Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:

Phil Knight
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Phil Knight (born 1938) is the founder and head of Nike, Inc., the
number one athletic shoe company in the world. Already a legend in the
retail and marketing worlds, Knight has turned into something of a
mainstream hero, the subject of admiring articles in popular magazines.
It is a reputation Knight hasearned over the years as both a visionary
businessman and a hard-nosed CEO.

The man whom The Sporting News named the "most powerful" person
of the year in sports for 1993 was no athlete, coach, or commissioner.
Rather, it was the man who for nearly 30 years has shod the great sports
stars as well as the Saturday-afternoon "jocks"-Nike founder and CEO
Philip "Phil" Knight. The former college track runner refers to Nike's
world headquarters as a campus and runs it that way. "His every move is
now scrutinized as carefully as the glamorous superstars who wear his
sneakers," reported Frank Deford in a Vanity Fair profile.

Knight was born in Portland, Oregon, on February 24, 1938, the son of
William H. and Lola (Hatfield) Knight. Oregon's only billionaire "forged
his go-it-alone philosophy while growing up in Portland, the son of a
domineering but loving father who was publisher of the now defunct
Oregon Journal," noted Susan Hauser in People magazine. Though too
small to excel in contact sports, young Knight took refuge in track.
When his father refused to give him a summer job at his newspaper,
believing his son should find work on his own, Knight went to the rival
Oregonian, where he worked the night shift tabulating sports scores and
every morning ran home the full seven miles.

New Running Shoe

That interest in sports-and especially track-gave Knight the impetus to

study the way track shoes were being made and marketed in the late
1950s. For assistance he consulted his coach, the University of Oregon's
famed Bill Bowerman, who himself would become a senior member of
the Nike team. Together they determined that American shoes were
inferior in style and quality, too heavy, and too easily damaged. The
Japanese, on the other hand, were experimenting with new, trimmed-
down styles fashioned in lightweight, hardy nylon. Knight wrote his
Stanford business-school term paper on the subject, then a few years
later got involved personally by visiting Japan and arranging to import
new-design running shoes himself.

"Knight ran Blue Ribbon Sports [named for a beer label] out of a
storefront hole-in-the-wall next to the Pink Bucket Tavern in a working-
class section of Portland," noted Sports Illustrated writer Donald Katz.
"From the beginning Knight's animating idea was to promote high-
quality, low-cost Japanese shoes, at a time when high quality was rarely
associated with Japanese products, and to eventually displace [rival
brand] Adidas, the triple-striped German shoes worn by all serious track
and field athletes at the time."

"In the early days, anybody with a glue pot and a pair of scissors could
get into the shoe business," Knight told Geraldine Willigan in a Harvard
Business Review interview. "So the way to stay ahead was through
product innovation. We were also good at keeping our manufacturing
costs down. The big, established players like Puma and Adidas were still
manufacturing in high-wage European companies. But we knew that
wages were lower in Asia." This fact has garnered criticism for Knight
and Nike by those who point out the vast difference between the wages
earned by a factory worker in Indonesia compared to the salary drawn
by a Nike celebrity endorser. But Knight insisted in the Sports
Illustrated article that "we're not gouging anybody. … A country like
Indonesia is converting from farm labor to semiskilled-an industrial
transition that has occurred throughout history. There's no question in
my mind that we're giving these people hope."
Knight's reputation in the track and field world also helped him gain an
early edge. "We just tried to get our shoes on the feet of runners," he
said in Willigan's article. "And we were able to get a lot of great ones
under contract-people like [distance stars] Steve Prefontaine and Alberto
Salazar-because we spent a lot of time at track events and had
relationships with the runners, but mostly because we were doing
interesting things with our shoes."

Unique Image and New Technology

From the start, Knight's shoes sported their own look (including the
distinctive "swoosh" logo that still appears today) and their own attitude.
An early effort to promote the newly dubbed "Nike"-pronounced NY-
kee and named for the Greek goddess of victory-included a now-classic
advertisement set at the 1972 Olympic track trials in Eugene, Oregon.
The copy boasted that four of the top seven marathoners wore Nikes. As
a Time writer pointed out, the ads conveniently "neglected to mention
that runners wearing [Adidas] shoes placed first, second and third."

By the mid-1970s Nike was at the cutting edge of workout-shoe

technology. For instance, it was Bowerman, the former track coach, who
poured some liquid latex into his wife's waffle iron, thereby inventing
the famous sole that made the earliest Nikes feel like bedroom slippers.
Nike didn't exactly burst from the gate in profit, though. Major sports
stars demanded major compensation for wearing Knight's brand. A
turning point came in the 1980s, when tennis star Jimmy Connors won
Wimbledon in a pair of Nikes and John McEnroe "hurt his ankle, [and]
started wearing an obscure three-quarter [Nike] model that had sold all
of 10,000 pairs that year. Because of McEnroe's strained ligaments,"
noted a Vanity Fair writer, "the model sold a million two the very next
year. It was about that time when Knight woke up one morning worth
$178 million."

There was one area in which Nike made a serious misstep. Knight
acknowledged in a Sports Illustrated article that his company "lost its
way" when it came to aerobics shoes. The longstanding boys-club
atmosphere of the Nike boardroom saw little promise in a lightweight
shoe for women to wear to their exercise classes. In fact, the notion of
aerobics was laughed away as just the conceit of "a bunch of fat ladies
dancing to music," as Hauser quoted in the People article. That lack of
insight opened the door for an upstart company called Reebok, which
then virtually cornered the market in this burgeoning subsection of the
athletic shoe industry. That was the beginning of a longstanding rivalry
between Nike and Reebok for market dominance.

