Pride

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

  THE PROBLEMS WERE never going to stop, I realized, but for the moment we had more momentum than problems. To build on this momentum we rolled out a new ad campaign with a sexy new slogan: “There is no finish line.” It was the idea of our new ad agency and its CEO, John Brown. He’d just opened his own shop in Seattle, and he was young, bright, and of course the opposite of an athlete. That was all we seemed to hire in those days. Besides Johnson and myself, Nike was a haven for the sedentary. Still, nonjock or not, Brown managed to dream up a campaign and a tagline that perfectly captured Nike’s philosophy. His ad showed a single runner on a lonely country road, surrounded by tall Douglas firs. Oregon, clearly. The copy read: “Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.” Everyone around me thought the ad was bold, fresh. It didn’t focus on the product, but on the spirit behind the product, which was something you never saw in the 1970s. People congratulated me on that ad as if we’d achieved something earth-shattering. I’d shrug. I wasn’t being modest. I still didn’t believe in the power of advertising. At all. A product, I thought, speaks for itself, or it doesn’t. In the end, it’s only quality that counts. I couldn’t imagine that any ad campaign would ever prove me wrong or change my mind. Our advertising people, of course, told me I was wrong, wrong, a thousand percent wrong. But again and again I’d ask them: Can you say definitively that people are buying Nikes because of your ad? Can you show it to me in black-and-white numbers? Silence. No, they’d say… we can’t say that definitively. So then it’s a little hard to get enthused, I’d say—isn’t it? Silence. I OFTEN WISHED I had more time to kick back and debate the niceties of advertising. Our semidaily crises were always bigger and more pressing than what slogan to print under a picture of our shoes. In the second half of 1977 the crisis was our debenture holders. They were suddenly clamoring for a way to cash in. By far the best way for them to do so would be a public offering, which, we tried to explain to them, was not an option. They didn’t want to hear that.

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

  MY SALES STRATEGY was simple, and I thought rather brilliant. After being rejected by a couple of sporting goods stores (“Kid, what this world does not need is another track shoe!”), I drove all over the Pacific Northwest, to various track meets. Between races I’d chat up the coaches, the runners, the fans, and show them my wares. The response was always the same. I couldn’t write orders fast enough. Driving back to Portland I’d puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible. Sometimes people wanted my shoes so badly that they’d write me, or phone me, saying they’d heard about the new Tigers and just had to have a pair, could I please send them, COD? Without my even trying, my mail order business was born. Sometimes people would simply show up at my parents’ house. Every few nights the doorbell would ring, and my father, grumbling, would get up from his vinyl recliner and turn down the TV and wonder who in the world. There on the porch would be some skinny kid with oddly muscular legs, shifty-eyed and twitchy, like a junky looking to score. “Buck here?” the kid would say. My father would call through the kitchen to my room in the servants’ quarters. I’d come out, invite the kid in, show him over to the sofa, then kneel before him and measure his foot. My father, hands jammed into his pockets, would watch the whole transaction, incredulous. Most people who came to the house had found me through word of mouth. Friend of a friend. But a few found me through my first attempt at advertising—a handout I’d designed and produced at a local print shop. Along the top, in big type, it said: Best news in flats! Japan challenges European track shoe domination! The handout then went on to explain: Low Japanese labor costs make it possible for an exciting new firm to offer these shoes at the low low price of $6.95. Along the bottom was my address and phone number. I nailed them up all over Portland.

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

  I then mailed my names off to the factory. It was dark as I walked out of the office building, into the crowded Tokyo street. A feeling came over me, unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I felt spent, but proud. I felt drained, but exhilarated. I felt everything I ever hoped to feel after a day’s work. I felt like an artist, a creator . I looked back over my shoulder, took one last look at Nissho’s offices. Under my breath I said, “We made this.” I ’ D BEEN IN Japan three weeks, longer than I expected, which posed two problems. The world was large, but the shoe world was small, and if Onitsuka got wind that I was in their “neighborhood,” and didn’t stop by, they’d know I was up to something. It wouldn’t take much for them to find out, or figure out, that I was lining up their replacement. So I needed to go down to Kobe, make an appearance at Onitsuka’s offices. But extending my trip, being gone from home another week, was unacceptable. Penny and I had never been apart that long. I phoned her and asked her to fly over and join me for this last leg. Penny jumped at the chance. She’d never seen Asia, and this might be her last chance before we were out of business and out of money. It might also be her last chance to use that matching pink luggage. And Dot was available for babysitting. The flight was long, though, and Penny didn’t like planes. When I went to the Tokyo airport to meet her, I knew I’d be collecting a fragile woman. I forgot, however, how intimidating Haneda Airport could be. It was a solid mass of bodies and baggage. I couldn’t move, couldn’t find Penny. Suddenly she appeared at the sliding glass doors of customs. She was trying to push forward, trying to get through. There were too many people—and armed police—on every side of her. She was trapped. The doors slid open, the crowd surged forward, and Penny fell into my arms. I’d never seen her so exhausted, not even after she gave birth to Matthew. I asked if the plane had a flat tire and she’d gotten out to change it. Joke? Kitami? Remember? She didn’t laugh. She said the plane hit turbulence two hours outside Tokyo and the flight was a roller coaster. She was wearing her best lime-green suit, now badly wrinkled and stained, and she was the same shade of lime-green. She needed a hot shower, and a long rest, and some fresh clothes. I told her we had a suite waiting at the wonderful Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. A half hour later, when we pulled up to the hotel, she said she was going to use the ladies’ room while I checked us in. I hurried to the front desk, got our room keys, and sat on one of the lobby sofas to wait.

