by Kenny Moore
The first BRS store opened in 1967 at 3107 Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, next to a beauty salon. Johnson was soon managing the retail store and mail-order operation, writing ads, and pushing shoes at races. Serious runners came to know his name almost subliminally, because he took exceptional photos at every major meet he could get to, which were gobbled up by Track and Field News and run with a tiny “Photo by Jeff Johnson” credit line.
That’s what he was doing when I met him at the 1966 national AAU cross-country race at Pierce Junior College in Woodland Hills. After finishing fourth, I’d changed into my flats when he came over and pointed at them. “I sell all the Tigers down here,” he said, “but this is the first time I’ve seen those.”
“They’re the Cortez,” I said. “Don’t they keep you in the loop?”
“I worked for the company two years before I had my first phone call!”
Years later, Johnson reflected on that cry.
“It sounds preposterous now, but it was true,” he said. “Knight never communicated. The BRS ‘office’—his house where he still lived with his parents—never called me and he was never there when I called it. I got to know his sister very well. Sometimes I’d learn about my company’s top-of-the-line shoes by seeing them run by on athletes’ feet. Later, dealers would show me my own line. The head office wouldn’t alert me to a thing.”
For the first six years after he joined the company, Johnson didn’t set foot in Oregon, in part because in 1967 Knight sent him to establish an East Coast beachhead. Again, communication was comic. Knight hired John Bork, who’d been a world-class half-miler, to take over for Johnson in the Santa Monica store—but he didn’t tell Johnson. It was a memorable moment for both when Bork strode in the store and announced he was the new manager.
“If this happened in any other operation than Buck Knight’s,” Jeff said later, “I’d have been sick at seeming to be fired like that, all my work for nothing. But somehow I knew that just couldn’t be.”
It wasn’t. Knight showed up the next day, embarrassed to find that Bork had gotten there first. “You just got a new job,” he told Jeff, fanning out a sheaf of New England travel brochures. “A big shipment from Onitsuka is at sea, heading for New York Harbor. Cross-country season is two months away, and there’s no way anyone but you could start up a new operation on the East Coast. Beat those shoes back there and be ready to go.”
“I pick the location.”
“You pick,” said Knight. “Anywhere but Portland, Maine. We confuse our factory enough as it is.”
Johnson drove across the continent, met the shoes in New York, U-Hauled them to an old house he’d rented by a funeral parlor in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and sold them all by October. He remembered the time as thrilling in its absorption. “The problems were obvious,” he would say. “The solutions were, too. We just had to not let our growing pains kill us.”
Johnson at least suffered those pains at a distance. Others were not so lucky. The first office Knight opened in Portland was a narrow storefront next to the Pink Bucket Tavern. Soon, as more stores opened around the country, a dozen green employees were receiving, packing, and shipping shoes. Penny Parks, a student of Buck’s at Portland State who’d become his fiancée, sorted invoices. Knight’s early hires were friends and family members who had no background in the tasks of importing and warehousing. Inventory counts rarely matched. The Onitsuka Company was shameless about shipping completely different shoe models than BRS had ordered, but no one kept track of the discrepancies. Business expenses were put on personal credit cards, ensnaring them all in thickets of IOUs.
Fortuitously, Bowerman had put into motion the wheels of a solution. “We were always trying to look for people who could help us above and beyond what they were doing,” Knight would recall. “And one who saved us was Bob Woodell.”
It had taken Woodell a year after his paralyzing accident to stabilize enough to leave the hospital. His weight had dropped from 142 to 95 pounds before slowly rebounding. After six months of bruising attempts to learn how to walk with braces, Woodell accepted its impossibility and sank into his wheelchair. During that summer of 1967, he battled the painful questions that erupt from loss and injustice and he fought them all down. He had always been a tiger, always upbeat. The reality of his disability could not overcome the reality of his psyche. “I am what I am and what the world has made me,” he concluded. “I may never walk again, but I have a loving family and I can focus on what’s important. I can live with that. I will live with that.”