Though sales slipped and profits fell during the mid-1980s, Nike
regained its place at the top of the market in 1984, when Knight returned
from a fact-finding trip to Asia. Knight is a firm believer in the Japanese
way of doing business and conducting life: "He often greets his secretary
with a courtly bow or 'moshi, moshi,' the Japanese equivalent of hello,
and pads around behind sliding screen doors in a pair of cotton slippers,"
reported Hauser.

Celebrity Athlete Endorsements

Known as a taskmaster CEO, Knight is also particular when it comes to

matters of promotion. "Hi, I'm Phil Knight and I don't believe in
advertising," was the way Nike's ad agency president remembered
meeting his new client. Signing up perhaps the greatest basketball player
of all time, the former Chicago Bulls' superstar Michael Jordan, was
only one of the breakthrough strategies that made Nike-wearers the envy
of schoolyard pickup games everywhere. Nike slogans-"Bo Knows,"
"It's Gotta Be the Shoes," and especially "Just Do It"-have entered the
pop-culture lexicon. The Nike image has been linked closely with
notable "bad boys"-names like McEnroe, Andre Agassi, and Charles
Barkley-as well as icons like the Beatles (through Nike's controversial
use of the song "Revolution") and Bugs Bunny.

But the world of sports endorsements is a brutal one, as the public

learned at the 1992 summer Olympic games in Barcelona. America's
basketball "dream team" swept the field to win the gold medal, but faced
screaming headlines and heated debate when several members
threatened not to appear in a medal ceremony unless they were wearing
their Nike apparel-to the consternation of Reebok, the team's "official"
sponsor. (Dream Team member Barkley ably summed up the
controversy, said Katz in Sports Illustrated, when he told a reporter that
he had "two million reasons not to wear Reebok.")

For all the controversy Knight has helped engender in his company, he
points out that the tradeoff is an increased awareness by the media,
whose stories about the shoes and those who endorse them are the kind
of publicity that money can't buy. As he told Willigan, the athletic shoe
industry, "and Nike in particular, gets a lot more press than many others
because it's more fun to talk about us than about a company that makes
widgets. On the one hand, we don't mind the attention; we like getting
our name in the press. On the other hand, the company usually gets
treated in a superficial, lighthearted way, which is not what we're all
about. Nike is not about going to a ball game. It's a business."

A later addition to the business was sports management. Simply put, it

ensured that Nike endorsers maintained consistency outside the
company-most importantly, by not endorsing any other product that
would interfere with the Nike image. Sports management was born after
Knight caught Nike endorser Andre Agassi in a commercial for Canon
cameras. While cameras themselves don't conflict with shoes, the
message in the commercial certainly did. "When Agassi looked into the
camera and said, 'Image is everything,' Knight flipped," says Katz. "It
was 180 degrees from our imagery," Knight told the Sport Illustrated
writer. "We work hard to convey that performance, not image, is
everything."

Nike realized that image did count for something when it released a shoe
displaying a logo that resembled the Arabic word for "Allah," or God.
Many members of the Muslim faith were upset, and in June 1997 Nike
recalled 38,000 pairs of the shoes and issued an apology. The company
noted that the logo was an oversight and issued a statement saying they
did not mean to offend anyone with it.
Asian Labor Issues

The company came under increasing scrutiny for its wages and working
conditions in Indonesia, China, and Vietnam. United Nations
Ambassador, Andrew Young, released a report finding no issue with
Nike's factories, noting that facilities were "clean, organized, adequately
ventilated and well lit," according to a Reuters Business Report article.
However, human rights groups charged that Indonesian workers were
incessantly striking over low wages; Nike workers received $2.46 per
day in a nation that counted $4 per day as the minimum subsistence
wage.

Independent filmmaker Michael Moore, whose 1989 documentary

Roger and Me depicted a heartless corporate mindset at General Motors,
turned his cameras on Nike, among numerous other firms. Moore
addressed the issue of how Nike treats its workers and requested jobs for
people in his depressed hometown of Flint, Michigan. Knight countered
that American workers do not want jobs in shoe factories, but Moore
was able to find a crowd of jobless workers in Flint who would be happy
to make Nikes. For his part, Knight was the only CEO to agree to appear
in the Moore film.

The uproar over the Asian workers dragged on for Nike, and they
eventually raised wages a small amount. Some American women's
groups, protested that female employees-the bulk of Nike's Asian work
force-were still working 100 to 200 hours overtime at Nike just to pay
their bills. They issued statements accusing Nike of corporal punishment
and sexual harassment in the shops as well. By mid-1998, Knight
announced in a speech to the National Press Club that Nike was
"dedicated to giving American consumers assurances that the products
they buy are not manufactured under abusive circumstances," according
to a Gannett News Service article. He added that he had been branded as
a "corporate crook," and defended his business practices, citing
"misinformation and misunderstanding" as reasons for the media assault
on Nike. Knight noted that a number of policies were going to be
implemented in their production facilities, including raising the working
age to 16 at clothing factories and 18 at shoe factories; using safer, non-
toxic glues when possible; adopting stricter, U.S.-dictated air quality
standards; instituting on-site education programs, and more.

