Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike: Knight, Phil: 9781501135910: Books: Amazon.com
I read Just Do It
by Donald Katz when I was building my sneaker company arch. I knew reading about Nike’s growth during an important moment in the history of the company could provide insight into running my own sneaker brand. As informative as the book was, it didn’t necessarily help me in developing a working business plan. I had to grow arch with very little assistance and guidance. I approached it based on my work with Sho-Shot, the company I held a license for and made a basketball sneaker and uniforms. Sho-Shot taught me a lot about the industry. My personal experience in the development of both Sho-Shot and arch wasn’t enough to push me to the end of the 100M dash of launching a footwear and apparel business. I was missing critical components.
Nike has always been able to capitalize on the newness surrounding the development of sport (jogging in the 60s and 70s) and the explosion of media from college to professional leagues in the 80s. The timeliness of Nike’s rise gave the brand the ability to constantly introduce new concepts and products. Just Do It is a look at Nike from 89-94. During this turbulent period Nike was bolstered by another defining creation of a new segment. In Just Do It Nike caught fire with Bo Jackson and Cross Training. The aerobics craze of the 80s had undercut Nike’s momentum in basketball with Air Jordan. Women were buying Reebok Freestyles and adidas got extremely lucky with Run DMC. These things shook Nike and they had to adjust. The rise of professional multi-sport athletes allowed for a new category. Bo and Deion Sanders recaptured the imagination of the U.S. Andre Agassi became iconic. Michael Jordan began winning championships. Charles Barkley was not a role model and Magic Johnson retired because of his HIV status, causing Converse to fall off. Just Do It covered that moment in time, and it couldn’t help me because I didn’t understand the real history of Nike.
Just Do It was a different more business-based approach than Swoosh: Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There, which read like fiction. That’s because Rob Strasser’s wife wrote the book. Strasser was a former Nike Man from the early days. In Shoe Dog Phil Knight laments not apologizing to Strasser who died of a heart attack. Knight’s ultra-competitive nature didn’t allow him to make peace after Strasser had moved to adidas. I’m deviating. Swoosh gives incredible insight into the culture of Nike and how the company has come to so thoroughly dominate the sportswear market. Swoosh was the best book written about Nike’s birth until Shoe Dog. Which only makes sense. Phil Knight was the writer of a thesis at Stanford Business School that seemed like a long-shot. Knight’s manifesto on building a sneaker company was written at a time when entrepreneurship wasn’t the cool thing for a college graduate to pursue. Knight’s business background is what seemed like the logical approach to life, and that’s what Phil Knight did initially until he decided to take a year to travel abroad.
Shoe Dog, like Just Do It and Swoosh, aren’t books that could have helped me to build a sneaker company. I am no longer chasing that dream. I gave almost 14 years attempting to become the next Nike or Under Armour. I very rarely had anyone who wanted to help me. I worked alone and I was a bit too soon as Instagram has allowed a million small brands to pop up since 2016. What I learned through my challenges is that timing is everything. Timing was critical in the creation of Nike, but what became painfully evident for a Black man reading Shoe Dog is that until Instagram and TikTok arrived, I had very little chance to truly be “successful”.
Shoe Dog is a beautifully written book about the foundation of Nike from 1962 to when Nike vs Onitsuka was finally completed. The book also covers in detail Nike’s battle with the U.S. government where lobbyists had to save the Swoosh from a 25-million-dollar tax bill (American Selling Price) that would have destroyed the business. Shoe Dog is Phil Knight penning what feels like an ode to his life. The tragedy of a son’s death is very briefly addressed at the end of the book, but throughout the text mortality is a clock in a mirror with hands made of our own eyes, skin and hair. Each day those hands show the effects of time, and reading it we understand that soon we won’t see the last sweep of the second hand, or in Phil Knight’s case the last second on the clock in a sporting event.
What Shoe Dog was for me was a discussion in why less privileged people very rarely create billion-dollar businesses. Having read Swoosh and Just Do It, I walked into the reading of Shoe Dog with a bias. I know that Nissho probably would have never worked with a Black man. I knew that Phil Knight began this business with friends and associates and none of those people were Black. This was the 60s of course. When I was building Sho-Shot and arch I was attempting to read business books rooted in privilege. Reading from this position sucks because you end up tick marking every moment that shows why you can’t do something, instead of reading between the lines and pulling knowledge from the details you can mimic. The instances of privilege in Shoe Dog are striking, however. They are mentioned in an almost thoughtless manner. The language is matter of fact:
- At the start of the book when Knight discusses his “Crazy Idea” on page 11 he states, “I’d need my father’s approval. More I’d need his cash.” His father was the publisher of the Oregon Journal.
