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NIGHT

We love going to the movies. We always have. But tonight we have a dilemma. We’ve seen all the violent movies, which Penny likes best, so we’re going to have to venture outside our comfort zone, try something different. A comedy, maybe.

I leaf through the paper. “How about The Bucket List—at the ­Century? Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman?”

She frowns: I guess.

It’s Christmastime, 2007.

THE BUCKET LIST turns out to be anything but a comedy. It’s a movie about mortality. Two men, Nicholson and Freeman, both terminally ill with cancer, decide to spend their remaining days doing all the fun things, the crazy things, they’ve always wanted to do, to make the most of their time before they kick the bucket. An hour into the movie, there’s not a chuckle to be had.

There are also many strange, unsettling parallels between the movie and my life. First, Nicholson always makes me think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which makes me think of Kesey, which takes me back to my days at the University of Oregon. Second, high on the bucket list of Nicholson’s character is seeing the Himalayas, which transports me to Nepal.

Above all, Nicholson’s character employs a personal assistant—a sort of surrogate son—named Matthew. He even looks a bit like my son. Same scruffy goatee.

When the movie ends, when the lights come up, Penny and I are both relieved to stand and return to the bright glare of real life.

The theater is a new sixteen-screen colossus in the heart of Cathedral City, just outside Palm Springs. These days we spend much of the winter there, hiding from the chilly Oregon rains. Walking through the lobby, waiting for our eyes to adjust, we spot two familiar faces. At first we can’t place them. We’re still seeing Nicholson and Freeman in our minds. But these faces are equally familiar—equally famous. Now we realize. It’s Bill and Warren. Gates and Buffett.

We stroll over.

Neither man is what you’d call a close friend, but we’ve met them several times, at social events and conferences. And we have common causes, common interests, a few mutual acquaintances. “Fancy meeting you here!” I say. Then I cringe. Did I really just say that? Is it possible that I’m still shy and awkward in the presence of celebrities?

“I was just thinking about you,” one of them says.

We shake hands, all around, and talk mostly about Palm Springs. Isn’t this place lovely? Isn’t it wonderful to get out of the cold? We talk about families, business, sports. I hear someone behind us whisper, “Hey, look, Buffett and Gates—who’s that other guy?”

I smile. As it should be.

In my head I can’t help doing some quick math. At the moment I’m worth $10 billion, and each of these men is worth five or six times more. Lead me from the unreal to the real.

Penny asks if they enjoyed the movie. Yes, they both say, looking down at their shoes, though it was a bit depressing. What’s on your bucket lists? I nearly ask, but I don’t. Gates and Buffett seem to have done everything they’ve ever wanted in this life. They have no bucket lists, surely.

Which makes me ask myself: Have I?

AT HOME PENNY picks up her needlepoint and I pour myself a glass of wine. I pull out a yellow legal pad to look at my notes and lists for tomorrow. For the first time in a while . . . it’s blank.

We sit in front of the eleven o’clock news, but my mind is far, far away. Drifting, floating, time-traveling. A familiar feeling of late.

I’m apt to spend long stretches of the day walking around in my childhood. For some reason I think a lot about my grandfather, Bump Knight. He had nothing, less than nothing. And yet he managed to scrimp and save and buy a brand-new Model T, in which he moved his wife and five kids from Winnebago, Minnesota, all the way to Colorado, then on to Oregon. He told me that he didn’t bother to get his driver’s license, he just up and went. Descending the Rockies in that rattling, shuddering piece of tin, he repeatedly scolded it. “Whoa, WHOA, you son of a bitch!” I heard this story so many times from him, and from aunts and uncles and cousins, I feel as though I was there. In a way, I was.

Bump later bought a pickup, and he loved putting us grandkids in the back of it, driving us into town on errands. Along the way he’d always stop by Sutherlin Bakery and buy us a dozen glazed doughnuts—­each. I need only look up at the blue sky or the white ceiling (any blank screen will do) and I see myself, dangling my bare feet over his truck bed, feeling the fresh green wind on my face, licking glaze off a warm doughnut. Could I have risked as much, dared as much, walked the razor’s edge of entrepreneurship between safety and catastrophe, without the early foundation of that feeling, that bliss of safety and contentment? I don’t think so.

