سال هزار و نهصد و هفتاد و چهار

1974

I sat in the federal courthouse in downtown Portland, at a little wooden table, alongside Strasser and Cousin Houser, staring at the high ceiling. I tried to take deep breaths. I tried not to look to my left, at the opposing table, at the five raptor-eyed lawyers representing Onitsuka and four other distributors, all of whom wanted to see me ruined.

It was April 14, 1974.

We’d tried one last time to avoid this nightmare. In the moments before the trial began we’d offered to settle. We’d told Onitsuka: Pay us eight hundred thousand dollars in damages, withdraw your suit in Japan, we’ll withdraw ours, and we’ll all walk away. I didn’t think there was much chance of acceptance, but Cousin Houser thought it worth a try.

Onitsuka rejected the offer instantly. And made no counter. They were out for blood.

Now the bailiff shouted, “Court is in session!” The judge swooped into the courtroom and banged his gavel and my heart jumped. This is it, I told myself.

The head lawyer for Onitsuka’s side, Wayne Hilliard, gave his opening statement first. He was a man who enjoyed his work, who knew he was good at it. “These men . . . have unclean hands!” he cried, pointing at our table. “Unclean . . . hands,” he repeated. This was a standard legal term, but Hilliard made it sound lurid, almost pornographic. (Everything Hilliard said sounded somewhat sinister to me, because he was short and had a pointy nose and looked like the Penguin.) Blue Ribbon “conned” Onitsuka into this partnership, he bellowed. Phil Knight went to Japan in 1962 and pretended there was a company called Blue Ribbon, and thereafter he employed subterfuge, theft, spies, whatever necessary, to perpetuate this con.

By the time Hilliard was done, by the time he’d taken his seat next to his four fellow lawyers, I was ready to find in favor of Onitsuka. I looked into my lap and asked myself, How could you have done all those terrible things to those poor Japanese businessmen?

Cousin Houser stood. Right away it was clear that he didn’t have Hilliard’s fire. It just wasn’t in his nature. Cousin Houser was organized, prepared, but he wasn’t fiery. At first I was disappointed. Then I looked more closely at Cousin Houser, and listened to what he was saying, and thought about his life. As a boy he’d suffered a severe speech impediment. Every “r” and “l” had been a hurdle. Even into his teens he’d sounded like a cartoon character. Now, though he retained slight traces of the impediment, he’d largely overcome it, and as he addressed the packed courtroom that day, I was filled with admiration, and filial loyalty. What a journey he’d made. We’d made. I was proud of him, proud he was on our side.

Moreover, he’d taken our case on contingency because he’d thought it would come to trial in months. Two years later he hadn’t seen a dime. And his costs were astronomical. My photocopying bill alone was in the tens of thousands. Now and then Cousin Houser mentioned that he was under intense pressure from his partners to kick us to the curb. At one point he’d even asked Jaqua to take over the case. (No thanks, Jaqua said.) Fire or no, Cousin Houser was a true hero. He finished speaking, seated himself at our table, and looked at me and Strasser. I patted his back. Game on.

AS THE PLAINTIFFS, we presented our case first, and the first witness we called was the founder and president of Blue Ribbon, Philip H. Knight. Walking to the stand I felt as if it must be some other Philip Knight being called, some other Philip Knight now raising his hand, swearing to tell the truth, in a case marked by so much deceit and rancor. I was floating above my body, watching the scene unfold far below.

I told myself as I settled deep into the creaky wooden chair in the witness stand and straightened my necktie, This is the most important account you’ll ever give of yourself. Don’t blow it.

And then I blew it. I was every bit as bad as I’d been in the depositions. I was even a little worse.

