Total Effort

By the end, tears were rolling down my face.  As I finished the last chapter of Shoe Dog, an autobiographical account of the creation of Nike by one of its co-founders, Phil Knight, I felt that I had re-lived the entire journey with him.  Everybody has heard of Nike, of course, but Phil Knight is almost a mystery man when measured against how much we know about the legendary founders of other famous companies. The same could probably be said of the story of Nike itself.  Why did I find the story so compelling? Perhaps the fact that Phil Knight was an avid runner created a connection right away.  Or perhaps it was that the story is set in the world of sports and the luminous talents that Nike is associated with.  Ultimately, a passage in the book itself suggested the answer, but more on that later.

For most of us, Nike is about its athletes.  Everything about the brand seems to be inextricably linked with the stable of transcendent sporting talents that they have sponsored over the years. So, it came as a surprise to read in Shoe Dog that Phil Knight didn't really care to pay athletes to endorse Nike products and had to be practically forced to do so.  I normally steer clear of  "celebrity" autobiographies.  For one, I am suspicious of their motives (mostly feels like a vanity project), but more pertinently, I wonder what I would gain from them.  But, I got Shoe Dog as a birthday gift and one day, for some reason, I picked it up and started reading it.  And, I couldn't put it down.

The history of Nike, as reported by its founder, reads like an exciting thriller - all manner of twists and turns, near-death experiences, high adrenaline risk, tragedy, and triumph.  Phil Knight did have a ghost writer, but I felt that it his voice coming through loud and clear in the book.  His words and actions (as outlined in the book) seem completely consistent with the personality that emerges from the book - one does not get the sense that he is sugar coating or air brushing anything.  He is (famously) guarded about this personal life (although the important stuff is there), but he doesn't hold back on any aspect that is related to Nike. 

What comes through shining brightly is the focus and strength of belief one has to have to create something like Nike.  Today, their success seems inevitable, but that was hardly the case for the vast majority of their existence.  Over and over again, Phil Knight (& early members of his team) had to fight the odds just to stay afloat.  When we look at a big success (or failure) from the remove of time or space, we tend to see only the large contours.  But, to truly appreciate what it took - one has to see all the little wrinkles and the accretion of small layers that led to the edifice.  Only by noticing the details can we appreciate the all-consuming passion and effort that it takes to create a Nike.

I had carried around this vague notion that it was the "Be Like Mike" campaign with Michael Jordan that really launched Nike as a world wide brand and I was waiting eagerly for the chapter where Phil Knight would surely talk about partnering with some of the greatest athletes of our time - Jordan, Tiger, Kobe, Federer, LeBron.  But instead, the athlete that he talks about most was Steve Prefontaine (or "Pre" as he was more commonly known) - the middle distance track athlete from Oregon. Nike couldn't officially sponsor Pre since he would have lost his amateur status, so they "hired" him as an employee.  Pre was a household name in Oregon right around the time that Nike was trying to break into the big time and Knight dwells in some detail about their relationship and how Pre inspired him (& Nike).  The story ends in tragedy, though - Pre died in a car accident at the age of 24.  He was driving the MG convertible that he had bought with his first Nike "salary."

Knight closes the book talking about another personal tragedy and it is here that he finally mentions how much some of those famous athletes mentioned above mean to him.  Once again, I was struck by how unexpected the relationships were - they were less about the endorsement deals and more about the personal connection he had with each of these athletes.  This chapter really resonated with me - perhaps because many of these athletes have loomed large in my own sports fandom.  His loyalty to "his" athletes is unswerving and it doesn't seem to have a lot to do with their on-field success. He describes how Tiger Woods was the first one to call him during his (Phil's) personal tragedy and goes on to add, "And I will never stand for a bad word spoken about Tiger in my presence." My eyes welled up re-reading that now, as they did several months ago when I read them for the first time.

I rarely mark passages in books because, for me, writing anything in a book is tantamount to defacing it, but I had to make an exception with this one.  Phil Knight has a way of distilling his thoughts into really powerful passages that immediately resonated with me.  As a life long sports fan, I have spent many, many, hours watching, reading, and generally obsessing about sports.  Rarely did I feel this time was wasted and, in fact, feel sympathy for people who do not (or cannot) appreciate sports.  However, I have never been able to satisfactorily capture why this is so. This passage from Shoe Dog does it for me:

"This, I decided, this is what sports are, what they can do.  Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people's victories.  And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about."

Watching Pre run a race in his trademark all-out style, Phil Knight muses about what made Pre such a compelling athlete to watch.  He suggests that, "No matter the sport - no matter the human endeavor, really - total effort will win people's heart."  That actually does a pretty nice job of capturing why Phil Knight's story had such an impact on me.