سال هزار و نهصد و هفتاد و هفت

1977

His name was M. Frank Rudy, he was a former aerospace engineer, and he was a true original. One look at him told you he was a nutty professor, though it wasn’t until years later that I learned the full extent of his nuttiness. (He kept a meticulous diary of his sex life and bowel movements.) He had a business partner, Bob Bogert, another brainiac, and they had a Crazy Idea, and together they were going to pitch us—that’s the sum total of what I knew that morning in March 1977 as we settled around the conference table. I wasn’t even sure how these guys reached us, or how they’d arranged this meeting.

“Okay, fellas,” I said, “what’ve you got?”

It was a beautiful day, I remember. The light outside the room was a buttery pale yellow, and the sky was blue for the first time in months, so I was distracted, a little spring feverish, as Rudy leaned his weight on the edge of the conference table and smiled. “Mr. Knight, we’ve come up with a way to inject . . . air . . . into a running shoe.”

I frowned and dropped my pencil. “Why?” I said.

“For greater cushioning,” he said. “For greater support. For the ride of a lifetime.”

I stared. “You’re kidding me, right?”

I’d heard a lot of silliness from a lot of different people in the shoe business, but this. Oh. Brother.

Rudy handed me a pair of soles that looked as if they’d been teleported from the twenty-second century. Big, clunky, they were clear thick plastic and inside were—bubbles? I turned them over. “Bubbles?” I said.

“Pressurized air bags,” he said.

I set down the soles and gave Rudy a closer look, a full head-to-toe. Six-three, lanky, with unruly dark hair, bottle-bottom glasses, a lopsided grin, and a severe vitamin D deficiency, I thought. Not enough sunshine. Or else a long-lost member of the Addams Family.

He saw me appraising him, saw my skepticism, and wasn’t the least fazed. He walked to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and began writing numbers, symbols, equations. He explained at some length why an air shoe would work, why it would never go flat, why it was the Next Big Thing. When he finished I stared at the blackboard. As a trained accountant I’d spent a good part of my life looking at blackboards, but this Rudy fella’s scribbles were something else. Indecipherable.

Humans have been wearing shoes since the Ice Age, I said, and the underlying design hasn’t changed all that much in forty thousand years. There hadn’t really been a breakthrough since the late 1800s, when cobblers started lasting left and right shoes differently, and rubber companies started making soles. It didn’t seem all too likely that, at this late date in history, something so new, so revolutionary, was going to be dreamed up. “Air shoes” sounded to me like jet packs and moving sidewalks. Comic book stuff.

Rudy still wasn’t discouraged. He kept at it, unflappable, earnest. Finally he shrugged and said that he understood. He’d tried to pitch Adidas and they’d been skeptical, too. Abracadabra. That was all I needed to hear.

I asked if I could fit his air soles into my running shoes and give them a try. “They don’t have a moderator,” he said. “They’d be loose and wobbly.”

“I don’t care about that,” I said.

I squeezed the soles into my shoes, slipped the shoes back on, laced them up. Not bad, I said, bouncing up and down.

I went for a six-mile run. They were indeed unstable. But they were also one heck of a ride.

I ran back to the office. Still covered with sweat, I ran straight up to Strasser and told him: “I think we might have something here.”

THAT NIGHT STRASSER and I went to dinner with Rudy and Bogert. Rudy explained more of the science behind the air soles, and this second time around it started to make sense. I told him there was a possibility we could do business. Then I turned it over to Strasser to close.

I’d hired Strasser for his legal mind, but by 1977 I’d discovered his true talent. Negotiating. The first few times I asked him to work out a contract with sports agents, the toughest negotiators in the world, he more than held his own. I was amazed. So were the agents. Every time, Strasser walked away with more than we’d ever hoped. No one scared him, no one matched him in a clash of wills. By 1977 I was sending him into every negotiation with total confidence, as if I were sending in the Eighty-Second Airborne.

His secret, I think, was that he just didn’t care what he said or how he said it or how it went over. He was totally honest, a radical tactic in any negotiation. I recall one tug-of-war Strasser had over Elvin Hayes, the Washington Bullets all-star, whom we badly wanted to sign again. Elvin’s agent told Strasser, “You should give Elvin your whole damn company!”

Strasser yawned. “You want it? Help yourself. We’ve got ten grand in the bank.

“Final offer, take it or leave it.”

The agent took it.

