سال هزار و نهصد و هشتاد

1980

We all gathered in the conference room and Chang gave us his bio. He was born in Shanghai, and raised in opulence. His grandfather was the third-largest soy sauce manufacturer in northern China, and his father had been the third-highest-­ranking member of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When Chang was a teenager, however, the revolution came. The Changs fled to the United States, to Los Angeles, where Chang attended Hollywood High. He often thought he’d go back, and his parents did also. They kept in close touch with friends and family in China, and his mother remained extremely close with Soong Ching-ling, the godmother of the revolution.

In the meantime Chang attended Princeton, and studied architecture, and moved to New York. He landed a job at a good architectural firm, where he worked on the Levittown project. Then he set up his own firm. He was making decent money, doing good work, but bored stiff. He wasn’t having any fun, and he didn’t feel he was accomplishing anything real.

One day a Princeton friend complained about being unable to get a visa for Shanghai. Chang helped his friend get the visa, and helped him set up appointments with business contacts, and found that he enjoyed it. Being an emissary, a go-between, was a better use of his time and talents.

Even with his help, Chang cautioned, getting into China was extremely difficult. The process was laborious. “You can’t just apply for permission to visit China,” he said. “You have to formally request that the Chinese government invite you. Bureaucracy doesn’t begin to describe it.”

I closed my eyes and pictured, somewhere on the other side of the world, a Chinese version of the bureau-kraken.

I also thought of the ex-GIs who’d explained Japanese business practices to me when I was twenty-four. I’d followed their advice, to the letter, and never regretted it. So, under Chang’s direction, we put together a written presentation.

It was long. It was almost as long as Werschkul on American Selling Price, Volume I. We, too, had it bound.

Often we asked each other: Is anyone actually going to read this thing?

Oh well, we said. This is how Chang says it’s done.

We sent it off to Beijing without hope.

AT THE FIRST Buttface of 1980 I announced that, though we’d gained the upper hand with the Feds, it might go on forever if we didn’t do something bold, something outrageous. “I’ve given this a lot of thought,” I said, “and I think what we need to do is . . . ­American Selling Price ourselves.”

The Buttfaces laughed.

Then they stopped laughing and looked at each other.

We spent the rest of the weekend kicking it around. Was it possible? Nah, it couldn’t be. Could we? Oh, no way. But . . . maybe?

We decided to give it a try. We launched a new shoe, a running shoe with nylon uppers, and called it One Line. It was a knockoff, dirt cheap, with a simple logo, and we manufactured it in Saco, at Hayes’s ancient factory. We priced it low, just above cost. Now customs officials would have to use this “competitor” shoe as a new reference point in deciding our import duty.

That was the jab. That was just to get their attention. Then we threw the left hook. We produced a TV commercial telling the story of a little company in Oregon, fighting the big bad government. It opened on a runner doing his lonely road work, as a deep voice extolled the ideals of patriotism, liberty, the American way. And fighting tyranny. It got people pretty fired up.

Then we threw the haymaker. On February 29, 1980, we filed a $25 million antitrust suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that our competitors, and assorted rubber companies, through underhanded business practices, had conspired to take us out.

We sat back, waited. We knew it wouldn’t take long, and indeed it didn’t. The bureau-kraken cracked up. He threatened to go nuclear, whatever that meant. It didn’t matter. He didn’t matter. His bosses, and his bosses’ bosses, didn’t want this fight anymore. Our competitors, and their accomplices in the government, realized that they’d underestimated our will.

Immediately they initiated settlement talks.

DAY IN, DAY out, our lawyers would phone. From some government office, some blue-chip law firm, some conference room on the East Coast, meeting with the other side, they’d tell me the latest settlement offer being floated, and I’d reject it out of hand.

One day the lawyers said we could settle the whole thing, with no fuss, no courtroom drama, for the tidy sum of $20 million.

Not a chance, I said.

Another day they phoned and said we could settle for $15 million.

Don’t make me laugh, I said.

As the number crept lower, I had several heated conversations with Hayes, and Strasser, and my father. They wanted me to settle, be done with this. “What’s your ideal number?” they’d ask. Zero, I’d say.

