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Phil KnightTop Home > Library > Miscellaneous > BiographiesPhil Knight (born 1938) is the founder and head of Nike, Inc., the number one athletic shoe company in the world. Already a legend in the retail and marketing worlds, Knight has turned into something of a mainstream hero, the subject of admiring articles in popular magazines. It is a reputation Knight hasearned over the years as both a visionary businessman and a hard-nosed CEO.

The man whom The Sporting News named the "most powerful" person of the year in sports for 1993 was no athlete, coach, or commissioner. Rather, it was the man who for nearly 30 years has shod the great sports stars as well as the Saturday-afternoon "jocks"-Nike founder and CEO Philip "Phil" Knight. The former college track runner refers to Nike's world headquarters as a campus and runs it that way. "His every move is now scrutinized as carefully as the glamorous superstars who wear his sneakers," reported Frank Deford in a Vanity Fair profile.

Knight was born in Portland, Oregon, on February 24, 1938, the son of William H. and Lola (Hatfield) Knight. Oregon's only billionaire "forged his go-it-alone philosophy while growing up in Portland, the son of a domineering but loving father who was publisher of the now defunct Oregon Journal," noted Susan Hauser in People magazine. Though too small to excel in contact sports, young Knight took refuge in track. When his father refused to give him a summer job at his newspaper, believing his son should find work on his own, Knight went to the rival Oregonian, where he worked the night shift tabulating sports scores and every morning ran home the full seven miles.

New Running Shoe

That interest in sports-and especially track-gave Knight the impetus to study the way track shoes were being made and marketed in the late

1950s. For assistance he consulted his coach, the University of Oregon's famed Bill Bowerman, who himself would become a senior member of the Nike team. Together they determined that American shoes were inferior in style and quality, too heavy, and too easily damaged. The Japanese, on the other hand, were experimenting with new, trimmed-down styles fashioned in lightweight, hardy nylon. Knight wrote his Stanford business-school term paper on the subject, then a few years later got involved personally by visiting Japan and arranging to import new-design running shoes himself.

"Knight ran Blue Ribbon Sports [named for a beer label] out of a storefront hole-in-the-wall next to the Pink Bucket Tavern in a working-class section of Portland," noted Sports Illustrated writer Donald Katz. "From the beginning Knight's animating idea was to promote high-quality, low-cost Japanese shoes, at a time when high quality was rarely associated with Japanese products, and to eventually displace [rival brand] Adidas, the triple-striped German shoes worn by all serious track and field athletes at the time."

"In the early days, anybody with a glue pot and a pair of scissors could get into the shoe business," Knight told Geraldine Willigan in a Harvard Business Review interview. "So the way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We were also good at keeping our manufacturing costs down. The big, established players like Puma and Adidas were still manufacturing in high-wage European companies. But we knew that wages were lower in Asia." This fact has garnered criticism for Knight and Nike by those who point out the vast difference between the wages earned by a factory worker in Indonesia compared to the salary drawn by a Nike celebrity endorser. But Knight insisted in the Sports Illustrated article that "we're not gouging anybody. … A country like Indonesia is converting from farm labor to semiskilled-an industrial transition that has occurred throughout history. There's no question in my mind that we're giving these people hope."

Knight's reputation in the track and field world also helped him gain an early edge. "We just tried to get our shoes on the feet of runners," he said in Willigan's article. "And we were able to get a lot of great ones under contract-people like [distance stars] Steve Prefontaine and Alberto Salazar-because we spent a lot of time at track events and had relationships with the runners, but mostly because we were doing interesting things with our shoes."

Unique Image and New Technology

From the start, Knight's shoes sported their own look (including the distinctive "swoosh" logo that still appears today) and their own attitude. An early effort to promote the newly dubbed "Nike"-pronounced NY-kee and named for the Greek goddess of victory-included a now-classic advertisement set at the 1972 Olympic track trials in Eugene, Oregon. The copy boasted that four of the top seven marathoners wore Nikes. As a Time writer pointed out, the ads conveniently "neglected to mention that runners wearing [Adidas] shoes placed first, second and third."

By the mid-1970s Nike was at the cutting edge of workout-shoe technology. For instance, it was Bowerman, the former track coach, who poured some liquid latex into his wife's waffle iron, thereby inventing the famous sole that made the earliest Nikes feel like bedroom slippers. Nike didn't exactly burst from the gate in profit, though. Major sports stars demanded major compensation for wearing Knight's brand. A turning point came in the 1980s, when tennis star Jimmy Connors won Wimbledon in a pair of Nikes and John McEnroe "hurt his ankle, [and] started wearing an obscure three-quarter [Nike] model that had sold all of 10,000 pairs that year. Because of McEnroe's strained ligaments," noted a Vanity Fair writer, "the model sold a million two the very next year. It was about that time when Knight woke up one morning worth $178 million."

There was one area in which Nike made a serious misstep. Knight acknowledged in a Sports Illustrated article that his company "lost its way" when it came to aerobics shoes. The longstanding boys-club

atmosphere of the Nike boardroom saw little promise in a lightweight shoe for women to wear to their exercise classes. In fact, the notion of aerobics was laughed away as just the conceit of "a bunch of fat ladies dancing to music," as Hauser quoted in the People article. That lack of insight opened the door for an upstart company called Reebok, which then virtually cornered the market in this burgeoning subsection of the athletic shoe industry. That was the beginning of a longstanding rivalry between Nike and Reebok for market dominance.