In addition to the Asian labor issues, many people remained outraged

over Nike's escalating costs, especially since a large market for the
products are poor, inner-city youth. One shoe endorsed by basketball
player, Anfernee Hardaway, was tagged at $180, and the Air Jordans
touted by superstar Michael Jordan had always been priced at over $100.
Perhaps this combination of issues served to cause a slump. Sales and
profits fell in 1998, and Nike laid off 1,900 employees. However, the
company remained the world's largest shoemaker. It won a lawsuit in
early 1999 that had accused the firm of lying to consumers about
"sweatshop" conditions in Asian factories. Human rights groups
remained unconvinced.

When not at the helm, Knight enjoys the fruits of his success. He and his
wife Penelope "Penny" Parks have two grown sons and one foster
daughter. They live in non-ostentatious comfort in Oregon, with a
gaggle of pets and Knight's "only personal concession to flash: [a] black
Lamborghini (vanity plates: NIKE MN) and red Ferrari," as Hauser
noted in People. The workplace is also the scene of fun and comfort:
Nike World Campus features three restaurants, plus fitness center,
beauty salon, laundry service, jogging facilities, a day-care center, and
other amenities.

Knight can't help but see success in Nike's future, as the company
expands its product line to include a wide range of apparel and
accessories. As a Forbes writer noted, the man who built an empire on a
pair of shoes still cherishes the words of his track coach: "Play by the
rules, but be ferocious."

Further Reading
Strasser, Julie, SWOOSH: The Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men
Who Played There, Harper Business, 1993.

Forbes, August 2, 1993.

Gannett News Service, May 12, 1998.

Harvard Business Review, July-August 1992.

Independent, October 28, 1997, p. 15.

People, May 4, 1992.

Philadelphia Inquirer, October 10, 1998.

Reuter's Business Report, June 24, 1997.

South China Morning Post, February 8, 1999.

Sports Illustrated, August 19, 1993.

Time, June 30, 1980; February 15, 1982.

U.S. News & World Report, September 22, 1997, p. 48.

Vanity Fair, August 1993.

"Nike, Inc.," Hoover's Online, March 3, 1999. Available from

http://www.hoovers.com.
 
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
Phil Knight
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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia
This article is about the co-founder of Nike. For the guitarist of Shihad,
see Phil Knight (musician).
Phil Knight
 February 24, 1938 (age 72)
Born
Portland, Oregon, U.S.
Occupation Co-founder and Chairman of Nike, Inc.
Net worth US$10.2 billion (2010)[1]
Spouse Penny Knight
Children Three
Website
Nike Corporation

Philip Hampson "Phil" Knight (born February 24, 1938) is the co-
founder and Chairman of Nike, Inc.. He resigned as the company's chief
executive officer in 2004, while retaining the position of chairman of the
board. As of 2010, Knight's stake in Nike gives him an estimated net
worth of US$11.1 billion, making him the 23rd richest person in the
U.S.[1]

A graduate of the University of Oregon and Stanford Graduate School of

Business, he has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the schools.
Knight gave the largest donation in history at the time to Stanford's
business school in 2006. A native Oregonian, he ran track for coach Bill
Bowerman at the University of Oregon, with whom he would co-found
Nike.

Contents [hide]
 1 Early years
o 1.1 Budding entrepreneur

 2 Nike's origin
o 2.1 Labor issues
 3 Philanthropy
 4 Later years
 5 References
  6 External links

Early years
Phil Knight was born February 24, 1938 in Portland, Oregon, the son of
a lawyer and future newspaper publisher.[2] Knight attended Cleveland
High School in Portland and then the University of Oregon in Eugene,
where he was a member of Phi Gamma Delta ("FIJI") fraternity and
earned a journalism degree in 1959.[2] He was a middle-distance runner
at the school under track coach Bill Bowerman and ran a personal best
4:10 mile,[3] winning varsity letters for track in 1957, 1958, and 1959.

Budding entrepreneur

Right after graduating from Oregon, Knight enlisted in the Army and
served one year on active duty and seven years in the Army Reserve.[2]
After the year of active duty, he enrolled at Stanford Graduate School of
Business.[2] In Frank Shallenberger's Small Business class, Knight
developed a love affair with something besides sports — he discovered
he was an entrepreneur. Knight recalls in a Stanford Magazine article[2]
"That class was an 'aha!' moment" ... "Shallenberger defined the type of
person who was an entrepreneur--and I realized he was talking to me. I
remember after saying to myself: 'This is really what I would like to do.'
" In this class Knight needed to create a business plan. His paper, "Can
Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese
Cameras Did to German Cameras?", essentially was the premise to his
foray into selling running shoes. He graduated with a Masters of
Business Administration from the school in 1962.[2]

Knight set out on a trip around the world after graduation, during which
he made a stop in Kobe, Japan in November 1962. It was there he
discovered Tiger brand running shoes, manufactured in Kobe by the
Onitsuka Co. So impressed with the quality and low cost, Knight made a
cold call on Mr. Onitsuka, who agreed to meet with him. By the end of
the meeting, Knight had secured distribution rights for the western
United States for Tiger running shoes.[citation needed]

The first Tiger samples would take more than a year to be shipped to
Knight, during which time he found a job as an accountant in Portland,
Oregon. When Knight finally received the shoe samples, he mailed two
pairs to Bill Bowerman in Eugene in the hope of gaining a sale and an
influential endorsement. To Knight's surprise, Bowerman not only
ordered the Tiger shoes, he offered to become a partner with Knight and
would provide some design ideas for better running shoes. The two men
shook hands on a partnership on January 25, 1964, the birthdate of Blue
Ribbon Sports, forerunner to Nike.[4]

Nike's origin
Knight's first sales were made out of a now legendary green Plymouth
Valiant at track meets across the Pacific Northwest. By 1969, these early
sales allowed Knight to leave his accountant job and work full time for
Blue Ribbon Sports.