I didn’t want to pay one penny. Even one penny would be unfair.

But Jaqua, and Cousin Houser, and Chuck, who were all consulting on the case, sat me down one day and explained that the government needed something to save face. They couldn’t walk away from this fight with nothing. As negotiations ground to a halt, I met one-on-one with Chuck. He reminded me that until this fight was behind us, we couldn’t think about going public, and if we didn’t go public we continued to risk losing everything.

I became petulant. I moaned about fairness. I talked about holding out. I said maybe I didn’t want to go public—ever. Yet again I expressed my fear that going public would change Nike, ruin it, by turning over control to others. What would happen to the culture of Oregon Track, for instance, if it was subject to shareholder votes or corporate raider demands? We’d gotten a little taste of that scenario with the small group of debenture holders. Scaling up and letting in thousands of shareholders—it would be a thousand times worse. Above all, I couldn’t bear the thought of one titan buying up shares, becoming a behemoth on the board. “I don’t want to lose control,” I said to Chuck. “That’s my greatest fear.”

“Well . . . there might be a way to go public without losing any control,” he said.

“What?”

“You could issue two classes of stock—class A and class B. The public would get class Bs, which would carry one vote per share. The founders and inner circle, and your convertible debenture holders, would get class As, which would entitle them to name three-­quarters of the board of directors. In other words, you raise enormous sums of money, turbocharge your growth, but ensure that you keep control.”

I looked at him, dumbstruck. “Can we really do that?”

“It’s not easy. But the New York Times and the Washington Post and a couple of others have done it. I think you can do it.”

Maybe it wasn’t satori, or kensho, but it was instant enlightenment. In a flash. The breakthrough I’d been seeking for years. “Chuck,” I said, “that sounds like . . . the answer.”

At the next Buttface I explained the concept of class A and class B, and everyone had the same reaction. At long last. But I cautioned the Buttfaces: Whether or not this was the solution, we needed to do something, right now, fix our cash flow problem once and for all, because our window was closing. I could suddenly see a recession on the horizon. Six months, a year at the max. If we waited, tried to go public then, the market would give us far less than we were worth.

I asked for a show of hands. Going public . . . all in favor?

It was unanimous.

The moment we resolved our longstanding cold war with our competitors and the Feds, we would initiate a public offering.

THE SPRING FLOWERS were up by the time our lawyers and government officials had settled on a number: $9 million. It still sounded way too high, but everyone told me to pay it. Take the deal, they kept saying. I spent an hour staring out my window, mulling. The flowers and the calendar said it was spring, but that day the clouds were eye-level, dishwater gray, and the wind was cold.

I groaned. I grabbed the phone and dialed Werschkul, who had taken the role of lead negotiator. “Let’s do it.”

I told Carole Fields to cut the check. She brought it to me for my signature. We looked at each other and of course we were both thinking about the time I’d written that check for $1 million, which I couldn’t cover. Now I was writing a check for $9 million, and there was no way it was going to bounce. I looked at the signature line. “Nine million,” I whispered. I could still remember selling my 1960 MG with racing tires and a twin cam for eleven hundred dollars. Like yesterday. Lead me from the unreal to the real.

THE LETTER ARRIVED at the start of summer. The Chinese government requests the pleasure of a visit . . .

I spent a month deciding who would go. It has to be the A Team, I thought, so I sat with a yellow legal pad in my lap, making lists of names, scratching them out, making new lists.

Chang, of course.

Strasser, naturally.

Hayes, surely.

I notified everyone who was going on the trip to get their papers and passports and affairs in order. Then I spent the days leading up to our departure reading, cramming on Chinese history. The Boxer Rebellion. The Great Wall. Opium Wars. Ming dynasty. Confucius. Mao.

And darned if I was going to be the only student. I made a syllabus for all members of our traveling party.

In July 1980 we boarded a plane. Beijing, here we come. But first, Tokyo. I thought it would be a good idea to stop there along the way. Just to check in. Sales were starting to grow again in the Japanese market. Also, Japan would be a nice way to ease everyone into China, which was going to be a challenge for all of us. Baby steps. Penny and Gorman—­I’d learned my lesson.