Now, seeing great potential in these “air soles,” Strasser offered Rudy ten cents for every pair of soles that we sold, and Rudy demanded twenty, and after weeks of haggling they settled somewhere in the middle. We then shipped Rudy and his partner back to Exeter, which was becoming our de facto Research and Development Department.

Of course, when Johnson met Rudy, he did exactly what I’d done. He slipped some air soles into his running shoes and trotted six brisk miles, after which he phoned me. “This could be huge,” he said.

“That’s what I thought,” I said.

But Johnson worried that the bubble would cause friction. His foot felt hot, he said. He had the start of a blister. He suggested putting air in the midsole as well, to level out the ride. “Don’t tell me,” I said, “tell your new roommate, Mr. Rudy.”

FRESH OFF HIS successful closing with Rudy, we gave Strasser another critical assignment. Sign college basketball coaches. Nike had a solid stable of NBA players, and sales of basketball shoes were rising briskly, but we had virtually no college teams. Not even the University of Oregon. Unthinkable.

The coach, Dick Harter, told us in 1975 that he’d left the decision up to his players, and the team vote was 6–6. So the team stayed with Converse.

The next year the team voted for Nike, 9–3, but Harter said it was still too close, so he was staying with Converse.

What the?

I told Hollister to lobby the players steadily over the next twelve months. Which he did. And the 1977 vote was 12–0 for Nike.

The next day I met Harter in Jaqua’s office, and he told us he still wasn’t ready to sign.

Why not?

“Where’s my twenty-five hundred dollars?” he said.

“Ah,” I said. “Now I get it.”

I mailed Harter a check. At last my Ducks would wear Nikes on the hardboards.

At almost this same odd moment in time, a second strange shoe inventor showed up on our doorstep. His name was Sonny Vaccaro, and he was just as unique as Frank Rudy. Short, round, with constantly darting eyes, he spoke in a soupy voice with an Americanized Italian accent, or an Italianized American accent, I couldn’t place it. He was a shoe dog, for sure, but a shoe dog straight out of The Godfather. When he first arrived at Nike he carried with him several shoes of his own invention, which set off gales of laughter around the conference room. The guy was no Rudy. And yet in the course of conversation he claimed to be chummy with every college basketball coach in the country. Somehow, years before, he’d founded a popular high school all-star game, the Dapper Dan Classic, and it was a big hit, and through it he’d gotten to know all the coaching royalty.

“Okay,” I told him, “you’re hired. You and Strasser hit the road, go out and see if you can crack that college basketball market.”

All the great basketball schools—UCLA, Indiana, North Carolina, and so on—had long-standing deals with Adidas or Converse. So who was left? And what could we offer? We hurriedly dreamed up an “Advisory Board,” another version of our Pro Club, our NBA reward system—but it was small beer. I fully expected Strasser and Vaccaro to fail. And I expected to see neither of them for a year, at least.

One month later Strasser was standing in my office, beaming. And shouting. And ticking off names. Eddie Sutton, Arkansas! Abe Lemmons, Texas! Jerry Tarkanian, UNLV! Frank McGuire, South Carolina! (I leaped out of my chair. McGuire was a legend: He’d defeated Wilt Chamberlain’s Kansas team to win the national championship for North Carolina.) We hit pay dirt, Strasser said.

Plus, almost as a throw-in, he mentioned two under-the-radar youngsters: Jim Valvano at Iona and John Thompson at Georgetown.

(A year or two later he did the same thing with college football coaches, landing all the greats, including Vince Dooley and his national champion Georgia Bulldogs. Herschel Walker in Nikes—yes.)

We rushed out a press release, announcing that Nike had these schools under contract. Alas, the press release had a bad typo. Iona was spelled “Iowa.” Lute Olson, coach at Iowa, phoned immediately. He was irate. We apologized and said we’d send a correction the next day.

He got quiet. “Well now wait wait,” he said, “what’s this Advisory Board anyway . . . ?”

The Harter Rule, in full effect.

OTHER ENDORSEMENTS WERE a greater struggle. Our tennis effort had started so promisingly, with Nastase, but then we’d hit that speed-bump with Connors, and now Nastase was dumping us. Adidas had offered him one hundred thousand dollars a year, including shoes, clothes, and rackets. We had the right to match, but it was out of the question. “Fiscally irresponsible,” I said to Nasty’s agent, and everyone else who would listen. “No one will ever see a sports endorsement deal that big ever again!”