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

  I tell them about the untapped resources, natural and human, that the world has at its disposal, the abundant ways and means to solve its many crises. All we have to do, I tell the students, is work and study, study and work, hard as we can. Put another way: We must all be professors of the jungle. I TURN OUT the lights, walk upstairs to bed. Curled up with a book beside her, Penny has drifted off. That chemistry, that in-sync feeling from Day One, Accounting 101, remains. Our conflicts, such as they are, have centered mostly on work versus family. Finding a balance. Defining that word “balance.” At our most trying moments, we’ve managed to emulate those athletes I most admire. We’ve held on, pressed through. And now we’ve endured. I slide under the covers, gingerly, so as not to wake her, and I think of others who’ve endured. Hayes lives on a farm in the Tualatin Valley, 108 rolling acres, with a ridiculous collection of bulldozers and other heavy equipment. (His pride and joy is a John Deere JD-450C. It’s bright school-bus yellow and as big as a one-bedroom condo.) He has some health problems, but he bulldozes ahead. Woodell lives in central Oregon with his wife. For years he flew his own private airplane, giving the middle finger to everyone who said he’d be helpless. (Above all, flying private meant he never again had to worry about an airline losing his wheelchair.) He’s one of the best storytellers in the history of Nike. My favorite, naturally, is the one about the day we went public. He sat his parents down and told them the news. “What does that mean?” they whispered. “It means your original eight-thousand-dollar loan to Phil is worth $1.6 million.” They looked at each other, looked at Woodell. “I don’t understand,” his mother said. If you can’t trust the company your son works for, who can you trust? When he retired from Nike, Woodell became head of the Port of Portland, managing all the rivers and the airports. A man immobilized, guiding all that motion. Lovely. He’s also the leading shareholder and director of a successful microbrewery. He always did like his beer. But whenever we get together for dinner, he tells me, of course, his greatest joy and proudest accomplishment is his college-bound son, Dan. Woodell’s old antagonist, Johnson, lives slap in the middle of a Robert Frost poem, somewhere in the wilderness of New Hampshire. He’s converted an old barn into a five-story mansion, which he calls his Fortress of Solitude. Twice divorced, he’s filled the place to the rafters with dozens of reading chairs, and thousands and thousands of books, and he keeps track of them all with an extensive card catalog. Each book has its own number and its own index card, listing author, date of publication, plot summary—and its precise location in the fortress. Of course.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I called Don, then in San Francisco, to “prepare” him. He was startled but agreed with the alterations. Despite Don’s preparation, others at Grove reacted in surprise at the rewritten galleys. Knowing how expensive the resetting would be, I had offered out of my royalties to pay for it—a contractual provision. But Barney Rosset made no objection to changes, and he refused to charge me. Publication was rescheduled, and the book was reset. I had no doubt that City of Night would be an enormous success. I was right. In a reversed way. I had thought it would sell modestly and that the book would be greeted with critical raves. The opposite occurred, dramatically. Before the official publication date, my book appeared in the No. 8 slot of Time’s national bestseller list. Also before publication, I saw my first review. Even for the dark ages of the early 1960’s the title of the review in The New York Review of Books was vicious in its overt bigotry. What followed matched its headline. The book climbed quickly to the No. 1 spot on bestseller lists in New York, California. Nationally on all lists it reached third place. In a review featured on its cover, The New Republic attempted to surpass the attack of The New York Review of Books; it was a draw. The book went into a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh printing and remained on the bestseller lists for almost seven months. In its assault of about eight lines, The New Yorker made one factual mistake and one grammatical error. Only the book’s subject seemed to be receiving outraged attention; its careful structure, whether successful or not, was virtually ignored. I was being viewed and written about as a hustler who had somehow managed to write, rather than as a writer who was writing intimately about hustling—and many other subjects. That persisting view would affect the critical reception of every one of my following books, and still does, to this day. I remained in El Paso. Once again, a letter came with a plane ticket, to New York. A man who had read my book and was outraged by its treatment in The New York Review of Books invited me to attend the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in Tanglewood.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  She is increasingly invited to speak in Muslim countries. In 2007 she was awarded a medal by the Egyptian government for her services to Islam under the auspices of the prestigious Al-Azhar madrassa, the first foreigner to have been awarded this decoration. In the summer of 2007, she was invited by the Malaysian government to speak in Kuala Lumpur (even though her books are banned there!) and gave the Muis Lecture in Singapore. She also spoke at the Young Presidents’ Organization in Istanbul and later that year gave the keynote address at an international conference on Islamophobia there. In January 2008, she visited Pakistan, where she gave lectures on Islam in Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi to packed audiences. Karen Armstrong was awarded the Four Freedoms Award for Freedom of Worship by the Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Institute (2008) and the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize, Tubingen University (2009). She is a Trustee of the British Museum and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Literature. In February 2008, she was awarded the TED Prize and is currently working with TED on a major international project to create, launch, and propagate a Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public, crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as well as in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, which will be signed in the fall of 2009 by one thousand religious and secular leaders. THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA Copyright © 2009 by Karen Armstrong All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com www.randomhouse.ca Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Armstrong, Karen, [date] The case for God / Karen Armstrong. — 1st ed. p. cm. 1. God—History of doctrines. 2. Religious life—History. 3. God (Christianity)—History of doctrines. 4. Christian life—History. 5. Apologetics. I. Title. BL473.A76 2009 211—dc22 2009014044 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Armstrong, Karen, [date] The case for God / Karen Armstrong. 1. God—History of doctrines. 2. Religious life—History. 3. God (Christianity)—History of doctrines. 4. Christian life—History. 5. Apologetics. I. Title. BL473.A75 2009 211 C2009-902600-7 Ebook ISBN 9780307272928 v3.0_r1 Introduction W e are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile. In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be readily accessible to anybody. “That book was really hard!” readers have told me reproachfully, shaking their heads in faint reproof. “Of course it was!”