After forty years I’ve stepped down as Nike CEO, leaving the company in good hands, I think, and good shape, I trust. Sales last year, 2006, were $16 billion. (Adidas was $10 billion, but who’s counting?) Our shoes and clothes are in five thousand stores worldwide, and we have ten thousand employees. Our Chinese operation in Shanghai alone has seven hundred. (And China, our second-largest market, is now our largest producer of shoes. I guess that 1980 trip paid off.)

The five thousand employees at the world headquarters in Beaverton are housed on an Edenic collegiate campus, with two hundred acres of wooded wilderness, laced by rolling streams, dotted by pristine ball fields. The buildings are named after the men and women who have given us more than their names and endorsements. Joan Benoit Samuelson, Ken Griffey Jr., Mia Hamm, Tiger Woods, Dan Fouts, Jerry Rice, Steve Prefontaine—they’ve given us our identity.

As chairman I still go most days to my office. I look around at all those buildings, and I don’t see buildings, I see temples. Any building is a temple if you make it so. I think often of that momentous trip when I was twenty-four. I think of myself standing high above Athens, gazing at the Parthenon, and I never fail to experience the sensation of time folding in on itself.

Amid the campus buildings, along the campus walkways, there are enormous banners: action photos of the super athletes, the legends and giants and titans who’ve elevated Nike to something more than a brand.

Jordan.

Kobe.

Tiger.

Again, I can’t help but think of my trip around the world.

The River Jordan.

Mystical Kobe, Japan.

That first meeting at Onitsuka, pleading with the executives for the right to sell Tigers . . .

Can this all be a coincidence?

I think of the countless Nike offices around the world. At each one, no matter the country, the phone number ends in 6453, which spells out Nike on the keypad. But, by pure chance, from right to left it also spells out Pre’s best time in the mile, to the tenth of a second: 3:54.6.

I say by pure chance, but is it really? Am I allowed to think that some coincidences are more than coincidental? Can I be forgiven for thinking, or hoping, that the universe, or some guiding daemon, has been nudging me, whispering to me? Or else just playing with me? Can it really be nothing but a fluke of geography that the oldest shoes ever discovered are a pair of nine-thousand-year-old sandals . . . salvaged from a cave in Oregon?

Is there nothing to the fact that the sandals were discovered in 1938, the year I was born?

I ALWAYS FEEL a thrill, a shot of adrenaline, when I drive through the intersection of the campus’s two main streets, each named after a Nike Founding Father. All day, every day, the security guard at the front gate gives visitors the same directions. What you wanna do is take Bowerman Drive all the way up to Del Hayes Way . . . I also take great pleasure in strolling past the oasis at the center of campus, the Nissho Iwai Japanese Gardens. In one sense our campus is a topographical map of Nike’s history and growth; in another it’s a diorama of my life. In yet another sense it’s a living, breathing expression of that vital human emotion, maybe the most vital of all, after love. Gratitude.

The youngest employees at Nike seem to have it. In abundance. They care deeply about the names on the streets and buildings, and about the bygone days. Like Matthew begging for his bedtime story, they clamor for the old tales. They crowd the conference room whenever Woodell or Johnson visits. They’ve even formed a discussion group, an informal think tank, to preserve that original sense of innovation. They call themselves The Spirit of 72, which fills my heart.

But it’s not just the young people within the company who honor the history. I think back to July 2005. In the middle of some event, I can’t recall which, LeBron James asks for a private word.

“Phil, can I see you a moment?”

“Of course.”

“When I first signed with you,” he says, “I didn’t know all that much about the history of Nike. So I’ve been studying up.”

“Oh?”

“You’re the founder.”

“Well. Cofounder. Yes. It surprises a lot of people.”

“And Nike was born in 1972.”

“Well. Born—? Yes. I suppose.”

“Right. So I went to my jeweler and had them find a Rolex watch from 1972.”

He hands me the watch. It’s engraved: With thanks for taking a chance on me.

As usual, I say nothing. I don’t know what to say.

It wasn’t much of a chance. He was pretty close to a sure thing. But taking a chance on people—he’s right. You could argue that’s what it’s all been about.

I GO OUT to the kitchen, pour another glass of wine. Returning to my recliner, I watch Penny needlepoint for a while and the mental images come tumbling faster and faster. As if I’m needlepointing memories.