Twelve hours later, walking the streets of Tokyo, alone, my mind kept spinning back to 1962. My Crazy Idea. Now I was back, on the verge of taking that idea into a mammoth new market. I thought of Marco Polo. I thought of Confucius. But I also thought of all the games I’d seen through the years—football, basketball, baseball—when one team had a big lead in the final seconds, or innings, and relaxed. Or tightened. And therefore lost.

I told myself to stop looking back, keep my gaze forward.

We ate a few wonderful Japanese dinners, and visited a few old friends, and after two or three days, rested and ready, we were all set to go. Our flight to Beijing was the next morning.

We had one last meal together in the Ginza, washed down with several cocktails, and everyone turned in early. I took a hot shower, phoned home, and poured myself into bed. A few hours later I woke to frantic knocking. I looked at the clock on the nightstand. Two a.m. “Who’s there?”

“David Chang! Let me in!”

I went to the door and found Chang looking very un-Chang. Rumpled, harried, regimental tie askew. “Hayes isn’t going!” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Hayes is downstairs in the bar and he says he can’t do it, he cannot get on that plane.”

“Why not?”

“He’s having some kind of panic attack.”

“Yes. He has phobias.”

“What kind of phobias?”

“He has . . . all the phobias.”

I started to get dressed, to go down to the bar. Then I remembered who it was we were dealing with. “Go to bed,” I said to Chang. “Hayes will be there in the morning.”

“But—”

“He’ll be there.”

First thing in the morning, dull-eyed, deathly pale, Hayes was standing in the lobby.

Of course, he made sure to pack enough “medicine” for his next attack. Hours later, going through customs in Beijing, I heard behind me a great commotion. The room was bare, with plywood partitions, and on the other side of one partition several Chinese officers were shouting. I went around the partition and found two officers, agitated, pointing at Hayes and his open suitcase.

I walked over. Strasser and Chang walked over. Lying atop Hayes’s giant underwear were twelve quarts of vodka.

No one said anything for the longest time. Then Hayes heaved a sigh.

“That’s for me,” he said. “You guys are on your own.”

OVER THE NEXT twelve days we traveled all over China, in the company of government handlers. They took us to Tiananmen Square and made sure we stopped a long time in front of the giant portrait of Chairman Mao, who had died four years earlier. They took us to the Forbidden City. They took us to the Ming tombs. We were fascinated, of course, and curious—too curious. We made our handlers excruciatingly uncomfortable with all our questions.

At one stop I looked around and saw hundreds of people in Mao suits and flimsy black shoes, which seemed made of construction paper. But a few children were wearing canvas sneakers. That gave me hope.

What we wanted to see, of course, were factories. Our handlers reluctantly agreed. They took us by train to remote towns, far from Beijing, where we saw vast and terrifying industrial complexes, small metropolises of factories, each one more outdated than the last. Old, rusted, decrepit, these factories made Hayes’s ancient Saco ruin look state-of-the-art.

Above all, they were filthy. A shoe would roll off the assembly line with a stain, a swath of grime, and nothing would be done. There was no overarching sense of cleanliness, no real quality control. When we pointed out a defective shoe, the officials running the factories would shrug and say: “Perfectly functional.”

Never mind aesthetics. The Chinese didn’t see why the nylon or canvas in a pair of shoes needed to be the same shade in the left shoe and the right. It was common practice for a left shoe to be light blue and a right shoe to be dark blue.

We met with scores of factory officials, and local politicians, and assorted dignitaries. We were toasted, feted, queried, monitored, talked at, and almost always welcomed warmly. We ate pounds of sea urchin and roasted duck, and at many stops we were treated to thousand-­year-old eggs. I could taste every one of those thousand years.

Of course we were served many Mao tais. After all my trips to Taiwan, I was prepared. My liver was seasoned. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much Hayes would like them. With each sip he smacked his lips and asked for more.

Near the end of our visit we took a nineteen-hour train ride to Shanghai. We could’ve flown, but I insisted on the train. I wanted to see, to experience the countryside. Within the first hour the men were cursing me. The day was dripping hot and the train was not air-conditioned.

