Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

Phil Knight competed as a middle-distance runner for the University of Oregon in the 1950s, without ever being a top talent. His coach, Bill Bowerman, was obsessed with the weight of each athlete's shoes and was always cutting and patching his students' pairs, convinced that a few fewer grams meant pounds less fatigue in a long race.

At the time, the running shoe market was dominated by German brands, mainly Adidas, in a kind of monopoly that left little room for a new company in the United States. Once he had graduated, Knight did an MBA at Stanford, where a professor asked students to write a paper about building a business around something they truly liked.

Knight wrote about an idea that sounded crazy for a business student: importing cheap, well-made running shoes from Japan, the same way Japanese cameras were already competing with German ones. The paper sat in a drawer for months, until it became the engine of a trip he paid for on his own, with no idea he was about to found a company.

In 1962, before settling into a steady job, Knight convinced his father to fund a trip around the world, selling it as one last adventure before adult life. In reality, he was already carrying his school paper in his suitcase, and the stop that mattered most on the route was Japan.

In Kobe, he went alone to the factory of Onitsuka, the Japanese company that made the Tiger shoe, and asked for a meeting with the executives. With no experience and no real company behind him, Knight made up, right there on the spot, the name of a distributor that didn't exist yet: Blue Ribbon Sports.

The Japanese, impressed by the young American's confidence, gave him the right to distribute Tiger shoes in the western United States. Knight went home with a few sample shoes under his arm and a responsibility invented in a conference room, with no capital, no office, and no plan beyond his own nerve.

The first boxes of Tiger shoes arrived by ship, and Knight had no store and no salesperson: he drove to track meets around rural Oregon and sold pairs straight out of the trunk of his car to the runners and coaches themselves.

While the distributor was just crawling along, Knight kept a day job as an accountant at a big auditing firm, running Blue Ribbon Sports at night and on weekends. That was how, without giving up the safety of a steady paycheck, he got through the first years of near-certain losses that every new business faces.

Bill Bowerman came in as a partner soon after, buying a small stake in the distributor, and began tinkering with the Tiger shoes he received, trying to make the sole lighter and grippier for track athletes. It was the start of a partnership in which the former coach became, without realizing it, the company's research department.