I watch Pete Sampras crush every opponent at one of his many Wimbledons. After the final point he tosses his racket into the stands—to me! (He overshoots and hits the man behind me, who sues, of course.)

I see Pete’s archrival, Andre Agassi, win the U.S. Open, unseeded, and come to my box after the final shot, in tears. “We did it, Phil!”

We?

I smile as Tiger drains the final putt at Augusta—or is it St. Andrews? He hugs me—and holds on for many seconds longer than I expect.

I roll my mind back over the many private, intimate moments I’ve shared with him, and with Bo Jackson, and with Michael Jordan. Staying at Michael’s house in Chicago, I pick up the phone next to the bed in the guestroom and discover that there’s a voice on the line. May I help you? It’s room service. Genuine, round-the-clock, whatever-your-heart-desires room service.

I set down the phone, my mouth hanging open.

They’re all like sons, and brothers—family. No less. When Tiger’s father, Earl, dies, the church in Kansas holds fewer than one hundred, and I’m honored to be included. When Jordan’s father is murdered, I fly to North Carolina for the funeral and discover with a shock that a seat is reserved for me in the front row.

All of which leads me back, of course, to Matthew.

I think of his long, difficult search for meaning, for identity. For me. His search often looked so familiar, even though Matthew didn’t have my luck, or my focus. Nor my insecurity. Maybe if he’d had a little more insecurity . . .

In his quest to find himself, he dropped out of college. He experimented, dabbled, rebelled, argued, ran away. Nothing worked. Then, at last, in 2000, he seemed to enjoy being a husband, a father, a philanthropist. He got involved in Mi Casa, Su Casa, a charity building an orphanage in El Salvador. On one of his visits there, after a few days of hard, satisfying work, he took a break. He drove with two friends to Ilopango, a deep-water lake, to go scuba diving.

For some reason he decided to see how deep he could go. He decided to take a risk that even his risk-addicted father would never take.

Something went wrong. At 150 feet my son lost consciousness.

If I were to think about Matthew in his final moments, fighting for air, I believe my imagination could get me very close to how he must have felt. After the thousands of miles I’ve logged as a runner, I know that feeling of fighting for that next breath. But I won’t let my imagination go there, ever.

Still, I’ve talked to the two friends who were with him. I’ve read everything I’ve been able to get my hands on about diving accidents. When things go wrong, I’ve learned, a diver often feels something called “the martini effect.” He thinks everything is okay. Better than okay. He feels euphoric. That must have happened to Matthew, I tell myself, because at the last second he pulled out his mouthpiece. I choose to believe this euphoria scenario, to believe that my son didn’t suffer at the end. That my son was happy. I choose, because it’s the only way I can go on.

Penny and I were at the movies when we found out. We’d gone to the five o’clock showing of Shrek 2. In the middle of the movie we turned and saw Travis standing in the aisle. Travis. Travis?

He was whispering to us in the dark. “You guys need to come with me.”

We walked up the aisle, out of the theater, from darkness to light. As we emerged he said, “I just got a phone call from El Salvador . . .”

Penny fell to the floor. Travis helped her up. He put his arm around his mother and I staggered away, to the end of the hallway, tears streaming. I recall seven strange unbidden words running through my head, over and over, like a fragment of some poem: So this is the way it ends.

BY THE NEXT morning the news was everywhere. Internet, radio, newspapers, TV, all blaring the bare facts. Penny and I pulled the blinds, locked the doors, cut ourselves off. But not before our niece Britney moved in with us. To this day I believe that she saved our lives.

Every Nike athlete wrote, emailed, phoned. Every single one. But the first was Tiger. His call came in at 7:30 a.m. I will never, ever forget. And I will not stand for a bad word spoken about Tiger in my presence.

Another early caller was Alberto Salazar, the ferociously competitive distance runner who won three straight New York City Marathons in Nikes. I will always love him for many things, but above all for that show of concern.

He’s a coach now, and recently he brought a few of his runners to Beaverton. They were having a light workout, in the middle of Ro-naldo Field, when someone turned and saw Alberto on the ground, gasping for air. A heart attack. He was legally dead for fourteen minutes, until paramedics revived him and rushed him to St. Vincent’s.