Cousin Houser tried to help me, to lead me. He struck an encouraging tone, gave me a friendly smile with each question, but my mind was going in multiple directions. I couldn’t concentrate. I hadn’t slept the night before, hadn’t eaten that morning, and I was running on adrenaline, but the adrenaline wasn’t giving me extra energy or clarity. It was only clouding my brain. I found myself entertaining strange, almost hallucinatory thoughts, like how much Cousin Houser resembled me. He was about my age, about my height, with many of my same features. I’d never noticed the family resemblance until now. What a Kafkaesque twist, I thought, being interrogated by yourself.

By the end of his questioning, I had made a slight recovery. The adrenaline was gone and I was starting to make sense. But now it was the other side’s turn to have a go at me.

Hilliard drilled down, down. He was relentless and I was soon reeling. I hemmed, hawed, couched every other word in strange qualifiers. I sounded shady, shifty, even to myself. When I talked about going through Kitami’s briefcase, when I tried to explain that Mr. Fujimoto wasn’t really a corporate spy, I saw the courtroom spectators, and the judge, look skeptical. Even I was skeptical. Several times I looked into the distance and squinted and thought, Did I really do that?

I scanned the courtroom, looking for help, and saw nothing but hostile faces. The most hostile was Bork’s. He was sitting right behind the Onitsuka table, glaring. Now and then he’d lean into the Onitsuka lawyers, whispering, handing them notes. Traitor, I thought. Benedict Arnold. Prompted by Bork, presumably, Hilliard came at me from new angles, with new questions, and I lost track of the plot. I often had no idea what I was saying.

The judge, at one point, scolded me for not making sense, for being overly complicated. “Just answer the questions concisely,” he said. “How concisely?” I said. “Twenty words or less,” he said.

Hilliard asked his next question.

I ran a hand over my face. “There’s no way I can answer that question in twenty words or less,” I said.

The judge required lawyers on both sides to stay behind their tables while questioning witnesses, and to this day I think that ten yards of buffer might have saved me. I think if Hilliard had been able to get closer, he might have cracked me, might have reduced me to tears.

Toward the end of his two-day cross I was numb. I’d hit bottom. The only place to go was up. I could see Hilliard decide that he’d better let me go before I started to rise and make a comeback. As I slid off the stand I gave myself a grade of D minus. Cousin Houser and Strasser didn’t disagree.

THE JUDGE IN our case was the Honorable James Burns, a notorious figure in Oregon jurisprudence. He had a long, dour face, and pale gray eyes that looked out from beneath two protruding black eyebrows. Each eye had its own little thatch roof. Maybe it was because factories were so much on my mind in those days, but I often thought Judge Burns looked as if he’d been built in some far-off factory that manufactured hanging judges. And I thought he knew it, too. And took pride in it. He called himself, in all seriousness, James the Just. In his operatic basso he’d announce, “You are now in the courtroom of James the Just!”

Heaven have mercy on anyone who, thinking James the Just was being a bit dramatic, dared to laugh.

Portland was still a small town—minuscule, really—and we’d heard through the grapevine that someone had recently bumped into James the Just at his men’s club. The judge was having a martini, moaning about our case. “Dreadful case,” he was saying to the bartender and anyone who’d listen, “perfectly dreadful.” So we knew he didn’t want to be there any more than we did, and he often took out his unhappiness on us, berating us over small points of order and decorum.

Still, despite my horrid performance on the stand, Cousin Houser and Strasser and I had a sense that James the Just was inclining toward our side. Something about his demeanor: He was slightly less ogreish to us. On a hunch, therefore, Cousin Houser told the opposing counsel that, if they were still considering our original settlement, forget it, the offer was no longer on the table.

That same day, James the Just called a halt to the trial and admonished both sides. He was perturbed, he said, by all he was reading about this case in the local newspapers. He was damned if he was going to preside over a media circus. He ordered us to cease and desist discussing the case outside the courthouse.

We nodded. Yes, Your Honor.

Johnson sat behind our table, often sending notes to Cousin Houser, and always reading a novel during sidebars and breaks. After court adjourned each day, he’d unwind by taking a stroll around downtown, visiting different sporting goods stores, checking on our sales. (He also did this every time he found himself in a new city.)

