سال هزار و نهصد و هفتاد و یک

1971

“Guess who’s coming to dinner,” Woodell said.

He wheeled into my office and handed me the telex. Ki-tami had accepted my invitation. He was coming to Portland to spend a few days. Then he was going to make a wider tour of the United States, for reasons he declined to share. “Visiting other potential distributors,” I said to Woodell. He nodded.

It was March 1971. We vowed that Kitami was going to have the time of his life, that he would return home feeling love in his heart for America, Oregon, Blue Ribbon—and me. When we were done with him he’d be incapable of doing business with anyone else. And so, we agreed, the visit should close on a high note, with a gala dinner at the home of our prize asset—Bowerman.

IN MOUNTING THIS charm offensive, naturally I enlisted Penny. Together we met Kitami’s flight, and together we whisked him straight to the Oregon coast, to her parents’ oceanfront cottage, where we’d spent our wedding night.

Kitami had a companion with him, a sort of bag carrier, personal assistant, amanuensis, named Hiraku Iwano. He was just a kid, naïve, innocent, in his early twenties, and Penny had him eating out of her hand before we hit Sunset Highway.

We both slaved to give the two men an idyllic Pacific Northwest weekend. We sat on the porch with them and breathed in the sea air. We took them for long walks on the beach. We fed them world-class salmon and poured them glass after glass of good French wine. We tried to focus most of our attention on Kitami, but both Penny and I found it easier to talk to Iwano, who read books and seemed guileless. Kitami seemed like a man who was importing guile by the boatload.

Monday, bright and early, I drove Kitami back to Portland, to First National Bank. Just as I was determined to charm him on this trip, I thought that he could be helpful in charming Wallace, that he could vouch for Blue Ribbon and make credit easier to get.

White met us in the lobby and walked us into a conference room. I looked around. “Where’s Wallace?” I asked. “Ah,” White said, “he won’t be able to join us today.”

What? That was the whole point of visiting the bank. I wanted Wallace to hear Kitami’s ringing endorsement. Oh well, I thought—good cop will just have to relay the endorsement to bad cop.

I said a few preliminary words, expressed confidence that Kitami could bolster First National’s faith in Blue Ribbon, then turned the floor over to Kitami, who scowled and did the one thing guaranteed to make my life harder. “Why do you not give my friends more money?” he said to White.

“W-w-what?” White said.

“Why do you refuse to extend credit to Blue Ribbon?” Kitami said, pounding his fist on the table.

“Well now—” White said.

Kitami cut him off. “What kind of bank is this? I do not understand! Maybe Blue Ribbon would be better off without you!”

White turned white. I tried to jump in. I tried to rephrase what Kitami was saying, tried to blame the language barrier, but the meeting was over. White stormed out, and I stared in astonishment at Kitami, who was wearing an expression that said, Job well done.

I DROVE KITAMI to our new offices in Tigard and showed him around, introduced him to the gang. I was fighting hard to maintain my composure, to remain pleasant, to block out all thoughts about what had just happened. I was afraid that at any second I might lose it. But when I settled Kitami into a chair across from my desk, it was he who lost it—at me. “Blue Ribbon sales are disappointing!” he said. “You should be doing much better.”

Stunned, I said that our sales were doubling every year. Not good enough, he snapped. “Should be triple some people say,” he said. “What people?” I asked. “Never mind,” he said.

He took a folder from his briefcase, flipped it open, read it, snapped it shut. He repeated that he didn’t like our numbers, that he didn’t think we were doing enough. He opened the folder again, shut it again, shoved it back into his briefcase. I tried to defend myself, but he waved his hand in disgust. Back and forth we went, for quite a while, civil but tense.

After nearly an hour of this he stood and asked to use the men’s room. Down the hall, I said.

The moment he was out of sight I jumped from behind my desk. I opened his briefcase and rummaged through and took out what looked like the folder he’d been referring to. I slid it under my desk blotter, then jumped behind my desk and put my elbows on the blotter.

Waiting for Kitami to return, I had the strangest thought. I recalled all the times I’d volunteered with the Boy Scouts, all the times I’d sat on Eagle Scout review boards, handing out merit badges for honor and integrity. Two or three weekends a year I’d question pink-cheeked boys about their probity, their honesty, and now I was stealing documents from another man’s briefcase? I was headed down a dark path. No telling where it might lead. Wherever, there was no getting around one immediate consequence of my actions. I’d have to recuse myself from the next review board.

How I longed to study the contents of that folder, and photocopy every scrap of paper in it, and go over it all with Woodell. But Kitami was soon back. I let him resume scolding me about sluggish numbers, let him talk himself out, and when he stopped I summed up my position. Calmly I said that Blue Ribbon might increase its sales if we could order more shoes, and we might order more shoes if we had more financing, and our bank might give us more financing if we had more security, meaning a longer contract with Onitsuka. Again he waved his hand. “Excuses,” he said.

I raised the idea of funding our orders through a Japanese trading company, like Nissho Iwai, as I’d mentioned in my wire months before. “Baah,” he said, “trading companies. They send money first—men later. Take over! Work way into your company, then take over.”

Translation: Onitsuka was only manufacturing a quarter of its own shoes, subcontracting the other three-quarters. Kitami was afraid that Nissho would find Onitsuka’s network of factories, then go right around Onitsuka and become a manufacturer and put Onitsuka out of business.

Kitami stood. He needed to go back to his hotel, he said, have a rest. I said I’d have someone drive him, and I’d meet him for a cocktail later at his hotel bar.

The instant he was gone I went and found Woodell and told him what had happened. I held up the folder. “I stole this from his briefcase,” I said. “You did what?” Woodell said. He started to act appalled, but he was just as curious as I was about the folder’s contents. Together we opened it and laid it on his desk and found that it contained, among other things, a list of eighteen athletic shoe distributors across the United States and a schedule of appointments with half of them.

So there it was. In black and white. Some people say. The “some people” damning Blue Ribbon, poisoning Kitami against us, were our competitors. And he was on his way to visit them. Kill one Marlboro Man, twenty more rise up to take his place.