- On page 13 his father agreed to a trip Phil Knight would take to travel around the world. “-a trip might be just the finishing touch to my education.” Knight on his trip would bring along a friend. A companion from his Stanford graduate school. Knight asked and days later, “(Carter) got the okay from his parents, plus a loan from his father.” At this moment I realize the opportunity Phil Knight had at a time Black people couldn’t vote and were in a decade where our greatest leaders of the Civil Rights era would be murdered.
- Knight and his friend stayed in places around the world. They stopped in Hawaii and decided to remain there for a while. They even landed jobs there that would allow them to surf all day and work at night. They left that job selling encyclopedias and landed jobs at Investors Overseas Services selling securities. Now it should be stated, opportunity arrives because of preparation and Knight had an MBA. That wasn’t exactly privilege but consider the ability to move to Hawaii on your parent’s dime after graduating with your Masters. You surf and sell books and then land a job at a Securities firm. Then when you tire of that position and that place, you move on to Japan a country only 20 years removed from World War II.
- On page 22 we learn “Luckily my father knew people in Tokyo, including …American guys working at United Press International.” The trip to Japan is what would lead to the founding of Blue Ribbon Sports the Crazy Idea from his masters thesis. Think about the moves from Portland to Hawaii to Japan where ex-GIs would assist Knight in meeting with the heads of Onitsuka. Now think about the fact that Knight got this meeting without having a name for the sneaker company. He had to make it up on the spot. That’s not privilege, that’s ingenuity.
- Privilege is being able to finish the meeting, land a deal with Onitsuka to import running shoes and being able to call your father to have money wired to Onitsuka to pay for a shipment of shoes.
- Privilege is continuing a journey that took Phil Knight from Bangkok, to Vietnam, to Kathmandu and then to wondering the streets of Bombay on New Year’s Eve. Knight then went to Kenya and Cairo. Imagine the ability in the 60s to visit countries and experience the world. Young Black people at that time were doing Freedom Rides and waiting on Kennedy to initiate the Civil Rights Act. Knight was continuing his journey in the same year Medgar Evers, an Army Vet and activist was killed in his driveway. Evers died because he was fighting for the rights of Black folks. Knight went on to Istanbul, Milan and Paris.
- As Knight finished up his travels and returned home, he was able to meet with the CEO of Pacific Power & Light who informed him he should get his CPA. Knight enrolled at Portland State to earn his CPA.
- In 1964 Phil Knight got his shipment from Onitsuka and sold out. He ordered 900 more. He didn’t have enough money so his father gave him a letter of guarantee and sent him to the First National Bank of Oregon and, “On the strength of my father’s reputation, and nothing more, the bank approved the loan.” In 1964 the Civil Rights Act had finally passed. At the same time Phil Knight had gotten a loan to ramp up Blue Ribbon Sports. The following year Malcolm X was murdered.
All of these things don’t diminish the work Phil Knight did. He still had to organize and scrape to find money again and again. He had to build a team. The people around him supported him and did incredible work. Employee #2 Jeff Johnson moved from coast to coast. The team of lawyers and accountants helped Blue Ribbon transition to Nike in 1972. Phil Knight was able to capture lightening and harness it. Was he privileged, definitely. Is this all I got from reading the book? Not at all. I realized that starting a business requires a tremendous amount of help and a lot of luck, but most important it requires preparation. Shoe Dog reminded me that having a Crazy Idea is easy; bringing that Crazy Idea to fruition requires money and connections and even then success is not a guarantee. Today, the world is much smaller. Throughout the 60s Phil Knight built Blue Ribbon Sports. At the same time Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Schools were still being integrated. Four little girls were murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen in a church bombing. Nike turned 50 years old this week. There are celebrations taking place. Two weeks ago Patrick Lyoya was shot in the back of the head by cops in Grand Rapids. Nike is a 50-billion-dollar company at 50 years old. I read a book about how the company overcame financial difficulties and the owner dealt with tragedy, but in the back of my mind I understood that this sneaker culture I love so much was created by privileges a person the same age, but a different race could have never created.