There was one old fan in the corner of our train car, the blades barely moving the hot dust around. To get cool, Chinese passengers thought nothing of stripping down to their underwear, and Hayes and Strasser thought this gave them license to do the same. If I live to be two hundred years old, I won’t forget the sight of those leviathans walking up and down the train car in their T-shirts and BVDs. Nor will any Chinese man or woman who was on the train that day.

Before leaving China we had a final errand or two in Shanghai. The first was to secure a deal with the Chinese track-and-field federation. This meant securing a deal with the government’s Ministry of Sports. Unlike the Western world, where every athlete made his own deal, China itself negotiated endorsement deals for all its athletes. So, in an old Shanghai schoolhouse, in a classroom with seventy-­five-year-old furniture and a huge portrait of Chairman Mao, Strasser and I met with the ministry representative. The first several minutes the representative lectured us on the beauties of communism. He kept saying that the Chinese like to do business with “like-minded people.” Strasser and I looked at each other. Like-minded? What gives? Then the lecture abruptly stopped. The representative leaned forward and in a low voice that struck me as a Chinese version of uber agent Leigh Steinberg he asked: “How much you offering?”

Within two hours we had ourselves a deal. Four years later, in Los Angeles, the Chinese track-and-field team would walk into an Olympic stadium for the first time in nearly two generations wearing American shoes and warm-ups.

Nike shoes and warm-ups.

Our final meeting was with the Ministry of Foreign Trade. As with all previous meetings, there were several rounds of long speeches, mainly by officials. Hayes was bored during the first round. By the third round he was suicidal. He started playing with the loose threads on the front of his polyester dress shirt. Suddenly he became annoyed with the threads. He took out his lighter. As the deputy minister of foreign trade was hailing us as worthy partners, he stopped and looked up to see that Hayes had set himself on fire. Hayes beat on the flame with his hands, and managed to put it out, but only after ruining the moment, and the speaker’s mojo.

It didn’t matter. Just before getting on the plane home we signed deals with two Chinese factories, and officially became the first American shoemaker in twenty-five years to be allowed to do business in China.

It seems wrong to call it “business.” It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher—and none of us wavered in the belief that “stakes” didn’t mean “money.” For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day business of the human body isn’t our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living—and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman.

Maybe it will grow on me.

THERE WAS NO time to unpack. There was no time to get over our post-China jet lag, which was profound. As we returned to Oregon, the process of going public was in full swing. Big choices needed to be made. Especially: who was going to manage the offering.

Public offerings don’t always succeed. On the contrary, when mismanaged, they turn into train wrecks. So this was a critical decision right out of the blocks. Chuck, having worked at Kuhn, Loeb, still had strong relationships with their people, and thought they’d be best. We interviewed four or five other firms but in the end decided to go with Chuck’s instincts. He hadn’t steered us wrong yet.

Next we had to create a prospectus. It took fifty drafts, at least, to get it looking and sounding the way we wanted.

Finally, at the tail end of summer, we handed all our paperwork to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and at the start of September we released the formal announcement. Nike will be creating 20 million shares of class A stock and 30 million shares of class B. The price of the stock, we told the world, would be somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two dollars a share. TBD.

Of 50 million shares, total, almost 30 million would be held in reserve, and about 2 million class Bs would be sold to the public. Of the roughly 17 million remaining class A shares, the preexisting shareholders, or insiders, meaning me, Bowerman, the debenture holders, and the Buttfaces, would own 56 percent.

I personally would own about 46 percent. It needed to be that much, we all agreed, because the company needed to be run by one person, to speak with one firm and steady voice—come what may. There could be no chance of alliances or breakaway factions, no existential struggles for control. To the outsider the division of shares might have seemed disproportionate, unbalanced, unfair. To the Butt-faces it was a necessity. There wasn’t a word of dissent or complaint. Ever.

WE HIT THE road. Days before the offering we went out to sell potential investors on the worthiness of our product, our company, our brand. Ourselves. After China, we weren’t in any mood to travel, but there was no other way. We had to do what Wall Street calls a dog-and-pony show. Twelve cities, seven days.