I was outraged, of course. But mostly hurt. For seven years we’d devoted ourselves to Tiger shoes. We’d introduced them to America, we’d reinvented the line. Bowerman and Johnson had shown Onitsuka how to make a better shoe, and their designs were now foundational, setting sales records, changing the face of the industry—and this was how we were repaid? “And now,” I said to Woodell, “I have to go meet this Judas for cocktails.”

First I went for a six-mile run. I don’t know when I’ve run harder, or been less present in my body. With each stride I yelled at the trees, screamed at the cobwebs hanging in the branches. It helped. By the time I’d showered and dressed and driven to meet Kitami at his hotel, I was almost serene. Or maybe I was in shock. What Kitami said during that hour together, what I said—no memory. The next thing I remember is this. The following morning, when Kitami came to the office, Woodell and I ran a sort of shell game. While someone whisked Kitami into the coffee room, Woodell blocked the door to my office with his wheelchair and I slid the folder back into the briefcase.

ON THE LAST day of Kitami’s visit, hours before the big dinner party, I hurried down to Eugene to confer with Bowerman and his lawyer, Jaqua. I left Penny to drive Kitami down later in the day, thinking: What’s the worst that could happen?

Cut to Penny, hair disheveled, dress smeared with grease, pulling up to Bowerman’s house. As she stumbled out of the car I thought for a moment that Kitami had attacked her, but she took me aside and explained that they’d had a flat. “That son of a bitch,” she whispered, “stayed in the car—on the highway—and let me fix the tire all by myself!”

I steered her inside. We both needed something strong to drink.

This wasn’t a simple matter, however. Mrs. Bowerman, a devout Christian Scientist, didn’t normally allow alcohol in her home. She was making an exception on this special night, but she’d asked me ahead of time to please be sure that everyone behaved and no one overdid it. So, though my wife and I both needed a stiff one, I was forced to make it a small one.

Mrs. Bowerman now gathered us all in the living room. “In honor of our distinguished guests,” she announced, “tonight we are serving . . . mai tais!”

Applause.

Kitami and I still had at least one thing in common. We both liked mai tais. Very much. Something about them reminded each of us of Hawaii, that wonderful layover between the West Coast and Japan, where you could unwind before going back into the long workdays. Still, he and I stopped at one that evening. Mindful of Mrs. Bowerman, so did everyone else. Everyone but Bowerman. He’d never been much of a drinker, and he’d certainly never tasted a mai tai before, and we all watched in dread and dismay as the drinks took effect. And then some. Something about that tangy combination of curaçao and lime juice, pineapple and rum, hit Bowerman right on the screws. After two mai tais he was a different person.

As he tried to fix his third mai tai he bellowed, “We’re out of ice!” No one answered. So he answered himself. “No problem.” He marched out to the garage, to the large meat freezer, and grabbed a bag of frozen blueberries. He tore it open, scattering blueberries everywhere. He then tossed a huge handful of frozen blueberries into his drink. “Tastes better this way,” he announced, returning to the living room. Now he walked around the room, slopping handfuls of frozen blueberries into everyone’s glass.

Sitting, he began to tell a story, which seemed in highly questionable taste. It built to a crescendo I feared we’d all remember for years to come. That is, if we could understand the crescendo. Bowerman’s words, normally so crisp, so precise, were growing squishy around the edges.

Mrs. Bowerman glared at me. But what could I do? I shrugged my shoulders and thought: You married him. And then I thought: Oh, wait, so did I.

Back when the Bowermans attended the 1964 Olympics in Japan, Mrs. Bowerman had fallen in love with nashi pears, which are like small green apples, only sweeter. They don’t grow in the United States, so she smuggled a few seeds home in her purse and planted them in her garden. Every few years, she told Kitami, when the nashis bloomed, they refreshed her love of all things Japanese. He seemed quite beguiled by this story. “Och!” Bowerman said, exasperated. “Japples!”

I put a hand over my eyes.

Finally came the moment when I thought the party might spin out of control, when I wondered if we might actually need to call the cops. I looked across the room and spotted Jaqua, sitting beside his wife, glaring at Kitami. I knew that Jaqua had been a fighter pilot in the war, that his wingman, one of his closest friends, had been shot out of the sky by a Japanese Zero. In fact Jaqua and his wife had named their first child after that dead wingman, and I suddenly regretted telling Jaqua about Kitami’s Folder of Betrayal. I perceived something bubbling inside Jaqua, and rising to his throat, and I sensed the real possibility that Bowerman’s lawyer and best friend and neighbor might stand and march across the room and sock Kitami in the jaw.

The one person who seemed to be having an uncomplicatedly wonderful time was Kitami. Gone was the angry Kitami from the bank. Gone was the scolding Kitami from my office. Talking, laughing, slapping his knee, he was so personable that I wondered what might have happened if I’d given him a mai tai before driving him over to First National.

Late in the evening he spotted something across the room—a guitar. It belonged to one of Bowerman’s three sons. Kitami walked over, picked it up, and began to finger the strings. Then strum them. He carried the guitar to a short flight of steps that led from the Bowermans’ sunken living room to their dining room and, standing on the top step, started to play. And sing.

All heads turned. Conversation ceased. It was a country-western song, of some sort, but Kitami performed it like a traditional Japanese folk song. He sounded like Buck Owens on a koto harp. Then without any segue he switched to “O Sole Mio.” I recall thinking: Is he really singing “O Sole Mio”?

He sang it louder. O sole mio, sta nfronte a te! O sole, o sole mio, sta nfronte a te!

A Japanese businessman, strumming a Western guitar, singing an Italian ballad, in the voice of an Irish tenor. It was surreal, then a few miles past surreal, and it didn’t stop. I’d never known there were so many verses to “O Sole Mio.” I’d never known a roomful of active, restless Oregonians could sit so still and quiet for so long. When he set down the guitar, we all tried not to make eye contact with each other as we gave him a big hand. I clapped and clapped and it all made sense. For Kitami, this trip to the United States—the visit to the bank, the meetings with me, the dinner with the Bowermans—­wasn’t about Blue Ribbon. Nor was it about Onitsuka. Like everything else, it was all about Kitami.