Early on he reported back that Nikes were selling like crazy, thanks to Bowerman’s waffle trainer. The shoe had just hit the market, and it was sold out everywhere, meaning we were outpacing Onitsuka, even Puma. The shoe was such a hit that we could envision, for the first time, one day approaching Adidas’s sales numbers.

Johnson got to talking with one store manager, an old friend, who knew the trial was under way. “How’s it going?” the store manager said. “Going well,” Johnson said. “So well, in fact, we withdrew our settlement offer.”

First thing the next morning, as we gathered in the courtroom, each of us sipping our coffee, we noticed an unfamiliar face at the defense table. There were the five lawyers . . . and one new guy? Johnson turned, saw, and went white. “Oh . . . shit,” he said. In a frantic whisper he told us that the new guy was the store manager . . . with whom he’d inadvertently discussed the trial.

Now Cousin Houser and Strasser went white.

The three of us looked at each other, and looked at Johnson, and in unison we turned and looked at James the Just. He was banging his gavel and clearly about to explode.

He stopped banging. Silence filled the courtroom. Now he started yelling. He spent a full twenty minutes tearing into us. One day after his gag order, he said, one day, someone on Team Blue Ribbon had walked into a local store and run his mouth. We stared straight ahead, like naughty children, wondering if we were about to be a mistrial. But as the judge wound down his tirade, I thought I detected the tiniest twinkle in his eye. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, James the Just is more performer than ogre.

Johnson redeemed himself with his testimony. Articulate, dazzlingly anal about the tiniest details, he described the Boston and the Cortez better than anyone else in the world could, including me. Hilliard tried and tried to break him, and couldn’t. What a pleasure it was to watch Hilliard bang his head against that cement-like Johnson unflappability. Stretch versus the crab was less of a mismatch.

Next we called Bowerman to the stand. I had high hopes for my old coach, but he just wasn’t himself that day. It was the first time I ever saw him flustered, even a bit intimidated, and the reasons quickly became obvious. He hadn’t prepared. Out of contempt for Onitsuka, and disdain for the whole sordid business, he’d decided to wing it. I was saddened. Cousin Houser was annoyed. Bowerman’s testimony could have put us over the top.

Ah well. We consoled ourselves with the knowledge that at least he hadn’t done anything to hurt us.

Next Cousin Houser read into the record the deposition of Iwano, the young assistant who’d accompanied Kitami on his two trips to the United States. Happily, Iwano proved to be as guileless, as pure of heart, as he’d first seemed to me and Penny. He’d told the truth, the whole truth, and it flatly contradicted Kitami. Iwano testified that there was a firm, fixed plan in place to break our contract, to abandon us, to replace us, and that Kitami had discussed it openly many times.

We then called a noted orthopedist, an expert on the impact of running shoes on feet, joints, and the spine, who explained the differences among the many brands and models on the market, and described how the Cortez and Boston differed from anything Onitsuka ever made. Essentially, he said, the Cortez was the first shoe ever that took pressure off the Achilles. Revolutionary, he said. Game-changing. While testifying, he spread out dozens of shoes, and pulled them apart, and tossed them around, which agitated James the Just. Apparently the judge was OCD. He liked his courtroom neat, always. Repeatedly he asked our orthopedist to stop making a mess, to keep the shoes in orderly pairs, and repeatedly our orthopedist ignored him. I started to hyperventilate, thinking James the Just was going to find our expert witness in contempt.

