, which is covering a lot of territory,” Knight says. “Bowerman was a great teacher, in the purest sense of the word, and he was the biggest influence in my life, outside my family. He taught me how to compete.
“Bowerman used to say, ‘I am a professor of competitive responses, not a track coach.’ His point was true. Focus on big events, prepare physically, emotionally and intellectually, and get the best of yourself. Best education I ever had came on Hayward Field.”
Oregon’s Steve Prefontaine, the greatest distance runner in U.S. history, was Nike’s first endorsement athlete.
“Pre embodied everything a competitor should be. He was ferocious. He was the Bowerman spirit epitomized on the running track,” Knight says. “We still raise Pre’s name around here a lot. His is the only personality statue on our campus.”

Joan Benoit Samuelson, America’s fastest female marathoner, herself a winged goddess, is the first finisher in the first women’s marathon in Olympic history.
“Obviously, you have touched on my very favorites. Bowerman, Prefontaine, Benoit,” Knight offers. “Joanie’s win in the 1984 Games is the single most moving moment in track and field for me. Right off the charts. We’ve been with her from the time she worked in our tiny research lab in Exeter, New Hampshire.
“Joanie won that gold medal against big odds. She had surgery in the spring and there was some question, could she make the team? She made the team and everybody worried, could she stay with the Grete Waitzs and Ingrid Kristiansens?
“Well, Joanie took off on her own and never looked back. She crossed the finish line, the first winner, gold medalist, of the first Olympic women’s marathon. Then she grabbed the American flag. It was enormously moving. That doesn’t define Joan Benoit, but when you say Joan Benoit, that incident stands out above all the others. Talk about Nike and the pride it has in athletes who have worn the stripe in battle, she stands near the top of the list. We named the buildings here, and one was named after her.”
Mrs. Samuelson’s Nike building, home to the richly paneled Boston Pub as well as the employee restaurant and gift shop, is sometimes called The Student Union.
“Phil Knight and Nike have treated me like family,” Samuelson says, “so it’s like being invited into their house. I always feel included. Knight has honored athletes throughout the years. He’s a man who went on a mission to help athletes and changed society. He never lost sight of his humble beginnings and the people who have touched his life.”
Turns out Knight played more than a spectator’s role when the single most moving moment in his track and field life unfolded.
Outside the Olympic stadium in Los Angeles, Nike artfully covered the entire side of a many-storied brick building with a colorful mural. Huge. The last thing the marathoners would see before entering the tunnel to the finish line. A mural of Benoit winning the Boston Marathon. More than just another shoe advertisement, the wall art was testimony to Nike’s confidence in Little Joanie.
Nike’s prayers, too.

“That mural symbolized my motivation,” Mrs. Samuelson says. “I wanted to reciprocate to Nike and all the people who supported me. Like Phil Knight. I focused on that wall, and it helped me through all my trials. When I trained, I kept that image in mind. I never lost sight of what the mural meant, who it represented.”
They also named an office building after Alberto Salazar. The Rookie, America’s fastest male marathoner, once the hardest working man in sports, is now a veteran Nike employee. Still hard at work.
“Knight’s love for sports most strikes me,” Salazar says. “Amazing really. Despite the level of success he’s attained, he has never forgotten his roots. He is still really grounded in sports.”
At its best, like sports, Nike is a mutual love fest.
“Alberto is a ferocious competitor who won’t quit,” Buck explains. “He is running a lot of miles and he still has high ambitions. Last year Alberto won the Friendship Marathon in South Africa over 53 miles. He’s still running very well and competes as good as anybody.”
The buildings on the monumental Nike campus are named after 35-year-old people. “They did a lot,” Knight says simply. With conviction. There is, just an aside, a new building on the University of Oregon campus named the Knight Library.

Buck admires ferocity in battle.
“Someone once said to Jimmy Connors, ‘You’re a ferocious competitor.’ And he said, ‘It isn’t that I like to win so much, it’s just I am afraid of losing,’ Knight explains. “I think they all have that.”
How motivating is fear to Knight? “It’s huge,” he laughs heartily. “You set certain goals, but you really don’t want to lose. I don’t mean fear in the sense you’re timid and shaking and unwilling to accept challenges. It’s a situation where you’re afraid of letting yourself down or letting down your friends and acquaintances and associates. The most horrible moment in any business, especially this business which revolves around a huge amount of emotion and emotional attachment to a company and its products, is when we have to lay people off. It’s just,” Buck searches for the right word, “it’s just awful. Just rips at you.
“And that’s a fear thing. I don’t want to go through that again. Yet I know I will. Because you can’t be aggressive and go after your goals, if you are afraid. You just to try not to overreach yourself.
“Talk about being afraid to lose,” Knight continues. “I can remember when we went public in 1980, something like 7500 people bought stock in Nike. That original list sat on the top of my credenza for three years. That list was the last thing I would look at when I sat down at my desk every day. Every day, I thought, ‘They put all their savings into this company.’ He laughs heartily. ‘My God, I can’t let all these people down.'”