KITAMI LEFT PORTLAND the next day on his not-so-secret mission, his Give-Blue-Ribbon-the-Brush-Off tour of America. I asked again about his destination, and again he didn’t answer. Yoi tabi de arimas yoh ni, I said. Safe travels.

I’d recently commissioned Hayes, my old boss from Price Waterhouse, to do some consulting work for Blue Ribbon, and now I huddled with him and tried to decide my next move before Kitami’s return. We agreed that the best thing to do was keep the peace, try to convince Kitami not to leave us, not to abandon us. As angry and wounded as I was, I needed to accept that Blue Ribbon would be lost without Onitsuka. I needed, Hayes said, to stick with the devil I knew, and persuade him to stick with the devil he knew.

Later that week, when the devil returned, I invited him out to Tigard for one more visit before his flight home. Again I tried to rise above it all. I brought him into the conference room and with Woodell and I on one side of the table, and Kitami and his assistant, Iwano, on the other, I screwed a big smile onto my face and said that we hoped he’d enjoyed his visit to our country.

He said yet again that he was disappointed in the performance of Blue Ribbon.

This time, however, he said he had a solution.

“Shoot,” I said.

“Sell us your company.”

He said it so very softly. The thought crossed my mind that some of the hardest things ever said in our lifetimes are said softly.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Onitsuka Co. Ltd. will buy controlling interest in Blue Ribbon, fifty-one percent. It is best deal for your company. And you. You would be wise to accept.”

A takeover. A hostile freaking takeover. I looked at the ceiling. You gotta be kidding, I thought. Of all the arrogant, underhanded, ungrateful, bullying—

“And if we do not?”

“We will have no choice but to set up superior distributors.”

“Superior. Uh-huh. I see. And what about our written agreement?”

He shrugged. So much for agreements.

I couldn’t let my mind go to any of those places it was trying to go. I couldn’t tell Kitami what I thought of him, or where to stick his offer, because Hayes was right, I still needed him. I had no backup, no plan B, no exit strategy. If I was going to save Blue Ribbon, I needed to do it slowly, on my own schedule, so as not to spook customers and retailers. I needed time, and therefore I needed Onitsuka to keep sending me shoes for as long as possible.

“Well,” I said, fighting to control my voice, “I have a partner, of course. Coach Bowerman. I’ll have to discuss your offer with him.”

I was certain Kitami would see through this amateurish stall. But he rose, hitched his pants, and smiled. “Talk it over with Dr. Bowerman. Get back to me.”

I wanted to hit him. Instead I shook his hand. He and Iwano walked out.

In the suddenly Kitami-less conference room, Woodell and I stared into the grain of the conference table and let the stillness settle over us.

I SENT MY budget and forecast for the coming year to First National, with my standard credit request. I wanted to send a note of apology, begging forgiveness for the Kitami debacle, but I knew White would roll with it. And besides, Wallace hadn’t been there. Days after White got my budget and forecast he told me to come on down, he was ready to talk things over.

I wasn’t in the hard little chair across from his desk more than two seconds before he delivered the news. “Phil, I’m afraid First National will not be able to do business any longer with Blue Ribbon. We will issue no more letters of credit on your behalf. We will pay off your last remaining shipments as they come in with what remains in your account—but when that last bill is paid, our relationship will be terminated.”

I could see by White’s waxy pallor that he was stricken. He’d had no part in this. This was coming from on high. Thus there was no point in arguing. I spread my arms. “What do I do, Harry?”

“Find another bank.”

“And if I can’t? I’m out of business, right?”

He looked down at his papers, stacked them, fastened them with a paper clip. He told me that the question of Blue Ribbon had deeply divided the bank officers. Some were for us, some were against. Ultimately it was Wallace who’d cast the deciding vote. “I’m sick about this,” White said. “So sick that I’m taking a sick day.”

I didn’t have that option. I staggered out of First National and drove straight to U.S. Bank. I pleaded with them to take me in.

Sorry, they said.

They had no desire to buy First National’s secondhand problems.

THREE WEEKS PASSED. The company, my company, born from nothing, and now finishing 1971 with sales of $1.3 million, was on life support. I talked with Hayes. I talked with my father. I talked with every other accountant I knew, one of whom mentioned that Bank of California had a charter allowing it to do business in three western states, including Oregon. Plus, Bank of Cal had a branch in Portland. I hurried over and, indeed, they welcomed me, gave me shelter from the storm. And a small line of credit.

Still, it was only a short-term solution. They were a bank, after all, and banks were, by definition, risk-averse. Regardless of my sales, Bank of California would soon view my zero cash balances with alarm. I needed to start preparing for that rainy day.

My thoughts kept returning to that Japanese trading company. Nissho. Late at night I’d think, “They have $100 billion in sales . . . and they want desperately to help me. Why?”

For starters, Nissho did huge volumes on low net margins, and therefore it loved growth companies with big upsides. That was us. In spades. In the eyes of Wallace and First National we’d been a land mine; to Nissho we were a potential gold mine.

So I went back. I met with the man sent from Japan to run the new General Commodities Department, Tom Sumeragi. A graduate of Tokyo University, the Harvard of Japan, Sumeragi looked strikingly like the great film actor Toshiro Mifune, who was famous for his portrayal of Miyamoto Musashi, the epic samurai duelist and author of a timeless manual on combat and inner strength, The Book of Five Rings. Sumeragi looked most like the actor when lipping a Lucky Strike. And he lipped them a lot. Twice as much when he drank. Unlike Hayes, however, who drank because he liked the way booze made him feel, Sumeragi drank because he was lonely in America. Almost every evening after work he’d head to the Blue House, a Japanese bar-restaurant, and talk in his native tongue with the ­mama-san, which just made him lonelier.

He told me that Nissho was willing to take a second position to the bank on their loans. That would certainly quell my bankers. He also offered this nugget of information: Nissho had recently dispatched a delegation to Kobe, to investigate financing shoes for us, and to convince Onitsuka to let such a deal go through. But Onitsuka had thrown the Nissho delegation out on their asses. A $25 million company throwing out a $100 billion company? Nissho was embarrassed, and angry. “We can introduce you to many quality sports shoe manufacturers in Japan,” Sumeragi said, smiling.