• From Educated (2018)

  In the end, I chose four intellectual movements from the nineteenth century and examined how they had struggled with the question of family obligation. One of the movements I chose was nineteenth-century Mormonism. I worked for a solid year, and at the end of it I had a draft of my thesis: “The Family, Morality, and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813–1890.” The chapter on Mormonism was my favorite. As a child in Sunday school, I’d been taught that all history was a preparation for Mormonism: that every event since the death of Christ had been fashioned by God to make possible the moment when Joseph Smith would kneel in the Sacred Grove and God would restore the one true church. Wars, migrations, natural disasters—these were mere preludes to the Mormon story. On the other hand, secular histories tended to overlook spiritual movements like Mormonism altogether. My dissertation gave a different shape to history, one that was neither Mormon nor anti-Mormon, neither spiritual nor profane. It didn’t treat Mormonism as the objective of human history, but neither did it discount the contribution Mormonism had made in grappling with the questions of the age. Instead, it treated the Mormon ideology as a chapter in the larger human story. In my account, history did not set Mormons apart from the rest of the human family; it bound them to it. I sent Dr. Runciman the draft, and a few days later we met in his office. He sat across from me and, with a look of astonishment, said it was good. “Some parts of it are very good,” he said. He was smiling now. “I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t earn a doctorate.” As I walked home carrying the heavy manuscript, I remembered attending one of Dr. Kerry’s lectures, which he had begun by writing, “Who writes history?” on the blackboard. I remembered how strange the question had seemed to me then. My idea of a historian was not human; it was of someone like my father, more prophet than man, whose visions of the past, like those of the future, could not be questioned, or even augmented. Now, as I passed through King’s College, in the shadow of the enormous chapel, my old diffidence seemed almost funny. Who writes history? I thought. I do . —ON MY TWENTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY, the birthday I had chosen, I submitted my PhD dissertation. The defense took place in December, in a small, simply furnished room. I passed and returned to London, where Drew had a job and we’d rented a flat. In January, nearly ten years to the day since I’d set foot in my first classroom at BYU, I received confirmation from the University of Cambridge: I was Dr. Westover. I had built a new life, and it was a happy one, but I felt a sense of loss that went beyond family. I had lost Buck’s Peak, not by leaving but by leaving silently.

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

  Whatever you dummies think best. WE WERE ON track in 1979 for sales of $140 million. Better yet, our quality was rising apace. People in the trade, industry insiders, were writing articles, praising us for “finally” putting out a better shoe than Adidas. Personally, I thought the insiders were late to the party. Other than a few early stumbles, our quality had been tops for years. And we’d never lagged in innovation. (Plus, we had Rudy’s air soles in the pipeline.) Aside from our war with the government, we were in great shape.