I know that hospital well. My son Travis was born there, my mother died there, twenty-seven years after my father. In his final six months I was able to take my father on a long trip, to put to rest the eternal question of whether he was proud, to show him that I was proud of him. We went around the world, saw Nikes in every country we visited, and with every appearance of a swoosh his eyes shone. The pain of his impatience, his hostility to my Crazy Idea—it had faded. It was long gone. But not the memory.

Fathers and sons, it’s always been the same, since the dawn of time. “My dad,” Arnold Palmer once confided to me at the Masters, “did all he could to discourage me from being a professional golfer.” I smiled. “You don’t say.”

Visiting Alberto, walking into the lobby of St. Vincent’s, I was overcome with visions of both my parents. I felt them at my elbow, at my ear. Theirs was a strained relationship, I believe. But, as with an iceberg, everything was below the surface. In their house on Claybourne Street, the tension was concealed, and calm and reason almost always prevailed, because of their love for us. Love wasn’t spoken, or shown, but it was there, always. My sisters and I grew up knowing that both parents, different as they were from each other, and from us, cared. That’s their legacy. That’s their lasting victory.

I walked to the cardiac unit, saw the familiar sign on the door: No Admittance. I sailed past the sign, through the door, down the hall, and found Alberto’s room. He lifted his head off the pillow, managed a pained smile. I patted his arm and we had a good talk. Then I saw that he was fading. “See you soon,” I said. His hand shot out and grabbed mine. “If something happens to me,” he said, “promise me you’ll take care of Galen.”

His athlete. The one he’d been training. Who was just like a son to him.

I got it. Oh, how I got it.

“Of course,” I said. “Of course. Galen. Consider it done.”

I walked out of the room, barely hearing the beeping machines, the laughing nurses, the patient groaning down the hall. I thought of that phrase, “It’s just business.” It’s never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.

TIME FOR BED, Penny says, packing up her needlepoint.

Yes, I tell her. I’ll be along in a minute.

I keep thinking of one line in The Bucket List. “You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.” I forget if it was Nicholson or Freeman. The line is so true, so very true. And it transports me to Tokyo, to the offices of Nissho. I was there not long ago for a visit. The phone rang. “For you,” the Japanese receptionist said, extending the receiver. “Me?” It was Michael Johnson, the three-time gold medalist, holder of the world record in the 200 meters and 400 meters. He did it all in our shoes. He happened to be in Tokyo, he said, and heard I was, too. “Do you want to have dinner?” he asked.

I was flattered. But I told him I couldn’t. Nissho was having a banquet for me. I invited him to come. Hours later we were sitting together on the floor, before a table covered with shabu-shabu, toasting each other with cup after cup of sake. We laughed, cheered, clinked glasses, and something passed between us, the same thing that passes between me and most of the athletes I work with. A transference, a camaraderie, a sort of connection. It’s brief, but it nearly always happens, and I know it’s part of what I was searching for when I went around the world in 1962.

To study the self is to forget the self. Mi casa, su casa.

Oneness—in some way, shape, or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking.

I THINK OF others who didn’t make it this far. Bowerman died on Christmas Eve, 1999, in Fossil. He’d gone back to his hometown, as we always suspected he would. He still owned his house on the mountaintop above campus, but he chose to quit it, to move with Mrs. Bowerman to a Fossil retirement home. He needed to be where he started—did he tell someone that? Or am I imagining him muttering it to himself ?

I remember when I was a sophomore, we had a dual meet with Washington State, in Pullman, and Bowerman made the bus driver go through Fossil so he could show us. I immediately thought of that sentimental detour when I heard that he’d lain down on the bed and never got up.

It was Jaqua who phoned. I was reading the paper, the Christmas tree blinking blinking blinking. You always remember the strangest details from such moments. I choked into the phone, “I’ll have to call you back,” then walked upstairs to my den. I turned out all the lights. Eyes shut, I replayed a million different moments, including that long-ago lunch at the Cosmopolitan Hotel.

Deal?

Deal.

An hour passed before I could go back downstairs. At some point that night I gave up the Kleenex and just draped a towel over my shoulder. A move I learned from another beloved coach—John Thompson.

Strasser passed suddenly, too. Heart attack, 1993. He was so young, it was a tragedy, all the more so because it came after we’d had a falling out. Strasser had been instrumental in signing Jordan, in building up the Jordan brand and wrapping it around Rudy’s air soles. Air Jordan changed Nike, took us to the next level, and the next, but it changed Strasser, too. He felt that he should no longer be taking orders from anyone, including me. Especially me. We clashed, too many times, and he quit.