So there we were in 1977 without a horse in tennis. We quickly hired a local pro to be a consultant, and that summer he and I went to Wimbledon. On our first day in London we met with a group of American tennis officials. “We’ve got some great young players,” they said. “Elliot Telscher may be the best. Gottfried is also outstanding. Whatever you do, just stay away from the kid playing out on Court 14.”

“Why?”

“He’s a hothead.”

I went straight to Court 14. And fell madly, hopelessly in love with a frizzy-haired high schooler from New York City named John McEnroe.

AT THE SAME time we were signing deals with athletes and coaches and nutty professors, we were coming out with the LD 1000, a running shoe that featured a dramatically flared heel. The heel flared so much, in fact, that from certain angles it looked like a water ski. The theory was that a flared heel would lessen torque on the leg and reduce pressure on the knee, thus lowering the risk of tendinitis and other running-related maladies. Bowerman designed it, with heavy input from Vixie the podiatrist. Customers loved it.

At first. Then came the issues. If a runner didn’t land just right, the flared heel could cause pronation, knee problems, or worse. We issued a recall and braced ourselves for a public backlash—but it never came. On the contrary, we heard nothing but gratitude. No other shoe company was trying new things, so our efforts, successful or not, were seen as noble. All innovation was hailed as progressive, forward-thinking. Just as failure didn’t deter us, it didn’t seem to diminish the loyalty of our customers.

Bowerman, however, got very down on himself. I tried to console him by reminding him that there was no Nike without him, so he should continue to invent, create, fearlessly. The LD 1000 was like a literary genius’s novel that didn’t quite come together. It happened to the best of them. No reason to stop writing.

My pep talks didn’t work. And then I made the mistake of mentioning the air sole we had in development. I told Bowerman about Rudy’s oxygenated innovation, and Bowerman scoffed. “Pff—air shoes. That’ll never work, Buck.”

He sounded a bit—jealous?

I considered it a good sign. His competitive juices were already flowing again.

MANY AFTERNOONS I’D sit around the office with Strasser, trying to figure out why some lines were selling and some not, which led to broader discussions of what people thought of us, and why. We didn’t have focus groups, or market research—we couldn’t afford them—so we tried to intuit, divine, read tea leaves. Clearly people liked the look of our shoes, we agreed. Clearly they liked our story: Oregon firm founded by running geeks. Clearly they liked what wearing a pair of Nikes said about them. We were more than a brand; we were a statement.

Some of the credit went to Hollywood. We had a guy out there giving Nikes to stars, all kinds of stars, big, little, rising, fading. Every time I turned on the TV our shoes were on a character in some hit show—Starsky & Hutch, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Incredible Hulk. Somehow, our Hollywood liaison got a pair of Senorita Cortezes into the hands of Farrah Fawcett, who wore them in a 1977 episode of Charlie’s Angels. That was all it took. One quick shot of Farrah in Nikes and every store in the nation was sold out of Senorita Cortezes by noon the next day. Soon the cheerleaders at UCLA and USC were jumping and leaping in what was commonly called the Farrah Shoe.

All of which meant more demand . . . and more problems meeting demand. Our manufacturing base was broader. Besides Japan, we now had several factories in Taiwan and two smaller factories in Korea, plus Puerto Rico and Exeter, but still we couldn’t keep up. Also, the more factories we brought online, the more strain it put on our cash.

Occasionally our problems had nothing to do with cash. In Korea, for instance, the five biggest factories were so massive, and the competition among them so cutthroat, we knew we were going to get knocked off soon. Sure enough, one day I received in the mail a perfect replica of our Nike Bruin, including the trademark swoosh. Imitation is flattery, but knockoff is theft, and this theft was diabolical. The detail and workmanship, without any input from our people, was startlingly good. I wrote the president of the factory and demanded he cease and desist or I’d have him thrown in jail for a hundred years.

And by the way, I added, how would you like to work with us?

I signed a contract with his factory in the summer of 1977, which ended our knockoff problem for the moment. More important, it gave us the capacity to shift production in a huge way, if need be.

It also ended once and for all our dependence on Japan.

THE PROBLEMS WERE never going to stop, I realized, but for the moment we had more momentum than problems. To build on this momentum we rolled out a new ad campaign with a sexy new slogan: “There is no finish line.” It was the idea of our new ad agency and its CEO, John Brown. He’d just opened his own shop in Seattle, and he was young, bright, and of course the opposite of an athlete. That was all we seemed to hire in those days. Besides Johnson and myself, Nike was a haven for the sedentary. Still, nonjock or not, Brown managed to dream up a campaign and a tagline that perfectly captured Nike’s philosophy. His ad showed a single runner on a lonely country road, surrounded by tall Douglas firs. Oregon, clearly. The copy read: “Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.”