Mary Decker Slaney doesn’t have her name on a building.
“She’s worn Nike shoes and she’s not worn Nike shoes. She’s an athlete we are real proud of. Mary overcame tremendous adversity to set the records she set. I like her a lot. She obviously didn’t get the gold medal she wanted and so, when most people think of her, they recall her fall at the Olympics, but she accomplished an enormous amount. She held, what, every American record and many world records as well. Mary’s been a great competitor.”
Slaney might own a building at Nike’s headquarters but for injury. And a couple bad breaks. Knight hates to see athletes lose the opportunity to compete.
“Twenty years ago, another Oregonian who didn’t fit the mold, Steve Prefontaine, fought a battle with AAU, the governing body that ruled amateur athletics in those days, and Nike was at his side,” Knight said in a recent defense of an athlete’s Olympic team berth. “A few years after that, we were there to support the rights of women to run long-distance events when the conventional wisdom was against us. The heritage of Nike is to support the rights of individual athletes.”
At Nike, anti-establishment tendencies make sense.
“We watched the establishment committees, ruling bodies over thirty, forty, fifty years, continually make decisions which basically harmed the athletes rather than helped them,” Buck says. “And, it’s a sad commentary, but true, that the situation has been so bad for so long.
“Essentially that’s what they did with Butch Reynolds. They found him guilty, and banned him from the Olympic Games. And, lo and behold, he wasn’t guilty. You can never give Butch Reynolds his medals back or his Olympic opportunity. A terrible thing.
“Tonya Harding wasn’t a very popular figure, all the media was against her, but the process really alarmed us. We thought somebody should stand up and say so, so we did. I like to think that’s who we are. Our support for Tonya was typical of Nike.”
Typically, Nike helped pioneer professional road running. God knows it hasn’t gone anywhere.
“Kinda has,” Knight demurs. “Athletes are getting paid for performance, they are making a living. The money’s above the table, out in front of everybody. It’s open. That’s certainly better than it was.”

How do we re-invent track and field?
“We’ve tried to make our peace with TAC, with some success,” Buck answers. “When you look at the position of track and field in the world today, it’s tragic. Much of the problem, more than just blaming it on some U.S. officials, stems from the very top, the international level, where track and field is not managed well. That mismanagement filters down. You’ve got a situation where our sport is really hurting in an age when sports in general are booming.
“We try to help from time to time. We hosted ‘a meeting of the minds’ of some of the top people. We’ve encouraged televising track and field. We are as frustrated as you that we’ve made different efforts to improve the situation and we really haven’t found a formula yet. It’s more complicated than getting women’s distance running into the Olympics. But we’ll keep trying and we’ll make some progress. I’m just not sure when.
“There is also a tradition of not looking after the sport,” Knight points out. “Not benefitting the athletes. So, there’s a certain mindset that doesn’t even know what we’re talking about.
“Ironically, when the 1996 Olympics come to Atlanta, one of the prime television shows will be track and field. Then it will just disappear for another four years.”
His favorite athlete to watch on TV? Wouldn’t be polite to mention just one, but Knight’s office sits high atop, the fourth floor actually, of the John McEnroe Building.
“One of the great athletes of the sixties was Arnold Palmer, who created this enormous following, Arnies’ Army. It didn’t matter if Nicklaus won more tournaments, Palmer was more popular. And part of his appeal was he wore his emotions on his sleeves and he competed hard and everybody lived and died with those emotions on his sleeve. And Palmer was always just short of throwing a club. He never threw a club that I remember, but you could feel he wanted to sometimes.
“John McEnroe threw the club,” Knight notes. “His emotions were out there for everybody to see. He was enormously talented, but so are a lot of them. I liked his mind. He was mentally tough and a very creative player. Rose to the occasion, better than anybody of his era. John would have the tantrums on the court, which offended people, but off the court he did a lot of decent things without much publicity.”

McEnroe was an artist. So, too, is Knight. Buck Artist, sounds like a new superhero.
“I prefer to think artistically now, rather than financially,” he’s said. “The real test of a businessman is if he’s an artist.”
Grow or die, could be the man’s motto. Nike is his painting.
“Part of the art is a response to media,” Buck explains. “Particularly television which consistently portrays the businessman as some sort of evil money grubber. They say something like two-thirds of all the murders on television dramas are committed by businessmen. It’s really too bad that’s the case, because the businessmen I admire, Akio Morita of Sony, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, G.E’s Jack Welch, they are creators. They are artists in many ways. The businessman as an artist is a theme you don’t hear, and I think it’s an honest theme people should be aware of. So when we talk about what we’re trying to do as businessmen, and businesswomen, around here, I paint that picture a lot.” No pun intended.
Nike is Knight’s Great American Novel, the final chapter yet written.
Having finally reached the metaphorical mountain top, I ask the enlightening Knight if he has any message for the running world?
“Yeah. Keep the faith,” he says, always exhorting the home team to greater heights. “The sport will transcend its difficult times to be bigger and better than ever.”
Coach Phil Knight never stops competing. Never stops. The target now is to invent a new game. The end of the big race is far off. Plenty of time on the clock yet to run.
Remember one thing. At Nike, there is still no passing the Buck.
Running Times, September 1995
***
They called him “Swathmaster.” In 1979, Jack D. Welch & Dr. E.C. Frederick sold Running magazine to Nike, where Jack became the company’s second Director of Public Relations. Two weeks after a triumphant 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Phil Knight dropped Welch from the team. Knight – a man who would throw a club – broke seven telephones that year and Welch still wears Nike.