Though sales slipped and profits fell during the mid-1980s, Nike regained its place at the top of the market in 1984, when Knight returned from a fact-finding trip to Asia. Knight is a firm believer in the Japanese way of doing business and conducting life: "He often greets his secretary with a courtly bow or 'moshi, moshi,' the Japanese equivalent of hello, and pads around behind sliding screen doors in a pair of cotton slippers," reported Hauser.

Celebrity Athlete Endorsements

Known as a taskmaster CEO, Knight is also particular when it comes to matters of promotion. "Hi, I'm Phil Knight and I don't believe in advertising," was the way Nike's ad agency president remembered meeting his new client. Signing up perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, the former Chicago Bulls' superstar Michael Jordan, was only one of the breakthrough strategies that made Nike-wearers the envy of schoolyard pickup games everywhere. Nike slogans-"Bo Knows," "It's Gotta Be the Shoes," and especially "Just Do It"-have entered the pop-culture lexicon. The Nike image has been linked closely with notable "bad boys"-names like McEnroe, Andre Agassi, and Charles Barkley-as well as icons like the Beatles (through Nike's controversial use of the song "Revolution") and Bugs Bunny.

But the world of sports endorsements is a brutal one, as the public learned at the 1992 summer Olympic games in Barcelona. America's basketball "dream team" swept the field to win the gold medal, but faced screaming headlines and heated debate when several members

threatened not to appear in a medal ceremony unless they were wearing their Nike apparel-to the consternation of Reebok, the team's "official" sponsor. (Dream Team member Barkley ably summed up the controversy, said Katz in Sports Illustrated, when he told a reporter that he had "two million reasons not to wear Reebok.")

For all the controversy Knight has helped engender in his company, he points out that the tradeoff is an increased awareness by the media, whose stories about the shoes and those who endorse them are the kind of publicity that money can't buy. As he told Willigan, the athletic shoe industry, "and Nike in particular, gets a lot more press than many others because it's more fun to talk about us than about a company that makes widgets. On the one hand, we don't mind the attention; we like getting our name in the press. On the other hand, the company usually gets treated in a superficial, lighthearted way, which is not what we're all about. Nike is not about going to a ball game. It's a business."

A later addition to the business was sports management. Simply put, it ensured that Nike endorsers maintained consistency outside the company-most importantly, by not endorsing any other product that would interfere with the Nike image. Sports management was born after Knight caught Nike endorser Andre Agassi in a commercial for Canon cameras. While cameras themselves don't conflict with shoes, the message in the commercial certainly did. "When Agassi looked into the camera and said, 'Image is everything,' Knight flipped," says Katz. "It was 180 degrees from our imagery," Knight told the Sport Illustrated writer. "We work hard to convey that performance, not image, is everything."

Nike realized that image did count for something when it released a shoe displaying a logo that resembled the Arabic word for "Allah," or God. Many members of the Muslim faith were upset, and in June 1997 Nike recalled 38,000 pairs of the shoes and issued an apology. The company noted that the logo was an oversight and issued a statement saying they did not mean to offend anyone with it.

Asian Labor Issues

The company came under increasing scrutiny for its wages and working conditions in Indonesia, China, and Vietnam. United Nations Ambassador, Andrew Young, released a report finding no issue with Nike's factories, noting that facilities were "clean, organized, adequately ventilated and well lit," according to a Reuters Business Report article. However, human rights groups charged that Indonesian workers were incessantly striking over low wages; Nike workers received $2.46 per day in a nation that counted $4 per day as the minimum subsistence wage.

Independent filmmaker Michael Moore, whose 1989 documentary Roger and Me depicted a heartless corporate mindset at General Motors, turned his cameras on Nike, among numerous other firms. Moore addressed the issue of how Nike treats its workers and requested jobs for people in his depressed hometown of Flint, Michigan. Knight countered that American workers do not want jobs in shoe factories, but Moore was able to find a crowd of jobless workers in Flint who would be happy to make Nikes. For his part, Knight was the only CEO to agree to appear in the Moore film.

The uproar over the Asian workers dragged on for Nike, and they eventually raised wages a small amount. Some American women's groups, protested that female employees-the bulk of Nike's Asian work force-were still working 100 to 200 hours overtime at Nike just to pay their bills. They issued statements accusing Nike of corporal punishment and sexual harassment in the shops as well. By mid-1998, Knight announced in a speech to the National Press Club that Nike was "dedicated to giving American consumers assurances that the products they buy are not manufactured under abusive circumstances," according to a Gannett News Service article. He added that he had been branded as a "corporate crook," and defended his business practices, citing "misinformation and misunderstanding" as reasons for the media assault on Nike. Knight noted that a number of policies were going to be

implemented in their production facilities, including raising the working age to 16 at clothing factories and 18 at shoe factories; using safer, non-toxic glues when possible; adopting stricter, U.S.-dictated air quality standards; instituting on-site education programs, and more.

