by Kenny Moore
He called Woodell. “I’ve got it!”
“What?”
“Nike!”
“What’s a Nike? Spell it.”
“It’s the winged goddess of victory. Greek mythology. It has every hallmark of a great hallmark! It’s short. It’s got a catchy consonant!”
A gathering pause. “Got anything else?”
“No! No! This is it! Listen, Woodell, this is destiny, this is it!”
Woodell rolled into Knight’s office. “There’s a new one. ‘Nike.’”
“What?”
“Greek winged goddess of victory. Nike.”
“Sounds like a Jeff deal to me,” Knight said. “What happened to Dimension Six?”
“Nobody likes that but you. This Nike thing would fit the shoes.”
They had a 9 a.m. deadline to telex their choice to the factory. At five ’til, Knight typed it in. “Which did you pick?” asked Woodell when he was done.
“I guess we’ll go with the Nike thing for a while. I don’t like any of them, but I guess that’s the best of the bunch.”
The first Nike shoes began to trickle into BRS stores in Portland, Eugene, Culver City, and Natick that winter. They had vinyl swooshes stitched on the uppers. Of course, as soon as they sold a single Nike Cortez, they would be in technical violation of their agreement to sell only Tigers. But sell them they did. At the February 1972 National Sporting Goods Association trade show in Chicago, Jeff Johnson and the Blue Ribbon brochure said the new Nikes were “a parallel development to our Tiger line.”
Dealers were confused about the new shoes but ordered some anyway, both to give them a try and out of loyalty to Johnson. Soon, back in Kobe, Japan, Mr. Onitsuka was reading that BRS brochure, airmailed to him by a prospective Tiger distributor. Shoji Kitami was on the next plane out.
Kitami hit Knight’s office in March 1972. “What is this thing,” he demanded, “called ‘Nike?’”
Knight told him the new brand was a hedge in case the Tiger contract wasn’t renewed. Surely that was reasonable.
“How many track and field shoes have arrived?”
“Just six thousand.” (But by then he had more en route.)
Kitami headed to Los Angeles. Knight called his manager there, John Bork, and told him to use any measures necessary to prevent Kitami from seeing the Nike inventory. Bork tried to some extent, but Kitami said he was going to the bathroom, fought his way into the stock room, and started tearing open orange and black boxes. Finally he found a Cortez and grimaced with satisfaction. He had proof of BRS’s betrayal and he knew what to do with it.
It wasn’t long after that that John Bork went to work for Tiger.
On May 10, Knight, Bowerman, and Jaqua met with Kitami in Jaqua’s Eugene law offices. Knight didn’t know that many of the distributors he’d been threatening to sue for contract interference if they signed on to sell Tigers had actually insisted that Kitami formally terminate his contract with BRS before they’d sign with him.
Kitami said he was sorry Knight had breached their contract and handed him a letter from Kihachira Onitsuka that ended their relationship. Knight replied that the first breach had been Kitami’s in lining up dealers behind his back.
John Jaqua softly said that disagreements such as this could often be settled if the desire existed to continue the relationship. But if Kitami had no wish to repair it, Blue Ribbon would proceed with legal action.
“We would still like Dr. Bowerman to continue to develop ideas for us,” Kitami said blandly. Bowerman, as he put it later, “took the opportunity to educate him that that was never going to happen.”
Kitami said that the offer of a joint venture, with Onitsuka being in control, was a very good deal for all concerned. Knight, finally free of the need to conceal his feelings, jumped from his chair, furious. Jaqua called a recess and hustled his two friends out into the hall. “You’re not going to get any more shoes from them,” he said.
As Kitami departed, Knight told him he’d see him in US court.
The next day Jaqua fired off a letter saying that if Onitsuka didn’t continue shipping shoes, BRS intended to sue for breach of contract and to “enjoin within the United States sales of shoes developed by Dr. Bowerman and upon which there is a registered or common law trademark. These would include Cortez, Roadrunner, Tahoe, Simba, Jogger, Boston, and Olympia XIX.” They would also sue for “damages for unauthorized use of the Bowerman name in worldwide advertising.”