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

  MANY AFTERNOONS I’D sit around the office with Strasser, trying to figure out why some lines were selling and some not, which led to broader discussions of what people thought of us, and why. We didn’t have focus groups, or market research—we couldn’t afford them—so we tried to intuit, divine, read tea leaves. Clearly people liked the look of our shoes, we agreed. Clearly they liked our story: Oregon firm founded by running geeks. Clearly they liked what wearing a pair of Nikes said about them. We were more than a brand; we were a statement. Some of the credit went to Hollywood. We had a guy out there giving Nikes to stars, all kinds of stars, big, little, rising, fading. Every time I turned on the TV our shoes were on a character in some hit show—Starsky & Hutch, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Incredible Hulk. Somehow, our Hollywood liaison got a pair of Senorita Cortezes into the hands of Farrah Fawcett, who wore them in a 1977 episode of Charlie’s Angels. That was all it took. One quick shot of Farrah in Nikes and every store in the nation was sold out of Senorita Cortezes by noon the next day. Soon the cheerleaders at UCLA and USC were jumping and leaping in what was commonly called the Farrah Shoe. All of which meant more demand… and more problems meeting demand. Our manufacturing base was broader. Besides Japan, we now had several factories in Taiwan and two smaller factories in Korea, plus Puerto Rico and Exeter, but still we couldn’t keep up. Also, the more factories we brought online, the more strain it put on our cash. Occasionally our problems had nothing to do with cash. In Korea, for instance, the five biggest factories were so massive, and the competition among them so cutthroat, we knew we were going to get knocked off soon. Sure enough, one day I received in the mail a perfect replica of our Nike Bruin, including the trademark swoosh. Imitation is flattery, but knockoff is theft, and this theft was diabolical. The detail and workmanship, without any input from our people, was startlingly good. I wrote the president of the factory and demanded he cease and desist or I’d have him thrown in jail for a hundred years. And by the way, I added, how would you like to work with us? I signed a contract with his factory in the summer of 1977, which ended our knockoff problem for the moment. More important, it gave us the capacity to shift production in a huge way, if need be. It also ended once and for all our dependence on Japan.

• From Educated (2018)

  Kerry had, tipping and swaying in the wind; everyone else was holding tightly to the stone parapet, knees bent, backs arched, as if unsure whether to walk or crawl. I raised my hand and gripped the wall. “You don’t need to do that,” he said. “It’s not a criticism.” He paused, as if unsure he should say more. “Everyone has undergone a change,” he said. “The other students were relaxed until we came to this height. Now they are uncomfortable, on edge. You seem to have made the opposite journey. This is the first time I’ve seen you at home in yourself. It’s in the way you move: it’s as if you’ve been on this roof all your life.” A gust of wind swept over the parapet and Dr. Kerry teetered, clutching the wall. I stepped up onto the ridge so he could flatten himself against the buttress. He stared at me, waiting for an explanation. “I’ve roofed my share of hay sheds,” I said finally. “So your legs are stronger? Is that why you can stand in this wind?” I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your mind.” He stared at me blankly. He hadn’t understood. “I’m just standing,” I said. “You are all trying to compensate, to get your bodies lower because the height scares you. But the crouching and the sidestepping are not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable. If you could just control your panic, this wind would be nothing.” “The way it is nothing to you,” he said. —I WANTED THE MIND of a scholar, but saw in myself the mind of a roofer. The other students belonged in a library; I belonged in a crane. The first week passed in a blur of lectures. In the second week, every student was assigned a supervisor to guide their research. My supervisor, I learned, was the eminent Professor Jonathan Steinberg, a former vice-master of a Cambridge college, who was much celebrated for his writings on the Holocaust. My first meeting with Professor Steinberg took place a few days later. I waited at the porter’s lodge until a thin man appeared and, producing a set of heavy keys, unlocked a wooden door set into the stone. I followed him up a spiral staircase and into the clock tower itself, where there was a well-lit room with simple furnishings: two chairs and a wooden table. I could hear the blood pounding behind my ears as I sat down. Professor Steinberg was in his seventies but I would not have described him as an old man. He was lithe, and his eyes moved about the room with probing energy. His speech was measured and fluid. “I am Professor Steinberg,” he said.

• From Educated (2018)