It was Jeff Johnson, a friend of Knight's, who suggested the name Nike.
Nike is named after the Greek winged goddess of victory. Nike's logo,
now considered one of the most powerful logos in the world, was
commissioned for a mere $35 from Carolyn Davidson.[5] According to
Nike's website, Knight stated "I don't love it, but it will grow on me."
However, in 1983 (Nike went public in 1980), Davidson was given an
undisclosed amount of Nike stock for her contribution to the company's
brand.

Labor issues

Knight was named a "Corporate Crook" in Michael Moore's 1996 book

Downsize This!. The book cited the harsh conditions in Indonesian
sweatshops, where pregnant women and girls as young as fourteen years
old sewed shoes for factories that the company contracted to make its
products. Moore went to Knight in the hopes of convincing him to fix
this problem. The interview can be seen in Moore's film The Big One –
of the nearly 20 CEOs that Moore wished to interview for his movie,
only Knight agreed to speak with Moore.

Knight informed Moore that Nike does not own any of the factories that
make its products. Knight told Moore if he was willing to invest in and
build a factory in the U.S. that could match the price of footwear made
overseas, Nike would consider buying shoes from him.

In 1998, Knight pledged to impose more stringent standards for the

factories that Nike engages to manufacture its goods, including
minimum age standards, factory monitoring, and greater external access
to Nike's practices.

Philanthropy
In 2000, Knight was inducted into the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame for
his Special Contribution to Sports in Oregon.[6] Knight is believed to
have contributed approximately $230 million to the University of
Oregon, the majority of which was for athletics. [7] On August 18, 2007,
Knight announced that he and his wife, Penny, would be donating an
additional $100 million to the University of Oregon Athletics Legacy
Fund.[8] This donation is reportedly the largest in the University's history.

However, Knight's contributions to the Athletic department at U of O

have not come without controversy.[9] His significant contributions have
granted him influence and access atypical of an athletic booster. In
addition to the "best seats in the house" for any U of O athletic event, he
has his own personalized locker in the football team's locker room, and
an athletic building named for him (the library is named for his mother,
the law school is named for his father, and the under-construction
basketball arena is named for his son). However, most controversial was
his successful lobbying to have his friend and former insurance
salesman, Pat Kilkenny, named as Athletic Director.[10] Kilkenny,
another wealthy athletic booster, has neither a college degree nor any
germane experience. Kilkenny attended but did not graduate from the
University of Oregon, leaving the school several hours short of
completion. The former chairman and chief executive officer of the San
Diego-based Arrowhead General Insurance Agency, he grew his
business into a nationwide organization with written premiums of nearly
$1 billion when he sold the company in 2006.[11] ESPN's Outside the
Lines spotlighted Knight and his donation-backed influence on U of O
athletics on an April 6, 2008 episode.

In 2006, Phil Knight donated $105 million to Stanford Graduate School

of Business, at the time the largest donation to a business school in
history.[12] Knight also provided monetary support to his high school
alma mater Cleveland High School for their new track, football field,
and gymnasium.

In October 2008, Phil and Penny Knight pledged $100 million to the
OHSU Cancer Institute, the largest gift in the history of Oregon Health
& Science University. In recognition, the university renamed it the
OHSU Knight Cancer Institute.[13]

Later years
Knight resigned as the company's CEO November 18, 2004, while
retaining the position of chairman of the board.[14][15] He was replaced by
William Perez, former CEO of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., who was in
turn replaced by Mark Parker in 2006.[16]

In 2002, Knight purchased Will Vinton (Animation) Studios, where his

son, Travis, worked as an animator, and changed the name to LAIKA.
Travis was named to the LAIKA Board of Directors later that year, and
became CEO of LAIKA in March 2009, replacing Nike alum Dale
Wahl.[17] LAIKA released their first feature film (stop motion) Coraline
in February 2009.
 The Force Behind the Nike Empire