Kihachiro Onitsuka would testify later that he was unaware of Shoji Kitami’s approaching other distributors without Knight’s knowledge. But he didn’t countermand his managing director’s statements in Oregon. The rift would be irreparable. Yet Onitsuka the company couldn’t simply turn ships around and sell the shoes they carried elsewhere. Many consignments made it into BRS’s warehouses and stores. It was good that they did, because the new brand took a while to equal them in quality. However, it was not long until Blue Ribbon Sports was on its own.
“So that was when we started Nike,” said Knight twenty years later. “There were some dark days in there.” Yet reflecting on them made him summon the same words he’d used to encourage Jeff Johnson during the darkest. “Obviously in retrospect, that was the best thing that ever happened to us.”
It was as a means of therapy, in that tense summer of 1971, when he couldn’t share the Onitsuka threats with anybody, that Bill Bowerman began fooling with urethane and Barbara’s waffle iron. When Geoff Hollister slipped on Bill’s first test pair, he found that the “urethane spikes” on the balls of his feet seemed to grip almost regardless of what they touched, be it track, road, grass, or mud.
In the fall, Bowerman made me a pair and showed off his sheets of molded sole material. I, too, felt they had broader applications than just the track. I was so sure they were going to let me run away from Frank Shorter in the 1971 AAU cross-country race in San Diego that I got excited and ran the first mile in 4:19. Frank ran 4:30 for that mile and every other mile of the 10,000 meters, caught me at halfway and won. I got sixth. (Later, in the 1972 Twilight Mile, I ran a PR 4:03.2 in waffles, thought to be the fastest mile in a flat at that time.)
In December 1971, Shorter and I ran the Fukuoka Marathon in Kyushu, Japan. The week before the race, young Yoshihiko Hikita of the Onitsuka Company fitted us with Tiger’s new Obori model of racing flat, named roughly for the Fukuoka Park in which we all trained.
We loved the shoes. Bowerman had not intimated a thing to me about Onitsuka trying to take over his company. In our blissful ignorance, Frank and I were unstinting in our praise for the shoes, Hikita (Frank would later hire him away from Tiger for his own clothing company), and Shoji Kitami himself, who attended the race.
It was only a great deal later that I learned that Bill had let me run in Tigers as part of the grand delaying strategy not to alert Onitsuka that there was a big break coming. Those pleasant hours with Kitami in Fukuoka were part of Buck and Bill’s disinformation campaign.
Shorter won in 2:12:50.4, defeating Akio Usami and becoming a favorite for the Munich Olympic marathon. I got sick and crawled in twenty-ninth. When I got home, I showed Bill the new Oboris and asked how the company liked his nubs idea. “Buck doesn’t seem all that taken by the waffle except for football shoes,” he said. “But I’m convinced they’re the thing to sole some road shoes.”
Bowerman would revisit the idea a year or so later, when BRS board members would agree that training flats were the real market for the waffle sole and that, in fact, the waffle sole was the first really new product in shoes in half a century. But right then Bill had other priorities. “I’m discontinuing tests,” he said. “We have an Olympic Trials to plan. We have a team to choose.”
CHAPTER 25
Munich
“NEITHER THE AAU NOR THE UNITED STATES OLYMPIC COMMITTEE,” WROTE Bob Newland in a paper he would deliver to the Eugene Round Table in 1974, “have any type of operations manual to assist a group receiving the honor of staging a nati
onal track meet. Each group evidently goes about running its meet while making the same mistakes all the others did.” The Round Table, begun in 1912, assembles the town’s academic elite and business people for purposes of mutual edification. Bowerman was the only UO head coach ever invited to join.
The Oregon Track Club, charged with producing Eugene’s first Olympic Track and Field Trials, responded by leaving no possibility for error. “In January 1972,” wrote Newland, “our organization table listed twenty-eight different committees, each with a chairman. The steering committee of OTC president Dale Pederson, vice president Ed Doll, treasurer Wayne Atwood, Olympic coach Bill Bowerman, and I felt it our responsibility to the incoming athletes to address their needs for legal, medical, banking, housing, food, meet information, transportation, hospitality, registration, and religious services.” Since the Trials also included the twenty- and fifty-kilometer racewalks, the decathlon, and the marathon, each had its own committee. Oregon State University furnished officials for the decathlon.