In addition to the Asian labor issues, many people remained outraged over Nike's escalating costs, especially since a large market for the products are poor, inner-city youth. One shoe endorsed by basketball player, Anfernee Hardaway, was tagged at $180, and the Air Jordans touted by superstar Michael Jordan had always been priced at over $100. Perhaps this combination of issues served to cause a slump. Sales and profits fell in 1998, and Nike laid off 1,900 employees. However, the company remained the world's largest shoemaker. It won a lawsuit in early 1999 that had accused the firm of lying to consumers about "sweatshop" conditions in Asian factories. Human rights groups remained unconvinced.

When not at the helm, Knight enjoys the fruits of his success. He and his wife Penelope "Penny" Parks have two grown sons and one foster daughter. They live in non-ostentatious comfort in Oregon, with a gaggle of pets and Knight's "only personal concession to flash: [a] black Lamborghini (vanity plates: NIKE MN) and red Ferrari," as Hauser noted in People. The workplace is also the scene of fun and comfort: Nike World Campus features three restaurants, plus fitness center, beauty salon, laundry service, jogging facilities, a day-care center, and other amenities.

Knight can't help but see success in Nike's future, as the company expands its product line to include a wide range of apparel and accessories. As a Forbes writer noted, the man who built an empire on a pair of shoes still cherishes the words of his track coach: "Play by the rules, but be ferocious."

Further Reading

Strasser, Julie, SWOOSH: The Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There, Harper Business, 1993.

Forbes, August 2, 1993.

Gannett News Service, May 12, 1998.

Harvard Business Review, July-August 1992.

Independent, October 28, 1997, p. 15.

People, May 4, 1992.

Philadelphia Inquirer, October 10, 1998.

Reuter's Business Report, June 24, 1997.

South China Morning Post, February 8, 1999.

Sports Illustrated, August 19, 1993.

Time, June 30, 1980; February 15, 1982.

U.S. News & World Report, September 22, 1997, p. 48.

Vanity Fair, August 1993.

"Nike, Inc.," Hoover's Online, March 3, 1999. Available from http://www.hoovers.com.

 

Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Phil KnightTop Home > Library > Miscellaneous > WikipediaThis article is about the co-founder of Nike. For the guitarist of Shihad, see Phil Knight (musician).Phil Knight

BornFebruary 24, 1938 (age 72)

Portland, Oregon, U.S.

Occupation Co-founder and Chairman of Nike, Inc.

Net worth US$10.2 billion (2010)[1]

Spouse Penny Knight

Children Three

Website

Nike Corporation

Philip Hampson "Phil" Knight (born February 24, 1938) is the co-founder and Chairman of Nike, Inc.. He resigned as the company's chief executive officer in 2004, while retaining the position of chairman of the board. As of 2010, Knight's stake in Nike gives him an estimated net worth of US$11.1 billion, making him the 23rd richest person in the U.S.[1]

A graduate of the University of Oregon and Stanford Graduate School of Business, he has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the schools. Knight gave the largest donation in history at the time to Stanford's business school in 2006. A native Oregonian, he ran track for coach Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon, with whom he would co-found Nike.

Contents [hide] 1 Early years

o 1.1 Budding entrepreneur

2 Nike's origin

o 2.1 Labor issues

3 Philanthropy

4 Later years

5 References

6 External links

Early years

Phil Knight was born February 24, 1938 in Portland, Oregon, the son of a lawyer and future newspaper publisher.[2] Knight attended Cleveland High School in Portland and then the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he was a member of Phi Gamma Delta ("FIJI") fraternity and earned a journalism degree in 1959.[2] He was a middle-distance runner at the school under track coach Bill Bowerman and ran a personal best 4:10 mile,[3] winning varsity letters for track in 1957, 1958, and 1959.

Budding entrepreneur

Right after graduating from Oregon, Knight enlisted in the Army and served one year on active duty and seven years in the Army Reserve.[2]

After the year of active duty, he enrolled at Stanford Graduate School of Business.[2] In Frank Shallenberger's Small Business class, Knight developed a love affair with something besides sports — he discovered he was an entrepreneur. Knight recalls in a Stanford Magazine article[2]

"That class was an 'aha!' moment" ... "Shallenberger defined the type of person who was an entrepreneur--and I realized he was talking to me. I remember after saying to myself: 'This is really what I would like to do.' " In this class Knight needed to create a business plan. His paper, "Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?", essentially was the premise to his foray into selling running shoes. He graduated with a Masters of Business Administration from the school in 1962.[2]

Knight set out on a trip around the world after graduation, during which he made a stop in Kobe, Japan in November 1962. It was there he discovered Tiger brand running shoes, manufactured in Kobe by the Onitsuka Co. So impressed with the quality and low cost, Knight made a cold call on Mr. Onitsuka, who agreed to meet with him. By the end of

the meeting, Knight had secured distribution rights for the western United States for Tiger running shoes.[citation needed]

The first Tiger samples would take more than a year to be shipped to Knight, during which time he found a job as an accountant in Portland, Oregon. When Knight finally received the shoe samples, he mailed two pairs to Bill Bowerman in Eugene in the hope of gaining a sale and an influential endorsement. To Knight's surprise, Bowerman not only ordered the Tiger shoes, he offered to become a partner with Knight and would provide some design ideas for better running shoes. The two men shook hands on a partnership on January 25, 1964, the birthdate of Blue Ribbon Sports, forerunner to Nike.[4]

Nike's origin

Knight's first sales were made out of a now legendary green Plymouth Valiant at track meets across the Pacific Northwest. By 1969, these early sales allowed Knight to leave his accountant job and work full time for Blue Ribbon Sports.