It might have been okay if he’d just quit. But he went to work for Adidas. An intolerable betrayal. I never forgave him. (Though I did recently—happily, proudly—hire his daughter, Avery. Twenty-two years old, she works in Special Events, and she’s said to be thriving. It’s a blessing and a joy to see her name in the company directory.) I wish Strasser and I had patched things up before he died, but I don’t know that it was possible. We were both born to compete, and we were both bad at forgiving. For both of us, betrayal was extra potent kryptonite.

I felt that same sense of betrayal when Nike came under attack for conditions in our overseas factories—the so-called sweatshop controversy. Whenever reporters said a factory was unsatisfactory, they never said how much better it was than the day we first went in. They never said how hard we’d worked with our factory partners to upgrade conditions, to make them safer and cleaner. They never said these factories weren’t ours, that we were renters, one among many tenants. They simply searched until they found a worker with complaints about conditions, and they used that worker to vilify us, and only us, knowing our name would generate maximum publicity.

Of course my handling of the crisis only made it worse. Angry, hurt, I often reacted with self-righteousness, petulance, anger. On some level I knew my reaction was toxic, counterproductive, but I couldn’t stop myself. It’s just not easy to remain even-keeled when you wake up one day, thinking you’re creating jobs and helping poor countries modernize and enabling athletes to achieve greatness, only to find yourself being burned in effigy outside the flagship retail store in your own hometown.

The company reacted as I did. Emotionally. Everyone was reeling. Many late nights in Beaverton, you’d find all the lights on, and soul-searching conversations taking place in various conference rooms and offices. Though we knew that much of the criticism was unjust, that Nike was a symbol, a scapegoat, more than the true culprit, all of that was beside the point. We had to admit: We could do better.

We told ourselves: We must do better.

Then we told the world: Just watch. We’ll make our factories shining examples.

And we did. In the ten years since the bad headlines and lurid exposés, we’ve used the crisis to reinvent the entire company.

For instance. One of the worst things about a shoe factory used to be the rubber room, where uppers and soles are bonded. The fumes are choking, toxic, cancer-causing. So we invented a water-based bonding agent that gives off no fumes, thereby eliminating 97 percent of the carcinogens in the air. Then we gave this invention to our competitors, handed it over to anyone who wanted it.

They all did. Nearly all of them now use it.

One of many, many examples.

We’ve gone from a target of reformers to a dominant player in the factory reform movement. Today the factories that make our products are among the best in the world. An official at the United Nations recently said so: Nike is the gold standard by which we measure all apparel factories.

Out of the sweatshop crisis also came the Girl Effect, a massive Nike effort to break the generational cycles of poverty in the bleakest corners of the world. Along with the United Nations and other corporate and government partners, the Girl Effect is spending tens of millions of dollars in a smart, tough, global campaign to educate and connect and lift up young girls. Economists, sociologists, not to mention our own hearts, tell us that, in many societies, young girls are the most economically vulnerable, and vital, demographic. So helping them helps all. Whether striving to end child marriage in Ethiopia, or building safe spaces for teenage girls in Nigeria, or launching a magazine and radio show that deliver powerful, inspiring messages to young Rwandans, the Girl Effect is changing millions of lives, and the best days of my week, month, year, are those when I receive the glowing reports from its front lines.

I’d do anything to go back, to make so many different decisions, which might or might not have averted the sweatshop crisis. But I can’t deny that the crisis has led to miraculous change, inside and outside Nike. For that I must be grateful.

Of course, there will always be the question of wages. The salary of a Third World factory worker seems impossibly low to Americans, and I understand. Still, we have to operate within the limits and structures of each country, each economy; we can’t simply pay whatever we wish to pay. In one country, which shall be nameless, when we tried to raise wages, we found ourselves called on the carpet, summoned to the office of a top government official and ordered to stop. We were disrupting the nation’s entire economic system, he said. It’s simply not right, he insisted, or feasible, that a shoe worker makes more than a medical doctor.

Change never comes as fast as we want it.

I think constantly of the poverty I saw while traveling the world in the 1960s. I knew then that the only answer to such poverty is entry-level jobs. Lots of them. I didn’t form this theory on my own. I heard it from every economics professor I ever had, at both Oregon and Stanford, and everything I saw and read thereafter backed it up. International trade always, always benefits both trading nations.