Lastly we called Woodell. I watched him wheel his chair slowly to the stand. It was the first time I’d ever seen him in a coat and tie. He’d recently met a woman, and gotten married, and now, when he told me that he was happy, I believed him. I took a moment to enjoy how far he’d come since we’d first met at that Beaverton sandwich shop. Then I immediately felt awful, because I was the cause of his being dragged through this muck. He looked more nervous up there than I’d been, more intimidated than Bowerman. James the Just asked him to spell his name and Woodell paused as if he couldn’t remember. “Um . . . W, double o, double d, . . .” Suddenly, he started to giggle. His name didn’t have a double d. But some ladies had double Ds. Oh boy. Now he was really laughing. Nerves, of course. But James the Just thought Woodell was mocking the proceedings. He reminded Woodell that he was in the courtroom of James the Just. Which only made Woodell giggle more.

I put a hand over my eyes.

WHEN ONITSUKA PRESENTED their case, they called as their first witness Mr. Onitsuka. He didn’t testify long. He said that he’d known nothing about my conflict with Kitami, nor about Kitami’s plans to stab us in the back. Kitami interviewing other distributors? “I never informed,” Mr. Onitsuka said. Kitami planning to cut us out? “I not know.”

Next up was Kitami. As he walked to the stand the Onitsuka lawyers rose and told the judge they would need a translator. I cupped my ear. A what? Kitami spoke perfect English. I recalled him boasting about learning his English from a record. I turned to Cousin Houser, my eyes bulging, but he only extended his hands, palms facing the floor. Easy.

In two days on the stand Kitami lied, again and again, through his translator, through his teeth. He insisted that he’d never planned to break our contract. He’d only decided to do so when he discovered we’d done so by making Nikes. Yes, he said, he’d been in touch with other distributors before we manufactured the first Nike, but he was just doing market research. Yes, he said, there was some discussion of Onitsuka’s buying Blue Ribbon, but the idea was initiated by Phil Knight.

After Hilliard and Cousin Houser had given their closing arguments, I turned and thanked many of the spectators for coming. Then Cousin Houser and Strasser and I went to a bar around the corner and loosened our neckties and drank several ice-cold beers. And several more. We discussed different ways it might have gone, different things we might have done. Oh, the things we might have done, we said.

And then we all went back to work.

IT WAS WEEKS later. Early morning. Cousin Houser phoned me at the office. “James the Just is going to rule at eleven o’clock,” he said.

I raced to the courthouse and met him and Strasser at our old table. Oddly, the courtroom was empty. No spectators. No opposing counsel, except Hilliard. His fellow lawyers had been unable to get here on such short notice.

James the Just came barging through the side door and ascended the bench. He shuffled some papers and began speaking in a low monotone, as if to himself. He said favorable things about both sides. I shook my head. How could he have favorable things to say about Onitsuka? Bad sign. Bad, bad, bad. If only Bowerman had been more prepared. If only I hadn’t melted under pressure. If only the orthopedist had kept his shoes in order!

The judge looked down at us, his protruding eyebrows longer and shaggier than when the trial began. He would not rule on the matter of the contract between Onitsuka and Blue Ribbon, he said.

I slumped forward.

Instead he would rule solely on the issue of trademarks. It seemed clear to him that this was a case of he-said, he-said. “We have here two conflicting stories,” he said, “and it’s the opinion of this court that Blue Ribbon’s is the more convincing.”

Blue Ribbon has been more truthful, he said, not only throughout the dispute, as evidenced by documents, but in this courtroom. “Truthfulness,” he said, “is ultimately all I have to go on, to gauge this case.”

He noted Iwano’s testimony. Compelling, the judge said. It would seem Kitami had lied. He then noted Kitami’s use of a translator: During the course of Mr. Kitami’s testimony, on more than one occasion, he interrupted the translator to correct him. Each time Mr. Kitami corrected him in perfect English.

Pause. James the Just looked through his papers. So, he declared, it’s therefore my ruling that Blue Ribbon will retain all rights to the names Boston and Cortez. Further, he said, there are clearly damages here. Loss of business. Misappropriation of trademark. The question is, how to assign a dollar figure for those damages. The normal course is to name a special master to determine what the damages are. This I will do in the coming days.

He slammed down his gavel. I turned to Cousin Houser and Strasser.

