Gratitude

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “I saw the hype around your book. I remember walking into the hospital and seeing people reading it in waiting rooms. I even saw someone reading it at the grocery store once. Pushing her cart and reading like she couldn’t put it down. I was proud of you.” I don’t know how I feel about him being proud of me. He barely knows me. It feels condescending, but then it doesn’t. Isaac isn’t really a condescending guy. He’s equal parts humble and slightly awkward about receiving praise. I saw it in the hospital. As soon as anyone started saying good things about him, his eyes would get shifty and he’d look for an escape route. He was all clickety-clack, don’t look back. Sixty two pieces. “So how did that get me here?” “Thirty minutes,” he says. “What?” “It’s been thirty minutes. Time for a shot.” He stands up and opens the cabinet where we keep the liquor. We keep finding hidden bottles. The rum was in a Ziploc bag in the sack of rice. “Whiskey or rum?” “Rum,” I say. “I’m sick of whiskey.” He grabs two clean coffee mugs and pours our shots. I drink mine before he’s even had time to pick up his mug. I smack my lips together as it rolls down my throat. At least it’s not the cheap stuff. “Well?” I demand. “How did it get me here?” “I don’t know,” he finally says. He finds the piece he’s looking for and joins it to the ear of his deer. “But I’d be stupid to think this wasn’t a fan. It’s that or there is one other option.” His voice drops off and I know what he’s thinking. “I don’t think it was him,” I rush. I pour myself a voluntary shot. I don’t have much of an alcohol tolerance and I haven’t eaten anything today. My head does a little flipsy doosey as the alcohol runs down my throat. I watch his fingers slide, clip into place, slide, search, slide… 100 pieces. I pick up my first piece, the one with the bulldog. “You know,” Isaac says. “My bike never did grow wings.” The rum has curbed my vinegar and loosened the muscles in my face. I fold my features into a version of shock mock and Isaac cracks up. “No, I don’t suppose it did. Birds are the only things that grow wings. We’re just left to muck through the mire like a bunch of emotional cave men.” “Not if you have someone to carry you.”

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Likewise, for question 2, find the total number of minutes, across all your waking hours, that you meaningfully focused on others, and so on. Odds are the gap between these two numbers is large. This gap represents your untapped potential, in a typical day, for creating conditions conducive to positivity resonance. Next, continue on to find the total number of minutes, across all your waking hours yesterday, that you sensed either the gestalt sense of positivity resonance (question 3) or one of three facets of it (questions 4 and 5, followed by questions 6 and 7). The gap between each of these numbers and your total number of minutes spent in the presence of others (question 1) represents your untapped potential for love, a number likely to be quite large. By contrast, the more modest gap between each of these numbers (for questions 3 through 7) and your total number of minutes spent with respectful and meaningful focus on others (question 2) represents how easily you were able to convert these opportunities into micro-moments of love. With this rundown before you, consider now the opportunity costs for self-absorptions like surfing the Internet. That kind of behavior is normal and inevitable, and at times even rejuvenating. But think about what other kinds of experiences you are crowding out. What do you miss out on? More love? Jeremy’s Story In my home office, I have three framed letters—two from my own sons and a third from a couple of children whom I may never meet. The two from my boys are cherished Mother’s Day gifts. Each lists what it takes to be their mom, ranging from “make the best pancakes” and “cheer me on” to “enjoy talking to me” and “teach me about what she teaches.” The third is written in blue marker on green construction paper and decorated with glitter glue and cartoon drawings. It reads: “Dear Dr. Fredrickson, Thank you for teaching Mr. Wills to be + [positive], [heart] Tisha and Kelly.” Mr. Wills is Jeremy Wills, one of my former students. A few years back, he’d enrolled in an upper-level undergraduate seminar of mine, on positive psychology, before which he’d never given a second thought to positive emotions. A few months ago, as I was thick into crafting part I of this book, I ran into Jeremy as I was walking across campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was back in town for a short stretch between jobs. He’d been a wonderful contributor in my class years back, so open and thoughtful, and I enjoy catching up with him when I can.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  The five thousand employees at the world headquarters in Beaverton are housed on an Edenic collegiate campus, with two hundred acres of wooded wilderness, laced by rolling streams, dotted by pristine ball fields. The buildings are named after the men and women who have given us more than their names and endorsements. Joan Benoit Samuelson, Ken Griffey Jr., Mia Hamm, Tiger Woods, Dan Fouts, Jerry Rice, Steve Prefontaine—they’ve given us our identity. As chairman I still go most days to my office. I look around at all those buildings, and I don’t see buildings, I see temples. Any building is a temple if you make it so. I think often of that momentous trip when I was twenty-four. I think of myself standing high above Athens, gazing at the Parthenon, and I never fail to experience the sensation of time folding in on itself. Amid the campus buildings, along the campus walkways, there are enormous banners: action photos of the super athletes, the legends and giants and titans who’ve elevated Nike to something more than a brand. Jordan. Kobe. Tiger. Again, I can’t help but think of my trip around the world. The River Jordan. Mystical Kobe, Japan. That first meeting at Onitsuka, pleading with the executives for the right to sell Tigers… Can this all be a coincidence? I think of the countless Nike offices around the world. At each one, no matter the country, the phone number ends in 6453, which spells out Nike on the keypad. But, by pure chance, from right to left it also spells