February 1995. Over twenty-five years have passed, so the statute of limitations has expired.
Anyway, it’s in my book. Makes a wonderful gift for runners of all ages.
Jeff Johnson, Nike’s long retired first employee, makes Phil Knight, the company’s notoriously shy and reclusive founder, look like a flashy extrovert. There would be no Nike without Johnson, who provided the name.
Without the full-length cushioned mid-sole, which Johnson invented from shower thongs, many of us would be on crutches today. He is the least known important figure in the history of the sport. And determined to stay that way.
JDW: I want to write a story about you.
JOJ: You don’t want to write a story about me.
JDW: Right. I want to write about your club.
JOJ: That’s better, but I don’t trust you. [Laughs.]
JDW: You can trust me.
JOJ: Okay.
JDW: I haven’t let you down too badly in the past.
JOJ: No. So, Knight laughed, huh? He’s having a good time?
JDW: Yeah. He admitted he’s fearful.
JOJ: Sure. Aren’t we all that way?
JDW: The good ones are.
JOJ: Fear drives us all. I don’t want to let my athletes down. Herb Elliot was afraid. He was more driven by the fear of losing than by the desire to win.
JDW: That’s true. Anyway, Knight looked absolutely normal and healthy and not at all as weird as I remember him being.
JOJ: I never gave much credence to the weird stories because weird had to be just a disguise he was hiding behind. I don’t believe people change that much.
JDW: I think the fear factor is an aspect of a lot of people’s drive.
JOJ: I suppose there are better reasons to be driven. But fear works good for me. Fear of letting somebody down. Or the fear of letting myself down or the fear of, mostly, the fear of letting other people down. I personally don’t give a shit. [Laughs.]
When I get myself in a position where people clearly are depending upon me for something, I get personally, this has nothing to do with Phil Knight, I get very uptight about trying to make sure every little thing gets done. If an enterprise does fail, then I will have at least done everything conceivable.
That even comes down to affecting my personal life in ways where I just become a complete wretch who won’t relax and won’t go out and have any fun during the period when some issue is in crisis, that I am responsible for. I just won’t take any time off. I won’t go out and be with people who want to have some kind of normal interchange, because to me that could be the moment when something needed to be tended to.
I think this fear may have been a contributing factor to the break-up of so many of the families at Nike. We might have had a lot of people like that at Nike, driven by fear, who basically said, this is the thing that defines me and I have to take care of this before I can take care of anything else, including my own family, because if I don’t take care of this then I have let so many people down, I am not worthy of my family or anything else. What happens then is they end up letting their family down.
The only guy who ever did that was Gorman. Gorman was a trooper and a soldier just like everybody else, but somehow he managed to find time to keep his family together.
We were all driven. I don’t know what drove everybody, but as much as anything, I just refused…
I remember when I was at Exeter, starting a shoe factory, being responsible for that, and having a clock running on how much money we could put into this before we went belly up. The need to turn it and make it profitable so we could stop putting money into it. Because we didn’t have the money to put into it. Essentially, between you and me, and maybe it was covered in the Swoosh book, dragging our feet on payments to Nissho-Iwai in order to finance the Exeter factory. We could only drag those so long, because if we burned that money up we’re weren’t going to have the money to pay them ever. And that would have been the end of the company. I had to make that thing get up and be profitable and it wasn’t my entire job. But it was my responsibility
I just didn’t see there was any hope. I really didn’t know how this could possibly work. I certainly didn’t know what I was doing. I just took it one day at a time and said, it’s not going to fail today. It may fail tomorrow but it won’t fail today. The next morning, I would get up and say the same thing. We’ll fake it until five o’clock.
This was people’s lives involved here, too. It wasn’t just Phil Knight we’d be letting down. We’d be letting down everybody else in the company. Mortgage payments, college, two kids’ tuition, and everything else depended on this thing staying afloat. It was a huge responsibility and, of course, Phil has felt that responsibility all of his life.
Each one of us had the ball in our hand and you could fumble it or not fumble it. At one time or another. It was a game where you had multiple balls, anyone could fumble it, and lose the game for everybody. Gorman could have sunk us in Korea, I could have sunk us in Exeter. There have been several people at several points in time who could have sunk the whole enterprise and just sucked it up and didn’t.