Another thing I often heard from those same professors was the old maxim: “When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will.” Though I’ve been known to call business war without bullets, it’s actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity. That’s why, haunted as I was by the Vietnam War, I always vowed that someday Nike would have a factory in or near Saigon.

By 1997 we had four.

I was very proud. And when I learned that we were to be honored and celebrated by the Vietnamese government as one of the nation’s top five generators of foreign currency, I felt that I simply had to visit.

What a wrenching trip. I don’t know if I’d appreciated the full depth of my hatred for the war in Vietnam until I returned twenty-­five years after the peace, until I joined hands with our former antagonists. At one point my hosts graciously asked what they could do for me, what would make my trip special or memorable. I got a lump in my throat. I didn’t want them to go to any trouble, I said.

But they insisted.

Okay, I said, okay, I’d like to meet eighty-six-year-old General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the Vietnamese MacArthur, the man who single-­handedly defeated the Japanese, the French, the Americans, and the Chinese.

My hosts stared in amazed silence. Slowly they rose and excused themselves and stood off in a corner, conversing in frantic Vietnamese.

After five minutes they came back. Tomorrow, they said. One hour.

I bowed deeply. Then counted the minutes until the big meeting.

The first thing I noticed as General Giáp entered the room was his size. This brilliant fighter, this genius tactician who’d organized the Tet Offensive, who’d planned those miles and miles of underground tunnels, this giant of history, came up to my shoulders. He was, maybe, five foot four.

And humble. No corncob pipe for Giáp.

I remember that he wore a dark business suit, like mine. I remember that he smiled as I did—shyly, uncertainly. But there was an intensity about him. I’d seen that kind of glittery confidence in great coaches, and great business leaders, the elite of the elite. I never saw it in a mirror.

He knew I had questions. He waited for me to ask them.

I said simply: “How did you do it?”

I thought I saw the corners of his mouth flicker. A smile? Maybe?

He thought. And thought. “I was,” he said, “a professor of the jungle.”

THOUGHTS OF ASIA always lead back to Nissho. Where on earth would we have been without Nissho? And without Nissho’s former CEO, Masuro Hayami. I got to know him well after Nike went public. We couldn’t help but bond: I was his most profitable client, and his most avid pupil. And he was perhaps the wisest man I ever knew.

Unlike many other wise men, he drew great peace from his wisdom. I fed off that peace.

In the 1980s, whenever I went to Tokyo, Hayami would invite me for the weekend to his beach house, near Atami, the Japanese Riviera. We’d always leave Tokyo late Friday, by rail, and have a cognac along the way. Within an hour we’d be at the Izu Peninsula, where we’d stop at some marvelous restaurant for dinner. The next morning we’d play golf, and Saturday night we’d have a Japanese-style barbecue in his backyard. We’d solve all the world’s problems, or I’d give him my problems and he’d solve them.

On one trip we ended the evening in Hayami’s hot tub. I recall, above the foaming water, the sound of the distant ocean slapping the shore. I recall the cool smell of the wind through the trees—­thousands and thousands of coastal trees, dozens of species not found in any Oregon forest. I recall the jungle crows cawing in the distance as we discussed the infinite. Then the finite. I complained about my business. Even after going public, there were so many problems. “We have so much opportunity, but we’re having a terrible time getting managers who can seize those opportunities. We try people from the outside, but they fail, because our culture is so different.”

Mr. Hayami nodded. “See those bamboo trees up there?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Next year . . . when you come . . . they will be one foot higher.”

I stared. I understood.

When I returned to Oregon I tried hard to cultivate and grow the management team we had, slowly, with more patience, with an eye toward more training and more long-term planning. I took the wider, longer view. It worked. The next time I saw Hayami, I told him. He merely nodded, once, hai, and looked off.

ALMOST THREE DECADES ago Harvard and Stanford began studying Nike, and sharing their research with other universities, which has created many opportunities for me to visit different colleges, to take part in stimulating academic discussions, to continue to learn. It’s always a happy occasion to be walking a campus, but also bracing, because while I find students today much smarter and more competent than in my time, I also find them far more pessimistic. Occasionally they ask in dismay: “Where is the U.S. going? Where is the world going?” Or: “Where are the new entrepreneurs?” Or: “Are we doomed as a society to a worse future for our children?”