I pondered. I still held out some hope that Onitsuka would come to its senses. And I worried about a paragraph in our written agreement that forbade me from importing other brands of track-and-field shoes. “Maybe down the road,” I said.

Sumeragi nodded. All in good time.

REELING FROM ALL this drama, I was deeply tired when I returned home each night. But I’d always get a second wind after my six-mile run, followed by a hot shower and a quick dinner, alone. (Penny and Matthew ate around four.) I’d always try to find time to tell Matthew a bedtime story, and I’d always try to find a bedtime story that would be educational. I invented a character called Matt History, who looked and acted a lot like Matthew Knight, and I inserted him into the center of every yarn. Matt History was there at Valley Forge with George Washington. Matt History was there in Massachusetts with John Adams. Matt History was there when Paul Revere rode through the dark of night on a borrowed horse, warning John Hancock that the British were coming. Hard on Revere’s heels was a precocious young horseman from the suburbs of Portland, Oregon . . .

Matthew would always laugh, delighted to find himself caught up in these adventures. He’d sit up straighter in bed. He’d beg for more, more.

When Matthew was asleep, Penny and I would talk about the day. She’d often ask what we were going to do if it all went south. I’d say, “I can always fall back on accounting.” I did not sound sincere, because I wasn’t. I was not delighted to be caught up in these adventures.

Eventually Penny would look away, watch TV, resume her needlepoint, or read, and I’d retreat to my recliner, where I’d administer the nightly self-catechism.

What do you know?

I know Onitsuka can’t be trusted.

What else do you know?

I know my relationship with Kitami can’t be salvaged.

What does the future hold?

One way or another, Blue Ribbon and Onitsuka are going to break up. I just need to stay together as long as possible while I develop other supply sources, so I can manage the breakup.

What’s Step One?

I need to scare off all the other distributors Onitsuka has lined up to replace me. Blast them right out of the water, by firing off letters threatening to sue if they breach my contract.

What’s Step Two?

Find my own replacement for Onitsuka.

I flashed on a factory I’d heard about, in Guadalajara, the one where Adidas had manufactured shoes during the 1968 Olympics, allegedly to skirt Mexican tariffs. The shoes were good, as I recalled. So I set up a meeting with the factory managers.

EVEN THOUGH IT was in central Mexico, the factory was called Canada. Right away I asked the managers why. They chose the name, they said, because it sounded foreign, exotic. I laughed. Canada? Exotic? It was more comic than exotic, not to mention confusing. A factory south of the border named for a country north of the border.

Oh well. I didn’t care. After looking the place over, after taking inventory of their present line of shoes, after surveying their leather room, I was impressed. The factory was big, clean, well run. Plus, it was Adidas-endorsed. I told them I’d like to place an order. Three thousand pairs of leather soccer shoes, which I planned to sell as football shoes. The factory owners asked me about the name of my brand. I told them I’d have to get back to them on that.

They handed me the contract. I looked at the dotted line above my name. Pen in hand, I paused. The question was now officially on the table. Was this a violation of my deal with Onitsuka?

Technically, no. My deal said I could import only Onitsuka track and field shoes, no others; it said nothing about importing someone else’s football shoes. So I knew this contract with Canada wouldn’t violate the letter of my Onitsuka deal. But the spirit?

Six months previously I would never have done this. Things were different now. Onitsuka had already broken the spirit of our deal, and my spirit, so I pulled the cap off my pen and signed the contract. I signed the heck out of that Canada contract. Then I went out for Mexican food.

Now about that logo. My new soccer-qua-football shoe would need something to set it apart from the stripes of Adidas and Onitsuka. I recalled that young artist I’d met at Portland State. What was her name? Oh, yes, Carolyn Davidson. She’d been in the office a number of times, doing brochures and ad slicks. When I got back to Oregon I invited her to the office again and told her we needed a logo. “What kind?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “That gives me a lot to go on,” she said. “Something that evokes a sense of motion,” I said. “Motion,” she said, dubious.

She looked confused. Of course she did, I was babbling. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted. I wasn’t an artist. I showed her the soccer-­football shoe and said, unhelpfully: This. We need something for this.

She said she’d give it a try.

Motion, she mumbled, leaving my office. Motion.

Two weeks later she came back with a portfolio of rough sketches. They were all variations on a single theme, and the theme seemed to be . . . fat lightning bolts? Chubby check marks? Morbidly obese squiggles? Her designs did evoke motion, of a kind, but also motion sickness. None spoke to me. I singled out a few that held out some promise and asked her to work with those.

Days later—or was it weeks?—Carolyn returned and spread a second series of sketches across the conference table. She also hung a few on the wall. She’d done several dozen more variations on the original theme, but with a freer hand. These were better. Closer.

Woodell and I and a few others looked them over. I remember Johnson being there, too, though why he’d come out from Wellesley, I can’t recall. Gradually we inched toward a consensus. We liked . . . this one . . . slightly more than the others.

It looks like a wing, one of us said.

It looks like a whoosh of air, another said.

It looks like something a runner might leave in his or her wake.

We all agreed it looked new, fresh, and yet somehow—ancient. Timeless.

For her many hours of work, we gave Carolyn our deepest thanks and a check for thirty-five dollars, then sent her on her way.

After she left we continued to sit and stare at this one logo, which we’d sort of selected, and sort of settled on by default. “Something eye-catching about it,” Johnson said. Woodell agreed. I frowned, scratched my cheek. “You guys like it more than I do,” I said. “But we’re out of time. It’ll have to do.”

“You don’t like it?” Woodell said.

I sighed. “I don’t love it. Maybe it will grow on me.”

We sent it to Canada.

Now we just needed a name to go with this logo I didn’t love. Over the next few days we kicked around dozens of ideas, until two leading candidates emerged.

Falcon.

And Dimension Six.

I was partial to the latter, because I was the one who came up with it. Woodell and everyone else told me that it was god-awful. It wasn’t catchy, they said, and it didn’t mean anything.

We took a poll of all our employees. Secretaries, accountants, sales reps, retail clerks, file clerks, warehouse workers—we demanded that each person jump in, make at least one suggestion. Ford had just paid a top-flight consulting firm $2 million to come up with the name of its new Maverick, I announced to everyone. “We haven’t got $2 million—but we’ve got fifty smart people, and we can’t do any worse than . . . Maverick.”