Or lucked through. Whatever. So much of that came from Phil. In the sense of our affection for him, or the unreasonable amount of trust he put in us, it inspired us not to let him down. If he had been a prick who micromanaged everything we did, you might have said, “Oh, fuck him. I have somebody else participating in here. I’ll do my job, I’ll put in my 9 to 5, I’ll do the best I can.” Basically sharing the responsibility, so if it fails, then you feel like you’ve shared the responsibility with the other guy. But Phil was so distant, so hands off, so remote, the whole thing was in your lap and you knew it. There was no dodging that. It was your own baby. If it sank, there was nobody you could go crying to, except your own ass.
It wasn’t like you were going to leave and get a real job somewhere else. [Laughs.]
Even if I had another talent which has yet to be identified at this distant point in my life, I didn’t have a whole lot of other interests. I might have been able to do something else, but I certainly wouldn’t have had as much fun or felt as much in synch with it as I did with a running shoe company and athletes and chasing the three-stripe guys.
Now that was a mission. The quest for the holy-grail-type of occupation, that wasn’t a job.
The quest came from Phil to some extent but it also came from the rest of us. All I ever cared about when I was a kid, even in junior high, all I ever cared about was running and racing and competition. Going into a job situation which was basically running and racing and competing against other guys who run and race in the sense of their products, it was just such a logical extension of all I ever cared about it. Some of it came from Phil, but much of it came from my personal background.
We were certainly used to getting our butts kicked. We could’ve gotten our butts kicked again, but we certainly weren’t going to drop out of the race. If you want to beat the analogy to death. We might lose the race but, goddamn it, we were going to hang in there to the fucking finish.
JDW: None of you guys were winners.
JOJ: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! That’s a good way to put it. A collection of losers, if there ever was one.
We were certainly able to take our lumps. Maybe the fact that we were losers sustained us, because there were some hard times, and there were some definite losses, and there were some turning points, like Tiger pulling the contract in ’71, ’72.
I remember guys who were with us then- I remember one in particular – who were really winners, really cool guys, really sharp, the kind of guys we really tried to feel we should be more like. They were professional, they looked sharp, they said the right thing. They combed their hair in the morning, they shaved, they looked sharp. Had the right shoes on the right feet, that kind of stuff, unlike the rest of us bumpkins. Whenever there was a major, major crisis, those guys left. They knew a sinking ship when they saw one, and they went out and got real jobs.
The rest of us sucked it up, accepted our beating, and went on. I guess we were used to that. The fact that we were losers, we could handle defeat. We didn’t like it, but we could handle it and we could go on. It certainly never occurred to us to go out and get a responsible job, a real job, in a company that was stable.
That was the word we often heard, “you guys are just too unstable. I’m not comfortable here. Good luck. I love you all and you’re great guys but this is just too unstable for me. I can’t sleep at night.”
Just another beating for us. We’re used to it. We were resilient. When you are a 4:11 miler at Oregon, you’ve got to be resilient. That’s what Knight was. You got to be resilient because there’s about 900 guys better than you are.
In the Bowerman era, 4:11 is the water boy.
And I was worse than that in college. I was on the hamburger squad at Stanford.
JDW: And then you found the finish line.
JOJ: If I had found a finish line, I wouldn’t be out here. I am somewhat suffering because I am a creature of home and hearth. Basically, if I had found the finish line, I would still be in New Hampshire. I wouldn’t be out here living in a dive nine months a year in a state I can barely tolerate, up to my asshole in people, and stoplights and boring unchanging weather when people are telling me how wonderful it is back in Lebanon all the time. My neighbors will call and tell me about the latest snowstorm, the latest wild animals… so definitely, I haven’t found the finish line.
Or if I’ve found it, it’s back home, and as nice as it would be to take a break and sit there and watch a couple more movies and take a few swims and go out for a walk in the woods, I haven’t crossed the finish line yet, that’s basically it.
Setting up the club was a sense of responsibility ultimately. A sense of recognizing through a young friend’s experience, the difficulty of trying to find a satisfactory situation to run as a post-graduate. When you start to realize, you have to go to a decent climate with available facilities, where there is a dedicated, full-time coach, where there’s good people to train with, you put all those four variables up there, you are down to about zero options. You are basically dealing with some serious compromise someplace.
My friend found a great coach in a very cold climate. She found pieces of the whole puzzle, but she could never put the thing together. Maybe she’s found it now. I became acutely aware of how desperate the situation really is out there. I guess I’d known before, but watching her struggle, trying to find a place that was for her totally comfortable, I just said, “shit, this can’t be too hard.”