The marathon course was two laps of the thirteen-mile loop along the Willamette and around Springfield used for the 1971 national AAU race. That had been Frank Shorter’s first marathon. Tired of him always leaving me behind in the 10,000, I had talked him into trying my distance, in my town. At twenty miles we were together in the lead. I looked over. His stride told me nothing about how he was feeling. His question did: “Why couldn’t Phidippides have died here?” he asked. I won by a minute in 2:16:48. Frank would not lose another marathon for five years.
For the Trials marathon, the track club wanted to use a new footbridge over the Willamette, but that meant crossing railroad tracks to return to Hayward Field. Southern Pacific refused to promise a slow freight wouldn’t come along and chop the race in half. Bowerman spoke with Governor Tom McCall, who spoke with Southern Pacific superintendent A. W. Kilborn and the county parks department. One week before the Trials, a $400,000 tunnel under the tracks was completed and smoothly paved.
A less successful effort was to combine the men’s and women’s Olympic track Trials, which had never been held jointly. The protective coaches and officials on the women’s side were leery of being overshadowed by the men. Newland had immediately written the USOC women’s track and field committee and urged that the Trials be united in Eugene. “I said since we were doing the full eight-day Olympic schedule, the women’s events would not only not get lost, they’d be needed, they’d be showcased,” Newland would recall. “They wrote back that they already had their site picked, but I found out later they simply didn’t believe me.” The women’s Trials were held in Frederick, Maryland.
“Many Knights of the Round Table were responsible for the success of the Trials,” Newland would write. “Ray Hendrickson, our starter, is the best in the country. Dr. Bill McHolick and Mayor Les Anderson are our top high-jump officials. John Jaqua, our legal shark deluxe, keeps us out of trouble. John Alltucker and Jack Stafford make sure all is exact in measurement. Erhman Giustina is our fundraiser and expediter. George Hull and Lloyd Staples are our track inspectors, and we bask in the approval of our new University president, Robert D. Clark.” Clark’s support of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at San Jose State had been no barrier to his being offered the Oregon presidency. Bowerman would come to admire him for his scholarship as well as his courage.
The nerve center for runners was neither the track nor the athlete-thronged dorms. It was downtown, where flocks of ectomorphic, prominently veined competitors flitted through the Athletic Department store and were persuaded to stop, sit down, unlace, try on, and perhaps reconsider. Blue Ribbon Sports was taking exuberant advantage of its Bowerman-provided opportunity to introduce Nikes to the nation’s finest. Its walls plastered with the Register-Guard’s event-by-event Trials coverage, the little store was jammed even without customers. Jeff Johnson, Bob Woodell, Geoff Hollister, and the rest of the company had converged here to get shoes on feet.
Phil and Penny Knight were hot-pressing names on customized T-shirts to give to athletes along with their shoes. “How do you spell your first name, sir?” Phil asked a gnomic marathoner. “D-U-M-P,” he said.
“Okay,” Knight said, arranging the letters. “What’s your last?”
“Nixon.”
Thus did Tom Derderian run off in an emblem of the Trials’ zeitgeist. Derderian, who later wrote the official history of the Boston Marathon’s first 100 years, was camping on our lawn in nearby Lowell along with half a dozen other endurance men. Hollister’s house was so full it was dubbed the Hilton. At Roscoe Divine’s, Jere Van Dyk slept on a mattress with Gerry Lindgren.
Van Dyk, who had qualified for the 1500 meters, was again nearing odyssey’s end. After being discharged from the Army in the fall of 1970, he had moved to Paris, run for the Racing Club de France, and studied at the Sorbonne, taking its famed Cours de la Civilisation Française. “I was exploring, a Plymouth Brethren in Paris,” he would say. “I trained, ate, studied, read the Bible, and went to bed.” In 1971, he’d returned to Eugene for the AAU nationals, walking onto Hayward Field, as he would recall, “wearing wide-wale green cords, loafers, a long, black corduroy coat, a silk turquoise scarf, and sunglasses.” Marty Liquori walked over and said, “Liked your last movie.”
Van Dyk ran that national mile in his blue Club de France singlet, placing third behind Liquori in 4:00.0. If he had hoped for a kind word from Bowerman, it was in vain: “Bowerman was nowhere to be seen.” That fall, Olympic decathlon champion Bill Toomey and coach Pete Petersens (formerly of the Southern California Striders) began the Club West Track Club in Santa Barbara. They invited Van Dyk to join and he jumped at the chance to train during the pre-Olympic winter in what he thought of as Lotus Land.
