Phil Knight - Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

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Certain names have been changed.

Copyright 2016 by Phil Knight

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First Scribner hardcover edition April 2016

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Interior design by Kyle Kabel
Jacket design by Jaya Miceli and Jonathan Bush
Swoosh courtesy of Nike

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-3591-0
ISBN 978-1-5011-3593-4 (ebook)

For my grandchildren, so they will know

In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, but in the experts mind there are few.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind

DAWN

I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my shorts and sweatshirt, and laced up my green running shoes. Then slipped quietly out the back door.

I stretched my legs, my hamstrings, my lower back, and groaned as I took the first few balky steps down the cool road, into the fog. Why is it always so hard to get started?

There were no cars, no people, no signs of life. I was all alone, the world to myselfthough the trees seemed oddly aware of me. Then again, this was Oregon. The trees always seemed to know. The trees always had your back.

What a beautiful place to be from, I thought, gazing around. Calm, green, tranquilI was proud to call Oregon my home, proud to call little Portland my place of birth. But I felt a stab of regret, too. Though beautiful, Oregon struck some people as the kind of place where nothing big had ever happened, or was ever likely to. If we Oregonians were famous for anything, it was an old, old trail wed had to blaze to get here. Since then, things had been pretty tame.

The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest men I ever knew, spoke of that trail often. Its our birthright, hed growl. Our character, our fateour DNA . The cowards never started, hed tell me, and the weak died along the waythat leaves us.

Us. Some rare strain of pioneer spirit was discovered along that trail, my teacher believed, some outsized sense of possibility mixed with a diminished capacity for pessimismand it was our job as Oregonians to keep that strain alive.

Id nod, showing him all due respect. I loved the guy. But walking away Id sometimes think: Jeez, its just a dirt road.

That foggy morning, that momentous morning in 1962, Id recently blazed my own trailback home, after seven long years away. It was strange being home again, strange being lashed again by the daily rains. Stranger still was living again with my parents and twin sisters, sleeping in my childhood bed. Late at night Id lie on my back, staring at my college textbooks, my high school trophies and blue ribbons, thinking: This is me? Still?

I moved quicker down the road. My breath formed rounded, frosty puffs, swirling into the fog. I savored that first physical awakening, that brilliant moment before the mind is fully clear, when the limbs and joints first begin to loosen and the material body starts to melt away. Solid to liquid.

Faster, I told myself. Faster.

On paper, I thought, Im an adult. Graduated from a good collegeUniversity of Oregon. Earned a masters from a top business schoolStanford. Survived a yearlong hitch in the U.S. ArmyFort Lewis and Fort Eustis. My rsum said I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a twenty-four-year-old man in full... So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid?

Worse, like the same shy, pale, rail-thin kid Id always been.

Maybe because I still hadnt experienced anything of life. Least of all its many temptations and excitements. I hadnt smoked a cigarette, hadnt tried a drug. I hadnt broken a rule, let alone a law. The 1960s were just under way, the age of rebellion, and I was the only person in America who hadnt yet rebelled. I couldnt think of one time Id cut loose, done the unexpected.

Id never even been with a girl.

If I tended to dwell on all the things I wasnt, the reason was simple. Those were the things I knew best. Id have found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or might become. Like all my friends I wanted to be successful. Unlike my friends I didnt know what that meant. Money? Maybe. Wife? Kids? House? Sure, if I was lucky. These were the goals I was taught to aspire to, and part of me did aspire to them, instinctively. But deep down I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all... different.

I wanted to leave a mark on the world.

I wanted to win.

No, thats not right. I simply didnt want to lose.

And then it happened. As my young heart began to thump, as my pink lungs expanded like the wings of a bird, as the trees turned to greenish blurs, I saw it all before me, exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play.

Yes, I thought, thats it. Thats the word. The secret of happiness, Id always suspected, the essence of beauty or truth, or all we ever need to know of either, lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. Theres a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life.

At different times Id fantasized about becoming a great novelist, a great journalist, a great statesman. But the ultimate dream was always to be a great athlete. Sadly, fate had made me good, not great. At twenty-four I was finally resigned to that fact. Id run track at Oregon, and Id distinguished myself, lettering three of four years. But that was that, the end. Now, as I began to clip off one brisk six-minute mile after another, as the rising sun set fire to the lowest needles of the pines, I asked myself: What if there were a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing.

The world was so overrun with war and pain and misery, the daily grind was so exhausting and often unjustmaybe the only answer, I thought, was to find some prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy, that seemed fun, that seemed a good fit, and chase it with an athletes single-minded dedication and purpose. Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines, and I didnt want that. More than anything, that was the thing I did not want.

Which led, as always, to my Crazy Idea. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I need to take one more look at my Crazy Idea. Maybe my Crazy Idea just might... work?