I have been so blessed by always being at those intersections, being exposed to Jack Daniels for all these years, and Ned Frederick and the whole Nike experience and all the athletes I’ve met and all the coaches and Bowerman and having been a runner myself, I just feel, you know, I could put one of these things together. I am not that great, but how great do you have to be? There’s nothing out there. The Reebok Enclave is about it for middle distance running in this country. That’s about it. And that’s a great situation. There should be a dozen more of those.
So, I figured, what the hell, maybe I’ll do this. What became kind of an itch to try to experience coaching at this very high level evolved into a sense of responsibility. I really had to do it. I would have been disappointed in myself if I hadn’t done it. I mentioned that to [David] Chang once and he used the phrase, noblesse oblige, which I hadn’t remembered or heard for ages and ages, but that’s basically it. It was a obligation of the nobility, to the extent my life has exposed me to this all along, I am the perfect person to do it. I understand it. I get it. Pretty much. I think. At least as well as anybody else does.
I think I understand the sport. I think I understand what athletes are going through. When they train and when they race. I think I am a party to the obsession they struggle under and I recognize where lies the line between proper and obsessive training. I can try to exert some kind of external influence on the great talents of the world that maybe from time to time are inclined to self-destruct, and help them through that.
That’s all they really need. Bowerman, Tom Fleming, virtually any coach you talk to about his great athletes, will say his main function is pulling in the reins. I think Dick Brown said the same thing about Mary Slaney. The only skill a coach brings to an athlete is knowing when it’s time to say “Whoa. Stop now. Don’t go off and run those extra quarters. That’s not going to do you any good today.” The athletes probably know that intellectually, but emotionally they are driven to run those extra miles because they think it makes them special.
Maybe they are afraid. The fear of not running, to take that responsibility on themselves to say I shouldn’t do this, is too fiercesome. They need somebody to take the responsibility of the decision for them. I’ve been there. I’ve seen that. I’ve done that. Lived there myself, in that obsessive world of doing too much. I think I have as clear an insight into obsession as anybody else. Maybe I can put a harness on it for the elite athletes I encounter along the way.
JDW: So, who’s on the team?
JOJ: I’ve only been out here four months and I came out with no fanfare. The first athletes we got are mostly people who were here. We have only had a couple people come in from the outside so far. Heavily laced with ex-Stanford athletes.
There’s Marc Olesen, a Canadian, and a 1500, 5k guy. Mainly a 5k guy now. 3k, 5k. 1500PR is 3:39.26, his 5k PR is 13:38.09.
Gary Stolz, another Stanford guy, who was second in the 1992 NCAA X-C behind Bob Kennedy. He’s been pretty much injured ever since. His career cut short by achilles problems. Finally had surgery for it and he’s coming back. He’s run 13:51 for 5k. Indoors.
Fred Carter, another Stanford guy. 8:45.92 in the steeplechase in ’92
James Cramton, a novice half miler. He’s never run a half mile but he wants to try. He has 46.6 in the quarter.
Ray Appenheimer, he’s from Colgate. He’s run 13:59 for 5k. He just came in 3 weeks ago.
Jon Pritchard from Penn State attending graduate school in Biology here, he’s run 14:17 for 5k.
Rey Flores from the University of Massachusetts, lives in San Francisco, so he doesn’t train with The Farm Team on a regular basis. His best times are 14:19 for 5k and 30:10 for 10k. He’s run faster on the roads. He just ran a 1:06:40 half-marathon.
Jeff Atkinson is training with us. He’s not part of our club because he runs for Foot Locker. He’s one of our daily training mates and part of our training stable, who wears a different uniform at meets. He’s run 3:52.80 for the mile and was an ’88 Olympian at 1500m.
Kevin Connor, a thirty-year-old kid still trying to break two minutes for the 800. We’re trying to get him under.
Kevin and James to some extent measure the ranges of this club. Right now we are sort of grass roots and we’re sort of elite, and everything in between so far. We may have an identity crisis if we have 60 people here all of a sudden. We may have to make some sort of decision about what we want to do, and who we are. At the moment The Farm Team is just a really nice training group.
We have two women who train with us on a regular basis. Michelle Deasy, she’s a 5k, 10k girl out of Cornell. She’s run 16:37 for 5k and 34:39 for 10k. Michelle is pretty much a novice. She didn’t start running until she was a junior in college. She got out of college with only two years running experience. She was a walk-on at Cornell. Her coach had no idea she had any talent, so he wasted half a year with her, he said.