We won?

Oh my . . . we won.

I shook hands with Cousin Houser and Strasser, then clapped their shoulders, then hugged them both. I allowed myself one delicious sidelong look at Hilliard. But to my disappointment he had no reaction. He was staring straight ahead, perfectly still. It had never really been his fight. He was just a mercenary. Coolly, he shut his briefcase, clicked the locks, and without a glance in our direction he stood and strolled out of the courtroom.

WE WENT STRAIGHT to the London Grill at the Benson Hotel, not far from the courthouse. We each ordered a double and toasted James the Just. And Iwano. And ourselves. Then I phoned Penny from the pay phone. “We won!” I cried, not caring that they could hear me in all the rooms of the hotel. “Can you believe it—we won!”

I called my father and yelled the same thing.

Both Penny and my father asked what we’d won. I couldn’t tell them. We still didn’t know, I said. One dollar? One million? That was tomorrow’s problem. Today was about relishing victory.

Back in the bar Cousin Houser and Strasser and I had one more stiff one. Then I phoned the office to find out the daily pair count.

A WEEK LATER we got a settlement offer: four hundred thousand dollars. Onitsuka knew full well that a special master might come up with any kind of number, so they were seeking to move preemptively, contain their losses. But four hundred thousand dollars seemed low to me. We haggled for several days. Hilliard wouldn’t budge.

We all wanted to be done with this, forever. Especially Cousin Houser’s overlords, who now authorized him to take the money, of which he’d get half, the largest payment in the history of his firm. Sweet vindication.

I asked him what he was going to do with all that loot. I forget what he said. With ours, Blue Ribbon would simply leverage Bank of California into greater borrowing. More shoes on the water.

THE FORMAL SIGNING was scheduled to take place in San Francisco, at the offices of a blue-chip firm, one of many on Onitsuka’s side. The office was on the top floor of a high-rise downtown, and our party arrived that day in a loud, raucous mood. We were four—me, Cousin Houser, Strasser, and Cale, who said he wanted to be present for all the big moments in Blue Ribbon history. Present at the Creation, he said, and present now for the Liberation.

Maybe Strasser and I had read too many war books, but on the way to San Francisco we talked about famous surrenders through history. Appomattox. Yorktown. Reims. It was always so dramatic, we agreed. The opposing generals meeting in a train car or abandoned farmhouse, or on the deck of an aircraft carrier. One side contrite, the other stern but gracious. Then the fountain pens scratching across the “surrender instrument.” We talked about MacArthur accepting the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri, giving the speech of a lifetime. We were getting carried away, to be sure, but our sense of history, and martial triumph, was underscored by the date. It was July 4.

A clerk led us into a conference room crammed full of attorneys. Our mood abruptly changed. Mine did, anyway. At the center of the room was Kitami. A surprise.

I don’t know why I was surprised to see him. He needed to sign the papers, cut the check. He reached out his hand. A bigger surprise.

I shook it.

We all took seats around the table. Before each of us stood a stack of twenty documents, and each document had dozens of dotted lines. We signed until our fingers tingled. It took at least an hour. The mood was tense, the silence profound, except for one moment. I recall that Strasser let forth with a huge sneeze. Like an elephant. And I also recall that he was begrudgingly wearing a brand-new navy-­blue suit, which he’d had tailored by his mother-­in-law, who put all the extra material into the breast pocket. Strasser, affirming his status as the world’s foremost antisartorialist, now reached into his pocket and pulled out a long string of extra gabardine and used it to blow his nose.

At last a clerk collected all the documents, and we all capped our pens, and Hilliard instructed Kitami to hand over the check.

Kitami looked up, dazed. “I have no check.”

What did I see in his face at that moment? Was it spite? Was it defeat? I don’t know. I looked away, scanned the faces around the conference table. They were easier to read. The lawyers were in total shock. A man comes to a settlement conference without a check?