It was Jeff Johnson, a friend of Knight's, who suggested the name Nike. Nike is named after the Greek winged goddess of victory. Nike's logo, now considered one of the most powerful logos in the world, was commissioned for a mere $35 from Carolyn Davidson.[5] According to Nike's website, Knight stated "I don't love it, but it will grow on me." However, in 1983 (Nike went public in 1980), Davidson was given an undisclosed amount of Nike stock for her contribution to the company's brand.

Labor issues

Knight was named a "Corporate Crook" in Michael Moore's 1996 book Downsize This!. The book cited the harsh conditions in Indonesian sweatshops, where pregnant women and girls as young as fourteen years old sewed shoes for factories that the company contracted to make its products. Moore went to Knight in the hopes of convincing him to fix

this problem. The interview can be seen in Moore's film The Big One – of the nearly 20 CEOs that Moore wished to interview for his movie, only Knight agreed to speak with Moore.

Knight informed Moore that Nike does not own any of the factories that make its products. Knight told Moore if he was willing to invest in and build a factory in the U.S. that could match the price of footwear made overseas, Nike would consider buying shoes from him.

In 1998, Knight pledged to impose more stringent standards for the factories that Nike engages to manufacture its goods, including minimum age standards, factory monitoring, and greater external access to Nike's practices.

Philanthropy

In 2000, Knight was inducted into the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame for his Special Contribution to Sports in Oregon.[6] Knight is believed to have contributed approximately $230 million to the University of Oregon, the majority of which was for athletics.[7] On August 18, 2007, Knight announced that he and his wife, Penny, would be donating an additional $100 million to the University of Oregon Athletics Legacy Fund.[8] This donation is reportedly the largest in the University's history.

However, Knight's contributions to the Athletic department at U of O have not come without controversy.[9] His significant contributions have granted him influence and access atypical of an athletic booster. In addition to the "best seats in the house" for any U of O athletic event, he has his own personalized locker in the football team's locker room, and an athletic building named for him (the library is named for his mother, the law school is named for his father, and the under-construction basketball arena is named for his son). However, most controversial was his successful lobbying to have his friend and former insurance salesman, Pat Kilkenny, named as Athletic Director.[10] Kilkenny, another wealthy athletic booster, has neither a college degree nor any germane experience. Kilkenny attended but did not graduate from the

University of Oregon, leaving the school several hours short of completion. The former chairman and chief executive officer of the San Diego-based Arrowhead General Insurance Agency, he grew his business into a nationwide organization with written premiums of nearly $1 billion when he sold the company in 2006.[11] ESPN's Outside the Lines spotlighted Knight and his donation-backed influence on U of O athletics on an April 6, 2008 episode.

In 2006, Phil Knight donated $105 million to Stanford Graduate School of Business, at the time the largest donation to a business school in history.[12] Knight also provided monetary support to his high school alma mater Cleveland High School for their new track, football field, and gymnasium.

In October 2008, Phil and Penny Knight pledged $100 million to the OHSU Cancer Institute, the largest gift in the history of Oregon Health & Science University. In recognition, the university renamed it the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute.[13]

Later years

Knight resigned as the company's CEO November 18, 2004, while retaining the position of chairman of the board.[14][15] He was replaced by William Perez, former CEO of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., who was in turn replaced by Mark Parker in 2006.[16]

In 2002, Knight purchased Will Vinton (Animation) Studios, where his son, Travis, worked as an animator, and changed the name to LAIKA. Travis was named to the LAIKA Board of Directors later that year, and became CEO of LAIKA in March 2009, replacing Nike alum Dale Wahl.[17] LAIKA released their first feature film (stop motion) Coraline in February 2009.

The Force Behind the Nike Empire

by Jackie Krentzman

As 20-year-old Stanford golfer Tiger Woods fought his way to an unprecedented third U.S. Amateur title last summer, Nike founder Phil Knight shadowed him from hole to hole, appraising the young phenom's every smile the way a golf coach would his swing. "I hope we sign him," Knight said at the time. "If not, I hope he goes to medical school." Three days later, Woods called a news conference, stepped before the TV cameras and announced that he was quitting college to join the Professional Golf Association Tour.

"Well," he said with a big grin, "I guess it's 'Hello, world,' huh?"

An adoring sports media lapped up the young man's winning soundbite. Then, just 24 hours later, the other shoe dropped. In a barrage of new TV spots and full-page newspaper ads, Nike unveiled its latest pitchman: pro golfer Tiger Woods. The Nike-crafted tag line on the ads? "Hello, World."

Woods may be the company's current star, but its controversial CEO and founder is the real story. Nike signed Woods to a five-year endorsement deal, reportedly worth more than $40 million, and has thrown its considerable weight behind him. The company is packaging the young golfer--who is part African American, part Chinese, part American Indian, part Thai and part white--as the Jackie Robinson of golf, breaking down barriers each time he steps on a course. The press savaged the ads for posing Woods as a racial trailblazer, a path long since pioneered by black golfers such as Charlie Sifford and Lee Elder.