That isn’t entirely true, but he didn’t realize she could run on varsity until, I think, she finished second girl one day. Which is pretty unusual for a walk-on at Cornell, because Cornell traditionally has one of the top five or six teams in the country in women’s cross-country and she walked on to it. With no running experience whatsoever.
Angela Mogielski has run 16:50 for 5k and she’s also run 2:10 for 800m, so she has good range.
We have a couple of at-large people who aren’t training with us. Brad Hudson is actually a Farm Team member in Eugene. Under what circumstances, I don’t know. He just called me out of the blue and said Jacco Tuominen had said Brad needed a club. We take care of his equipment needs.
We also have a girl in North Carolina, named Andrea Green. She’s a 2:07 half-miler, former ACC champion at UNC. Who’s now out of college and continuing to run. She is our first qualifier for a national championship. She ran 2:08 this winter and qualified for the Atlanta Indoor meet in a couple of weeks.
JDW: Why these athletes?
JOJ: Ask them. I just came out here, and said, “Here I am.” And these people showed up. I mean, I didn’t choose them. [Laughs.]
JDW: What’s the criteria for being on The Farm Team? “Hello, here I am?”
JOJ: I said, “I’m here.” And these athletes said, “Okay. Can I come?” And I said, sure, why not. That’s the criteria. I basically haven’t said “no” to anybody.
We have a second coach. There are two coaches here. The other one is Tom Laris, who was a 1968 Olympian at 10,000m. He’s the President of a securities business in Palo Alto. E-Trade Securities. Basically, as I understand his situation, he goes to work at 4 or 5 in the morning to catch the early morning stock operations in NYC. So he feels justified in leaving work around 3 o’clock, ’cause he’s been up since about three in the morning. His late afternoons are at the track. He’s basically giving back to a sport he’s participated in for a long time.
JDW: Credentials?
JOJ: Thirteen years of high school coaching experience. I coached three women’s clubs in New England, Liberty Athletic Club, Sea Coast Striders and the Athletica Track Club, overlapping those 13 years. I’m certified at Level 2 with the USAT&F’s coaching certification program. Level 2 is the highest certification you can get right now. There’s about 500 and something Level 2’s in the country. Just means you went through the schools. You can still be at Level 2 and be horrid.
Laris and I make an interesting team. Like I say to the athletes, I’ve read the books, Tom has actually done it. That’s the way I put it. He’s lived it, he’s done it. I’ve just sort of studied it.
Twenty years ago, the opportunities for post-grad athletes were beginning to tail off a little bit. Thirty years ago, those opportunities were pretty good. I remember in the mid-60’s, Pete Petersens had a great group with the Southern California Striders. Ted Hayden had a wonderful University of Chicago Track Club, going great guns with Wolhuter and Ken Sparks, and Lowell Powell, whatever the guy’s name was, remember him, the guy who ran with a beard. A terrific track club. Mihaly Igloi had the Los Angeles Track Club. Just a great bunch of clubs in this country then. All those things have sorta dropped by the wayside.
Seems to me there’s a lot less of an opportunity now for people. Those clubs were very poorly funded, if funded at all. I see we’ve come back to that situation. Our athletes are real amateurs. They are struggling in part-time jobs, trying to make ends meet, so they can keep chasing their dreams here. To me, this is a very ’60’s kind of thing.
I ran for Pete Petersens’ Southern California Striders briefly, so I know what that was about. We were just working and got off work and came out to practice and ran as a group and tried to do well. And he had a bunch of Olympians running with us at that time, Ted Nelson and Ron Larrieu, good people, but they were basically amateurs, living in crummy apartments, working at crummy jobs, trying to extend their running careers another few years.
That’s what we’ve got with these guys. Atkinson and Oleson are talented guys with degrees and can do other things, but the fires still burn. They want to go out to that track one more time.
JDW: Speaking personally, money can be a problem sometimes.
JOJ: I don’t talk to them hardly at all about their finances, I consider that kind of a personal thing, but I have heard Atkinson saved his money from the time when he was really hot. And he fairly much banked that, back in the late 80’s. I don’t know if that’s true. If you want to get into his finances, get into it with him, not with me, because I don’t know.
They are monks, more than anything else. They have this very Spartan life of running, wearing hair shirts and sleeping on hard cots in a little cell somewhere. I think the joy of it is to gather on the golf course in the twilight for group runs. And bashing through intervals on a Saturday morning on the track. With each other.