No one spoke. Now Kitami looked ashamed; he knew he’d erred. “I will mail check when I return to Japan,” he said.

Hilliard was gruff. “See that it’s mailed as soon as possible,” he told his client.

I picked up my briefcase and followed Cousin Houser and Strasser out of the conference room. Behind me came Kitami and the other lawyers. We all stood and waited for the elevator. When the doors opened we all crowded on, shoulder to shoulder, Strasser himself taking up half the car. No one spoke as we dropped to the street. No one breathed. Awkward doesn’t begin to describe it. Surely, I thought, Washington and Cornwallis weren’t forced to ride the same horse away from Yorktown.

STRASSER CAME TO the office some days after the verdict, to wind things down, to say good-bye. We steered him into the conference room and everyone gathered around and gave him a thunderous ovation. His eyes were teary as he raised a hand and acknowledged our cheers and thanks.

“Speech!” someone yelled.

“I’ve made so many close friends here,” he said, choking up. “I’m going to miss you all. And I’m going to miss working on this case. Working on the side of right.”

Applause.

“I’m going to miss defending this wonderful company.”

Woodell and Hayes and I looked at each other. One of us said: “So why don’t you come work here?”

Strasser turned red and laughed. That laugh—I was struck again by the incongruous falsetto. He waved his hand, pshaw, as if we were kidding.

We weren’t kidding. A short while later I invited Strasser to lunch at the Stockpot in Beaverton. I brought along Hayes, who by now was working full-time for Blue Ribbon, and we made a hard pitch. Of all the pitches in my life, this might have been the most carefully prepared and rehearsed, because I wanted Strasser, and I knew there would be pushback. He had before him a clear path to the very top of Cousin Houser’s firm, or any other firm he might choose. Without much effort he could become partner, secure a life of means, privilege, prestige. That was the known, and we were offering him The Unknown. So Hayes and I spent days role-playing, polishing our arguments and counterarguments, anticipating what objections Strasser might raise.

I opened by telling Strasser that it was all a foregone conclusion, really. “You’re one of us,” I said. One of us. He knew what those words meant. We were the kind of people who simply couldn’t put up with corporate nonsense. We were the kind of people who wanted our work to be play. But meaningful play. We were trying to slay Goliath, and though Strasser was bigger than two Goliaths, at heart he was an utter David. We were trying to create a brand, I said, but also a culture. We were fighting against conformity, against boringness, against drudgery. More than a product, we were trying to sell an idea—a spirit. I don’t know if I ever fully understood who we were and what we were doing until I heard myself saying it all that day to Strasser.

He kept nodding. He never stopped eating, but he kept nodding. He agreed with me. He said he’d gone directly from our battle royal with Onitsuka to working on several humdrum insurance cases, and every morning he’d wanted to slit his wrists with a paper clip. “I miss Blue Ribbon,” he said. “I miss the clarity. I miss that feeling, every day, of getting a win. So I thank you for your offer.”

Still, he wasn’t saying yes. “What’s up?” I said.

“I need . . . to ask . . . my dad,” he said.

I looked at Hayes. We both guffawed. “Your dad!” Hayes said.

The same dad who’d told the cops to haul Strasser away? I shook my head. The one argument Hayes and I hadn’t prepared for. The eternal pull of the old man.

“Okay,” I said. “Talk to your father. Get back to us.”

Days later, with his old man’s blessing, Strasser agreed to become the first-ever in-house counsel for Blue Ribbon.

WE HAD ABOUT two weeks to relax and enjoy our legal victory. Then we looked up and saw a new threat looming on the horizon. The yen. It was fluctuating wildly, and if it continued to do so it would spell certain doom.