by Jackie Krentzman

As 20-year-old Stanford golfer Tiger Woods fought his way to an unprecedented third U.S.
Amateur title last summer, Nike founder Phil Knight shadowed him from hole to hole,
appraising the young phenom's every smile the way a golf coach would his swing. "I hope we
sign him," Knight said at the time. "If not, I hope he goes to medical school." Three days later,
Woods called a news conference, stepped before the TV cameras and announced that he was
quitting college to join the Professional Golf Association Tour.
K
N
"Well," he said with a big grin, "I guess it's 'Hello, world,' huh?"
I
G
An adoring sports media lapped up the young man's winning soundbite. Then, just 24 hours
H
later, the other shoe dropped. In a barrage of new TV spots and full-page newspaper ads, Nike
T
unveiled its latest pitchman: pro golfer Tiger Woods. The Nike-crafted tag line on the ads?
"Hello, World."
W
A
Woods may be the company's current star, but its controversial CEO and founder is the real
T
story. Nike signed Woods to a five-year endorsement deal, reportedly worth more than $40
C
million, and has thrown its considerable weight behind him. The company is packaging the
H
young golfer--who is part African American, part Chinese, part American Indian, part Thai
:
and part white--as the Jackie Robinson of golf, breaking down barriers each time he steps on a
T
course. The press savaged the ads for posing Woods as a racial trailblazer, a path long since
h
pioneered by black golfers such as Charlie Sifford and Lee Elder.
e
But the world's largest athletic shoe and apparel company had triumphed again, creating a
C
buzz for its masterful orchestration of Woods's coming-out party and raising hackles with its
E
questionable use of race to promote him. It was pure Philip Hampson Knight: innovative,
O
controversial and very, very successful.
s
u
r
Of course, you'd expect nothing less from the man who turned a tiny company called Blue
v
Ribbon Sports into Nike Corp., a multibillion-dollar enterprise and a household name. A
e
former middle-distance runner at the University of Oregon (he ran a
y
respectable 4:10 mile), Knight, MBA '62, has been on a 30-year endorphin
s
rush. He has made more money from athletics than anyone, ever. With a net
worth of $5.3 billion, Knight ranks sixth on Forbes's latest list of the richest
h
Americans. Blue Ribbon Sports cleared $3,240 in its first year, 1964. In fiscal year 1996,
i
Nike's revenue hit a stratospheric $6.5 billion (with $550 million in income). "In a very short
s
period of time, Phil Knight created one of the greatest American commerce stories of the 20th
century," says sports agent David Falk, who has frequently butted heads with Knight over the
B
marketing and representation of athletes.
e
a
v
e
r
t
o
If one of those athletes weren't Michael Jordan, consumers worldwide might still be
pronouncing Nike like Mike. In large part because of that one employee with the thousand-watt
smile and springboard legs, there is no greater status symbol among youths than Nike products.

But make no mistake: As athletically awesome and charismatic as Michael Jordan is, he alone
did not make Nike as recognizable worldwide as Coke and McDonalds. Nor did he make "Just
Do It" the slogan that best encapsulates the 1990s. Nike is a cultural icon because Knight
understood and captured the zeitgeist of American pop culture and married it to sports. He
found a way to harness society's worship of heroes, obsession with status symbols and
predilection for singular, often rebellious figures. Nike's seductive marketing focuses squarely
on a charismatic athlete or image, rarely even mentioning or showing the shoes. The Nike
swoosh is so ubiquitous that the name Nike is often omitted altogether.

"Phil understands the symbolic power and attractiveness of sports," says A. Michael Spence,
dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Nike board member. "And he helped
build that connection in our culture."

Knight also understood that this lust for heroes and appreciation for in-your-face attitude is not
limited to American youth. He correctly predicted that American culture was a marketable
commodity--that teenagers from Paris to Shanghai would be just as taken with Charles
Barkley's ample attitude as teenagers in Trenton and San Diego.

No company has put as much creative energy and resources into marketing celebrities as Nike.
If, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century,
then Nike is its Picasso, imaginatively expanding the parameters of the medium's use of the
athlete-endorser. "We didn't invent it," Knight acknowledges in an interview, "but we ratcheted
it up several notches."

Nike engineered shoes for the top echelon of athletes to compete and train in.
At the same time, the company's mass marketing made the shoes so attractive
and desirable that they became a de rigueur accessory to the American
wardrobe and dream--even if increasingly sedentary teens only wore them to
watch TV. Thirty years ago, American teenagers owned either a pair of
Converse All-Stars or Keds. Today, the average American boy owns 10 pairs
of sneakers.

Understanding how Phil Knight made Nike a household name is easy. Understanding Phil
Knight is not. For someone whose empire rests on visceral consumer reactions, Knight is
remarkably self-contained.

Once dubbed the "most powerful man in sports" by the Sporting News, Knight presents himself
as affable, albeit slightly stiff and a tad shy. He unobtrusively enters the Wimbledon conference
room on the fourth floor of the John McEnroe Building on the Nike World Campus in
Beaverton, Ore. (a good hour's jog from Portland), clears his throat, introduces himself and
apologizes for being 10 minutes late. "Where should I sit?" he asks. Knight isn't wearing his
ever-present Oakley sunglasses (he's rarely photographed without them), which is a bonus, as
his pale blue eyes open wide and sparkle when a topic engages him.

Like many of the 2,700 employees on the campus, Knight instinctively glances down at his
visitor's shoes before taking a seat at the far end of the conference table, his back to the picture
window that offers a view of the campus and the 10-acre lake anchoring it. I nervously appraise
my black leather, conservative flats and kick myself for making such a boring choice for a
meeting with the man who made footwear an art form. It's like picking up John DeLorean in a
Yugo.

Knight, 58, still has the lean, almost gaunt build of a runner. Known for his decidedly dressed-
down and wrinkled wardrobe, he looks surprisingly natty. A black linen suit drapes loosely over
his slender frame. His black, collarless shirt buttons up to his Adam's apple. With his trim
beard, collar-length, wavy red-blond hair shrouding most of the gray, he suggests a record
executive who looks and sounds remarkably like actor Donald Sutherland.

Knight has been portrayed as mysterious, inscrutable, eccentric, unpredictable, enigmatic,

idiosyncratic, shy, aloof, reclusive, competitive and a genius. But the world may never know
which adjective suits him best. Knight, who with his wife of 28 years, Penny, has two grown
sons, shuns publicity and self-explication the way Howard Stern courts it.

