سال هزار و نهصد و شصت و شش

1966

As I neared the end of my contract with Onitsuka, I checked the mail every day, hoping for a letter that would say they wanted to renew. Or that they didn’t. There would be relief in knowing ­either way. Of course I was also hoping for a letter from Sarah, saying she’d changed her mind. And as always I was braced for a letter from my bank, telling me my business was no longer welcome.

But every day the only letters were from Johnson. Like Bowerman, the man didn’t sleep. Ever. I could think of no other explanation for his ceaseless stream of correspondence. Much of which was pointless. Along with gobs of information I didn’t need, the typical Johnson letter would include several long parenthetical asides, and some kind of rambling joke.

There might also be a hand-drawn illustration.

There might also be a musical lyric.

Sometimes there was a poem.

Batted out on a manual typewriter that violently Brailled the onionskin pages, many Johnson letters contained some kind of story. Maybe “parable” is a better word. How Johnson had sold this person a pair of Tigers, but down the road said person might be good for X more pairs, and therefore Johnson had a plan . . . How Johnson had chased and badgered the head coach at such-and-such high school, and tried to sell him six pairs, but in the end sold him a baker’s dozen . . . which just went to show . . .

Often Johnson would describe in excruciating detail the latest ad he’d placed or was contemplating placing in the back pages of Long Distance Log or Track & Field News. Or he’d describe the photograph of a Tiger shoe he’d included with the ad. He’d constructed a makeshift photo studio in his house, and he’d pose the shoes seductively on the sofa, against a black sweater. Never mind that it sounded a bit like shoe porn, I just didn’t see the point of placing ads in magazines read exclusively by running nerds. I didn’t see the point of advertising, period. But Johnson seemed to be having fun, and he swore the ads worked, so, fine, far be it from me to stop him.

The typical Johnson letter would invariably close with a lament, either sarcastic or pointedly earnest, about my failure to respond to his previous letter. And the one before that, etc. Then there would be a PS, and usually another PS, and sometimes a pagoda of PS’s. Then one last plea for encouraging words, which I never sent. I didn’t have time for encouraging words. Besides, it wasn’t my style.

I look back now and wonder if I was truly being myself, or if I was emulating Bowerman, or my father, or both. Was I adopting their man-of-few-words demeanor? Was I maybe modeling all the men I admired? At the time I was reading everything I could get my hands on about generals, samurai, shoguns, along with biographies of my three main heroes—Churchill, Kennedy, and Tolstoy. I had no love of violence, but I was fascinated by leadership, or lack thereof, under extreme conditions. War is the most extreme of conditions. But business has its warlike parallels. Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.

I wasn’t that unique. Throughout history men have looked to the warrior for a model of Hemingway’s cardinal virtue, pressurized grace. (Hemingway himself wrote most of A Moveable Feast while gazing at a statue of Marshal Ney, Napoléon’s favorite commander.) One lesson I took from all my home-schooling about heroes was that they didn’t say much. None was a blabbermouth. None micromanaged. Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. So I didn’t answer Johnson, and I didn’t pester him. Having told him what to do, I hoped that he would surprise me.

Maybe with silence.

To Johnson’s credit, though he craved more communication, he never let the lack of it discourage him. On the contrary, it motivated him. He was anal, he recognized that I was not, and though he enjoyed complaining (to me, to my sister, to mutual friends), he saw that my managerial style gave him freedom. Left to do as he pleased, he responded with boundless creativity and energy. He worked seven days a week, selling and promoting Blue Ribbon, and when he wasn’t selling, he was beaverishly building up his customer data files.

Each new customer got his or her own index card, and each index card contained that customer’s personal information, shoe size, and shoe preferences. This database enabled Johnson to keep in touch with all his customers, at all times, and to keep them all feeling special. He sent them Christmas cards. He sent them birthday cards. He sent them notes of congratulation after they completed a big race or marathon. Whenever I got a letter from Johnson I knew it was one of dozens he’d carried down to the mailbox that day. He had hundreds and hundreds of customer-correspondents, all along the spectrum of humanity, from high school track stars to octogenarian weekend joggers. Many, upon pulling yet another Johnson letter from their mailboxes, must have thought the same thing I did: “Where does this guy find the time?”

Unlike me, however, most customers came to depend on Johnson’s letters. Most wrote him back. They’d tell him about their lives, their troubles, their injuries, and Johnson would lavishly console, sympathize, and advise. Especially about injuries. Few in the 1960s knew the first thing about running injuries, or sports injuries in general, so Johnson’s letters were often filled with information that was impossible to find anywhere else. I worried briefly about liability issues. I also worried that I’d one day get a letter saying Johnson had rented a bus and was driving them all to the doctor.

Some customers freely volunteered their opinion about Tigers, so Johnson began aggregating this customer feedback, using it to create new design sketches. One man, for instance, complained that Tiger flats didn’t have enough cushion. He wanted to run the Boston Marathon but didn’t think Tigers would last the twenty-six miles. So Johnson hired a local cobbler to graft rubber soles from a pair of shower shoes into a pair of Tiger flats. Voilà. Johnson’s Frankenstein flat had space-age, full-length, midsole cushioning. (Today it’s standard in all training shoes for runners.) The jerry-rigged Johnson sole was so dynamic, so soft, so new, Johnson’s customer posted a personal best in Boston. Johnson forwarded me the results and urged me to pass them along to Tiger. Bowerman had just asked me to do the same with his batch of notes a few weeks earlier. Good grief, I thought, one mad genius at a time.