out Pre’s best time in the mile, to the tenth of a second: 3:54.6. I say by pure chance, but is it really? Am I allowed to think that some coincidences are more than coincidental? Can I be forgiven for thinking, or hoping, that the universe, or some guiding daemon, has been nudging me, whispering to me? Or else just playing with me? Can it really be nothing but a fluke of geography that the oldest shoes ever discovered are a pair of nine-thousand-year-old sandals… salvaged from a cave in Oregon? Is there nothing to the fact that the sandals were discovered in 1938, the year I was born? I ALWAYS FEEL a thrill, a shot of adrenaline, when I drive through the intersection of the campus’s two main streets, each named after a Nike Founding Father. All day, every day, the security guard at the front gate gives visitors the same directions. What you wanna do is take Bowerman Drive all the way up to Del Hayes Way… I also take great pleasure in strolling past the oasis at the center of campus, the Nissho Iwai Japanese Gardens. In one sense our campus is a topographical map of Nike’s history and growth; in another it’s a diorama of my life. In yet another sense it’s a living, breathing expression of that vital human emotion, maybe the most vital of all, after love. Gratitude.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  They’ve even formed a discussion group, an informal think tank, to preserve that original sense of innovation. They call themselves The Spirit of 72, which fills my heart. But it’s not just the young people within the company who honor the history. I think back to July 2005. In the middle of some event, I can’t recall which, LeBron James asks for a private word. “Phil, can I see you a moment?” “Of course.” “When I first signed with you,” he says, “I didn’t know all that much about the history of Nike. So I’ve been studying up.” “Oh?” “You’re the founder.” “Well. Cofounder. Yes. It surprises a lot of people.” “And Nike was born in 1972.” “Well. Born—? Yes. I suppose.” “Right. So I went to my jeweler and had them find a Rolex watch from 1972.” He hands me the watch. It’s engraved: With thanks for taking a chance on me . As usual, I say nothing. I don’t know what to say. It wasn’t much of a chance. He was pretty close to a sure thing. But taking a chance on people—he’s right. You could argue that’s what it’s all been about. I GO OUT to the kitchen, pour another glass of wine. Returning to my recliner, I watch Penny needlepoint for a while and the mental images come tumbling faster and faster. As if I’m needlepointing memories. I watch Pete Sampras crush every opponent at one of his many Wimbledons. After the final point he tosses his racket into the stands—to me! (He overshoots and hits the man behind me, who sues, of course.) I see Pete’s archrival, Andre Agassi, win the U.S. Open, unseeded, and come to my box after the final shot, in tears. “We did it, Phil!” We? I smile as Tiger drains the final putt at Augusta—or is it St. Andrews? He hugs me—and holds on for many seconds longer than I expect. I roll my mind back over the many private, intimate moments I’ve shared with him, and with Bo Jackson, and with Michael Jordan. Staying at Michael’s house in Chicago, I pick up the phone next to the bed in the guestroom and discover that there’s a voice on the line. May I help you? It’s room service. Genuine, round-the-clock, whatever-your-heart-desires room service. I set down the phone, my mouth hanging open. They’re all like sons, and brothers—family. No less. When Tiger’s father, Earl, dies, the church in Kansas holds fewer than one hundred, and I’m honored to be included. When Jordan’s father is murdered, I fly to North Carolina for the funeral and discover with a shock that a seat is reserved for me in the front row. All of which leads me back, of course, to Matthew. I think of his long, difficult search for meaning, for identity. For me. His search often looked so familiar, even though Matthew didn’t have my luck, or my focus. Nor my insecurity.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Kobe. Tiger. Again, I can’t help but think of my trip around the world. The River Jordan. Mystical Kobe, Japan. That first meeting at Onitsuka, pleading with the executives for the right to sell Tigers... Can this all be a coincidence? I think of the countless Nike offices around the world. At each one, no matter the country, the phone number ends in 6453, which spells out Nike on the keypad. But, by pure chance, from right to left it also spells out Pre’s best time in the mile, to the tenth of a second: 3:54.6. I say by pure chance, but is it really? Am I allowed to think that some coincidences are more than coincidental? Can I be forgiven for thinking, or hoping, that the universe, or some guiding daemon, has been nudging me, whispering to me? Or else just playing with me? Can it really be nothing but a fluke of geography that the oldest shoes ever discovered are a pair of nine-thousand-year-old sandals... salvaged from a cave in Oregon? Is there nothing to the fact that the sandals were discovered in 1938, the year I was born? I ALWAYS FEEL a thrill, a shot of adrenaline, when I drive through the intersection of the campus’s two main streets, each named after a Nike Founding Father. All day, every day, the security guard at the front gate gives visitors the same directions. What you wanna do is take Bowerman Drive all the way up to Del Hayes Way... I also take great pleasure in strolling past the oasis at the center of campus, the Nissho Iwai Japanese Gardens. In one sense our campus is a topographical map of Nike’s history and growth; in another it’s a diorama of my life. In yet another sense it’s a living, breathing expression of that vital human emotion, maybe the most vital of all, after love. Gratitude. The youngest employees at Nike seem to have it. In abundance. They care deeply about the names on the streets and buildings, and about the bygone days. Like Matthew begging for his bedtime story, they clamor for the old tales. They crowd the conference room whenever Woodell or Johnson visits. They’ve even formed a discussion group, an informal think tank, to preserve that original sense of innovation. They call themselves The Spirit of 72, which fills my heart. But it’s not just the young people within the company who honor the history. I think back to July 2005. In the middle of some event, I can’t recall which, LeBron James asks for a private word. “Phil, can I see you a moment?” “Of course.” “When I first signed with you,” he says, “I didn’t know all that much about the history of Nike. So I’ve been studying up.” “Oh?” “You’re the founder.” “Well. Cofounder. Yes. It surprises a lot of people.” “And Nike was born in 1972.” “Well. Born—? Yes. I suppose.” “Right.