Before 1972 the yen-to-dollar rate had been pegged, constant, unvarying. One dollar was always worth 360 yen, and vice versa. You could count on that rate, every day, as sure as you could count on the sun rising. President Nixon, however, felt the yen was undervalued. He feared America was “sending all its gold to Japan,” so he cut the yen loose, let it float, and now the yen-to-dollar rate was like the weather. Every day different. Consequently, no one doing business in Japan could possibly plan for tomorrow. The head of Sony famously complained: “It’s like playing golf and your handicap changes on every hole.”

At the same time, Japanese labor costs were on the rise. Combined with a fluctuating yen, this made life treacherous for any company doing the bulk of its production in Japan. No longer could I envision a future in which most of our shoes were made there. We needed new factories, in new countries, fast.

To me, Taiwan seemed the next logical step. Taiwanese officials, sensing Japan’s collapse, were rapidly mobilizing to fill the coming void. They were building factories at warp speed. And yet the factories weren’t yet capable of handling our workload. Plus, their quality control was poor. Until Taiwan was ready, we’d need to find a bridge, something to hold us over.

I considered Puerto Rico. We were already making some shoes there. Alas, they weren’t very good. Also, Johnson had been down there to scout factories, in 1973, and he’d reported that they weren’t much better than the dilapidated ones he saw all over New England. So we talked about some sort of hybrid solution: taking raw materials from Puerto Rico and sending them to New England for lasting and bottoming.

Toward the end of 1974, that impossibly long year, this became our plan. And I was well prepared to implement it. I’d done my homework. I’d been making trips to the East Coast, to lay the groundwork, to look at various factories we might lease. I’d gone twice—first with Cale, then with Johnson.

The first time, the clerk at the rental car company declined my credit card. Then confiscated it. When Cale tried to smooth it over, offering up his credit card, the clerk said he wouldn’t accept Cale’s card, either, because Cale was with me. Guilt by association.

Talk about your deadbeats. I couldn’t bring myself to look Cale in the eye. Here we were, a dozen years out of Stanford, and while he was an eminently successful businessman, I was still struggling to keep my head above water. He’d known I was struggling, but now he knew exactly how much. I was mortified. He was always there at the big moments, the triumphant moments, but this humiliating little moment, I feared, would define me in his eyes.

Then, when we got to the factory, the owner laughed in my face. He said he wouldn’t consider doing business with some fly-by-night company he’d never heard of—let alone from Oregon.

On the second trip I met up with Johnson in Boston. I picked him up at Footwear News, where he’d been scouting potential suppliers, and together we drove to Exeter, New Hampshire, to see an ancient, shuttered factory. Built around the time of the American Revolution, the factory was a ruin. It had once housed the Exeter Boot and Shoe Company, but now it housed rats. As we pried open the doors and swatted away cobwebs the size of fishing nets, all sorts of creatures scurried past our feet and flew past our ears. Worse, there were gaping holes in the floor; one wrong step could mean a trip to the earth’s core.

The owner led us up to the third floor, which was usable. He said he could rent us this floor, with an option to buy the whole place. He also said we’d need help getting the factory properly cleaned and staffed, and he gave us the name of a local guy who could help. Bill Giampietro.

We met Giampietro the next day at an Exeter tavern. Within minutes I could see this was our man. A true shoe dog. He was fifty, thereabouts, but his hair had no gray. It seemed painted with black polish. He had a thick Boston accent, and besides shoes the only subject he ever broached was his beloved wife and kids. He was first-generation American—his parents came from Italy, where his father (of course) had been a cobbler. He had the serene expression and callused hands of a craftsman, and he proudly wore the standard uniform: stained pants, stained denim shirt, rolled up to the stained elbows. He said he’d never done anything in his life but cobble, and never wanted to. “Ask anyone,” he said, “they’ll tell you.” Everyone in New England called him Geppetto, he added, because everyone thought (and still thinks) Pinocchio’s father was a cobbler. (He was actually a carpenter.)

We each ordered a steak and a beer, and then I removed a pair of Cortezes from my briefcase. “Can you equip the Exeter factory to turn out these babies?” I asked. He took the shoes, examined them, pulled them apart, yanked out their tongues. He peered into them like a doctor. “No fucking problem,” he said, dropping them on the table.