I tell them about the devastated Japan I saw in 1962. I tell them about the rubble and ruins that somehow gave birth to wise men like Hayami and Ito and Sumeragi. I tell them about the untapped resources, natural and human, that the world has at its disposal, the abundant ways and means to solve its many crises. All we have to do, I tell the students, is work and study, study and work, hard as we can.

Put another way: We must all be professors of the jungle.

I TURN OUT the lights, walk upstairs to bed. Curled up with a book beside her, Penny has drifted off. That chemistry, that in-sync feeling from Day One, Accounting 101, remains. Our conflicts, such as they are, have centered mostly on work versus family. Finding a balance. Defining that word “balance.” At our most trying moments, we’ve managed to emulate those athletes I most admire. We’ve held on, pressed through. And now we’ve endured.

I slide under the covers, gingerly, so as not to wake her, and I think of others who’ve endured. Hayes lives on a farm in the Tualatin Valley, 108 rolling acres, with a ridiculous collection of bulldozers and other heavy equipment. (His pride and joy is a John Deere JD-450C. It’s bright school-bus yellow and as big as a one-bedroom condo.) He has some health problems, but he bulldozes ahead.

Woodell lives in central Oregon with his wife. For years he flew his own private airplane, giving the middle finger to everyone who said he’d be helpless. (Above all, flying private meant he never again had to worry about an airline losing his wheelchair.)

He’s one of the best storytellers in the history of Nike. My favorite, naturally, is the one about the day we went public. He sat his parents down and told them the news. “What does that mean?” they whispered. “It means your original eight-thousand-dollar loan to Phil is worth $1.6 million.” They looked at each other, looked at Woodell. “I don’t understand,” his mother said.

If you can’t trust the company your son works for, who can you trust?

When he retired from Nike, Woodell became head of the Port of Portland, managing all the rivers and the airports. A man immobilized, guiding all that motion. Lovely. He’s also the leading shareholder and director of a successful microbrewery. He always did like his beer.

But whenever we get together for dinner, he tells me, of course, his greatest joy and proudest accomplishment is his college-bound son, Dan.

Woodell’s old antagonist, Johnson, lives slap in the middle of a Robert Frost poem, somewhere in the wilderness of New Hampshire. He’s converted an old barn into a five-story mansion, which he calls his Fortress of Solitude. Twice divorced, he’s filled the place to the rafters with dozens of reading chairs, and thousands and thousands of books, and he keeps track of them all with an extensive card catalog. Each book has its own number and its own index card, listing author, date of publication, plot summary—and its precise location in the fortress.

Of course.

Scampering and prancing around Johnson’s spread are countless wild turkeys and chipmunks, most of whom he’s named. He knows them all so well, so intimately, he can tell you when one is late in hibernating. Beyond, in the distance, nestled in a field of tall grass and swaying maples, Johnson has built a second barn, a sacred barn, which he’s painted and lacquered and furnished and filled with overflow from his personal library, plus pallets of used books he buys at library sales. He calls this book utopia “Horders,” and he keeps it lighted, open, free, twenty-four hours a day, for any and all who need a place to read and think.

That’s Full-time Employee Number One.

In Europe, I’m told, there are T-shirts that read, Where is Jeff Johnson? Like the famous opening line from Ayn Rand, Who is John Galt? The answer is, Right where he should be.

WHEN IT CAME rolling in, the money affected us all. Not much, and not for long, because none of us was ever driven by money. But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.

I bought a Porsche. I tried to buy the Los Angeles Clippers, and wound up in a lawsuit with Donald Sterling. I wore sunglasses everywhere, indoors and out. There’s a photo of me in a ten-gallon gray cowboy hat—I don’t know where or when or why. I had to get it all out of my system. Even Penny wasn’t immune. Overcompensating for the insecurity of her childhood, she walked around with thousands of dollars in her purse. She bought hundreds of staples, like rolls of toilet paper, at a time.

It wasn’t long before we were back to normal. Now, to the extent that she and I ever think about money, we focus our efforts on a few specific causes. We give away $100 million each year, and when we’re gone we’ll give away most of what’s left.