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I thought of that phrase, “It’s just business.” It’s never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad. TIME FOR BED, Penny says, packing up her needlepoint. Yes, I tell her. I’ll be along in a minute. I keep thinking of one line in The Bucket List . “You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.” I forget if it was Nicholson or Freeman. The line is so true, so very true. And it transports me to Tokyo, to the offices of Nissho. I was there not long ago for a visit. The phone rang. “For you,” the Japanese receptionist said, extending the receiver. “Me?” It was Michael Johnson, the three-time gold medalist, holder of the world record in the 200 meters and 400 meters. He did it all in our shoes. He happened to be in Tokyo, he said, and heard I was, too. “Do you want to have dinner?” he asked. I was flattered. But I told him I couldn’t. Nissho was having a banquet for me. I invited him to come. Hours later we were sitting together on the floor, before a table covered with shabu-shabu, toasting each other with cup after cup of sake. We laughed, cheered, clinked glasses, and something passed between us, the same thing that passes between me and most of the athletes I work with. A transference, a camaraderie, a sort of connection . It’s brief, but it nearly always happens, and I know it’s part of what I was searching for when I went around the world in 1962. To study the self is to forget the self. Mi casa, su casa . Oneness—in some way, shape, or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking. I THINK OF others who didn’t make it this far. Bowerman died on Christmas Eve, 1999, in Fossil. He’d gone back to his hometown, as we always suspected he would. He still owned his house on the mountaintop above campus, but he chose to quit it, to move with Mrs. Bowerman to a Fossil retirement home. He needed to be where he started—did he tell someone that? Or am I imagining him muttering it to himself? I remember when I was a sophomore, we had a dual meet with Washington State, in Pullman, and Bowerman made the bus driver go through Fossil so he could show us. I immediately thought of that sentimental detour when I heard that he’d lain down on the bed and never got up. It was Jaqua who phoned. I was reading the paper, the Christmas tree blinking blinking blinking. You always remember the strangest details from such moments. I choked into the phone, “I’ll have to call you back,” then walked upstairs to my den. I turned out all the lights. Eyes shut, I replayed a million different moments, including that long-ago lunch at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Deal? Deal.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Sure, sure, we said, we’d love to have that quick infusion of capital. Oh, the things we could do with that money! The factories we could lease! The talent we could hire! But going public would change our culture, make us beholden, make us corporate. That’s not our play, we all agreed. Weeks later, strapped for money again, our bank accounts at zero, we took another look at the idea. And rejected it again. Wanting to settle the matter once and for all, I put the subject at the top of the agenda for our biannual gathering, a retreat we’d taken to calling the Buttface. JOHNSON COINED THE phrase, we think. At one of our earliest retreats he muttered: “How many multimillion-dollar companies can you yell out, ‘Hey, Buttface,’ and the entire management team turns around?” It got a laugh. And then it stuck. And then it became a key part of our vernacular. Buttface referred to both the retreat and the retreaters, and it not only captured the informal mood of those retreats, where no idea was too sacred to be mocked, and no person was too important to be ridiculed, it also summed up the company spirit, mission and ethos. The first few Buttfaces took place at various Oregon resorts. Otter Crest. Salishan. Ultimately we came to prefer Sunriver, an idyllic spot in sunny central Oregon. Typically, Woodell and Johnson would fly out from the East Coast, and we’d all drive out to Sunriver late Friday. We’d reserve a bunch of cabins, seize a conference room, and spend two or three days shouting ourselves hoarse. I can see myself so clearly at the head of a conference table, shouting, being shouted at—laughing until my voice was gone. The problems confronting us were grave, complex, seemingly insurmountable, made more so by the fact we were separated from each other by three thousand miles, at a time when communication wasn’t easy or instant. And yet we were always laughing. Sometimes, after a really cathartic guffaw, I’d look around the table and feel overcome by emotion. Camaraderie, loyalty, gratitude. Even love. Surely love. But I also remember feeling shocked that these were the men I’d assembled. These were the founding fathers of a multimillion-dollar company that sold athletic shoes? A paralyzed guy, two morbidly obese guys, a chain-smoking guy? It was bracing to realize that, in this group, the one with whom I had the most in common was... Johnson. And yet, it was undeniable. While everyone else was laughing, rioting, he’d be the sane one, sitting quietly in the middle of the table reading a book. The loudest voice at every Buttface always seemed to be Hayes. And the craziest. Like his girth, his personality was ever expanding, adding new phobias and enthusiasms. For instance, by this time Hayes had developed a curious obsession with heavy equipment. Backhoes, bulldozers, cherry pickers, cranes, they fascinated him. They... turned him on, there’s no other way to say it.