A Thousand and One Nikes : SWOOSH: The Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There, <i> By J. B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $24.95; 590 pp.)</i>
It is no longer possible to buy a pair of sneakers in the United States. The stores are loaded with tennis shoes and running shoes, aerobics shoes and basketball shoes, racquetball shoes and wrestling shoes. Then the last few years have seen the arrival of a revolutionary new type of athletic shoe called the “cross-trainer.” It is for people who want a shoe for more than one sport, who want to jog a little and play a game of tennis and walk to the mini-mart without changing shoes three times, who want what sounds suspiciously like a sneaker. But of course a cross-trainer is not a sneaker. It is the product of as much research and engineering as the space shuttle, and it costs three times as much as a sneaker.
“Swoosh: The Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There” takes us back to a simpler time, when sophisticated athletic shoes were worn only by athletes. In the late 1950s, a young man named Philip Knight ran track at the University of Oregon under legendary coach Bill Bowerman. Not satisfied with the running shoes then available, Bowerman learned to make his own, and Knight wore some of them.
A few years later, while attending Stanford Business School, Knight came up with an idea for a business: He would import and sell running shoes from Japan. With cheap Japanese labor, he figured, he could undercut the price of German-made Adidas, then the best shoe on the market. He met with Bowerman, who agreed to help design and test shoes. They put up $500 apiece to found the company that would eventually be called Nike.
Like Knight himself, the business seemed an unlikely prospect to succeed. The Japanese manufacturer from whom Knight bought his shoes proudly offered to the American market a discus-thrower’s shoe called the Throw-Up. When Knight’s first employee sold his first pair of shoes and was supposed to remit $6.25 to Knight, he delayed because he wasn’t sure he could afford the 15-cent fee his bank would charge to write the check. Playing it safe, Knight kept his own day job as an accountant for years.
Knight managed, however, to recruit highly motivated people to work for him. Many of them were runners. All of them loved sports. Crusaders in cushioned soles, they saw their work for Nike as a mission: to provide decent, affordable shoes to American athletes.
Key employees from the company’s early and middle years became major sources for “Swoosh’s” authors, a Los Angeles Times reporter and her sister, who was herself a Nike employee and is married to a former top Nike executive. This Nike Old Gang recalls the company they grew up in as a place much like Camelot on a sunny day. Working there was like belonging to a fraternity, one employee recalls. Nike operated “as much like a commune as any corporation could,” the authors declare. They describe executive retreats, known as “Buttfaces,” enlivened by drinking marathons. At Nike’s first national sales conference, they report, a rep from Texas did a brisk business selling marijuana pipes to his colleagues.
Like most great entrepreneurial ventures, Nike wasn’t built for the sake of money. It was built for fun--by people who had no idea what they were doing when they started. “Swoosh” captures the excitement of improvising a major enterprise, of winging one’s way into the Fortune 500. When Nike decided to establish a new manufacturing source in Korea, the book recounts, a company executive flew to Seoul and asked the desk clerk at his hotel, “Where can I find some shoe factories?” He found a good one.
The authors did not, however, have access to Knight, who ran Nike from the beginning and eventually became its major stockholder. This makes for an odd hole at the center of the book. Anecdotes compiled from his underlings make the man sound maddeningly vague, a non-leader who would never make a decision. Presented with a plan to introduce a line of “Nike Design” accessories, Knight came back with “no response.” Pressed to decide whether to sign Michael Jordan as a Nike endorser, “Knight never really said yes or no.” One is led to wonder why no one ever got frustrated enough to grab the guy by the throat and throttle a decision out of him--and also to wonder if Knight is being short-changed here, if the success of Nike is indeed owed to the enterprise of his freebooting associates or to some unenunciated master plan of their boss.
One thing that is made clear about Knight is that he never shrank from playing hardball. When he decided to stop marketing the shoes of his original Japanese supplier and start his own competing brand, he concealed his intention from the supplier as long as possible, to avoid being cut off prematurely. When the U.S. government came after Nike for $16 million in special import duties (Nikes have always been overwhelmingly manufactured overseas), Knight launched an intense lobbying campaign that succeeded in reducing the bill to $9 million as well as throwing out the rules under which Nike had been charged in the first place. As soon as it was out of its infancy, Nike became a major player in the shoe-company game of paying athletes to wear its shoes, including amateurs prohibited from accepting such fees.
As Nike grew into a corporate giant, it inevitably became more like IBM and less like Woodstock. The decline of an atmosphere of fun was a personal loss to its old-time employees. The decline of flexibility and innovation was a business problem. In the early 1980s, Reebok appeared on the scene with an immensely popular line of aerobic shoes (they had “a flattering fit, and made a woman’s foot look narrow,” the authors report). Nike was perversely slow to respond and suffered for it.
Nike finally bounced back with new products, memorable advertising and groundbreaking endorsement deals with Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson. Unaccountably, “Swoosh” cuts off the Nike-Jackson story in 1986, when Jackson was playing minor-league baseball for the Memphis Chicks and Knight was demanding to know who had signed the guy so that the idiot could be fired.
It would have been nice to follow Jackson a bit longer, but that is the way of “Swoosh,” a book that is always likable but prone to unpredictable rambles. Stories are started and left unfinished while random details pile up. And do we really need to know the date of the first major-league baseball victory by a pitcher in Nike spikes?
On the other hand, there’s the story about a business trip Knight and a colleague named Gorman made to Taiwan, where they were feted at a toast-intensive banquet. Knight, an old Asia hand, matched his hosts drink for drink. Gorman gave up trying and tossed his drinks under the table, where they splattered on Knight’s pant leg. When Knight, totally blotto, realized what Gorman had done, he knocked him down a flight of stairs. Then he vomited and lost his contact lens in the mess. It’s somehow good to know that this is part of how great companies are made.