At the moment we’re in the midst of building a gleaming new basketball facility at the University of Oregon. The Matthew Knight Arena. The logo at half court will be Matthew’s name in the shape of a torii gate. From the profane to the sacred . . . We’re also finishing construction on a new athletic facility, which we plan to dedicate to our mothers, Dot and Lota. On a plaque next to the entrance will go an inscription: Because mothers are our first coaches.

Who can say how differently everything would have turned out if my mother hadn’t stopped the podiatrist from surgically removing that wart and hobbling me for an entire track season? Or if she hadn’t told me I could run fast? Or if she hadn’t bought that first pair of Limber Ups, putting my father in his place?

Whenever I go back to Eugene, and walk the campus, I think of her. Whenever I stand outside Hayward Field, I think of the silent race she ran. I think of all the many races that each of us have run. I lean against the fence and look at the track and listen to the wind, thinking of Bowerman with his string tie blowing behind him. I think of Pre, God love him. Turning, looking over my shoulder, my heart leaps. Across the street stands the William Knight Law School. A very serious-looking edifice. No one ever jackasses around in there.

I CAN’T SLEEP. I can’t stop thinking about that blasted movie, The Bucket List. Lying in the dark, I ask myself again and again, What’s on yours?

Pyramids? Check.

Himalayas? Check.

Ganges? Check.

So . . . nothing?

I think about the few things I want to do. Help a couple of universities change the world. Help find a cure for cancer. Besides that, it’s not so much things I want to do as things I’d like to say. And maybe unsay.

It might be nice to tell the story of Nike. Everyone else has told the story, or tried to, but they always get half the facts, if that, and none of the spirit. Or vice versa. I might start the story, or end it, with regrets. The hundreds—maybe thousands—of bad decisions. I’m the guy who said Magic Johnson was “a player without a position, who’ll never make it in the NBA.” I’m the guy who tabbed Ryan Leaf as a better NFL quarterback than Peyton Manning.

It’s easy to laugh those off. Other regrets go deeper. Not phoning Hiraku Iwano after he quit. Not getting Bo Jackson renewed in 1996. Joe Paterno.

Not being a good enough manager to avoid layoffs. Three times in ten years—a total of fifteen hundred people. It still haunts.

Of course, above all, I regret not spending more time with my sons. Maybe, if I had, I could’ve solved the encrypted code of Matthew Knight.

And yet I know that this regret clashes with my secret regret—­that I can’t do it all over again.

God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. Short of that, I’d like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so that some young man or woman, somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted. Or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete or painter or novelist, might press on.

It’s all the same drive. The same dream.

It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I’d tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.

I’d like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bull’s-eye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bull’s-eye. It’s not one man’s opinion; it’s a law of nature.

I’d like to remind them that America isn’t the entrepreneurial Shangri-La people think. Free enterprise always irritates the kinds of trolls who live to block, to thwart, to say no, sorry, no. And it’s always been this way. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They’ve always fought uphill, and the hill has never been steeper. America is becoming less entrepreneurial, not more. A Harvard Business School study recently ranked all the countries of the world in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit. America ranked behind Peru.

And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop.

Luck plays a big role. Yes, I’d like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome. Some people might not call it luck. They might call it Tao, or Logos, or Jñana, or Dharma. Or Spirit. Or God.

Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao. And since no one has ever adequately defined Tao, I now try to go regularly to mass. I would tell them: Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart.

In what format do I want to say all this? A memoir? No, not a memoir. I can’t imagine how it could all fit into one unified narrative.

Maybe a novel. Or a speech. Or a series of speeches. Maybe just a letter to my grandkids.

I peer into the dark. So maybe there is something on my bucket list after all?

Another Crazy Idea.

Suddenly my mind is racing. People I need to call, things I need to read. I’ll have to get in touch with Woodell. I should see if we have any copies of those letters from Johnson. There were so many! Somewhere in my parents’ house, where my sister Joanne still lives, there must be a box with my slides from my trip around the world.

So much to do. So much to learn. So much I don’t know about my own life.

Now I really can’t sleep. I get up, grab a yellow legal pad from my desk. I go to the living room and sit in my recliner.

A feeling of stillness, of immense peace, comes over me.

I squint at the moon shining outside my window. The same moon that inspired the ancient Zen masters to worry about nothing. In the timeless, clarifying light of that moon, I begin to make a list.