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I ’ve spent a fair portion of my life in debt. As a young entrepreneur I became distressingly familiar with that feeling of going to sleep each night, waking up each day, owing many people a sum far greater than I could repay. Nothing, however, has made me feel quite so indebted as the writing of this book. Just as there’s no end to my gratitude, there seems no proper, logical place to begin to express it. And so. At Nike, I wish to thank my assistant, Lisa McKillips, for doing everything—I mean everything—perfectly, cheerfully, and always with her dazzling smile; old friends Jeff Johnson and Bob Woodell for making me remember, and being patient when I remembered it different; historian Scott Reames for deftly sifting facts from myths; and Maria Eitel for applying her expertise to weightiest matters. Of course, my biggest and most emphatic thanks to the 68,000 Nike employees worldwide for their daily efforts and their dedication, without which there would be no book, no author, no nothing. At Stanford, I wish to thank the mad genius and gifted teacher Adam Johnson for his golden example of what it means to be a working writer and a friend; Abraham Verghese, who instructs as he writes—quietly, effortlessly; and numberless graduate students I met with while sitting in the back row of writing classes—each inspired me with his or her passion for language and craft. At Scribner, thanks to the legendary Nan Graham for her steadfast support; Brian Belfiglio, Roz Lippel, Susan Moldow, and Carolyn Reidy for their bracing, energizing enthusiasm; Kathleen Rizzo for keeping production moving smoothly forward while always maintaining a sublime calm; above all, thanks to my supremely talented and razor-sharp editor, Shannon Welch, who gave me the affirmation I needed, when I needed it, without either of us fully appreciating how much I needed it. Her early note of praise and analysis and precocious wisdom was everything. Randomly, in no order, thanks to the many pals and colleagues who were so lavish with their time, talent, and advice, including super agent Bob Barnett, poet-administrator extraordinaire Eavan Boland, Grand Slam memoirist Andre Agassi, and number artist Del Hayes. A special and profound thank-you to memoirist-novelist-journalist-sportswriter-muse-friend J. R. Moehringer, whose generosity and good humor and enviable storytelling gifts I relied on through the many, many drafts of this book. Last, I wish to thank my family, all of them, but particularly my son Travis, whose support and friendship meant—and mean—the world. And, of course, a full-throated, full-hearted thanks to my Penelope, who waited. And waited. She waited while I journeyed, and she waited while I got lost. She waited night after night while I made my maddeningly slow way home—usually late, the dinner cold—and she waited the last few years while I relived it all, aloud, and in my head, and on the page, even though there were parts she didn’t care to relive. From the start, going on half a century, she’s waited, and now at last I can hand her these hard-fought pages and say, about them, about Nike, about everything: “Penny, I couldn’t have done it without you. ”

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Joan Benoit Samuelson, Ken Griffey Jr., Mia Hamm, Tiger Woods, Dan Fouts, Jerry Rice, Steve Prefontaine—they’ve given us our identity. As chairman I still go most days to my office. I look around at all those buildings, and I don’t see buildings, I see temples. Any building is a temple if you make it so. I think often of that momentous trip when I was twenty-four. I think of myself standing high above Athens, gazing at the Parthenon, and I never fail to experience the sensation of time folding in on itself. Amid the campus buildings, along the campus walkways, there are enormous banners: action photos of the super athletes, the legends and giants and titans who’ve elevated Nike to something more than a brand. Jordan. Kobe. Tiger. Again, I can’t help but think of my trip around the world. The River Jordan . Mystical Kobe , Japan. That first meeting at Onitsuka, pleading with the executives for the right to sell Tigers … Can this all be a coincidence? I think of the countless Nike offices around the world. At each one, no matter the country, the phone number ends in 6453, which spells out Nike on the keypad. But, by pure chance, from right to left it also spells out Pre’s best time in the mile, to the tenth of a second: 3:54.6. I say by pure chance, but is it really? Am I allowed to think that some coincidences are more than coincidental? Can I be forgiven for thinking, or hoping, that the universe, or some guiding daemon, has been nudging me, whispering to me? Or else just playing with me? Can it really be nothing but a fluke of geography that the oldest shoes ever discovered are a pair of nine-thousand-year-old sandals… salvaged from a cave in Oregon? Is there nothing to the fact that the sandals were discovered in 1938, the year I was born? I ALWAYS FEEL a thrill, a shot of adrenaline, when I drive through the intersection of the campus’s two main streets, each named after a Nike Founding Father. All day, every day, the security guard at the front gate gives visitors the same directions. What you wanna do is take Bowerman Drive all the way up to Del Hayes Way… I also take great pleasure in strolling past the oasis at the center of campus, the Nissho Iwai Japanese Gardens. In one sense our campus is a topographical map of Nike’s history and growth; in another it’s a diorama of my life. In yet another sense it’s a living, breathing expression of that vital human emotion, maybe the most vital of all, after love. Gratitude. The youngest employees at Nike seem to have it. In abundance. They care deeply about the names on the streets and buildings, and about the bygone days. Like Matthew begging for his bedtime story, they clamor for the old tales. They crowd the conference room whenever Woodell or Johnson visits.