Everyone around me thought the ad was bold, fresh. It didn’t focus on the product, but on the spirit behind the product, which was something you never saw in the 1970s. People congratulated me on that ad as if we’d achieved something earth-shattering. I’d shrug. I wasn’t being modest. I still didn’t believe in the power of advertising. At all. A product, I thought, speaks for itself, or it doesn’t. In the end, it’s only quality that counts. I couldn’t imagine that any ad campaign would ever prove me wrong or change my mind.

Our advertising people, of course, told me I was wrong, wrong, a thousand percent wrong. But again and again I’d ask them: Can you say definitively that people are buying Nikes because of your ad? Can you show it to me in black-and-white numbers?

Silence.

No, they’d say . . . we can’t say that definitively.

So then it’s a little hard to get enthused, I’d say—isn’t it?

Silence.

I OFTEN WISHED I had more time to kick back and debate the niceties of advertising. Our semidaily crises were always bigger and more pressing than what slogan to print under a picture of our shoes. In the second half of 1977 the crisis was our debenture holders. They were suddenly clamoring for a way to cash in. By far the best way for them to do so would be a public offering, which, we tried to explain to them, was not an option. They didn’t want to hear that.

I turned once more to Chuck Robinson. He’d served with distinction as lieutenant commander on a battleship in World War II. He’d built Saudi Arabia’s first steel mill. He’d helped negotiate the grain deal with the Soviets. Chuck knew business cold, better than anyone I’d ever met, and I’d been wanting his advice for quite some time. But over the last few years he’d been the number two man under Henry Kissinger at the State Department, and thereby “off-limits” to me, according to Jaqua. Now, with Jimmy Carter newly elected, Chuck was on Wall Street and available once again for consultations. I invited him out to Oregon.

I’ll never forget his first day in our office. I caught him up on the developments of the last few years and thanked him for his invaluable counsel about Japanese trading companies. Then I showed him our financial statements. He flipped through them, started to laugh. He couldn’t stop laughing. “Compositionally,” he said, “you are a Japanese trading company—90 percent debt!”

“I know.”

“You can’t live like this,” he said.

“Well . . . I guess that’s why you’re here.”

As the first order of business, I invited him to be on our board of directors. To my surprise, he agreed. Then I asked his opinion about going public.

He said going public wasn’t an option. It was mandatory. I needed to solve this cash flow problem, he said, attack it, wrestle it to the ground, or else I could lose the company. Hearing his assessment was frightening, but necessary.

For the first time ever I saw going public as inevitable, and I couldn’t help it, the realization made me sad. Of course we stood to make a great deal of money. But getting rich had never factored in my decisions, and it mattered even less to the Buttfaces. So when I brought it up at the next meeting and told them what Chuck had said, I didn’t ask for another debate. I just put it to a vote.

Hayes was for.

Johnson was against.

Strasser, too. “It’ll spoil the culture,” he kept saying, over and over.

Woodell was on the fence.

If there was one thing we all agreed on, however, it was the lack of barriers. Nothing stood in the way of going public. Sales were extraordinary, word of mouth was positive, legal disputes were behind us. We had debt, but for the moment it was manageable. At the start of the 1977 Christmas season, as the brightly colored lights appeared on the houses in my neighborhood, I recall thinking during one of my nightly runs: Everything is about to change. It’s just a matter of time.

And then came the letter.

AN UNIMPOSING LITTLE thing. Standard white envelope. Embossed return address. U.S. Customs Service, Washington, DC. I opened it and my hands started to shake. It was a bill. For $25 million.

I read it, and reread it. I couldn’t make heads or tails. As best I could determine, the federal government was saying that Nike owed customs duties dating back three years, by virtue of something called the “American Selling Price,” an old duty-assessing method. American Selling—what? I called Strasser into my office and thrust the letter at him. He read it, laughed. “This can’t be real,” he said, tugging his beard. “My reaction exactly,” I said.

We passed it back and forth and agreed it had to be a mistake. Because if it was real, if we actually did owe $25 million to the government, we were out of business. Just like that. All this talk of going public had been a colossal waste of time. Everything since 1962 had been a waste of time. There is no finish line? This right here, this is the finish line.

Strasser made a few phone calls and came back to me the next day. This time he wasn’t laughing. “It might be real,” he said.