  She was a grown woman with seven children, but this was the first time in her life that she was, without question or caveat, the one in charge. Sometimes, in the days after a birth, I detected in her something of Judy’s heavy presence, in a forceful turn of her head, or the imperious arch of an eyebrow. She stopped wearing makeup, then she stopped apologizing for not wearing it. Mother charged about five hundred dollars for a delivery, and this was another way midwifing changed her: suddenly she had money. Dad didn’t believe that women should work, but I suppose he thought it was all right for Mother to be paid for midwifing, because it undermined the Government. Also, we needed the money. Dad worked harder than any man I knew, but scrapping and building barns and hay sheds didn’t bring in much, and it helped that Mother could buy groceries with the envelopes of small bills she kept in her purse. Sometimes, if we’d spent the whole day flying about the valley, delivering herbs and doing prenatal exams, Mother would use that money to take me and Audrey out to eat. Grandma-over-in-town had given me a journal, pink with a caramel-colored teddy bear on the cover, and in it I recorded the first time Mother took us to a restaurant, which I described as “real fancy with menus and everything.” According to the entry, my meal came to $3.30. Mother also used the money to improve herself as a midwife. She bought an oxygen tank in case a baby came out and couldn’t breathe, and she took a suturing class so she could stitch the women who tore. Judy had always sent women to the hospital for stitches, but Mother was determined to learn. Self-reliance, I imagine her thinking. With the rest of the money, Mother put in a phone line.* One day a white van appeared, and a handful of men in dark overalls began climbing over the utility poles by the highway. Dad burst through the back door demanding to know what the hell was going on. “I thought you wanted a phone,” Mother said, her eyes so full of surprise they were irreproachable. She went on, talking fast. “You said there could be trouble if someone goes into labor and Grandma isn’t home to take the call. I thought, He’s right, we need a phone! Silly me! Did I misunderstand?” Dad stood there for several seconds, his mouth open. Of course a midwife needs a phone, he said. Then he went back to the junkyard and that’s all that was ever said about it. We hadn’t had a telephone for as long as I could remember, but the next day there it was, resting in a lime-green cradle, its glossy finish looking out of place next to the murky jars of cohosh and skullcap. —LUKE WAS FIFTEEN WHEN he asked Mother if he could have a birth certificate.

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

  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. The same thing happens to all kinds of college athletes. Years of training and competing at a high level take their toll. You need a rest. But now the rest was over. I needed to get back out there. I didn’t want to be the fat, flabby, sedentary head of a running-shoe company. And if tight suits and the specter of hypocrisy weren’t enough incentive, another motivation soon came along. Shortly after that all-comers race, after Grelle refused me the loan, he and I went for a private run. Four miles in, I saw Grelle looking back at me sadly as I huffed and puffed to keep up. It was one thing to have him refuse me money, it was another to have him give me pity. He knew I was embarrassed, so he challenged me. “This fall,” he said, “let’s you and me race—one mile. I’ll give you a full minute handicap, and if you beat me I’ll pay you a buck for every second of difference in our times.” I trained hard that summer. I got into the habit of running six miles every night after work. In no time I was back in shape, my weight down to 160. And when the day of the big race came—with Woodell on the stopwatch—I took thirty-six dollars from Grelle. (The victory was made all the sweeter the following week when Grelle jumped into an all-comers meet and ran 4:07.) As I drove home that day I felt immensely proud. Keep going, I told myself. Don’t stop. AT ALMOST THE halfway mark of the year—June 15, 1970—I pulled my Sports Illustrated from my mailbox and got a shock. On the cover was a Man of Oregon. And not just any Man of Oregon, but perhaps the greatest of all time, greater even than Grelle. His name was Steve Prefontaine, and the photo showed him sprinting up the side of Olympus, aka Bowerman Mountain.

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

  It took a half hour to name them all. I felt like Coleridge, writing “Kubla Khan” in an opium daze. I then mailed my names off to the factory. It was dark as I walked out of the office building, into the crowded Tokyo street. A feeling came over me, unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I felt spent, but proud. I felt drained, but exhilarated. I felt everything I ever hoped to feel after a day’s work. I felt like an artist, a creator. I looked back over my shoulder, took one last look at Nissho’s offices. Under my breath I said, “We made this.” I’D BEEN IN Japan three weeks, longer than I expected, which posed two problems. The world was large, but the shoe world was small, and if Onitsuka got wind that I was in their “neighborhood,” and didn’t stop by, they’d know I was up to something. It wouldn’t take much for them to find out, or figure out, that I was lining up their replacement. So I needed to go down to Kobe, make an appearance at Onitsuka’s offices. But extending my trip, being gone from home another week, was unacceptable. Penny and I had never been apart that long. I phoned her and asked her to fly over and join me for this last leg. Penny jumped at the chance. She’d never seen Asia, and this might be her last chance before we were out of business and out of money. It might also be her last chance to use that matching pink luggage. And Dot was available for babysitting. The flight was long, though, and Penny didn’t like planes. When I went to the Tokyo airport to meet her, I knew I’d be collecting a fragile woman. I forgot, however, how intimidating Haneda Airport could be. It was a solid mass of bodies and baggage. I couldn’t move, couldn’t find Penny. Suddenly she appeared at the sliding glass doors of customs. She was trying to push forward, trying to get through. There were too many people—and armed police—on every side of her. She was trapped. The doors slid open, the crowd surged forward, and Penny fell into my arms. I’d never seen her so exhausted, not even after she gave birth to Matthew. I asked if the plane had a flat tire and she’d gotten out to change it. Joke? Kitami? Remember? She didn’t laugh. She said the plane hit turbulence two hours outside Tokyo and the flight was a roller coaster. She was wearing her best lime-green suit, now badly wrinkled and stained, and she was the same shade of lime-green. She needed a hot shower, and a long rest, and some fresh clothes. I told her we had a suite waiting at the wonderful Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