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Randomly, in no order, thanks to the many pals and colleagues who were so lavish with their time, talent, and advice, including super agent Bob Barnett, poet-administrator extraordinaire Eavan Boland, Grand Slam memoirist Andre Agassi, and number artist Del Hayes. A special and profound thank-you to memoirist-novelist-journalist-sportswriter-muse-friend J. R. Moehringer, whose generosity and good humor and enviable storytelling gifts I relied on through the many, many drafts of this book. Last, I wish to thank my family, all of them, but particularly my son Travis, whose support and friendship meant—and mean—the world. And, of course, a full-throated, full-hearted thanks to my Penelope, who waited. And waited. She waited while I journeyed, and she waited while I got lost. She waited night after night while I made my maddeningly slow way home—usually late, the dinner cold—and she waited the last few years while I relived it all, aloud, and in my head, and on the page, even though there were parts she didn’t care to relive. From the start, going on half a century, she’s waited, and now at last I can hand her these hard-fought pages and say, about them, about Nike, about everything: “Penny, I couldn’t have done it without you.” More from the Author [image file=image_rsrc3K9.jpg] Shoe DogABOUT THE AUTHOROne of the world’s most influential business executives, PHIL KNIGHT is the founder of Nike, Inc. He served as CEO of the company from 1964 to 2004, as board chairman through 2016, and is currently chairman emeritus. He lives in Oregon with his wife, Penny. [image "Logo: Scribner" file=image_rsrc3KA.jpg] MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT SimonandSchuster.com www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Phil-Knight [image "Icon: Facebook" file=image_rsrc3KB.jpg] [image "Icon: Twitter" file=image_rsrc3KC.jpg] [image "Icon: Instagram" file=image_rsrc3KD.jpg] @ScribnerBooks We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook. Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. [image "Logo: Scribner" file=image_rsrc3KE.jpg] SCRIBNER An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Certain names have been changed. Copyright © 2016 by Phil Knight All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. First Scribner trade paperback edition May 2018 Scribner and design are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, LLC. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. Interior design by Kyle Kabel Cover design by Jaya Miceli and Jonathan Bush Swoosh Courtesy of Nike Library of Congress Control Number: 2016010080 ISBN 978-1-5011-3591-0 ISBN 978-1-5011-3592-7 (pbk) ISBN 978-1-5011-3593-4 (ebook)

• From Educated (2018)

  Gashes the size of football fields would appear at the mountain base, leaving a desolation of broken roots and upturned trees where once there had been a forest. He was probably chanting, “Got to be self-reliant” the day he climbed into a crawler and tore into the fields of satin wheat. —GRANDMA-OVER-IN-TOWN DIED ON MOTHER’S Day. I was doing research in Colorado when I heard the news. I left immediately for Idaho, but while traveling realized I had nowhere to stay. It was then that I remembered my aunt Angie, and that my father was telling anyone who would listen that she had put his name on a terrorist watch list. Mother had cast her aside; I hoped I could reclaim her. Angie lived next door to my grandfather, so again I parked along the white picket fence. I knocked. Angie greeted me politely, the way Grandpa had done. It was clear that she had heard much about me from my mother and father in the past five years. “I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “I’ll forget everything my dad has said about you, if you’ll forget everything he’s said about me.” She laughed, closing her eyes and throwing back her head in a way that nearly broke my heart, she looked so much like my mother. I stayed with Angie until the funeral. In the days before the service, my mother’s siblings began to gather at their childhood home. They were my aunts and uncles, but some of them I hadn’t seen since I was a child. My uncle Daryl, who I barely knew, suggested that his brothers and sisters should spend an afternoon together at a favorite restaurant in Lava Hot Springs. My mother refused to come. She would not go without my father, and he would have nothing to do with Angie. It was a bright May afternoon when we all piled into a large van and set off on the hour-long drive. I was uncomfortably aware that I had taken my mother’s place, going with her siblings and her remaining parent on an outing to remember her mother, a grandmother I had not known well. I soon realized that my not knowing her was wonderful for her children, who were bursting with remembrances and loved answering questions about her. With every story my grandmother came into sharper focus, but the woman taking shape from their collective memories was nothing like the woman I remembered. It was then I realized how cruelly I had judged her, how my perception of her had been distorted, because I’d been looking at her through my father’s harsh lens. During the drive back, my aunt Debbie invited me to visit her in Utah. My uncle Daryl echoed her. “We’d love to have you in Arizona,” he said. In the space of a day, I had reclaimed a family—not mine, hers. The funeral was the next day. I stood in a corner and watched my siblings trickle in.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Out of the sweatshop crisis also came the Girl Effect, a massive Nike effort to break the generational cycles of poverty in the bleakest corners of the world. Along with the United Nations and other corporate and government partners, the Girl Effect is spending tens of millions of dollars in a smart, tough, global campaign to educate and connect and lift up young girls. Economists, sociologists, not to mention our own hearts, tell us that, in many societies, young girls are the most economically vulnerable, and vital, demographic. So helping them helps all. Whether striving to end child marriage in Ethiopia, or building safe spaces for teenage girls in Nigeria, or launching a magazine and radio show that deliver powerful, inspiring messages to young Rwandans, the Girl Effect is changing millions of lives, and the best days of my week, month, year, are those when I receive the glowing reports from its front lines. I’d do anything to go back, to make so many different decisions, which might or might not have averted the sweatshop crisis. But I can’t deny that the crisis has led to miraculous change, inside and outside Nike. For that I must be grateful. Of course, there will always be the question of wages. The salary of a Third World factory worker seems impossibly low to Americans, and I understand. Still, we have to operate within the limits and structures of each country, each economy; we can’t simply pay whatever we wish to pay. In one country, which shall be nameless, when we tried