Also, unlike Ford, we had a deadline. Canada was starting production on the shoe that Friday.

Hour after hour was spent arguing and yelling, debating the virtue of this name or that. Someone liked Bork’s suggestion, Bengal. Someone else said the only possible name was Condor. I huffed and groused. “Animal names,” I said. “Animal names! We’ve considered the name of just about every animal in the forest. Must it be an animal?”

Again and again I lobbied for Dimension Six. Again and again I was told by my employees that it was unspeakably bad.

Someone, I forget who, summed up the situation neatly. “All these names . . . suck.” I thought it might have been Johnson, but all the documentation says he’d left and gone back to Wellesley by then.

One night, late, we were all tired, running out of patience. If I heard one more animal name I was going to jump out a window. Tomorrow’s another day, we said, drifting out of the office, headed out to our cars.

I went home and sat in my recliner. My mind went back and forth, back and forth. Falcon? Bengal? Dimension Six? Something else? Anything else?

THE DAY OF decision arrived. Canada had already started producing the shoes, and samples were ready to go in Japan, but before anything could be shipped, we needed to choose a name. Also, we had magazine ads slated to run, to coincide with the shipments, and we needed to tell the graphic artists what name to put in the ads. Finally, we needed to file paperwork with the U.S. Patent Office.

Woodell wheeled into my office. “Time’s up,” he said.

I rubbed my eyes. “I know.”

“What’s it going to be?”

“I don’t know.”

My head was splitting. By now the names had all run together into one mind-melting glob. Falconbengaldimensionsix.

“There is . . . one more suggestion,” Woodell said.

“From who?”

“Johnson phoned first thing this morning,” he said. “Apparently a new name came to him in a dream last night.”

I rolled my eyes. “A dream?”

“He’s serious,” Woodell said.

“He’s always serious.”

“He says he sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night and saw the name before him,” Woodell said.

“What is it?” I asked, bracing myself.

“Nike.”

“Huh?”

“Nike.”

“Spell it.”

“N-I-K-E,” Woodell said.

I wrote it on a yellow legal pad.

The Greek goddess of victory. The Acropolis. The Parthenon. The Temple. I thought back. Briefly. Fleetingly.

“We’re out of time,” I said. “Nike. Falcon. Or Dimension Six.”

“Everyone hates Dimension Six.”

“Everyone but me.”

He frowned. “It’s your call.”

He left me. I made doodles on my pad. I made lists, crossed them out. Tick, tock, tick, tock.

I needed to telex the factory—now.

I hated making decisions in a hurry, and that’s all I seemed to do in those days. I looked to the ceiling. I gave myself two more minutes to mull over the different options, then walked down the hall to the telex machine. I sat before it, gave myself three more minutes.

Reluctantly, I punched out the message. Name of new brand is . . .

A lot of things were rolling around in my head, consciously, unconsciously. First, Johnson had pointed out that seemingly all iconic brands—Clorox, Kleenex, Xerox—have short names. Two syllables or less. And they always have a strong sound in the name, a letter like “K” or “X,” that sticks in the mind. That all made sense. And that all described Nike.

Also, I liked that Nike was the goddess of victory. What’s more important, I thought, than victory?

I might have heard, in the far recesses of my mind, Churchill’s voice. You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. I might have recalled the victory medal awarded to all veterans of World War II, a bronze medallion with Athena Nike on the front, breaking a sword in two. I might have. Sometimes I believe that I did. But in the end I don’t really know what led me to my decision. Luck? Instinct? Some inner spirit?

Yes.

“What’d you decide?” Woodell asked me at the end of the day. “Nike,” I mumbled. “Hm,” he said. “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Maybe it’ll grow on us,” he said.

Maybe.

MY BRAND-NEW RELATIONSHIP with Nissho was promising, but it was brand new, and who would dare predict how it might evolve? I’d once felt the relationship with Onitsuka was promising, and look where that stood. Nissho was infusing me with cash, but I couldn’t let that make me complacent. I needed to develop as many sources of cash as possible.

Which brought me back to the idea of a public offering. I didn’t think I could withstand the disappointment of a second failed offering, so I plotted with Hayes to ensure that this one would work. We decided that the first offering hadn’t been aggressive enough. We hadn’t sold ourselves. This time we hired a hard-driving salesman.

Also, this time we decided not to sell stocks, but convertible debentures.

If business truly is war without bullets, then debentures are war bonds. The public loans you money, and in exchange you give them quasi-stock in your . . . cause. The stock is quasi because debenture holders are strongly encouraged, and incentivized, to hold their shares for five years. After that, they can convert the shares to common stock or get their money back with interest.

With our new plan, and our gung-ho salesman, we announced in June 1971 that Blue Ribbon would be offering two hundred thousand shares of debentures, at one dollar per, and this time the shares sold fast. One of the first to buy was my friend Cale, who didn’t hesitate to cut a check for ten thousand dollars, a princely sum.

“Buck,” he said, “I was there at the start, I’ll be there at the bitter end.”

CANADA WAS A letdown. The factory’s leather football shoe was pretty, but in cold weather its sole split and cracked. Irony upon irony—a shoe made in a factory called Canada, which couldn’t take the cold. Then again, maybe it was our fault. Using a soccer shoe for football. Maybe we were asking for it.

The quarterback for Notre Dame wore a pair that season, and it was a thrill to see him trot onto that hallowed gridiron at South Bend in a pair of Nikes. Until those Nikes disintegrated. (Just like the Irish did that year.) Job One, therefore, was finding a factory that could make sturdier, more weather-resistant shoes.

Nissho said they could help. They were only too happy to help. They were beefing up their commodities department, so Sumeragi had a wealth of information about factories around the world. He’d also recently hired a consultant, a bona fide shoe wizard, who’d been a disciple of Jonas Senter.