And its origin was sinister. Our American competitors, Converse and Keds, plus a few small factories—in other words, what was left of the American shoe industry—were all behind it. They’d lobbied Washington, in an effort to slow our momentum, and their lobbying had paid off, better than they’d ever dared hope. They’d managed to convince customs officials to effectively hobble us by enforcing this American Selling Price, an archaic law that dated back to the protectionist days, which preceded—some say prompted—the Great Depression.

Essentially the American Selling Price law, or ASP, said that import duties on nylon shoes must be 20 percent of the manufacturing cost of the shoe—unless there’s a “similar shoe” manufactured by a competitor in the United States. In which case, the duty must be 20 percent of the competitor’s selling price. So all our competitors needed to do was make a few shoes in the United States, get them declared “similar,” then price them sky high—and boom. They could send our import duties sky high, too.

And that’s just what they did. One dirty little trick, and they’d managed to spike our import duties by 40 percent—­retroactively. Customs was saying we owed them import duties dating back years, to the tune of $25 million. Dirty trick or not, Strasser told me customs wasn’t joking around. We owed them $25 million, and they wanted it. Now.

I put my head on my desk. A few years earlier, when my fight had been with Onitsuka, I told myself the problem was rooted in cultural differences. Some part of me, shaped by World War II, wasn’t all that surprised to be at odds with a former foe. Now I was in the position of the Japanese, at war with the United States of America. With my own government.

This was one conflict I never imagined, and desperately didn’t want, and yet I couldn’t duck it. Losing meant annihilation. What the government was demanding, $25 million, was very nearly our sales number for all of 1977. And even if we could somehow give them a year’s worth of revenue, we couldn’t continue to pay import duties that were 40 percent higher.

So there was only one thing to do, I told Strasser with a sigh. “We’ll have to fight this with everything we’ve got.”

I DON’T KNOW why this crisis hit me harder, mentally, than all the others. I tried to tell myself, over and over, We’ve been through bad times, we’ll get through this.

But this one just felt different.

I tried to talk to Penny about it, but she said I didn’t actually talk, I grunted and stared off. “Here comes the wall,” she’d say, exasperated, and a little frightened. I should have told her, That’s what men do when they fight. They put up walls. They pull up the drawbridge. They fill in the moat.

But from behind my rising wall I didn’t know how. I lost the ability in 1977 to speak. It was either silence or rage with me. Late at night, after talking on the phone with Strasser, or Hayes, or Woodell, or my father, I couldn’t see any way out. I could only see myself folding up this business I’d worked so hard to build. So I’d erupt—at the telephone. Instead of hanging up, I’d slam the receiver down, then slam it down again, harder and harder, until it shattered. Several times I beat the living tar out of that telephone.

After I’d done this three times, maybe four, I noticed the repairman from the telephone company eyeing me. He replaced the phone, checked to make sure there was a dial tone, and as he was packing up his tools he said very softly: “This is . . . really . . . immature.”

I nodded.

“You’re supposed to be a grown-up,” he said.

I nodded again.

If a phone repairman feels the need to chastise you, I told myself, your behavior probably needs modifying. I made promises to myself that day. I vowed that from then on I’d meditate, count backward, run twelve miles a night, whatever it took to hold it together.

HOLDING IT TOGETHER wasn’t the same thing as being a good father. I’d always promised myself that I’d be a better father to my sons than my father had been to me—meaning I’d give them more explicit approval, more attention. But in late 1977, when I evaluated myself honestly, when I looked at how much time I was spending away from the boys, and how distant I was even when I was home, I gave myself low marks. Going strictly by the numbers, I could only say that I was 10 percent better than my father had been with me.

At least I’m a better provider, I told myself.

And at least I keep telling them their bedtime stories.

Boston, April 1773. Along with scores of angry colonists, protesting the rise of import duties on their beloved tea, Matt and Travis History snuck aboard three ships in Boston Harbor and threw all the tea overboard . . .

The minute their eyes were closed, I would sneak out of the room and settle into my recliner and reach for the phone. Hey, Dad. Yeah. How you doing? . . . Me? Not so good.

Over the last ten years this had been my nightcap, my salvation. But now, more than ever, I lived for it. I craved things I could only get from my old man, though I’d have been hard-pressed to name them.

Reassurance?

Affirmation?

Comfort?

On December 9, 1977, I got them all, in a burst. Sports, of course, were the cause.