Bowerman had been keeping in loose touch. When he saw that Woodell had only been toughened by his ordeal, he picked up the phone and called Phil Knight. “Woodell says he thinks he wants to be a track coach,” Bowerman said, “but he’s had this accident, and I don’t really think he can be a track coach and attend all the events you’ve got to go to out of a wheelchair. He’s a hell of a bright and good guy. He might be good in the business.”
So Knight called Woodell and explained that Bowerman was a partner in BRS. Only then did Woodell realize why the Oregon locker room was so thick with Tigers. “I’m looking for some good people to help the company grow,” said Knight.
A few months later, Woodell began as manager of a new Eugene retail store dubbed The Athletic Department, which Geoff Hollister helped him open before departing to serve in the Navy. Hollister would always remember how Woodell growled at him when he tried to open a car door for him. Woodell’s expectation to be given no special treatment was ferocious. But medical problems made him transfer to the Portland office in 1969.
He soon regained his strength, and more. When Knight and Woodell lunched together, they’d take Woodell’s car, but only after Knight yelled, “Go!” and timed Woodell in rolling to the vehicle, opening the front seat, hurling himself in, folding his chair, and muscling it into the back seat.
The company was growing. “Sales were limited by how many shoes we had,” Knight would recall. “Shoes were limited by how many dollars we had to order them.” He and Penny Parks married in 1968. “I was still teaching accounting, but the next year, I told Penny if we sell $300,000 worth of product, I’m going to go full-time. She was pregnant and a little anxious. We hit $290,000. I said, That’s close enough.”
In the fall of 1969, Knight at last became a full-time employee of his five-year-old company. “There were nervous moments,” Knight would remember. “Every time I brought a fresh letter of credit home and it said, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Knight guarantee liabilities to the tune of $300,000,’ Penny’d say, ‘We don’t have $300,000.’ I’d say, ‘I don’t care. Just sign the thing.’”
As a full-time CEO, Knight centralized operations in Portland. For his top manager, he chose the meticulous and instinctively thrifty Bob Woodell, who promptly tightened ship. First, Woodell closed the Los Angeles warehouse and concentrated their product in a large Portland storehouse. He hired his mother, Myrle Woodell, who’d mastered warehousing at Pendleton Woolen Mills, to oversee it. Then Woodell reorganized BRS’s bookkeeping to correspond to the fiscal year.
This all freed Knight to think more strategically. In December 1969, he took his annual trip to Japan and sat down with Kihachiro Onitsuka. He noted that Tiger shipments were continually late or contained the wrong shoes, which were harder to sell. Onitsuka told him that he was building two new factories to address the problems. The Onitsuka Company’s total sales had reached $10 million, but were still mainly in the Japanese domestic market. So the founder had vowed to create a truly international company, an “Onitsuka of the World,” he said. In charge of this aggressive dream he put an aggressive man, Shoji Kitami.
Knight and Onitsuka signed a three-year contract that gave Blue Ribbon Sports the exclusive right to market Tigers in the United States in return for selling only the Onitsuka brand. The contract would expire at the end of 1972.
During those years, Knight sold every cushioned shoe Tiger shipped him. This was because his thickheaded competition couldn’t conce
ive that there was even a market for what the running and jogging boom was making essential—shock-absorbing road shoes. “That was the purpose of the Cortez,” Knight would recall. “When we put that together, Bill and I sent over the components and said here, make this. They were kind of reluctant, but they finally did it. That was about 1967. That was the first innovation for the American market.”
The amazing thing was how long it took other companies to catch on. “With the Cortez’s cushioning,” Knight would say, “we were in a monopoly position probably into the Olympic year, 1972. We had a great four-year run all by ourselves. Which gave us the sales volume to have a real company, kind of.” Knight moved the administrative offices to Tigard, Oregon, and the shipping department into an old White Stag warehouse on West Burnside Avenue.
The company’s success began to attract predatory eyes. Knight had always known this was a possibility. He had kept his best friend on the Oregon team, Dick Miller, in the loop. “When he really got going importing these Tigers,” said Miller later, “and was working so hard to establish the brand, I told him, You don’t have the trademark.”