I’d never heard of Senter, but Sumeragi assured me the man was a genuine, head-to-toe shoe dog. I’d heard this phrase a few times. Shoe dogs were people who devoted themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying, or designing of shoes. Lifers used the phrase cheerfully to describe other lifers, men and women who had toiled so long and hard in the shoe trade, they thought and talked about nothing else. It was an all-consuming mania, a recognizable psychological disorder, to care so much about insoles and outsoles, linings and welts, rivets and vamps. But I understood. The average person takes seventy-­five hundred steps a day, 274 million steps over the course of a long life, the equivalent of six times around the globe—shoe dogs, it seemed to me, simply wanted to be part of that journey. Shoes were their way of connecting with humanity. What better way of connecting, shoe dogs thought, than by refining the hinge that joins each person to the world’s surface?

I felt an unusual sympathy for such sad cases. I wondered how many I might have met in my travels.

The shoe market just then was flooded with knockoff Adidas, and it was Senter who’d unleashed the flood. He was the knockoff king, apparently. He also knew everything worth knowing about Asia’s legitimate shoe trade—factories, importing, exporting. He’d helped set up a shoe division for Mitsubishi, Japan’s largest trading company. Nissho couldn’t hire Senter himself, for various reasons, so they’d hired Senter’s protégé, a man named Sole.

“Really?” I said. “A shoe guy named Sole?”

Before meeting Sole, before going any further with Nissho, I considered if I was walking into another trap. If I partnered with Nissho, I’d soon be into them for a lot of money. If they also became the source of all our footwear, I would then be even more vulnerable to them than I had been to Onitsuka. And if they turned out to be as aggressive as Onitsuka, it would be lights out.

At Bowerman’s suggestion I talked it over with Jaqua, and he saw the conundrum. Quite a pickle, he said. He didn’t know what to advise. But he knew someone who would. His brother-in-law, Chuck Robinson, was CEO of Marcona Mining, which had joint ventures all over the world. Each of the big eight Japanese trading companies was a partner in at least one of Marcona’s mines, so Chuck was arguably the West’s leading expert on doing business with these guys.

I finagled a meeting with Chuck at his office in San Francisco and found myself wildly intimidated from the moment I walked in the door. I was agog at his office’s size—bigger than my house. And at its view—windows overlooking all of San Francisco Bay, with enormous tankers gliding slowly to and from the world’s great ports. And lining the walls were scale models of Marcona’s tanker fleet, which supplied coal and other minerals to every corner of the globe. Only a man of enormous power, and brains, could command such a redoubt.

I stammered through my presentation, but Chuck still managed to quickly get the drift. He boiled my complicated situation down to a compelling précis. “If the Japanese trading company understands the rules from the first day,” he said, “they will be the best partners you’ll ever have.”

Reassured, emboldened, I went back to Sumeragi and told him the rules. “No equity in my company. Ever.”

He went away and consulted with a few people in his office. Upon returning he said, “No problem. But here’s our deal. We take four percent off the top, as a markup on product. And market interest rates on top of that.”

I nodded.

Days later Sumeragi sent Sole to meet me. Given the man’s reputation, I was expecting some kind of godlike figure with fifteen arms, each one waving a wand made out of shoe trees. But Sole was a plain, ordinary, middle-age businessman, with a New York accent and a sharkskin suit. Not my kind of guy, and I wasn’t his kind, either. And yet we had no trouble finding common ground. Shoes, sports—plus an abiding distaste for Kitami. When I mentioned Kitami’s name, Sole scoffed. “The man’s an ass.”

We’re going to be fast friends, I thought.

Sole promised to help me beat Kitami, get free of him. “I can solve all your problems,” he said. “I know factories.” “Factories that can make Nikes?” I asked, handing him my new football shoe. “I can think of five off the top of my head!” he said.

He was adamant. He seemed to have two mental states—adamant and dismissive. I realized that he was selling me, that he wanted my business, but I was willing to be sold, and more than ready to be wanted.

The five factories Sole mentioned were all in Japan. So Sumeragi and I decided to go there and look them over in September 1971. Sole agreed to be our guide.

A WEEK BEFORE we were to leave, Sumeragi phoned. “Mr. Sole has suffered a heart attack,” he said. “Oh no,” I said. “He’s expected to recover,” Sumeragi said, “but traveling at this time is impossible. His son, who is very capable, will take his place.”

Sumeragi sounded as if he was trying to convince himself, more than me.

I flew alone to Japan, and met Sumeragi and Sole Jr. at Nissho’s office in Tokyo. I was taken aback when Sole Jr. stepped forward, hand outstretched. I assumed he’d be young, but he looked like a teenager. I had a hunch he’d be dressed in sharkskin, like his father, and he was. But his suit was three sizes too big. Was it in fact his father’s?

And like so many teens, he started every sentence with “I.” I think this. I think that. I, I, I.

I shot a glance at Sumeragi. He looked gravely concerned.

THE FIRST OF the factories we wanted to see was outside Hiroshima. All three of us went there by train, arriving midday. A cool, overcast afternoon. We weren’t due at the factory until the next morning, so I felt it important to take the extra time and visit the museum. And I wanted to go by myself. I told Sumeragi and Sole Jr. I would meet them in the hotel lobby the following morning.

Walking through those museum rooms . . . I couldn’t take it all in. I couldn’t process it. Mannequins dressed in singed clothes. Clumps of scorched, irradiated—jewelry? Cookware? I couldn’t tell. Photos that took me to a place far beyond emotion. I stood in horror before a child’s liquefied tricycle. I stood, open-mouthed, before the blackened skeleton of a building, where people had loved and worked and laughed, until. I tried to feel and hear the moment of impact.

I felt sick at heart as I turned a corner and came upon a scorched shoe, under glass, the footprint of its owner still visible.

The next morning, these ghastly images still fresh in my head, I was somber, heavily subdued as I drove with Sumeragi and Sole Jr. into the countryside, and I was almost startled by the good cheer of the factory officials. They were delighted to meet us, to show us their wares. Also, they said forthrightly, they were most eager to do a deal. They’d long been hoping to crack the U.S. market.

I showed them the Cortez, asked how long it might take to produce a sizable order of this shoe.

Six months, they said.

Sole Jr. stepped forward. “You’ll do it in three,” he barked.