to raise wages, we found ourselves called on the carpet, summoned to the office of a top government official and ordered to stop. We were disrupting the nation’s entire economic system, he said. It’s simply not right, he insisted, or feasible, that a shoe worker makes more than a medical doctor. Change never comes as fast as we want it. I think constantly of the poverty I saw while traveling the world in the 1960s. I knew then that the only answer to such poverty is entry-level jobs. Lots of them. I didn’t form this theory on my own. I heard it from every economics professor I ever had, at both Oregon and Stanford, and everything I saw and read thereafter backed it up. International trade always, always benefits both trading nations. Another thing I often heard from those same professors was the old maxim: “When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will.” Though I’ve been known to call business war without bullets, it’s actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity. That’s why, haunted as I was by the Vietnam War, I always vowed that someday Nike would have a factory in or near Saigon. By 1997 we had four.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  He also owned a great big chunk of land at Lake Arrowhead, someone said, and lived there in a rambling house. The man was born to win. (He was even still running competitively, one year away from becoming the best in the world.) There was an all-comers road race in Portland that summer, and Penny and I invited a group of people to the house afterward, for a cocktail party. I made sure to invite Grelle, then waited for just the right moment. When everyone was rested, a couple of beers to the good, I asked Grelle for a word in private. I took him into my den and made my pitch short and sweet. New company, cash flow problems, considerable upside, yadda yadda. He was gracious, courteous, and smiled pleasantly. “I’m just not interested, Buck.” With nowhere else to turn, with no other options, I was sitting at my desk one day, staring out the window. Woodell knocked. He rolled into the office, closed the door. He said he and his parents wanted to loan me five thousand dollars, and they wouldn’t take no for an answer. They also wouldn’t tolerate any mention of interest. In fact they wouldn’t even formalize the loan with any sort of papers. He was going to Los Angeles to see Bork, but while he was gone, he said, I should drive to his house and collect the check from his folks. Days later I did something beyond imagining, something I didn’t think myself capable of doing. I drove to Woodell’s house and asked for the check. I knew the Woodells weren’t well off. I knew that, with their son’s medical bills, they were scuffling more than I. This five thousand dollars was their life savings. I knew that. But I was wrong. His parents had a little bit more, and they asked if I needed that, too. And I said yes. And they gave me their last three thousand dollars, draining their savings down to zero. How I wished I could put that check in my desk drawer and not cash it. But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. On my way out the door I stopped. I asked them: “Why are you doing this?” “Because,” Woodell’s mother said, “if you can’t trust the company your son is working for, then who can you trust?” PENNY WAS CONTINUING to find creative ways of stretching her twenty-five-dollar grocery allowance, which meant fifty kinds of beef Stroganoff, which meant my weight ballooned. By the middle of 1970 I was around 190, an all-time high. One morning, getting dressed for work, I put on one of my baggier suits and it wasn’t baggy. Standing before the mirror I said to my reflection: “Uh-oh.” But it was more than the Stroganoff. Somehow, I’d gotten out of the running habit. Blue Ribbon, marriage, fatherhood—there was never time. Also, I’d felt burned out. Though I’d loved running for Bowerman, I’d hated it, too.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Chuck said: “I was gonna tell you about Ma an this Tattoo.” He fixes his grayish eyes straight ahead, on nothing immediate: on the past, maybe, remembering the scene. “See, I was, oh, just a kid—an one day, Christ, when I was 15, that little town in Georgia, well, I jes got tired of it... I mean, it wasnt bugging me or nothing—I jes knew it was time to split. Like something calling you. My old man, he died long ago. There was five of us—all brothers—an Ma. She took care of us, on a kind of farm like, outside that town, see? So I tole her one day, I am gonna split that town—go somewhere else. Man, she was cool, my Ma. She did not say: ‘Dont go,’ ‘Wait’—or nothin. She jes looks at me an nods, understanding like. Then she asks me when am I leaving. Tomorrow, I tells her. An, man, she says—dig this—she says: ‘Well, we are gonna go into town, you an me.’” (I see my own mother standing before the glasscase with the angel figurines: arms outstretched, waiting to reclaim me....) “We had this old Ford,” Chuck said. “I remember it real good—an I remember her drivin it into that ole town like she was on a hotrod! Yippee!...” He adjusted his hat firmly on his head as if the wind, even remembered, were powerful enough to blow it off. “So we go to this bar,” he went on, “an she orders beer. ‘Beer,’ she says to the bartender, ‘for a boy that is gonna be a man!’ Hell, man, I wasnt even old enough to be in that place. But everyone knowed Ma, an they did not care. She says we are gonna have one good Drunk, because, she figures, if my Old Man was aroun, he’dda taken me out, but he ain, so it’s up to her.... Shoot, I had juice before. Me an my brothers, we used to really get juiced up.” He sits up on the railing now, enthusiastically remembering—looking far beyond the park. “Once, man, we got so fuckin drunk—man—me an my older brother—we jes started throwin rocks at the sky! Throwin rocks at the sky, man! Crazy! Not mad or nothing—you know—but jes like, you know, to make sure it’s there.... Throwin rocks at the sky,” he echoes himself slowly, shaking his head, as if somehow, in some way he has not discovered and maybe never will and knows it, this is greatly important to him. “But those rocks, man, they jes kep comin right back at us. Didnt reach the Sky.... I guess—” he laughed, the barest trace of a mood disappearing instantly, “I guess we wasnt throwin them hard enough.”