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

  I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful. She nodded. Like basic accounting principles, she grasped it all intuitively, right away. I asked if she was seeing anyone. She confessed that she was. But the boy—well, she said, he was just a boy. All the boys she dated, she said, were just that—boys. They talked about sports and cars. (I was smart enough not to confess that I loved both.) “But you,” she said, “you’ve seen the world. And now you’re putting everything on the line to create this company…” Her voice trailed off. I stood up straighter. We said good-bye to the lions and tigers. FOR OUR SECOND date we walked over to Jade West, a Chinese restaurant across the street from the office. Over Mongolian beef and garlic chicken she told me her story. She still lived at home, and loved her family very much, but there were challenges. Her father was an admiralty lawyer, which struck me as a good job. Their house certainly sounded bigger and better than the one in which I’d grown up. But five kids, she hinted, was a strain. Money was a constant issue. A certain amount of rationing was standard operating procedure. There was never enough; staples, like toilet paper, were always in low supply. It was a home marked by insecurity . She did not like insecurity. She preferred security. She said it again. Security . That’s why she’d been drawn to accounting. It seemed solid, dependable, safe, a line of work she could always rely on. I asked how she’d happened to choose Portland State. She said she’d started out at Oregon State. “Oh,” I said, as if she’d confessed to doing time in prison. She laughed. “If it’s any consolation, I hated it.” In particular, she couldn’t abide the school’s requirement that every student take at least one class in public speaking. She was far too shy. “I understand, Miss Parks.” “Call me Penny.” After dinner I drove her home and met her parents. “Mom, Dad, this is Mr. Knight.” “Pleased to meet you,” I said, shaking their hands. We all stared at each other. Then the walls. Then the floor. Lovely weather we’re having, isn’t it? “Well,” I said, tapping my watch, snapping my rubber bands, “it’s late, I’d better be going.” Her mother looked at a clock on the wall. “It’s only nine o’clock,” she said. “Some hot date.” JUST AFTER OUR second date Penny went with her parents to Hawaii for Christmas. She sent me a postcard, and I took this as a good sign. When she returned, her first day back at the office, I asked her again to dinner. It was early January 1968, a bitterly cold night.

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

  Along with scores of angry colonists, protesting the rise of import duties on their beloved tea, Matt and Travis History snuck aboard three ships in Boston Harbor and threw all the tea overboard… The minute their eyes were closed, I would sneak out of the room and settle into my recliner and reach for the phone. Hey, Dad. Yeah. How you doing?… Me? Not so good. Over the last ten years this had been my nightcap, my salvation. But now, more than ever, I lived for it. I craved things I could only get from my old man, though I’d have been hard-pressed to name them. Reassurance? Affirmation? Comfort? On December 9, 1977, I got them all, in a burst. Sports, of course, were the cause. The Houston Rockets were playing the Los Angeles Lakers that night. At the start of the second half, Lakers guard Norm Nixon missed a jumper, and his teammate Kevin Kunnert, a seven-foot beanpole out of Iowa, fought for the rebound with Houston’s Kermit Washington. In the tussle, Washington pulled down Kunnert’s shorts, and Kunnert retaliated with an elbow. Washington then socked Kunnert in the head. A fight broke out. As Houston’s Rudy Tomjanovich ran over to defend his teammates, Washington turned and threw a devastating haymaker, breaking Tomjanovich’s nose, and jaw, and separating his skull and facial bones from his skin. Tomjanovich fell to the floor as if hit with a shotgun blast. His massive body struck the ground with a sickening smack. The sound echoed throughout the upper reaches of the L.A. Forum, and for several seconds Tomjanovich lay there, motionless, in an ever-widening puddle of his own blood. I hadn’t heard anything about it until I talked to my father that night. He was breathless. I was surprised that he’d watched the game, but everyone in Portland was basketball crazy that year, because our Trail Blazers were the defending NBA champs. Still, it wasn’t the game, per se, that had him breathless. After telling me about the fight, he cried, “Oh, Buck, Buck, it was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen.” Then there was a long pause and he added, “The camera kept zooming in and you could see quite clearly… on Tomjanovich’s shoes… the swoosh! They kept zooming in on the swoosh .” I’d never heard such pride in my father’s voice. Sure, Tomjanovich was in a hospital fighting for his life, and sure his facial bones were floating around his head—but Buck Knight’s logo was in the national spotlight. That might have been the night the swoosh became real to my father. Respectable. He didn’t actually use the word “proud.” But I hung up the phone feeling as if he had. It almost makes this all worthwhile, I told myself. Almost. SALES HAD BEEN climbing geometrically, year after year, ever since the first few hundred pairs I sold out of my Valiant. But as we closed out 1977… sales were going berserk. Nearly $70 million.