The Houston Rockets were playing the Los Angeles Lakers that night. At the start of the second half, Lakers guard Norm Nixon missed a jumper, and his teammate Kevin Kunnert, a seven-foot beanpole out of Iowa, fought for the rebound with Houston’s Kermit Washington. In the tussle, Washington pulled down Kunnert’s shorts, and Kunnert retaliated with an elbow. Washington then socked Kunnert in the head. A fight broke out. As Houston’s Rudy Tomjanovich ran over to defend his teammates, Washington turned and threw a devastating haymaker, breaking Tomjanovich’s nose, and jaw, and separating his skull and facial bones from his skin. Tomjanovich fell to the floor as if hit with a shotgun blast. His massive body struck the ground with a sickening smack. The sound echoed throughout the upper reaches of the L.A. Forum, and for several seconds Tomjanovich lay there, motionless, in an ever-widening puddle of his own blood.

I hadn’t heard anything about it until I talked to my father that night. He was breathless. I was surprised that he’d watched the game, but everyone in Portland was basketball crazy that year, because our Trail Blazers were the defending NBA champs. Still, it wasn’t the game, per se, that had him breathless. After telling me about the fight, he cried, “Oh, Buck, Buck, it was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen.” Then there was a long pause and he added, “The camera kept zooming in and you could see quite clearly . . . on Tomjanovich’s shoes . . . the swoosh! They kept zooming in on the swoosh.”

I’d never heard such pride in my father’s voice. Sure, Tomjanovich was in a hospital fighting for his life, and sure his facial bones were floating around his head—but Buck Knight’s logo was in the national spotlight.

That might have been the night the swoosh became real to my father. Respectable. He didn’t actually use the word “proud.” But I hung up the phone feeling as if he had.

It almost makes this all worthwhile, I told myself.

Almost.

SALES HAD BEEN climbing geometrically, year after year, ever since the first few hundred pairs I sold out of my Valiant. But as we closed out 1977 . . . sales were going berserk. Nearly $70 million. So Penny and I decided to buy a bigger house.

It was a strange thing to do, in the midst of an apocalyptic fight with the government. But I liked the idea of acting as if things were going to work out.

Fortune favors the brave, that sort of thing.

I also liked the idea of a change of scenery.

Maybe, I thought, it will initiate a change of luck.

We were sad to leave the old house, of course. Both boys had taken their first steps there, and Matthew had lived for that swimming pool. He was never so at peace as when frolicking in the water. I recall Penny shaking her head and saying, “One thing’s for certain. That boy will never drown.”

But both boys were getting so big, they desperately needed more room, and the new place had plenty. It sat on five acres high above Hillsboro, and every room felt spacious and airy. From the first night we knew we’d found our home. There was even a built-in niche for my recliner.

To honor our new address, our new start, I tried to keep a new schedule. Unless I was out of town, I tried to attend all the youth basketball games, and youth soccer games, and Little League games. I spent whole weekends teaching Matthew to swing a bat, though both of us wondered why. He refused to keep his back foot still. He refused to listen. He argued with me constantly.

The ball’s moving, he said, why shouldn’t I?

Because it’s harder to hit that way.

That was never a good enough reason for him.

Matthew was more than a rebel. He was, I discovered, more than a contrarian. He positively couldn’t abide authority, and he perceived authority lurking in every shadow. Any opposition to his will was oppression and thus a call to arms. In soccer, for instance, he played like an anarchist. He didn’t compete against the opponent so much as against the rules—the structure. If the other team’s best player was coming toward him on a breakaway, Matthew would forget the game, forget the ball, and just go for the kid’s shins. Down went the kid, out came the parents, and pandemonium would ensue. During one Matthew-­sparked melee, I looked at him and realized he didn’t want to be there any more than I did. He didn’t like soccer. For that matter, he didn’t care for sports. He was playing, and I was watching him play, out of some sense of obligation.

Over time his behavior had a suppressive effect on his younger brother. Though Travis was a gifted athlete and loved sports, Matthew had turned him off. One day little Travis simply retired. He would no longer go out for any teams. I asked him to reconsider, but the only thing he had in common with Matthew, and maybe his father, was a stubborn streak. Of all the negotiations in my life, those with my sons have been the most difficult.

On New Year’s Eve, 1977, I went around my new house, putting out the lights, and I felt a kind of fissure deep within the bedrock of my existence. My life was about sports, my business was about sports, my bond with my father was about sports, and neither of my two sons wanted anything to do with sports.

Like the American Selling Price, it all seemed so unjust.