But the world's largest athletic shoe and apparel company had triumphed again, creating a buzz for its masterful orchestration of Woods's coming-out party and raising hackles with its questionable use of race to promote him. It was pure Philip Hampson Knight: innovative, controversial and very, very successful.

Of course, you'd expect nothing less from the man who turned a tiny company called Blue Ribbon Sports into Nike Corp., a multibillion-dollar enterprise and a household name. A former middle-distance runner at the University of Oregon (he ran a respectable 4:10 mile), Knight, MBA '62, has been on a 30-year endorphin rush. He has made more money from athletics than anyone, ever. With a net worth of $5.3 billion, Knight ranks sixth on Forbes's latest list of the richest Americans. Blue Ribbon Sports cleared $3,240 in its first year, 1964. In fiscal year 1996, Nike's revenue hit a stratospheric $6.5 billion (with $550 million in income). "In a very short period of time, Phil Knight created one of the greatest American commerce stories of the 20th century," says sports agent David Falk, who has frequently butted heads with Knight over the marketing and representation of athletes.

KNIGHT WATCH: The CEO surveys his Beaverton

If one of those athletes weren't Michael Jordan, consumers worldwide might still be pronouncing Nike like Mike. In large part because of that one employee with the thousand-watt smile and springboard legs, there is no greater status symbol among youths than Nike products.

But make no mistake: As athletically awesome and charismatic as Michael Jordan is, he alone did not make Nike as recognizable worldwide as Coke and McDonalds. Nor did he make "Just Do It" the slogan that best encapsulates the 1990s. Nike is a cultural icon because Knight understood and captured the zeitgeist of American pop culture and married it to sports. He found a way to harness society's worship of heroes, obsession with status symbols and predilection for singular, often rebellious figures. Nike's seductive marketing focuses squarely on a charismatic athlete or image, rarely even mentioning or showing the shoes. The Nike swoosh is so ubiquitous that the name Nike is often omitted altogether.

"Phil understands the symbolic power and attractiveness of sports," says A. Michael Spence, dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Nike board member. "And he helped build that connection in our culture."

Knight also understood that this lust for heroes and appreciation for in-your-face attitude is not limited to American youth. He correctly predicted that American culture was a marketable commodity--that teenagers from Paris to Shanghai would be just as taken with Charles Barkley's ample attitude as teenagers in Trenton and San Diego.

No company has put as much creative energy and resources into marketing celebrities as Nike. If, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century, then Nike is its Picasso, imaginatively expanding the parameters of the medium's use of the athlete-endorser. "We didn't invent it," Knight acknowledges in an interview, "but we ratcheted it up several notches."

Nike engineered shoes for the top echelon of athletes to compete and train in. At the same time, the company's mass marketing made the shoes so attractive and desirable that they became a de rigueur accessory to the American wardrobe and dream--even if increasingly sedentary teens only wore them to watch TV. Thirty years ago, American teenagers owned either a pair of Converse All-Stars or Keds. Today, the average American boy owns 10 pairs

of sneakers.

Understanding how Phil Knight made Nike a household name is easy. Understanding Phil Knight is not. For someone whose empire rests on visceral consumer reactions, Knight is remarkably self-contained.

Once dubbed the "most powerful man in sports" by the Sporting News, Knight presents himself as affable, albeit slightly stiff and a tad shy. He unobtrusively enters the Wimbledon conference room on the fourth floor of the John McEnroe Building on the Nike World Campus in

Beaverton, Ore. (a good hour's jog from Portland), clears his throat, introduces himself and apologizes for being 10 minutes late. "Where should I sit?" he asks. Knight isn't wearing his ever-present Oakley sunglasses (he's rarely photographed without them), which is a bonus, as his pale blue eyes open wide and sparkle when a topic engages him.

Like many of the 2,700 employees on the campus, Knight instinctively glances down at his visitor's shoes before taking a seat at the far end of the conference table, his back to the picture window that offers a view of the campus and the 10-acre lake anchoring it. I nervously appraise my black leather, conservative flats and kick myself for making such a boring choice for a meeting with the man who made footwear an art form. It's like picking up John DeLorean in a Yugo.

Knight, 58, still has the lean, almost gaunt build of a runner. Known for his decidedly dressed-down and wrinkled wardrobe, he looks surprisingly natty. A black linen suit drapes loosely over his slender frame. His black, collarless shirt buttons up to his Adam's apple. With his trim beard, collar-length, wavy red-blond hair shrouding most of the gray, he suggests a record executive who looks and sounds remarkably like actor Donald Sutherland.

Knight has been portrayed as mysterious, inscrutable, eccentric, unpredictable, enigmatic, idiosyncratic, shy, aloof, reclusive, competitive and a genius. But the world may never know which adjective suits him best. Knight, who with his wife of 28 years, Penny, has two grown sons, shuns publicity and self-explication the way Howard Stern courts it.

