Knight waited more than a year for the samples to arrive. After a day of auditing for Coopers & Lybrand he'd come home and check the mail. "I kept getting letters from Onitsuka," he says, "always asking me to 'please wait a little more days.' Everybody told me I'd lost my $50."
In December 1963, the shipment of samples finally arrived. Knight immediately took the shoes to Bowerman and asked his opinion. The coach was enthusiastic, and the two men agreed on a partnership to be called Blue Ribbon Sports. Bowerman and Knight put up $500 each so they could order more shoes. Knight would supply a Japanese manufacturer and his business talents, and Bowerman would contribute his knowledge of shoe design and his countless contacts in sports.
In its first year, fledgling Blue Ribbon Sports sold 1,300 pairs of Tiger track shoes and tallied up $8,000 in revenues. Knight had all the more reason to be proud because he got the sales the hard way. Most of the time he would call up track coaches at local schools and ask if he could have 20 minutes with the team before a practice so he could tell them about some new track shoes. "I tried opening some retail accounts," Knight says, "but most of them thought Japanese track shoes were the funniest thing they'd ever heard of. They thought it was strictly comic-book stuff."
After a few runners tried them in competition and found them vastly superior to the clodhoppers they'd been wearing, sales began to pick up. In fact, running in general was becoming increasingly popular in Oregon, largely due to Bowerman's efforts in Eugene.
"I took a trip to New Zealand in 1961," Bowerman says, "and I was amazed to see people running in the streets. Not just kids either, but older people as well. I was very impressed and wanted to see something like that happen back home."
When he got back to Eugene, Bowerman, in cooperation with a local newspaper, announced a series of jogging clinics that started at the university's track on Saturdays and followed a course around town. "We began with maybe 25 people," he says, "and it grew steadily. One day Life magazine came to Eugene to take pictures of this sport called jogging, and 5,000 people must have shown up."
Since most of the joggers who reported to Bowerman's clinic were anything but trained athletes, much of his time was spent treating a variety of foot ailments. "It was like a big laboratory," he says. "Good Lord, they came up with all kinds of problems and I tried to help by fixing their shoes a little." Bowerman started adding more cushioning to the heel of running shoes and ended up creating a full-length midsole cushion that to this day is an essential feature of running shoes.
Blue Ribbon Sports was the first company to use this innovation when, in 1966, it introduced the Tiger Cortez, for years, one of the company's most popular models. It was also the first expression of the company's interest in technological innovation as a way of gaining market share, a characteristic that became more striking in the years ahead. Bowerman also teamed up with a local doctor, Waldo Harris, and wrote a book on jogging based on his experiences at the clinics. It stands as one of the seminal descriptions of a sport that some estimates claim now occupies 25 million people nationwide. "I had no idea it would get as popular as it has," Bowerman says. "Anyway, in those days I wasn't thinking about markets or fortunes. I was making better shoes a foot at a time. I left everything else up to Phil Knight, and believe me, he's a genius."
Judging from the results, Knight's abilities are of a very high order, although he would be the last person to claim genius. Moreover, he has his own view of his contribution to the company. "I've been fortunate in being able to pick good people," he says. "I can't think of anything I've done that could be more important."
One of the "good people" is Jeff Johnson, now Nike's vice-president in charge of Nike's research and development facilities at Exeter, N.H. Johnson and Knight knew each other casually when both were at Stanford but didn't see each other again until the spring of 1964. Johnson was doing graduate work in anthropology at UCLA and took a break from the daily grind one day to watch a track meet. After the meet, he was surprised to see Knight strolling across the infield. "I ran over to him," Johnson says, "and asked him what he was doing, and he started telling me something about selling Japanese sneakers. Then he wanted to know if I would sell them, too. I told him I'd have to think about it."
Johnson didn't have to think long. For a few months in 1964, Johnson had worked in the Los Angeles outlet for Adidas and had seen the demand for modern athletic shoes firsthand.
Most of his early business was mail order from ads he placed in Long Distance Log, which he describes as an "esoteric running magazine," or direct sales to word-of-mouth drop-ins. At first, he used his own apartment as a business address, but as word got out that Tiger shoes were worth wearing, more and more runners showed up at his door. "By 1966, it just got to be too much," he says. "So I rented some space next to a beauty parlor. I didn't ask Knight about it. For the first few years, it was extremely difficult to find Knight. He was always out in the boonies auditing somebody." Johnson had opened the company's first retail store, and sales responded. By 1967, Blue Ribbon Sports had revenues of almost $100,000 and was selling 10,000 to 12,000 pairs of track shoes a year.