"Genius" is the one attribute on the list that Knight questions. "Other than that, I'm all of those
things--most of those adjectives are right some of the time," he says. That's as
far as he'll go. When asked a potentially revealing question ("Have you
deliberately cultivated an image for yourself, the way Nike has for its
clients?") he toys with a can of Diet Pepsi or fiddles with the watch he took off
at the start of the interview. He signals that a question is not to his liking by
deftly shifting the focus to Nike, lapsing into corporate-speak or even abruptly cutting himself
off in mid-sentence and waiting--in stony silence--for the next question.

Knight was raised in Portland, the son of a lawyer turned newspaper publisher. He was a
middle-distance runner for the University of Oregon track team, which at the time had one of
the best programs in the country. Known as "Buck," Knight had more enthusiasm than talent,
which made him the ideal human guinea pig for legendary track coach Bill Bowerman's endless
tinkering with running shoes. "I was very aware of shoes when I was running track," Knight
says. "The American shoes were offshoots of tire companies. Shoes cost $5, and you would
come back from a five-mile run with your feet bleeding. Then the German companies came in
with $30 shoes, which were more comfortable. But Bowerman still wasn't satisfied. He
believed that shaving an ounce off a pair of shoes for a guy running a mile could make a big
difference. So Bowerman began making shoes himself, and since I wasn't the best guy on the
team, I was the logical one to test the shoes."
An indifferent student, Knight graduated from Oregon with a degree in journalism in 1959. He
enlisted in the army for a year (and served in the reserves for seven), then enrolled at the
Graduate School of Business at Stanford.

Stanford changed Knight's life. Finally, school wasn't drudgery. For the first time, he was
excited to read about something other than sports. And it was in Frank Shallenberger's small-
business class that Knight conceived Nike.

Shallenberger gave his class the following assignment: Invent a new business, describe its
purpose and create a marketing plan. In his paper, "Can Japanese Sports
Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German
Cameras?" Knight developed a blueprint for superior athletic shoes, produced
inexpensively in Japan, where labor was cheaper. "That class was an 'aha!'
moment," Knight says. "First, Shallenberger defined the type of person who
was an entrepreneur--and I realized he was talking to me. I remember after
writing that paper, saying to myself: 'This is really what I would like to do.' "

After graduating from Stanford, Knight acquiesced to his father's wishes and secured a "real"
job with a Portland accounting firm. But first, he traveled to Japan, where he became enamored
of Japanese culture and business practices. To this day, visitors to his office must remove their
shoes--even their $180 Air Pamirs--before entering. And Knight took leave of our interview by
forming a steeple with his hands and bowing.

Much has been made of Knight's meditative, almost dreamy mien and his affinity for all things
Asian, especially Japanese. Knight refined both his philosophy of life and business while in
Japan. He studied Asian culture and religion and climbed Mount Fuji, which the Japanese
consider a sort of pilgrimage. He also visited the Onitsuka shoe factory in Kobe, which was
producing Adidas knock-offs, called Tigers. Knight was so impressed with both the quality and
low production costs that he made a deal with Onitsuka to distribute Tigers in the United States.

After returning from Japan in 1964, the 26-year-old Knight began peddling Onitsuka running
shoes from the back of his green Plymouth Valiant at track meets across the Pacific Northwest.
Adidas was hardly quaking in its cleats, and Knight kept his day job as an accountant. But he
persevered, convinced that his inexpensive, high-performance shoes could beat the top
"sneakers"--Adidas, Converse All-Stars and Keds--in the market. By 1969, at the fortuitous
dawn of the jogging boom, Knight sold a million bucks worth of Onitsuka shoes bearing his
Blue Ribbon Sports label.

In 1971, Knight decided he could retire his accountant's wing tips. It was also time to give his
fledgling company a new name and logo. Knight favored "Dimension Six," but his 45
employees thankfully laughed that one down. Then Jeff Johnson, '63, a fellow running geek,
proposed a name that came to him in a dream: Nike, for the Greek winged goddess of victory.
The company paid $35 to commission a new logo--a fat checkmark dubbed a "swoosh"--and
the new shoe debuted at the 1972 Olympic trials in Eugene, Ore.
Nike sold $3.2 million worth of shoes in 1972, and its profits doubled each of the next 10 years.
Nike passed Adidas to become the industry leader in the United States in 1980, the year it went
public. The company made a quantum leap in 1984 when it signed the 21-year old Jordan to
endorse a basketball sneaker. Within a year, it seemed that every boy in America was strutting
about in the clunky, siren-red Air Jordan high-tops. "It wasn't planning," Knight says. "We
could see that he was a charismatic guy who jumps over the moon and is very competitive, but
nobody could have predicted what he would become to our culture."

Now it seems formulaic--sign a gifted athlete to a lucrative endorsement contract, give him his
own television commercial and shoe, blow him up larger than life and count the money. But in
1984, it was unprecedented. By signing, promoting and eventually turning
Jordan into a legend, Nike played a pivotal role in revving up the cult of
personality that now pervades sports. (Knight still gets a kick out of telling
this story: "A few years ago there was a poll in China to name the greatest
man ever. The winner was Mao, but there was a tie for second between
[revolutionary hero] Zhou Enlai and Michael Jordan of the Chicago Red Oxen!").

Ironically, the chairman of the company that has set the standard with its groundbreaking,
creative advertising campaigns (It's Gotta Be the Shoes, Bo Knows, Just Do It, Griffey for
President) had to be talked into advertising at all. "I used to believe that a good product sold
itself," says Knight, who like many of his employees sports a Nike "swoosh" tattoo, his on his
left calf. "When I first went to meet with Wieden and Kennedy [Nike's Portland-based ad
agency], I told them: 'I don't like advertising.' And I'm still uneasy with it."