"Genius" is the one attribute on the list that Knight questions. "Other than that, I'm all of those things--most of those adjectives are right some of the time," he says. That's as far as he'll go. When asked a potentially revealing question ("Have you deliberately cultivated an image for yourself, the way Nike has for its clients?") he toys with a can of Diet Pepsi or fiddles with the watch he took off at the start of the interview. He signals that a question is not to his liking by deftly shifting the focus to Nike, lapsing into corporate-speak or even abruptly cutting himself off in mid-sentence and waiting--in stony silence--for the next question.

Knight was raised in Portland, the son of a lawyer turned newspaper publisher. He was a middle-distance runner for the University of Oregon track team, which at the time had one of the best programs in the country. Known as "Buck," Knight had more enthusiasm than talent, which made him the ideal human guinea pig for legendary track coach Bill Bowerman's endless tinkering with running shoes. "I was very aware of shoes when I was running track," Knight says. "The American shoes were offshoots of tire companies. Shoes cost $5, and you would come back from a five-mile run with your feet bleeding. Then the German companies came in with $30 shoes, which were more comfortable. But Bowerman still wasn't satisfied. He believed that shaving an ounce off a pair of shoes for a guy running a mile could make a big difference. So Bowerman began making shoes himself, and since I wasn't the best guy on the team, I was the logical one to test the shoes."

An indifferent student, Knight graduated from Oregon with a degree in journalism in 1959. He enlisted in the army for a year (and served in the reserves for seven), then enrolled at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford.

Stanford changed Knight's life. Finally, school wasn't drudgery. For the first time, he was excited to read about something other than sports. And it was in Frank Shallenberger's small-business class that Knight conceived Nike.

Shallenberger gave his class the following assignment: Invent a new business, describe its purpose and create a marketing plan. In his paper, "Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?" Knight developed a blueprint for superior athletic shoes, produced inexpensively in Japan, where labor was cheaper. "That class was an 'aha!' moment," Knight says. "First, Shallenberger defined the type of person who was an entrepreneur--and I realized he was talking to me. I remember after

writing that paper, saying to myself: 'This is really what I would like to do.' "

After graduating from Stanford, Knight acquiesced to his father's wishes and secured a "real" job with a Portland accounting firm. But first, he traveled to Japan, where he became enamored of Japanese culture and business practices. To this day, visitors to his office must remove their shoes--even their $180 Air Pamirs--before entering. And Knight took leave of our interview by forming a steeple with his hands and bowing.

Much has been made of Knight's meditative, almost dreamy mien and his affinity for all things Asian, especially Japanese. Knight refined both his philosophy of life and business while in Japan. He studied Asian culture and religion and climbed Mount Fuji, which the Japanese consider a sort of pilgrimage. He also visited the Onitsuka shoe factory in Kobe, which was producing Adidas knock-offs, called Tigers. Knight was so impressed with both the quality and low production costs that he made a deal with Onitsuka to distribute Tigers in the United States.

After returning from Japan in 1964, the 26-year-old Knight began peddling Onitsuka running shoes from the back of his green Plymouth Valiant at track meets across the Pacific Northwest. Adidas was hardly quaking in its cleats, and Knight kept his day job as an accountant. But he persevered, convinced that his inexpensive, high-performance shoes could beat the top "sneakers"--Adidas, Converse All-Stars and Keds--in the market. By 1969, at the fortuitous dawn of the jogging boom, Knight sold a million bucks worth of Onitsuka shoes bearing his Blue Ribbon Sports label.

In 1971, Knight decided he could retire his accountant's wing tips. It was also time to give his fledgling company a new name and logo. Knight favored "Dimension Six," but his 45 employees thankfully laughed that one down. Then Jeff Johnson, '63, a fellow running geek, proposed a name that came to him in a dream: Nike, for the Greek winged goddess of victory. The company paid $35 to commission a new logo--a fat checkmark dubbed a "swoosh"--and the new shoe debuted at the 1972 Olympic trials in Eugene, Ore.

Nike sold $3.2 million worth of shoes in 1972, and its profits doubled each of the next 10 years. Nike passed Adidas to become the industry leader in the United States in 1980, the year it went public. The company made a quantum leap in 1984 when it signed the 21-year old Jordan to endorse a basketball sneaker. Within a year, it seemed that every boy in America was strutting about in the clunky, siren-red Air Jordan high-tops. "It wasn't planning," Knight says. "We could see that he was a charismatic guy who jumps over the moon and is very competitive, but nobody could have predicted what he would become to our culture."

Now it seems formulaic--sign a gifted athlete to a lucrative endorsement contract, give him his own television commercial and shoe, blow him up larger than life and count the money. But in 1984, it was unprecedented. By signing, promoting and eventually turning Jordan into a legend, Nike played a pivotal role in revving up the cult of personality that now pervades sports. (Knight still gets a kick out of telling this story: "A few years ago there was a poll in China to name the greatest man ever. The winner was Mao, but there was a tie for second between [revolutionary hero] Zhou Enlai and Michael Jordan of the Chicago Red Oxen!").

Ironically, the chairman of the company that has set the standard with its groundbreaking, creative advertising campaigns (It's Gotta Be the Shoes, Bo Knows, Just Do It, Griffey for President) had to be talked into advertising at all. "I used to believe that a good product sold itself," says Knight, who like many of his employees sports a Nike "swoosh" tattoo, his on his left calf. "When I first went to meet with Wieden and Kennedy [Nike's Portland-based ad agency], I told them: 'I don't like advertising.' And I'm still uneasy with it."