Van Dyk’s teammate and interval training partner, Jim Ryun, relished the warm, clean sea air. It was what he had come for. Ryun, who’d graduated from Kansas in 1969, was determined to redeem his loss to Kenya’s Kip Keino in the 1968 Olympic 1500. He and his wife, Anne, had actually moved to Eugene in late 1970 seeking milder winters. He trained by mail, using workouts sent by his lifelong coach, Bob Timmons, from Kansas. But Eugene’s pollen inflamed his allergies so badly that the Ryuns moved on to Santa Barbara. In May 1972, when the weather allowed, they moved back to Lawrence.
That same spring, at the West Coast Relays, Van Dyk faced his own internal struggle. Before the race he visited a former runner from his Assembly in Portland, who was teaching at Fresno State. “He had me get down on my knees and pray with him before my race,” Jere would recall. “It was the worst race I ever ran in my life. I got last. I’d relied on God to run the race for me, to give me the strength to run. I didn’t try myself. That worked for others, but no longer for me.” Then, in the last lap of the Modesto Relays mile, someone’s spikes raked Van Dyk’s Achilles, ripping his shoe off. Not seriously hurt, he finished with one bare foot, and he was racing fit when he settled in at the Divine house for the Trials.
Could modest Eugene sustain interest for eight days in a meet that, as the LA promoters had scoffed, could be run in two? The answer came early. The first morning’s schedule had only a few 100-meter heats and the hammer-throw prelims, followed by four hours of nothing (when in Munich the women would be competing). Six thousand Oregon track fans were equal to this. They arrived, cheered, departed, picnicked, shopped, or floated the river, then filed back in for the afternoon 800-meter heats, their number having doubled. All eight days would be packed.
The Trials were a complete athletic success. In the 800-meter final, Ryun seized the lead powerfully—too powerfully—with a lap to go. Bowling Green’s Dave Wottle ran him down and won in a world record of 1:44.3. Ryun faded to fourth. For him it would be the 1500 or nothing. Eddie Hart and Rey Robinson tied the world 100-meter mark of 9.9. Bob Seagren broke the world record in the pole vault with 18 feet 53⁄4 inches. UCLA’s Wayne Collett won the 400 in 44.2 from teammate John Smith, with Vince Matthews finishing third. Lee Evans, in fourth, rounded out the relay team. �
�Safest gold medal on the team,” he said. “The 1600-meter relay.”
The most emotional race for the town was the 10,000 meters. Jon Anderson was the son of Les Anderson, Eugene’s popular mayor, publisher of a lumber market newsletter, and OTC high-jump official. Jon had attended Eugene’s Sheldon High, then, strangely intoxicated by the aroma of ivy, had gone to Cornell. After graduating, he did a month of workouts with Bowerman, slipped on our OTC green and yellow stripes, started cautiously in the 10,000 final, and began moving up.
With six laps to go, three Florida Track Club runners, Shorter, Jeff Galloway, and Jack Bacheler, were in command. But Bacheler was having a rare off day. Anderson, sixty yards behind, was an emotional man, supremely equipped to incorporate the crowd’s frenzy into his own. He reached Bacheler’s shoulder with 100 to go and sprinted in like Billy Mills in Tokyo, taking third and the last spot on the team in 29:08.2. I yelled myself hoarse for him. When he came by on his victory lap and hugged me, all I could croak was “You just changed your life!”
“The single greatest example of the crowd taking things into its own hands I’ve ever seen,” said Bowerman.
This meant, however, that five days later Frank and I had to run the marathon trial in a way that would help Jack Bacheler—a great friend to all and mentor to Shorter and Galloway—make the team. Frank and I set a tough, 2:12 pace to turn the most eager chasers into wounded meat for Bacheler and Galloway—who were running 2:20 pace—to gobble up. It took us thirteen miles to shake the last guy, John Vitale, and then we coasted, our damage inflicted.
“My shining memory of those Trials,” Frank recalled later, “was when we hit the track and I realized we could finish together and people would understand. We were running to get somewhere, literally and figuratively, not to compete. We were still training and this was to get to the Games. Finishing together showed we were still on our way.”