It’s a very clubby, monkish, religious, spiritual kind of quest. They are certainly not in this for the money or the glory. Nobody knows who the hell they are. It’s just a very personal thing.
JDW: Why here?
JOJ: I was drawn to the Bay area by the climate as much as anything. If I had gone to Los Angeles, presumably I’d have another group and we’d be talking about different athletes. I like the Bay Area because the weather is about as good here as it is anywhere in country. It may be better here than anywhere else in the country. Very low rainfall, very low humidity, high level of sunshine. Wonderful terrain to run on. We have hills and parks and trails.
There is no association between The Farm Team and Stanford University. We don’t work out with the undergraduates. Stanford has been gracious enough to tolerate our occasional presence in some of their facilities.
Beyond the climate, it’s extremely easy to get around. This freeway system actually works here. I can get to San Francisco Airport in 30 minutes.
I figured there were eight universities within a 60-mile radius of Stanford. From Santa Cruz to Berkeley.
The point is, if athletes wanted to come out here and do graduate studies, they could choose from an enormous range of universities and still be within an hour’s driving time of practice. Also, a population base here that presumably might give us the best chance of finding jobs, too. Just seemed like this was a perfect place to come.
Of course, I did grow up here. That’s somewhat coincidental, but I am a little more at home here. Not a lot because it’s changed so much since then.
There was not a really high profile running club in this area and that just didn’t make sense to me. Because this was the area that could best support a club, I thought.
Boston is another good area for a club. The climate is not as good. A favorable climate for distance runners and tons of universities and it is very easy to get around down there very quickly. Boston has had good success with running clubs in Boston in the past 20 years. Boston is a prime spot. Maybe Washington, D.C. is just as good. But this is an area that seemed to be primo. There were sprint clubs here, but there was no major distance club that I was aware of.
And it just seemed there should be. And could be.
Just show up and go, “Yo!” And people would come.
So far so good.
My goal is to help these people reach their goals.
I was in New Hampshire enjoying life, but having a sense that there was something more I needed to do. Or should do. Or could do.
I have always had a sense about leaving something undone. The same sense an athlete has. I had an athlete call me the other night, another Canadian, who is probably going to join us in a few weeks. He gave as a reason, he didn’t want to get to middle-age and look back and wonder what he could’ve done. He wanted to come out here and play the hand one more time.
That’s the same thing that drives so many of us. Part of what was driving me. I didn’t want, at the age of 52 sitting in New Hampshire, to give it another ten years and get to the point where I was too old to do this and then wonder if I could have. Wonder, if I had, would I have had the chance to share an Olympic experience with an athlete. Would I have seen an athlete develop from an unknown to a known. Would I have some more old man stories, that kind of stuff. [Laughter.]
It came down to, I felt I had a responsibility to the sport, a responsibility to myself, I guess, ultimately to do this. Everybody does things for themselves first. I had to do this.
JDW: Are you trying to set an example?
JOJ: Ha! I would hate to be an example for anybody. I am one guy with a team. If anybody is looking for an example, The Farm Team should be an example. We’re only four months old. So it’s hard, we haven’t done anything yet. The need is great and I am struck by how easily somebody like myself, whom no one has ever heard of… there wasn’t a single athlete out here who was clamoring for me to come out from New Hampshire and coach them. No one had ever heard of me.
And nobody was too excited when they did hear about some high school coach coming across the country to open a club. But the situation is so desperate, you show up, say “Yo!“ and the athletes come. A field of dreams, of sorts.
JDW: Start a club and you have a team.
JOJ: That speaks to the need for a comprehensive club program in these United States, where it is so easy to set something up and get it going.
Our athletes are in pretty good shape already. They are running fairly well. Marc got 4th in the Sunkist 3000, his first indoor race of the year.
We are able to compete with other people. And that’s all we can ask.
JDW: You have downplayed your record. Four times you were named the state cross-country coach of the year. A former miler, two-miler at Stanford.
JOJ: But I was so slow nobody cared. Like 4:25. I was slower than road kill.
JDW: How’s your running now?
JOJ: Pathetic. I am averaging about two miles a day, with a range from zero to four.
02/27/95
Many years ago, I came across a Japanese saying I found particularly meaningful: A great man does not let himself be known. I am proud to have known a few, if only a little. – JDW