First stop, Manhattan. Breakfast meeting with a roomful of hard-eyed bankers, who represented thousands of potential investors. Hayes rose first and said a few introductory words. He summed up the numbers succinctly. He was quite good. Forceful, sober. Johnson then stood and spoke about the shoes themselves, what made them different and special, how they’d come to be so innovative. He was never better.

I closed. I talked about the company’s origins, its soul and spirit. I had a note card with a few words scribbled on it, but I didn’t look at it once. I had no uncertainty about what I wanted to say. I’m not sure I could’ve explained myself to a roomful of strangers, but I had no trouble explaining Nike.

I started with Bowerman. I talked about running for him at Oregon, then forming a partnership with him as a kid in my mid-­twenties. I talked about his brains, his bravery, his magic waffle iron. I talked about his booby-trapped mailbox. It was a funny story, and it never failed to get a laugh, but it had a point. I wanted to let these New Yorkers know that though we hailed from Oregon, we were not to be trifled with.

The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.

That first night we gave the same presentation at a formal dinner, in Midtown, before twice as many bankers. Cocktails were served beforehand. Hayes had one too many. This time, when he stood to speak, he decided to improvise, to free-style. “I’ve been around these guys a long time,” he said, laughing, “the core of the company, you might say, and I’m here to tell you, haha, they’re all chronic unemployables.”

Dry coughs.

A throat in the back was cleared.

A lone cricket chirped. Then died.

Somewhere, far off, one person laughed like a loon. To this day I think it was Johnson.

Money was no laughing matter to these people, and a public offering of this size was not the occasion for jokes. I sighed, looked down at my note card. If Hayes had driven a bulldozer through the room, it could hardly have been worse. Later that night I took him aside and told him I thought it was best if he didn’t speak anymore. Johnson and I would handle the formal presentations. But we’d still need him for the Q and A sessions.

Hayes looked at me, blinked once. He understood. “I thought you were going to send me home,” he said. “No,” I said, “you need to be part of this.”

We continued to Chicago, then Dallas, then Houston, then San Francisco. We went on to Los Angeles, then Seattle. At each stop we grew more tired, almost weepy with fatigue. Johnson and I especially. A strange sentimentality was stealing over us. On the airplanes, in the hotel bars, we talked about our salad days. His endless letters. Please send encouraging words. My silence. We talked about the name Nike coming to him in a dream. We talked about Stretch, and Giampietro, and the Marlboro Man, and all the different times I’d jerked him back and forth across the country. We talked about the day he was almost strung up by his Exeter employees, when their paychecks had bounced. “After all that,” Johnson said one day in the back of a town car, headed to the next meeting, “and now we’re the toasts of Wall Street.”

I looked at him. Things do change. But he hadn’t. He now reached into his bag, took out a book, and began to read.

The road show ended the day before Thanksgiving. I vaguely remember a turkey, some cranberries, my family around me. I vaguely remember being aware that it was an anniversary of sorts. I’d first flown to Japan on Thanksgiving Day, 1962.

Over dinner my father had a thousand questions about the public offering. My mother had none. She said she’d always known it would happen, ever since the day she bought a pair of seven-dollar Limber Ups. They were understandably feeling reflective, congratulatory, but I quickly hushed them, begged them not to be premature. The game was still on. The race was afoot.

WE CHOSE A date for the offering. December 2, 1980. The last remaining hurdle was settling on a price.

The night before the offering Hayes came into my office. “The guys at Kuhn, Loeb are recommending twenty dollars per share,” he said.

“Too low,” I said. “It’s insulting.”

Well, it can’t be too high, he cautioned. We want the damn thing to sell.

The whole process was crazy-making, because it was imprecise. There was no right number. It was all a matter of opinion, feeling, selling. Selling—that’s what I’d been doing for much of these last eighteen years, and I was tired of it. I didn’t want to sell anymore. Our stock was worth twenty-two dollars a share. That was the number. We’d earned that number. We deserved to be on the high end of the price range. A company called Apple was also going public that same week, and selling for twenty-two dollars a share, and we were worth as much as them, I said to Hayes. If a bunch of Wall Street guys didn’t see it that way, I was ready to walk away from the deal.