Others are just uneasy with Nike's particular brand of advertising. Even though the company's
commercials have been hailed as pop art, Nike has been denounced for turning sports stars into
cartoonish überathletes and creating a market of young consumers blinded by idolatry. And for
those with underdeveloped public personas, Nike has not hesitated to fill in the blanks. Nothing
wrong with that, Knight believes. Sports isn't about truth and accuracy. It's the central, unifying
culture of the United States and the stuff of romance and dreams. "Sports is like rock 'n' roll,"
he says. "Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are
all about emotions."

Some consider Nike--with its swoosh popping up on uniforms, on the lapels of college
basketball coaches, even as bus-size renderings on walls of stadiums--responsible for the over-
commercialization of sports. Nike is certainly not the first or only corporation to wield
considerable influence in the sports world, but it is the most brazen and visible. "Nike is the
prime representative of the way we overmarket and overadvertise and overdo everything these
days," says Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies in the USC school of cinema and
television. "The market is saturated to the point where it can be sickening. The problem is, we
now have people going gaga over a commercial, as much or more so than they do the sport
itself. Enough already."
For a time, Nike became a lightning rod for all sorts of criticism. The company came under fire
in the early 1990s when there was a spate of shootings and knifings in American inner cities by
teenagers coveting Nikes, which were just then pushing the $100 mark. Newspaper columnists
decried "Just Do It" as a nihilistic slogan that justified or even begat these crimes. Nike was
accused of focusing its ad campaigns on children in the ghettos, although, ironically, athletic
shoes are the most cross-cultural of commodities.

Then, in the 1992 Olympics, the company hit its public relations nadir when the Nike endorsers
on the Olympic basketball "Dream Team" refused to wear the official Olympic warm-up jerseys
on the medal stand because they bore the logo of archrival Reebok. Nike was perceived as
demanding that its athletes put shoe company before country. The incident became a symbol for
those concerned with the inexorable and rapidly advancing influence of money in the world of
athletics, obscuring or even warping the purity of the Games themselves.

Also in 1992, a group named Made in America called for a boycott of Nike products because
Nike shoes (like most athletic footwear) are made overseas, mainly in Asia where labor is
cheap. Nike has been criticized for its low pay and abusive treatment of some workers. Using
independent subcontractors, Nike makes many of its products in Indonesia, a world pariah for
its well-documented human-rights abuses. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has
launched his own crusade against Nike. He accuses the company of exploiting Indonesians
while quietly encouraging the Suharto government to crack down on dissent.

Over the years, Nike has also rattled cages with its penchant for signing athletes with rebellious,
even dicey, reputations, such as the outspoken Barkley and the untethered Chicago Bull, Dennis
Rodman. Not that Reebok endorser Sean Kemp or Converse man
Larry Johnson (both guilty of taunting lesser opponents while
representing the United States in the 1994 World Games) are
paragons of virtue, but Nike pioneered the trend of signing
athletes who project attitude as well as excellence.

An impenitent Knight shrugs when asked about these issues. "Our

business practices are no different than those of our competitors,"
he says. "But we are bigger, and thus more visible, so we get
more flack."

But it's more than that. Nike courts controversy. For instance, Nike donated $25,000 to Tonya
Harding's defense fund in 1994, in part to tweak Reebok, the sponsors of Nancy Kerrigan.
Nike's analog isn't the conservative team owner, but the cocky superstar who sets the agenda
and is so wildly popular he knows he can get away with just about anything. "Nike is at times
feisty, or counterestablishment, deliberately," says Spence, the business school dean. "That's
partly Phil and partly the athletic culture Nike is modeled after."

As Nike ran away with the athletic-shoe market in the '80s, these criticisms were merely
annoying pebbles wedged in its shoes. But then the company made a fatal mistake, one of great
hubris. It forgot about the women. When the aerobic fad hit in the mid-'80s, Nike ignored it.
But fledgling Boston-based Reebok high-stepped right in, creating a somewhat flimsy, but
attractive shoe that women bought like tickets to a Meryl Streep movie. Reebok's sales
surpassed Nike's in 1987. That struck a nerve, as it flouted, even mocked, Knight's bedrock
belief that, above all, authenticity and function sell shoes. To this day, Knight scorns Reebok
and its chairman, Paul Fireman, for its emphasis on fashion. "We're not in the fashion business,
as the Wall Street Journal wrote the other day," says Knight, clearly still peeved. "We're in the
sports business, and there's a big difference."

Reebok's blindside tackle gave Knight pause. Until then, Nike prided itself on being something
of a counterculture corporation. Irreverence and risk-taking were prized; the athletic
establishment and corporate wisdom were disdained. In keeping with Nike's collegiate, fraternal
atmosphere, the company's sprawling complex was officially dubbed the Campus. Employees
reported to work in sneakers and shorts, partied hard and made decisions on the run. "We had
no master plan," Knight acknowledges. "It was totally seat-of-the-pants." As if to underscore
the fact that he wasn't a typical CEO, Knight once showed up at a company event in drag.

But when Nike was dislodged from the top, he realized that his fly-by-Knight approach would
no longer work. Knight streamlined the company (laying off 600 of the company's 2,000
employees) and reorganized Nike along more conventional, corporate lines. Where Knight was
once famous for governing by instinct, today Nike studies reams of statistics and convenes a
focus group before designing a new shoelace. The marketing budget grew, and so did the
emphasis on design, Nike's euphemism for fashion.