Others are just uneasy with Nike's particular brand of advertising. Even though the company's commercials have been hailed as pop art, Nike has been denounced for turning sports stars into cartoonish überathletes and creating a market of young consumers blinded by idolatry. And for those with underdeveloped public personas, Nike has not hesitated to fill in the blanks. Nothing wrong with that, Knight believes. Sports isn't about truth and accuracy. It's the central, unifying culture of the United States and the stuff of romance and dreams. "Sports is like rock 'n' roll," he says. "Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions."

Some consider Nike--with its swoosh popping up on uniforms, on the lapels of college basketball coaches, even as bus-size renderings on walls of stadiums--responsible for the over-commercialization of sports. Nike is certainly not the first or only corporation to wield considerable influence in the sports world, but it is the most brazen and visible. "Nike is the prime representative of the way we overmarket and overadvertise and overdo everything these days," says Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies in the USC school of cinema and television. "The market is saturated to the point where it can be sickening. The problem is, we now have people going gaga over a commercial, as much or more so than they do the sport itself. Enough already."

For a time, Nike became a lightning rod for all sorts of criticism. The company came under fire in the early 1990s when there was a spate of shootings and knifings in American inner cities by teenagers coveting Nikes, which were just then pushing the $100 mark. Newspaper columnists decried "Just Do It" as a nihilistic slogan that justified or even begat these crimes. Nike was accused of focusing its ad campaigns on children in the ghettos, although, ironically, athletic shoes are the most cross-cultural of commodities.

Then, in the 1992 Olympics, the company hit its public relations nadir when the Nike endorsers on the Olympic basketball "Dream Team" refused to wear the official Olympic warm-up jerseys on the medal stand because they bore the logo of archrival Reebok. Nike was perceived as demanding that its athletes put shoe company before country. The incident became a symbol for those concerned with the inexorable and rapidly advancing influence of money in the world of athletics, obscuring or even warping the purity of the Games themselves.

Also in 1992, a group named Made in America called for a boycott of Nike products because Nike shoes (like most athletic footwear) are made overseas, mainly in Asia where labor is cheap. Nike has been criticized for its low pay and abusive treatment of some workers. Using independent subcontractors, Nike makes many of its products in Indonesia, a world pariah for its well-documented human-rights abuses. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has launched his own crusade against Nike. He accuses the company of exploiting Indonesians while quietly encouraging the Suharto government to crack down on dissent.

Over the years, Nike has also rattled cages with its penchant for signing athletes with rebellious, even dicey, reputations, such as the outspoken Barkley and the untethered Chicago Bull, Dennis Rodman. Not that Reebok endorser Sean Kemp or Converse man Larry Johnson (both guilty of taunting lesser opponents while representing the United States in the 1994 World Games) are paragons of virtue, but Nike pioneered the trend of signing athletes who project attitude as well as excellence.

An impenitent Knight shrugs when asked about these issues. "Our business practices are no different than those of our competitors," he says. "But we are bigger, and thus more visible, so we get more flack."

But it's more than that. Nike courts controversy. For instance, Nike donated $25,000 to Tonya Harding's defense fund in 1994, in part to tweak Reebok, the sponsors of Nancy Kerrigan. Nike's analog isn't the conservative team owner, but the cocky superstar who sets the agenda and is so wildly popular he knows he can get away with just about anything. "Nike is at times feisty, or counterestablishment, deliberately," says Spence, the business school dean. "That's partly Phil and partly the athletic culture Nike is modeled after."

As Nike ran away with the athletic-shoe market in the '80s, these criticisms were merely

annoying pebbles wedged in its shoes. But then the company made a fatal mistake, one of great hubris. It forgot about the women. When the aerobic fad hit in the mid-'80s, Nike ignored it. But fledgling Boston-based Reebok high-stepped right in, creating a somewhat flimsy, but attractive shoe that women bought like tickets to a Meryl Streep movie. Reebok's sales surpassed Nike's in 1987. That struck a nerve, as it flouted, even mocked, Knight's bedrock belief that, above all, authenticity and function sell shoes. To this day, Knight scorns Reebok and its chairman, Paul Fireman, for its emphasis on fashion. "We're not in the fashion business, as the Wall Street Journal wrote the other day," says Knight, clearly still peeved. "We're in the sports business, and there's a big difference."

Reebok's blindside tackle gave Knight pause. Until then, Nike prided itself on being something of a counterculture corporation. Irreverence and risk-taking were prized; the athletic establishment and corporate wisdom were disdained. In keeping with Nike's collegiate, fraternal atmosphere, the company's sprawling complex was officially dubbed the Campus. Employees reported to work in sneakers and shorts, partied hard and made decisions on the run. "We had no master plan," Knight acknowledges. "It was totally seat-of-the-pants." As if to underscore the fact that he wasn't a typical CEO, Knight once showed up at a company event in drag.

But when Nike was dislodged from the top, he realized that his fly-by-Knight approach would no longer work. Knight streamlined the company (laying off 600 of the company's 2,000 employees) and reorganized Nike along more conventional, corporate lines. Where Knight was once famous for governing by instinct, today Nike studies reams of statistics and convenes a focus group before designing a new shoelace. The marketing budget grew, and so did the emphasis on design, Nike's euphemism for fashion.