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

  bones from his skin. Tomjanovich fell to the floor as if hit with a shotgun blast. His massive body struck the ground with a sickening smack. The sound echoed throughout the upper reaches of the L.A. Forum, and for several seconds Tomjanovich lay there, motionless, in an ever-widening puddle of his own blood. I hadn’t heard anything about it until I talked to my father that night. He was breathless. I was surprised that he’d watched the game, but everyone in Portland was basketball crazy that year, because our Trail Blazers were the defending NBA champs. Still, it wasn’t the game, per se, that had him breathless. After telling me about the fight, he cried, “Oh, Buck, Buck, it was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen.” Then there was a long pause and he added, “The camera kept zooming in and you could see quite clearly... on Tomjanovich’s shoes... the swoosh! They kept zooming in on the swoosh.” I’d never heard such pride in my father’s voice. Sure, Tomjanovich was in a hospital fighting for his life, and sure his facial bones were floating around his head— but Buck Knight’s logo was in the national spotlight. That might have been the night the swoosh became real to my father. Respectable. He didn’t actually use the word “proud.” But I hung up the phone feeling as if he had. It almost makes this all worthwhile, I told myself. Almost. SALES HAD BEEN climbing geometrically, year after year, ever since the first few hundred pairs I sold out of my Valiant. But as we closed out 1977... sales were going berserk. Nearly $70 million. So Penny and I decided to buy a bigger house. It was a strange thing to do, in the midst of an apocalyptic fight with the government. But I liked the idea of acting as if things were going to work out. Fortune favors the brave, that sort of thing. I also liked the idea of a change of scenery. Maybe, I thought, it will initiate a change of luck. We were sad to leave the old house, of course. Both boys had taken their first steps there, and Matthew had lived for that swimming pool. He was never so at peace as when frolicking in the water. I recall Penny shaking her head and saying, “One thing’s for certain. That boy will never drown.” But both boys were getting so big, they desperately needed more room, and the new place had plenty. It sat on five acres high above Hillsboro, and every room felt spacious and airy. From the first night we knew we’d found our home. There was even a built-in niche for my recliner. To honor our new address, our new start, I tried to keep a new schedule. Unless I was out of town, I tried to attend all the youth basketball games, and youth soccer games, and Little League games.

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

  WE CHOSE A date for the offering. December 2, 1980. The last remaining hurdle was settling on a price. The night before the offering Hayes came into my office. “The guys at Kuhn, Loeb are recommending twenty dollars per share,” he said. “Too low,” I said. “It’s insulting.” Well, it can’t be too high, he cautioned. We want the damn thing to sell. The whole process was crazy-making, because it was imprecise. There was no right number. It was all a matter of opinion, feeling, selling. Selling—that’s what I’d been doing for much of these last eighteen years, and I was tired of it. I didn’t want to sell anymore. Our stock was worth twenty-two dollars a share. That was the number. We’d earned that number. We deserved to be on the high end of the price range. A company called Apple was also going public that same week, and selling for twenty-two dollars a share, and we were worth as much as them, I said to Hayes. If a bunch of Wall Street guys didn’t see it that way, I was ready to walk away from the deal. I glared at Hayes. I knew what he was thinking. Here we go again. Pay Nissho first. THE NEXT MORNING Hayes and I drove downtown to our law firm. A clerk showed us into the senior partner’s office. A paralegal dialed Kuhn, Loeb in New York, then clicked a button on a speaker in the middle of the big walnut desk. Hayes and I stared at the speaker. Disembodied voices filled the room. One of the voices grew louder, clearer. “Gentlemen… good morning.” “Good morning,” we said. The loud voice took the lead. It gave a long and careful explanation of Kuhn, Loeb’s reasoning on the stock price, which was jabberwocky. And so, the loud voice said, we can’t go any higher than twenty-one dollars. “No,” I said. “Our number is twenty-two.” We heard the other voices murmuring. They came up to twenty-one-fifty. “I’m afraid,” said the loud voice, “that’s our final offer.” “Gentlemen, twenty-two is our number.” Hayes stared at me. I stared at the speaker. Cracking silence. We could hear heavy breaths, pops, scrapes. Papers being shuffled. I closed my eyes and let all that white noise wash over me. I relived every negotiation in my life to that point. So, Dad, you remember that Crazy Idea I had at Stanford…? Gentlemen, I represent Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland, Oregon. You see, Dot, I love Penny. And Penny loves me. And if things continue in this vein, I see us building a life together. “I’m sorry,” the loud voice said angrily. “We’ll have to call you back.” Click. We sat. We said nothing. I took long deep breaths. The clerk’s face slowly melted. Five minutes passed. Fifteen minutes. Sweat ran down Hayes’s forehead and neck. The phone rang. The clerk looked at us, to make sure we were ready. We nodded. He pressed the button on the speaker.