I gasped. With the exception of Kitami, I’d always found the Japanese unfailingly polite, even in the heat of disagreement or intense negotiation, and I’d always strived to reciprocate. But in Hiroshima of all places I felt that politeness was that much more essential. Here, if nowhere else on earth, humans should be gentle and kind with one another. Sole Jr. was anything but. The ugliest of Americans.

It got worse. As we made our way across Japan he was brusque, boorish, strutting, swaggering, condescending to everyone we met. He embarrassed me, embarrassed all Americans. Now and then Sumeragi and I exchanged pained looks. We wanted desperately to scold Sole Jr., to leave him—but we needed his father’s contacts. We needed this horrid brat to show us where the factories were.

In Kurume, just outside Beppu, in the southern islands, we visited a factory that was part of a vast industrial complex run by the Bridgestone Tire Company. The factory was called Nippon Rubber. It was the biggest shoe factory I’d ever seen, a kind of Shoe Oz, capable of handling any order, no matter how big or complicated. We sat with factory officials in their conference room, just after breakfast, and this time, when Sole Jr. tried to speak, I didn’t let him. Each time he opened his mouth I spoke up, cut him off.

I told officials the kind of shoe we wanted, showed them the Cortez. They nodded gravely. I wasn’t sure they understood.

After lunch we returned to the conference room and there before me on the table was a brand-new Cortez, Nike side stripe and all, hot off the factory floor. Magic.

I spent the rest of the afternoon describing the shoes I wanted. Tennis, basketball, high top, low top, plus several more models of running shoes. The officials insisted they would have no trouble making any of these designs.

Fine, I said, but before placing an order I’ll need to see samples. The factory officials assured me that they could blast out samples and ship them within days to Nissho’s offices in Tokyo. We bowed to each other. I went back to Tokyo and waited.

Days and days of crisp fall weather. I walked around the city, drank Sapporo and sake, ate yakitori, and dreamed of shoes. I revisited the Meiji gardens, and sat beneath the ginkgos beside the torii gate. Portal to the sacred.

On Sunday I got a notice at my hotel. The shoes had arrived. I went down to the offices of Nissho, but they were closed. They had trusted me enough to give me a pass, however, so I let myself in, and sat in a big room, amid rows and rows of empty desks, inspecting the samples. I held them to the light, turned them this way and that. I ran my fingers along the soles, along the check or wing or whatever our new side stripe would be called. They were not perfect. The logo on this shoe wasn’t quite straight, the midsole on that shoe was a bit too thin. There should be more lift on this other one.

I made notes for the factory officials.

But minor imperfections aside, they were very good.

At last the only thing to do was think up names for the different models. I was panicked. I’d done such a poor job thinking up a name for my new brand—

Dimension Six? Everyone at Blue Ribbon still mocked me. I’d only gone with Nike because I was out of time, and because I’d trusted Johnson’s savant-like nature. Now I was on my own, in an empty office building in downtown Tokyo. I’d have to trust myself.

I held up the tennis shoe. I decided to call it . . . the Wimbledon.

Well. That was easy.

I held up another tennis shoe. I decided to call it . . . the Forest Hill. After all, that was the setting for the first U.S. Open.

I held up a basketball shoe. I called it the Blazer, after my hometown NBA team.

I held up another basketball shoe. I named it the Bruin, because the best college basketball team of all time was John Wooden’s Bruins. Not too creative, but.

Now the running shoes. Cortez, of course. And Marathon. And Obori. And Boston and Finland. I was feeling it. I was in the zone. I started dancing around the room. I heard a secret music. I held up a running shoe. I named it the Wet-Flyte. Boom, I said.

To this day I don’t know where that name came from.

It took a half hour to name them all. I felt like Coleridge, writing “Kubla Khan” in an opium daze. I then mailed my names off to the factory.

It was dark as I walked out of the office building, into the crowded Tokyo street. A feeling came over me, unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I felt spent, but proud. I felt drained, but exhilarated. I felt everything I ever hoped to feel after a day’s work. I felt like an artist, a creator. I looked back over my shoulder, took one last look at Nissho’s offices. Under my breath I said, “We made this.”

I’D BEEN IN Japan three weeks, longer than I expected, which posed two problems. The world was large, but the shoe world was small, and if Onitsuka got wind that I was in their “neighborhood,” and didn’t stop by, they’d know I was up to something. It wouldn’t take much for them to find out, or figure out, that I was lining up their replacement. So I needed to go down to Kobe, make an appearance at Onitsuka’s offices. But extending my trip, being gone from home another week, was unacceptable. Penny and I had never been apart that long.

I phoned her and asked her to fly over and join me for this last leg.

Penny jumped at the chance. She’d never seen Asia, and this might be her last chance before we were out of business and out of money. It might also be her last chance to use that matching pink luggage. And Dot was available for babysitting.

The flight was long, though, and Penny didn’t like planes. When I went to the Tokyo airport to meet her, I knew I’d be collecting a fragile woman. I forgot, however, how intimidating Haneda Airport could be. It was a solid mass of bodies and baggage. I couldn’t move, couldn’t find Penny. Suddenly she appeared at the sliding glass doors of customs. She was trying to push forward, trying to get through. There were too many people—and armed police—on every side of her. She was trapped.

The doors slid open, the crowd surged forward, and Penny fell into my arms. I’d never seen her so exhausted, not even after she gave birth to Matthew. I asked if the plane had a flat tire and she’d gotten out to change it. Joke? Kitami? Remember? She didn’t laugh. She said the plane hit turbulence two hours outside Tokyo and the flight was a roller coaster.

She was wearing her best lime-green suit, now badly wrinkled and stained, and she was the same shade of lime-green. She needed a hot shower, and a long rest, and some fresh clothes. I told her we had a suite waiting at the wonderful Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

A half hour later, when we pulled up to the hotel, she said she was going to use the ladies’ room while I checked us in. I hurried to the front desk, got our room keys, and sat on one of the lobby sofas to wait.

Ten minutes.

Fifteen minutes.

I went to the door of the ladies’ room and cracked it open. “Penny?”

“I’m frozen,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m on the floor of the ladies’ room . . . and I am frozen.”