“I know, I know,” Knight had said. That fact would always make him a middleman, ultimately at the mercy of his manufacturer. He was especially vulnerable because he couldn’t get Tigers from any other maker. Therefore, Knight was acutely sensitive to any actions by Onitsuka that seemed to hint that the supplier was using its leverage for other than mutual benefit. But there never had been any. Just the opposite, Knight felt. Onitsuka had offered him advice as he might to a son. However, the Tiger maker’s international growth was now Shoji Kitami’s bailiwick.
“We had gotten people’s attention,” Knight would remember. “So a lot of American shoe distributors were going to Japan and telling Onitsuka, ‘Well, if this two-bit outfit up in the woods in Oregon can do this kind of business, wait till you get somebody that’s really in the business.’”
Onitsuka listened and sent Kitami to talk to Knight. In March 1971, they had a week of unsettling meetings in Portland. Kitami was carrying a fat file of what he termed market research and said it contained letters from distributors all over America promising to sell ten times in one state what BRS had been selling in the whole country. He said he planned to go around and meet with them and study the market.
Knight asked him not to go and said that if Kitami signed a contract with any of them it would be a violation of BRS’s contractual right to exclusivity. Kitami would only promise that he wouldn’t sign anything before he came back through Portland in two weeks. When Kitami stepped out of the office for a while, Knight slipped the Onitsuka executive’s folder of distributor letters out from among his papers and put it aside. That night, he and Woodell read it. Kitami had eighteen appointments lined up in every major metropolitan area. All the distributors argued that the market was gargantuan and BRS alone could never meet it. Knight later slipped the file back into Kitami’s papers.
Kitami made his trip and returned with an ultimatum. He had signed no contracts, but was ready to. The panting distributors needed exclusive territories, so to begin with, he said, Blue Ribbon Sports would give up New York and California. That was a fifth of Knight’s business.
Again, Knight protested that it would be a violation of their contract. He also recognized it as a death-knell precedent. “If Onitsuka could say we don’t care what that piece of paper says,” Knight would recall, “they could carve up the entire United States and give it away to other distributors.” Knight’s company would have no reason to exist.
“After all these years,” Knight said to Kitami, “after what we’ve been through together, isn’t there some other arrangement we could come to?”
Kitami had been waiting for this. He said he would entertain one idea, a joint venture. A joint venture whereby “Onitsuka will own fifty-one per cent of the stock.”
Knight was stunned. Onitsuka Company was clearly using its power of supply to take over Blue Ribbon Sports. Kitami added that Knight and Woodell would still have jobs, but would be supervised by Onitsuka executives.
“We have to talk,” Knight said, “with Bill Bowerman.”
After the initial shouting, when Bowerman and John Jaqua heard of Kitami’s ultimatum from Knight, all three calmed down and came coldly to the same conclusion. The choice was between surrendering the company to Onitsuka or making their own shoes. Bowerman’s phrase was “Find another hole to jump in.” Bowerman did not accept that the company he’d cofounded was merely a distributor of other’s creations. He had designed a shoe that let Onitsuka succeed in the American market. BRS had the right, he felt, to license that shoe to other manufacturers.
Knight agreed. And if they created a fresh brand, a trademark they did own, they would never be blackmailed by a supplier again. But meanwhile they had no other hole to jump into, no fallback factory—and they had debts they couldn’t pay unless they kept selling Tigers.
So they played for time. Knight sent Kitami a letter masterful in its warmth and absence of substance: “I have spoken with Mr. Bowerman about your general proposal and he has been excited about the prospects.” There would be no sign of anger. Knight told no other BRS staffers, not even Jeff Johnson, of the Tiger betrayal. Nothing would be said or done that might let Onitsuka deduce that they were mad enough to approach other shoemakers.
This was the time, Bowerman would say, “when John Jaqua proved what a great sizer-upper he was.” Jaqua was certain from all he’d heard that their days of getting shoes from Onitsuka were numbered. “Go to Japan as soon as you can,” he urged Knight, “and find somebody to make a whole new line.” Knight heeded the advice, flying to Tokyo in October 1971.