Nike is back on top because it grew up, but Knight clearly misses his company's adolescent
days. "At first, we couldn't be establishment, because we didn't have any money," Knight says.
"We were guerrilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit. But, as we became No. 1 in our
industry, we've had to modify our culture and become a bit more planned."

Realigned, Nike replaced Reebok at the top of the charts in 1989 and has remained there ever
since. Nike outdistanced its competitors by moving beyond basketball, tennis and track to
control the women's and outdoor markets. (Nike also owns Cole-Haan, the dress-shoe
manufacturer, and Canstar Sports Inc., the world's largest hockey equipment company.) Nike
still takes risks and challenges the sports establishment, but much of the criticism leveled
against the company has quieted. Nike has become a major player in promoting women's sports
as well as funneling money into inner-city sports programs.

Now, 10 years after Nike's upheaval, Phil Knight has become a sort of professor emeritus. He
has handed over the daily running of the company to Thomas Clarke, who was appointed
president in 1994. Knight, who describes his own management style as "selectively hands-on,"
is still an everyday, hovering presence and very much the man in charge. But these days he is
more interested in being an artist than a businessman. "At this stage in my life, the creative
process is of great interest to me," he says.

For Knight, that means finding new markets to dominate and new products to peddle. Nike has
enjoyed great growth in the women's, apparel and outdoors markets. Nike is also opening up
more Nike Town stores, which are as much museum as retail outlet. (Chicago's store is one of
the city's top tourist attractions.) These towering shrines look about as much like a typical shoe
store as Dennis Rodman looks like a typical human. But the biggest push will be overseas. Nike
already owns 25 percent of the world market, dwarfing its competitors. That still leaves billions
of un-Niked feet out there.

Knight's overriding goal is to ensure Nike's legacy. "Phil is always thinking ahead," says Nelson
Farris, Nike's director of corporate education and a Knight confidante for 23 years. "He once
said in a speech that the worst thing he could envision was to sit his grandkids on his knee and
have them ask him, 'What's a Nike?' "

Knight is not one for reflection. Time spent basking in the glow of success or recounting past
triumphs is time wasted. Just as a baseball player is only as good as his last at-bat, Knight
figures Nike is only as good as its last quarterly report. Plato may have thought the unexamined
life was not worth living, but what did he know? All he wore was a pair of sandals.

Occasionally, though, Knight does indulge himself. Late at night, he leans back in his office
chair and gazes out the window. Lights reflect off the lake and illuminate the four miles of
running trails that crisscross and surround the campus. "Sometimes I look out there and I get
goosebumps," says Knight, almost dreamily. A small smile flits across his face, but he quickly
checks it. His voice hardens.

"But you better not spend much time doing that, because every six months is a new lifetime,
and you've got to worry about what's coming up to stay ahead of the curve," he says. "If you
want to spend time saying this is cool, you're going to get your ass kicked."

Knight laughs uncomfortably and reaches for his watch as if embarrassed to have committed
two personal transgressions: He reflected out loud, and he exposed a small corner of his heart.
He straightens out of a slouch, steadies his gaze and, like a shortstop, waits to field the next
question. The message is clear: introspection over. It's time once again to just do it.

Jackie Krentzman is a freelance writer based in the Bay Area.

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Notable Oregonians: Phil Knight - Innovator, Business Leader

Phil Knight, 1938-- (Photo: Nike)

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Phil Knight was born on February 24, 1938. As a youth he played sports and covered the sports beat for
his high school newspaper. Knight graduated from the University of Oregon with a B.S. in business
administration in 1959. There he competed on the track team and recorded a personal best time of 4:10
for the mile run. He received an MBA from Stanford University in 1962.

In 1964 Knight and his former track coach, Bill Bowerman, each invested $500 to start Blue Ribbon
Sports, the progenitor to Nike. They had both expressed dissatisfaction with American running shoes and
decided to try to improve on shoe design. Off to an uncertain start, Knight sold his shoes out of the back
of a station wagon but continued to practice as a certified public accountant and teach at Portland State
University until 1969.

The Cortez, the first shoe to appear under the Nike brand, arrived on the athletic scene in 1972. It
became successful and launched substantial growth for the the company named for the Greek goddess
of victory. By 1979 Nike claimed 50% of the U.S. running shoe market. Through the 1980s and 1990s,
Nike's advertisements helped make it the foremost retailer of athletic shoes worldwide. Most of the
advertisements featured endorsements from athletes such as basketball player Michael Jordan and golfer
Tiger Woods as well as slogans such as "Just Do It." The company has expanded over the years to
design and market apparel and sports equipment. It is now the world's largest sports and fitness
company.

Nike innovations in shoe design include the waffle sole and air cushioning. Knight has also introduced
several advances in the field of sports business. In December 2004, he stepped down as chief executive
officer and president of Nike. Knight continues as chairman of the company's board of directors.

Knight donated $105 million to the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2006, the largest donation to
a business school in history to that date. He also provided financial assistance to his high school alma
mater Cleveland High School in Portland for their new track, football field, and gymnasium. Knight and his
wife, Penny, donated $100 million to the OHSU Cancer Institute in Portland in 2008 and gave $5 million to
Willamette University in 2009.
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/phil-knight#ixzz19QZhgCzB