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  We’ll make our factories shining examples. And we did. In the ten years since the bad headlines and lurid exposés, we’ve used the crisis to reinvent the entire company. For instance. One of the worst things about a shoe factory used to be the rubber room, where uppers and soles are bonded. The fumes are choking, toxic, cancer-causing. So we invented a water-based bonding agent that gives off no fumes, thereby eliminating 97 percent of the carcinogens in the air. Then we gave this invention to our competitors, handed it over to anyone who wanted it. They all did. Nearly all of them now use it. One of many, many examples. We’ve gone from a target of reformers to a dominant player in the factory reform movement. Today the factories that make our products are among the best in the world. An official at the United Nations recently said so: Nike is the gold standard by which we measure all apparel factories. Out of the sweatshop crisis also came the Girl Effect, a massive Nike effort to break the generational cycles of poverty in the bleakest corners of the world. Along with the United Nations and other corporate and government partners, the Girl Effect is spending tens of millions of dollars in a smart, tough, global campaign to educate and connect and lift up young girls. Economists, sociologists, not to mention our own hearts, tell us that, in many societies, young girls are the most economically vulnerable, and vital, demographic. So helping them helps all. Whether striving to end child marriage in Ethiopia, or building safe spaces for teenage girls in Nigeria, or launching a magazine and radio show that deliver powerful, inspiring messages to young Rwandans, the Girl Effect is changing millions of lives, and the best days of my week, month, year, are those when I receive the glowing reports from its front lines. I’d do anything to go back, to make so many different decisions, which might or might not have averted the sweatshop crisis. But I can’t deny that the crisis has led to miraculous change, inside and outside Nike. For that I must be grateful. Of course, there will always be the question of wages. The salary of a Third World factory worker seems impossibly low to Americans, and I understand. Still, we have to operate within the limits and structures of each country, each economy; we can’t simply pay whatever we wish to pay. In one country, which shall be nameless, when we tried to raise wages, we found ourselves called on the carpet, summoned to the office of a top government official and ordered to stop. We were disrupting the nation’s entire economic system, he said. It’s simply not right, he insisted, or feasible, that a shoe worker makes more than a medical doctor. Change never comes as fast as we want it. I think constantly of the poverty I saw while traveling the world in the 1960s.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Suddenly my mind is racing. People I need to call, things I need to read. I’ll have to get in touch with Woodell. I should see if we have any copies of those letters from Johnson. There were so many! Somewhere in my parents’ house, where my sister Joanne still lives, there must be a box with my slides from my trip around the world. So much to do. So much to learn. So much I don’t know about my own life. Now I really can’t sleep. I get up, grab a yellow legal pad from my desk. I go to the living room and sit in my recliner. A feeling of stillness, of immense peace, comes over me. I squint at the moon shining outside my window. The same moon that inspired the ancient Zen masters to worry about nothing. In the timeless, clarifying light of that moon, I begin to make a list. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI’ve spent a fair portion of my life in debt. As a young entrepreneur I became distressingly familiar with that feeling of going to sleep each night, waking up each day, owing many people a sum far greater than I could repay. Nothing, however, has made me feel quite so indebted as the writing of this book. Just as there’s no end to my gratitude, there seems no proper, logical place to begin to express it. And so. At Nike, I wish to thank my assistant, Lisa McKillips, for doing everything—I mean everything—perfectly, cheerfully, and always with her dazzling smile; old friends Jeff Johnson and Bob Woodell for making me remember, and being patient when I remembered it different; historian Scott Reames for deftly sifting facts from myths; and Maria Eitel for applying her expertise to weightiest matters. Of course, my biggest and most emphatic thanks to the 68,000 Nike employees worldwide for their daily efforts and their dedication, without which there would be no book, no author, no nothing. At Stanford, I wish to thank the mad genius and gifted teacher Adam Johnson for his golden example of what it means to be a working writer and a friend; Abraham Verghese, who instructs as he writes—quietly, effortlessly; and numberless graduate students I met with while sitting in the back row of writing classes—each inspired me with his or her passion for language and craft. At Scribner, thanks to the legendary Nan Graham for her steadfast support; Brian Belfiglio, Roz Lippel, Susan Moldow, and Carolyn Reidy for their bracing, energizing enthusiasm; Kathleen Rizzo for keeping production moving smoothly forward while always maintaining a sublime calm; above all, thanks to my supremely talented and razor-sharp editor, Shannon Welch, who gave me the affirmation I needed, when I needed it, without either of us fully appreciating how much I needed it. Her early note of praise and analysis and precocious wisdom was everything.

• From Educated (2018)

  From Tyler’s wife, Stefanie, I would learn the story of this letter, how in the days after my father had threatened disownment, Tyler had gone to bed every night saying aloud to himself, over and over, “What am I supposed to do? She’s my sister.” When I heard this story, I made the only good decision I had made for months: I enrolled in the university counseling service. I was assigned to a sprightly middle-aged woman with tight curls and sharp eyes, who rarely spoke in our sessions, preferring to let me talk it out, which I did, week after week, month after month. The counseling did nothing at first—I can’t think of a single session I would describe as “helpful”—but their collective power over time was undeniable. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now, but there was something nourishing in setting aside that time each week, in the act of admitting that I needed something I could not provide for myself. Tyler sent the letter to my parents. That winter I spent many hours on the phone with him and Stefanie, who became a sister to me. They were available whenever I needed to talk, and back then I needed to talk quite a lot. Tyler paid a price for that letter, though the price is hard to define. He was not disowned, or at least his disownment was not permanent. Eventually he worked out a truce with my father, but their relationship may never be the same. I’ve apologized to Tyler more times than I can count for what I’ve cost him, but the words are awkwardly placed and I stumble over them. What is the proper arrangement of words? How do you craft an apology for weakening someone’s ties to his father, to his family? Perhaps there aren’t words for that. How do you thank a brother who refused to let you go, who seized your hand and wrenched you upward, just as you had decided to stop kicking and sink? There aren’t words for that, either. —WINTER WAS LONG THAT YEAR, the dreariness punctuated only by my weekly counseling sessions and the odd sense of loss, almost bereavement, I felt whenever I finished one TV series and had to find another. Then it was spring, then summer, and finally as summer turned to fall, I found I could read with focus. I could hold thoughts in my head besides anger and self-accusation. I returned to the chapter I had written nearly two years before at Harvard. Again I read Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. Again I thought about the family. There was a puzzle in it, something unresolved. What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves? I began the research. I narrowed the question, made it academic, specific.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I’d heard that Grelle had inherited a pile from his grandmother. On top of that, he was involved in all sorts of lucrative business ventures. He worked as a salesman for two grocery store chains, while selling caps and gowns to graduates on the side, and both ventures were said to be humming along. He also owned a great big chunk of land at Lake Arrowhead, someone said, and lived there in a rambling house. The man was born to win. (He was even still running competitively, one year away from becoming the best in the world.) There was an all-comers road race in Portland that summer, and Penny and I invited a group of people to the house afterward, for a cocktail party. I made sure to invite Grelle, then waited for just the right moment. When everyone was rested, a couple of beers to the good, I asked Grelle for a word in private. I took him into my den and made my pitch short and sweet. New company, cash flow problems, considerable upside, yadda yadda. He was gracious, courteous, and smiled pleasantly. “I’m just not interested, Buck.” With nowhere else to turn, with no other options, I was sitting at my desk one day, staring out the window. Woodell knocked. He rolled into the office, closed the door. He said he and his parents wanted to loan me five thousand dollars, and they wouldn’t take no for an answer. They also wouldn’t tolerate any mention of interest. In fact they wouldn’t even formalize the loan with any sort of papers. He was going to Los Angeles to see Bork, but while he was gone, he said, I should drive to his house and collect the check from his folks. Days later I did something beyond imagining, something I didn’t think myself capable of doing. I drove to Woodell’s house and asked for the check. I knew the Woodells weren’t well off. I knew that, with their son’s medical bills, they were scuffling more than I. This five thousand dollars was their life savings. I knew that. But I was wrong. His parents had a little bit more, and they asked if I needed that, too. And I said yes. And they gave me their last three thousand dollars, draining their savings down to zero. How I wished I could put that check in my desk drawer and not cash it. But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. On my way out the door I stopped. I asked them: “Why are you doing this?” “Because,” Woodell’s mother said, “if you can’t trust the company your son is working for, then who can you trust?”