A family connection was vital. Robin Jaqua’s brother Chuck Robinson was a deputy secretary of state in the Nixon administration. Robinson helped cement Knight’s relations with a huge Japanese trading company, Nissho Iwai.
Asian trading companies have little counterpart in the United States. They are the great business arrangers. Those in Japan specialize in different sectors of its economy (steel, autos, foodstuffs, and so on) and provide financial backing, shipping, and wholesaling, taking a small percentage every time. Often they do everything but actually make a product.
In Knight’s case Nissho Iwai agreed to finance the first runs of the new brand. That gave Knight both the entrée and a loan of $650,000 to order 20,000 pairs of shoes to be manufactured by the Nippon Rubber Company. Without Knight’s association with Nissho Iwai, the huge Nippon Rubber Company would never have bothered with such a gnat of a buyer. He ordered 6,000 pairs of the Cortez design, as well 10,000 pairs of tennis shoes and some basketball and wrestling models.
When those shoes eventually reached the US market, they couldn’t very well be called Nippon Rubbers. They needed a name and they needed an eye-catching logo. The first time Jeff Johnson visited Oregon was for a spring 1971 meeting in which he, Knight, Woodell, and John Bork chose that logo from a stack of designs by a Portland State art student, Carolyn Davidson. Davidson had been instructed to shoot for something that offered both support, such as Adidas’s arch-gripping three stripes, and “movement.” It was impossible. “Support is static,” she said. “Movement is movement.”
So they separated form and function. They put the support in the shoe and chose the logo strictly for its raciness. They kept coming back to a fat check mark. Johnson, always a function guy, kept saying, “It doesn’t do anything. It’s just decoration.” In lieu of anything better, though, they went with the check mark. “Maybe it’ll grow on me,” said Knight.
Johnson flew back to Massachusetts, where he’d built up the Eastern operation. He’d been impatient and distracted at the logo meeting “because only then had I learned the reason why we had to find a new supplier—Onitsuka’s threats.” Johnson had been depressed by Tiger’s behavior. “They had the right to enter new relationships when our contract expired in 1972,” he said years later, “but we had sold everything they had been capable of m
aking for us, which was always less than we had ordered. What were they doing looking for a tenfold increase in sales?” Johnson thought the prospects of starting over with a new brand no one had ever seen before were grim.
But Knight had had a little longer to assess the situation. He amazed Johnson when he said in all earnestness, “Jeff, we have them right where we want them. Onitsuka is too slow to react to product development ideas we give them. They never ship what we order. And they’d probably yank the distributorship at the end of the contract in 1972 anyway. What we need is a brand we can control, because we have everything else, the shoes, the top runners. This is the best thing that could ever happen to us.” Some of the vision in those words came right out of Knight’s original paper at Stanford’s business school. It was part of his strategy for beating Adidas in America.
Not long afterward, back in Massachusetts, Johnson got a letter from an old customer asking for a shoe made with “Swoosh fibre.” This was a fanciful term Jeff had invented in a 1967 ad for the nylon uppers of the Tiger Marathon model. Johnson sent the letter to Knight and noted that the word seemed to lodge in one’s memory. Over the next few years, though no one recalled exactly why, the check-mark design became known as the “swoosh.”
They were, of course, only half done. What brand name would be on the boxes that held the shoes with the swooshes? That was the question Woodell asked Johnson over the phone a few days later.
“Knight just came in,” said Woodell, “and told me we need a name by 9 a.m. tomorrow because they’re printing the boxes. But Phil says don’t worry if you can’t think of one because we’ve got ‘Dimension Six.’ I told him he can’t use a dumb name like that. He said, ‘Okay, come up with a better one.’ Got a better one?”
“No,” said Jeff, “but that’s horrible.”
“Sleep on it and call me early.”
Johnson did. And while he slept, the memory of a Mainliner magazine article he’d read on the plane filtered through his subconscious. It had been about what made for a memorable brand name. The best were short and contained an “exotic” letter or sound: Kodak, Coke, Zippo, Clorox, Xerox, Kleenex. When he awoke at seven in the morning, his liberal arts education presented him with another, the ancient Greek winged goddess of victory.