I glared at Hayes. I knew what he was thinking. Here we go again. Pay Nissho first.

THE NEXT MORNING Hayes and I drove downtown to our law firm. A clerk showed us into the senior partner’s office. A paralegal dialed Kuhn, Loeb in New York, then clicked a button on a speaker in the middle of the big walnut desk. Hayes and I stared at the speaker. Disembodied voices filled the room. One of the voices grew louder, clearer. “Gentlemen . . . good morning.”

“Good morning,” we said.

The loud voice took the lead. It gave a long and careful explanation of Kuhn, Loeb’s reasoning on the stock price, which was jabberwocky. And so, the loud voice said, we can’t go any higher than twenty-one dollars.

“No,” I said. “Our number is twenty-two.”

We heard the other voices murmuring. They came up to twenty-­one-fifty. “I’m afraid,” said the loud voice, “that’s our final offer.”

“Gentlemen, twenty-two is our number.”

Hayes stared at me. I stared at the speaker.

Cracking silence. We could hear heavy breaths, pops, scrapes. Papers being shuffled. I closed my eyes and let all that white noise wash over me. I relived every negotiation in my life to that point.

So, Dad, you remember that Crazy Idea I had at Stanford . . . ?

Gentlemen, I represent Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland, Oregon.

You see, Dot, I love Penny. And Penny loves me. And if things continue in this vein, I see us building a life together.

“I’m sorry,” the loud voice said angrily. “We’ll have to call you back.”

Click.

We sat. We said nothing. I took long deep breaths. The clerk’s face slowly melted.

Five minutes passed.

Fifteen minutes.

Sweat ran down Hayes’s forehead and neck.

The phone rang. The clerk looked at us, to make sure we were ready. We nodded. He pressed the button on the speaker.

“Gentlemen,” the loud voice said. “We have a deal. We’ll send it out to market this Friday.”

I drove home. I remember the boys were outside playing. Penny was standing in the kitchen. “How was your day?” she said.

“Hm. Okay.”

“Good.”

“We got our price.”

She smiled. “Of course you did.”

I went for a long run.

Then I took a hot, hot shower.

Then I had a quick dinner.

Then I tucked in the boys and gave them a story.

The year was 1773. Privates Matt and Travis were fighting under the command of General Washington. Cold, tired, hungry, their uniforms in tatters, they camped for the winter at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. They slept in log huts, wedged between two mountains: Mount Joy and Mount Misery. Morning till night, bitter cold winds sliced through the mountains and barreled through the chinks in the huts. Food was scarce; only a third of the men had shoes.

Whenever they walked outside, they left bloody footprints in the snow.

Thousands died. But Matt and Travis held on.

Finally, spring came. The troops got word that the British had retreated, and the French were coming to the aid of the colonists. Privates Matt and Travis knew from then on that they could live through anything. Mount Joy, Mount Misery.

The end.

Good night, boys.

Night, Dad.

I turned out the light and went and sat in front of the TV with Penny. Neither of us was really watching. She was reading a book and I was doing calculations in my head.

By this time next week Bowerman would be worth $9 million.

Cale—$6.6 million.

Woodell, Johnson, Hayes, Strasser—each about $6 million.

Fantasy numbers. Numbers that meant nothing. I never knew that numbers could mean so much, and so little, at the same time.

“Bed?” Penny said.

I nodded.

I went around the house, turning off lights, checking doors. Then I joined her. For a long time we lay in the dark. It wasn’t over. Far from it. The first part, I told myself, is behind us. But it’s only the first part.

I asked myself: What are you feeling?

It wasn’t joy. It wasn’t relief. If I felt anything, it was . . . regret?

Good God, I thought. Yes. Regret.

Because I honestly wished I could do it all over again.

I fell asleep for a few hours. When I woke it was cold and rainy. I went to the window. The trees were dripping water. Everything was mist and fog. The world was the same as it had been the day before, as it had always been. Nothing had changed, least of all me. And yet I was worth $178 million.

I showered, ate breakfast, drove to work. I was at my desk before anyone else.