I went in and found her on the cold tiles, lying on her side, ladies stepping over and around her. She was having a panic attack. And severe leg cramps. The long flight, the chaos at the airport, the months of stress about Kitami—it was too much for her. I spoke calmly, told her everything would be fine, and gradually she unclenched. I helped her to her feet, guided her upstairs, and asked the hotel to send up a masseuse.

As she lay on the bed, a cold washcloth on her forehead, I was worried, but a little bit grateful. I’d been on the edge of panic for weeks. Months. The sight of Penny in this state gave me a shot of adrenaline. One of us had to keep it together, for the sake of Matthew. This time it would have to be me.

THE NEXT MORNING I phoned Onitsuka and told them my wife and I were in Japan. Come on down, they said. Within an hour we were on the train for Kobe.

Everyone came out to meet us, including Kitami and Fujimoto and Mr. Onitsuka. What brings you to Japan? I told them we were vacationing. Spur-of-the-moment thing. “Very good, very good,” Mr. Onitsuka said. He made a big fuss over Penny, and we sat down to a hastily arranged tea ceremony. For a moment, amid all the small talk, all the laughter and pleasantries, it was possible to forget that we were on the edge of war.

Mr. Onitsuka even offered a car and driver to take Penny and me around and show us Kobe. I accepted. Then Kitami invited us to dinner that night. Again I reluctantly said yes.

Fujimoto came along, which added an extra layer of complexity. I looked around the table and thought: my bride, my enemy, my spy. Some life. Though the tone was friendly, cordial, I could feel the tangled subtext of every remark. It was like a loose wire buzzing and sparking in the background. I kept waiting for Kitami to come out with it, press me for an answer to his offer to buy Blue Ribbon. Oddly, he never brought it up.

Around nine o’clock he said he needed to be getting home. Fujimoto said he’d stay and have a nightcap with us. The moment Kitami was gone, Fujimoto told us everything he knew of the plan to cut off Blue Ribbon. It wasn’t much more than I’d gleaned from the folder in Kitami’s briefcase. Still, it was nice to sit with an ally, so we had several nightcaps, and a few laughs, until Fujimoto looked at his watch and let out a scream. “Oh no! It is after eleven. The train stop running!”

“Ah, no problem,” I said. “Come stay with us.”

“We have a big tatami in our room,” Penny said. “You can sleep on that.”

Fujimoto accepted, with many bows. He thanked me yet again for the bicycle.

An hour later, there we were, in one small room, pretending there was nothing out of the ordinary about the three of us bedding down together.

At sunrise I heard Fujimoto get up, cough, and stretch. He went to the bathroom, ran the water, brushed his teeth. Then he put on his clothes from the night before and slipped out. I fell back asleep but a short while later Penny went to the bathroom and when she came back to bed she was—laughing? I rolled over. Nope, she was crying. She looked as if she was on the verge of another panic attack. “He used . . . ,” she rasped. “What?” I said. She buried her head in the pillows. “He used . . . my toothbrush.”

AS SOON AS I got back to Oregon I invited Bowerman up to Portland to meet with me and Woodell, talk about the state of the business.

It seemed like any old meeting.

At some point, in the course of conversation, Woodell and I pointed out that the outer sole of the training shoe hadn’t changed in fifty years. The tread was still just waves or grooves across the bottom of the foot. The Cortez and Boston were breakthroughs in cushioning and nylon, revolutionary in upper construction, but there hadn’t been a single innovation in outer soles since before the Great Depression. Bowerman nodded. He made a note. He didn’t seem all that interested.

As I recall, once we’d covered all the new business on the agenda, Bowerman told us that a wealthy alum had just donated a million dollars to Oregon, earmarked for a new track—the world’s finest. His voice rising, Bowerman described the surface he’d created with that windfall. It was polyurethane, the same spongy surface that was to be used in Munich in the 1972 Olympics, where Bowerman was on tap to be head coach of the track team.

He was pleased. And yet, he said, he was far from satisfied. His runners still weren’t getting the full benefit of this new surface. Their shoes still weren’t gripping it right.

On the two-hour drive back to Eugene, Bowerman mulled what Woodell and I had said, and mulled his problem with the new track, and these two problems simmered and congealed in his thoughts.

The following Sunday, sitting over breakfast with his wife, Bowerman’s gaze drifted to her waffle iron. He noted the waffle iron’s gridded pattern. It conformed with a certain pattern in his mind’s eye, a pattern he’d been seeing, or seeking, for months, if not years. He asked Mrs. Bowerman if he could borrow it.

He had a vat of urethane in his garage, left over from the installation of the track. He carried the waffle iron out to the garage, filled it with urethane, heated it up—and promptly ruined it. The urethane sealed it shut, because Bowerman hadn’t added a chemical releasing agent. He didn’t know from chemical releasing agents.

Another person would have quit right then. But Bowerman’s brain also didn’t have a releasing agent. He bought another waffle iron, and this time filled it with plaster, and when the plaster hardened the jaws of the waffle iron opened, no problem. He took the resulting mold to the Oregon Rubber Company, and paid them to pour liquid rubber into it.

Another failure. The rubber mold was too rigid, too brittle. It broke right away.

But Bowerman felt he was getting closer.

He gave up the waffle iron altogether. Instead he took a sheet of stainless steel and punched it with holes, creating a waffle-like surface, and brought this back to the rubber company. The mold they made from that steel sheet was pliable, workable, and Bowerman now had two foot-sized squares of hard rubber nubs, which he brought home and sewed to the sole of a pair of running shoes. He gave these to one of his runners. The runner laced them on and ran like a rabbit.

Bowerman phoned me, excited, and told me about his experiment. He wanted me to send a sample of his waffle-soled shoes to one of my new factories. Of course, I said. I’d send it right away—to Nippon Rubber.

I look back over the decades and see him toiling in his workshop, Mrs. Bowerman carefully helping, and I get goosebumps. He was Edison in Menlo Park, Da Vinci in Florence, Tesla in Wardenclyffe. Divinely inspired. I wonder if he knew, if he had any clue, that he was the Daedalus of sneakers, that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations. I wonder if he could conceive in that moment all that he’d done. All that would follow.

I know I couldn’t.