Nike is back on top because it grew up, but Knight clearly misses his company's adolescent days. "At first, we couldn't be establishment, because we didn't have any money," Knight says. "We were guerrilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit. But, as we became No. 1 in our industry, we've had to modify our culture and become a bit more planned."

Realigned, Nike replaced Reebok at the top of the charts in 1989 and has remained there ever since. Nike outdistanced its competitors by moving beyond basketball, tennis and track to control the women's and outdoor markets. (Nike also owns Cole-Haan, the dress-shoe manufacturer, and Canstar Sports Inc., the world's largest hockey equipment company.) Nike still takes risks and challenges the sports establishment, but much of the criticism leveled against the company has quieted. Nike has become a major player in promoting women's sports as well as funneling money into inner-city sports programs.

Now, 10 years after Nike's upheaval, Phil Knight has become a sort of professor emeritus. He has handed over the daily running of the company to Thomas Clarke, who was appointed president in 1994. Knight, who describes his own management style as "selectively hands-on," is still an everyday, hovering presence and very much the man in charge. But these days he is more interested in being an artist than a businessman. "At this stage in my life, the creative

process is of great interest to me," he says.

For Knight, that means finding new markets to dominate and new products to peddle. Nike has enjoyed great growth in the women's, apparel and outdoors markets. Nike is also opening up more Nike Town stores, which are as much museum as retail outlet. (Chicago's store is one of the city's top tourist attractions.) These towering shrines look about as much like a typical shoe store as Dennis Rodman looks like a typical human. But the biggest push will be overseas. Nike already owns 25 percent of the world market, dwarfing its competitors. That still leaves billions of un-Niked feet out there.

Knight's overriding goal is to ensure Nike's legacy. "Phil is always thinking ahead," says Nelson Farris, Nike's director of corporate education and a Knight confidante for 23 years. "He once said in a speech that the worst thing he could envision was to sit his grandkids on his knee and have them ask him, 'What's a Nike?' "

Knight is not one for reflection. Time spent basking in the glow of success or recounting past triumphs is time wasted. Just as a baseball player is only as good as his last at-bat, Knight figures Nike is only as good as its last quarterly report. Plato may have thought the unexamined life was not worth living, but what did he know? All he wore was a pair of sandals.

Occasionally, though, Knight does indulge himself. Late at night, he leans back in his office chair and gazes out the window. Lights reflect off the lake and illuminate the four miles of running trails that crisscross and surround the campus. "Sometimes I look out there and I get goosebumps," says Knight, almost dreamily. A small smile flits across his face, but he quickly checks it. His voice hardens.

"But you better not spend much time doing that, because every six months is a new lifetime, and you've got to worry about what's coming up to stay ahead of the curve," he says. "If you want to spend time saying this is cool, you're going to get your ass kicked."

Knight laughs uncomfortably and reaches for his watch as if embarrassed to have committed two personal transgressions: He reflected out loud, and he exposed a small corner of his heart. He straightens out of a slouch, steadies his gaze and, like a shortstop, waits to field the next question. The message is clear: introspection over. It's time once again to just do it.

Jackie Krentzman is a freelance writer based in the Bay Area.

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Notable Oregonians: Phil Knight - Innovator, Business Leader

Phil Knight, 1938-- (Photo: Nike)

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Phil Knight was born on February 24, 1938. As a youth he played sports and covered the sports beat for

his high school newspaper. Knight graduated from the University of Oregon with a B.S. in business

administration in 1959. There he competed on the track team and recorded a personal best time of 4:10

for the mile run. He received an MBA from Stanford University in 1962.

In 1964 Knight and his former track coach, Bill Bowerman, each invested $500 to start Blue Ribbon

Sports, the progenitor to Nike. They had both expressed dissatisfaction with American running shoes and

decided to try to improve on shoe design. Off to an uncertain start, Knight sold his shoes out of the back

of a station wagon but continued to practice as a certified public accountant and teach at Portland State

University until 1969.

The Cortez, the first shoe to appear under the Nike brand, arrived on the athletic scene in 1972. It

became successful and launched substantial growth for the the company named for the Greek goddess

of victory. By 1979 Nike claimed 50% of the U.S. running shoe market. Through the 1980s and 1990s,

Nike's advertisements helped make it the foremost retailer of athletic shoes worldwide. Most of the

advertisements featured endorsements from athletes such as basketball player Michael Jordan and golfer

Tiger Woods as well as slogans such as "Just Do It." The company has expanded over the years to

design and market apparel and sports equipment. It is now the world's largest sports and fitness

company.

Nike innovations in shoe design include the waffle sole and air cushioning. Knight has also introduced

several advances in the field of sports business. In December 2004, he stepped down as chief executive

officer and president of Nike. Knight continues as chairman of the company's board of directors.

Knight donated $105 million to the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2006, the largest donation to

a business school in history to that date. He also provided financial assistance to his high school alma

mater Cleveland High School in Portland for their new track, football field, and gymnasium. Knight and his

wife, Penny, donated $100 million to the OHSU Cancer Institute in Portland in 2008 and gave $5 million to

Willamette University in 2009.

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