The cost? He did the math in his head. Renting and fixing up the Exeter factory, plus workers, materials, sundries—he guessed $250,000.

Let’s do it, I said.

Later, while Johnson and I were on a run, he asked me how we were going to pay a quarter of a million dollars for a factory when we could barely pay for Giampietro’s steak. I told him calmly—in fact with the calm of a madman—that I was going to have Nissho pay for it. “Why on earth is Nissho going to give you money to run a factory?” he asked. “Simple,” I said, “I’m not going to tell them.”

I stopped running, put my hands on my knees, and told Johnson, furthermore, that I was going to need him to run that factory.

His mouth opened, then shut. Just one year ago I’d asked him to move across the country to Oregon. Now I wanted him to move back east again? To work in close proximity to Giampietro? And Woodell? With whom he had a very . . . complicated . . . rapport? “Craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “Never mind the inconvenience, never mind the insanity of schlepping all the way back to the East Coast, what do I know about running a factory? I’d be in completely over my head.”

I laughed. I laughed and laughed. “Over your head?” I said. “Over your head ! We’re all in over our heads! Way over!”

He moaned. He sounded like a car trying to start on a cold morning.

I waited. Just give it a second, I thought.

He denied, fumed, bargained, got depressed, then accepted. The Five Stages of Jeff. At last he let out a long sigh and said he knew this was a big job, and, like me, he didn’t trust anyone else to handle it. He said he knew that, when it came to Blue Ribbon, each of us was willing to do whatever was necessary to win, and if “whatever was necessary” fell outside our area of expertise, hey, as Giampietro would say, “No fucking problem.” He didn’t know anything about running a factory, but he was willing to try. To learn.

Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company. Not that any of us thought we wouldn’t fail; in fact we had every expectation that we would. But when we did fail, we had faith that we’d do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it.

Johnson frowned, nodded. Okay, he said. Deal.

And so, as we entered the final days of 1974, Johnson was firmly ensconced in Exeter, and often, late at night, thinking of him back there, I’d smile and say under my breath: Godspeed, old friend.

You’re Giampietro’s problem now.

OUR CONTACT AT the Bank of California, a man named Perry Holland, was very much like Harry White at First National. Agreeable, friendly, loyal, but absolutely feckless, because he had rigid loan limits that were always well below our requests. And his bosses, like White’s, were always pressing us to slow down.

We responded in 1974 by mashing the accelerator. We were on pace for $8 million in sales, and nothing, but nothing, was going to stop us from hitting that number. In defiance of the bank, we made deals with more stores, and opened several stores of our own—and continued to sign celebrity athlete endorsers we couldn’t afford.

At the same time Pre was smashing American records in Nikes, the best tennis player in the world was smashing rackets in them. His name was Jimmy Connors, and his biggest fan was Jeff Johnson. Connors, Johnson told me, was the tennis version of Pre. Rebellious. Iconoclastic. He urged me to reach out to Connors, sign him to an endorsement deal, fast. Thus, in the summer of 1974 I phoned Connors’s agent and made my pitch. We’d signed Nastase for ten thousand dollars, I said, and we were willing to offer his boy half that.

The agent jumped at the deal.

Before Connors could sign the papers, however, he left the country for Wimbledon. Then, against all odds, he won Wimbledon. In our shoes. Next, he came home and shocked the world by winning the U.S. Open. I was giddy. I phoned the agent and asked if Connors had signed those papers yet. We wanted to get started promoting him. “What papers?” the agent said.

“Uh, the papers. We had a deal, remember?”

“Yeah, I don’t remember any deal. We’ve already got a deal three times better than your deal, which I don’t remember.”

Disappointing, we all agreed. But oh well.

Besides, we all said, we’ve still got Pre.

We’ll always have Pre.