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Randomly, in no order, thanks to the many pals and colleagues who were so lavish with their time, talent, and advice, including super agent Bob Barnett, poet-administrator extraordinaire Eavan Boland, Grand Slam memoirist Andre Agassi, and number artist Del Hayes. A special and profound thank-you to memoirist-novelist-journalist-sportswriter-muse-friend J. R. Moehringer, whose generosity and good humor and enviable storytelling gifts I relied on through the many, many drafts of this book. Last, I wish to thank my family, all of them, but particularly my son Travis, whose support and friendship meant—and mean—the world. And, of course, a full-throated, full-hearted thanks to my Penelope, who waited. And waited. She waited while I journeyed, and she waited while I got lost. She waited night after night while I made my maddeningly slow way home—usually late, the dinner cold—and she waited the last few years while I relived it all, aloud, and in my head, and on the page, even though there were parts she didn’t care to relive. From the start, going on half a century, she’s waited, and now at last I can hand her these hard-fought pages and say, about them, about Nike, about everything: “Penny, I couldn’t have done it without you.” More from the Author [image file=image_rsrc3K9.jpg] Shoe DogABOUT THE AUTHOROne of the world’s most influential business executives, PHIL KNIGHT is the founder of Nike, Inc. He served as CEO of the company from 1964 to 2004, as board chairman through 2016, and is currently chairman emeritus. He lives in Oregon with his wife, Penny. [image "Logo: Scribner" file=image_rsrc3KA.jpg] MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT SimonandSchuster.com www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Phil-Knight [image "Icon: Facebook" file=image_rsrc3KB.jpg] [image "Icon: Twitter" file=image_rsrc3KC.jpg] [image "Icon: Instagram" file=image_rsrc3KD.jpg] @ScribnerBooks We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook. Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. [image "Logo: Scribner" file=image_rsrc3KE.jpg] SCRIBNER An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Certain names have been changed. Copyright © 2016 by Phil Knight All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. First Scribner trade paperback edition May 2018 Scribner and design are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, LLC. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. Interior design by Kyle Kabel Cover design by Jaya Miceli and Jonathan Bush Swoosh Courtesy of Nike Library of Congress Control Number: 2016010080 ISBN 978-1-5011-3591-0 ISBN 978-1-5011-3592-7 (pbk) ISBN 978-1-5011-3593-4 (ebook)

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It was. A ritual burn, a ceremony of strange, protective magic. Bad things had fled from that burning tree. We laugh all the way back to the house, leaving the skeleton upright in the snow. And later that day Mum and I fly back to London. I drive her home, promise to see her soon, then make my way to Cambridge, and Stuart and Mandy’s house. I run to their door. I cannot wait to see my hawk. There she is, perched in their garden, fat and happy in a crowd of pointers with wagging tails. I thank Stuart for looking after her while I was gone. He stands by the patio doors, strangely drawn and tired. ‘No worries,’ he says. ‘I’ve not done much with her, to be honest. I’ve had flu. It’s been terrible. I’ve been in bed all Christmas. Just thrown her food.’ ‘Poor Stu,’ Mandy says, coming towards the table with three cups of coffee and a packet of open biscuits. ‘He’s really been in the wars.’ I look at my friends and my heart crumples. They have spent so many hours helping me, have shown me so much love. And I had taken it all for granted. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much,’ I say. ‘I love you guys. I really do.’ I say it with as much feeling as I can. I am not just thanking them for looking after my hawk. I get up to give Stuart a hug. ‘Don’t catch it,’ he says, backing away. I hug him anyway. On this breezy August day in 1939 White is in Ireland hiding from the war. He knows he ought to enlist, but he’s persuaded himself his flight here is not mere cowardice. He’d be wasted as a soldier, he thinks. He has a more important thing to do – finishing his epic about the Matter of Britain that will solve the problem of why humans fight at all. And that is why he has come here to County Mayo, and rented Sheskin Lodge to write in, a crumbling aristocratic bungalow with a glassed-in winter garden set amid acres of feral rhododendron and pine.