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

  Title : Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike Author: Knight, Phil Thank you for downloading 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 "Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight, Scribner" file=image_rsrc3K8.jpg] For my grandchildren, so they will know In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. —Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind DAWNI 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 myself—though 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, tranquil—I 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 we’d 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. It’s our birthright, he’d growl. Our character, our fate—our DNA. “The cowards never started,” he’d tell me, “and the weak died along the way—that 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 pessimism—and it was our job as Oregonians to keep that strain alive. I’d nod, showing him all due respect. I loved the guy. But walking away I’d sometimes think: Jeez, it’s just a dirt road.

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

  I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible. Sometimes people wanted my shoes so badly that they’d write me, or phone me, saying they’d heard about the new Tigers and just had to have a pair, could I please send them, COD? Without my even trying, my mail order business was born. Sometimes people would simply show up at my parents’ house. Every few nights the doorbell would ring, and my father, grumbling, would get up from his vinyl recliner and turn down the TV and wonder who in the world. There on the porch would be some skinny kid with oddly muscular legs, shifty-eyed and twitchy, like a junky looking to score. “Buck here?” the kid would say. My father would call through the kitchen to my room in the servants’ quarters. I’d come out, invite the kid in, show him over to the sofa, then kneel before him and measure his foot. My father, hands jammed into his pockets, would watch the whole transaction, incredulous. Most people who came to the house had found me through word of mouth. Friend of a friend. But a few found me through my first attempt at advertising—a handout I’d designed and produced at a local print shop. Along the top, in big type, it said: Best news in flats! Japan challenges European track shoe domination! The handout then went on to explain: Low Japanese labor costs make it possible for an exciting new firm to offer these shoes at the low low price of $6.95 . Along the bottom was my address and phone number. I nailed them up all over Portland. On July 4, 1964, I sold out my first shipment. I wrote to Tiger and ordered nine hundred more. That would cost roughly three thousand dollars, which would wipe out my father’s petty cash, and patience. The Bank of Dad, he said, is now closed. He did agree, grudgingly, to give me a letter of guarantee, which I took down to the First National Bank of Oregon. On the strength of my father’s reputation, and nothing more, the bank approved the loan. My father’s vaunted respectability was finally paying dividends, at least for me. I HAD A venerable partner, a legitimate bank, and a product that was selling itself. I was on a roll. In fact, the shoes sold so well, I decided to hire another salesman. Maybe two. In California. The problem was, how to get to California? I certainly couldn’t afford airfare. And I didn’t have time to drive. So every other weekend I’d load a duffel bag with Tigers, put on my crispest army uniform, and head out to the local air base.

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

  from beneath two protruding black eyebrows. Each eye had its own little thatch roof. Maybe it was because factories were so much on my mind in those days, but I often thought Judge Burns looked as if he’d been built in some far-off factory that manufactured hanging judges. And I thought he knew it, too. And took pride in it. He called himself, in all seriousness, James the Just. In his operatic basso he’d announce, “You are now in the courtroom of James the Just!” Heaven have mercy on anyone who, thinking James the Just was being a bit dramatic, dared to laugh. Portland was still a small town—minuscule, really—and we’d heard through the grapevine that someone had recently bumped into James the Just at his men’s club. The judge was having a martini, moaning about our case. “Dreadful case,” he was saying to the bartender and anyone who’d listen, “perfectly dreadful.” So we knew he didn’t want to be there any more than we did, and he often took out his unhappiness on us, berating us over small points of order and decorum. Still, despite my horrid performance on the stand, Cousin Houser and Strasser and I had a sense that James the Just was inclining toward our side. Something about his demeanor: He was slightly less ogreish to us. On a hunch, therefore, Cousin Houser told the opposing counsel that, if they were still considering our original settlement, forget it, the offer was no longer on the table. That same day, James the Just called a halt to the trial and admonished both sides. He was perturbed, he said, by all he was reading about this case in the local newspapers. He was damned if he was going to preside over a media circus. He ordered us to cease and desist discussing the case outside the courthouse. We nodded. Yes, Your Honor. Johnson sat behind our table, often sending notes to Cousin Houser, and always reading a novel during sidebars and breaks. After court adjourned each day, he’d unwind by taking a stroll around downtown, visiting different sporting goods stores, checking on our sales. (He also did this every time he found himself in a new city.) Early on he reported back that Nikes were selling like crazy, thanks to Bowerman’s waffle trainer. The shoe had just hit the market, and it was sold out everywhere, meaning we were outpacing Onitsuka, even Puma. The shoe was such a hit that we could envision, for the first time, one day approaching Adidas’s sales numbers. Johnson got to talking with one store manager, an old friend, who knew the trial was under way. “How’s it going?” the store manager said. “Going well,” Johnson said. “So well, in fact, we withdrew our settlement offer.” First thing the next morning, as we gathered in the courtroom, each of us sipping our coffee, we noticed an unfamiliar face at the defense table. There were the five lawyers... and one new guy?