EVERY NOW AND then I’d make a mental note to warn Johnson about his growing list of pen pals. Blue Ribbon was supposed to confine itself to the thirteen western states, and Full-time Employee Number One was not doing so. Johnson had customers in thirty-seven states, including the entire Eastern Seaboard, which was the heart of Marlboro Country. The Marlboro Man wasn’t doing anything with his territory, so Johnson’s incursions seemed harmless. But we didn’t want to rub the man’s nose in it.

Still, I never got around to telling Johnson my concerns. Per usual, I didn’t tell him anything.

AT THE START of summer I decided my parents’ basement was no longer big enough to serve as the headquarters of Blue Ribbon. And the servants’ quarters weren’t big enough for me. I rented a one-bedroom apartment downtown, in a spiffy new high-rise. The rent was two hundred dollars, which seemed pretty steep, but oh well. I also rented a few essentials—table, chairs, king-sized bed, olive couch—and tried to arrange them stylishly. It didn’t look like much, but I didn’t care, because my real furniture was shoes. My first-ever bachelor pad was filled from floor to ceiling with shoes.

I toyed with the idea of not giving Johnson my new address. But I did.

Sure enough, my new mailbox began to fill with letters. Return address: P.O. Box 492, Seal Beach, CA 90740.

None of which I answered.

THEN JOHNSON WROTE me two letters I couldn’t ignore. First, he said that he, too, was moving. He and his new wife were splitting up. He was planning to stay in Seal Beach, but taking a small bachelor apartment.

Days later he wrote to say he’d been in a car wreck.

It happened in the early morning, somewhere north of San Bernardino. He was on his way to a road race, of course, where he’d intended to both run and sell Tigers. He’d fallen asleep at the wheel, he wrote, and woke to find himself and his 1956 Volkswagen Bug upside down and airborne. He struck the divider, then rolled, then flew out of the car, just before it somersaulted down the embankment. When Johnson’s body finally stopped tumbling, he was on his back, looking at the sky, his collarbone, foot, and skull all shattered.

The skull, he said, was actually leaking.

Worse, being newly divorced, he had no one to care for him during his convalescence.

The poor guy was one dead dog from becoming a country-­western song.

Despite all these recent calamities, Johnson was of good cheer. He assured me in a series of chirpy follow-up letters that he was managing to meet all his obligations. He was dragging himself around his new apartment, filling orders, shipping shoes, corresponding promptly with all customers. A friend was bringing him his mail, he said, so not to worry, P.O. Box 492 was still fully operational. In closing, he added that because he was now facing alimony, child support, and untold medical bills, he needed to inquire about the long-term prospects of Blue Ribbon. How did I see the future?

I didn’t lie . . . exactly. Maybe out of pity, maybe haunted by the image of Johnson, single, lonely, his body wrapped in plaster of Paris, gamely trying to keep himself and my company alive, I sounded an upbeat tone. Blue Ribbon, I said, would probably morph over the years into a generalized sporting goods company. We’d probably have offices on the West Coast. And one day, maybe, in Japan. “Farfetched,” I wrote. “But it seems worth shooting for.”

This last line was wholly truthful. It was worth shooting for. If Blue Ribbon went bust, I’d have no money, and I’d be crushed. But I’d also have some valuable wisdom, which I could apply to the next business. Wisdom seemed an intangible asset, but an asset all the same, one that justified the risk. Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks—marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling—seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.

In closing I told Johnson that if he could sell 3,250 pairs of Tigers by the end of June 1966—completely impossible, by my calculations—I would authorize him to open that retail outlet he’d been harassing me about. I even put a PS at the bottom, which I knew he’d devour like a candy treat. I reminded him that he was selling so many shoes, so fast, he might want to speak to an accountant. There are income tax issues to consider, I said.

He fired back a sarcastic thanks for the tax advice. He wouldn’t be filing taxes, he said, “because gross income was $1,209 while expenses total $1,245.” His leg broken, his heart broken, he told me that he was also flat broke. He signed off: “Please send encouraging words.”

I didn’t.

SOMEHOW, JOHNSON HIT the magic number. By the end of June he’d sold 3,250 pairs of Tigers. And he’d healed. Thus, he was holding me to my end of the bargain. Before Labor Day he leased a small retail space at 3107 Pico Boulevard, in Santa Monica, and opened our first-ever retail store.

He then set about turning the store into a mecca, a holy of holies for runners. He bought the most comfortable chairs he could find, and afford (yard sales), and he created a beautiful space for runners to hang out and talk. He built shelves and filled them with books that every runner should read, many of them first editions from his own library. He covered the walls with photos of Tiger-shod runners, and laid in a supply of silk-screened T-shirts with Tiger across the front, which he handed out to his best customers. He also stuck Tigers to a black lacquered wall and illuminated them with a strip of can lights—very hip. Very mod. In all the world there had never been such a sanctuary for runners, a place that didn’t just sell them shoes but celebrated them and their shoes. Johnson, the aspiring cult leader of runners, finally had his church. Services were Monday through Saturday, nine to six.

When he first wrote me about the store, I thought of the temples and shrines I’d seen in Asia, and I was anxious to see how Johnson’s compared. But there just wasn’t time. Between my hours at Price Waterhouse, my drunken revels with Hayes, my nights and weekends handling the minutiae connected with Blue Ribbon, and my fourteen hours each month soldiering in the Reserves, I was on fumes.

Then Johnson wrote me a fateful letter, and I had no choice. I jumped on a plane.

JOHNSON’S CUSTOMER PEN pals now numbered in the hundreds, and one of them, a high school kid on Long Island, had written to Johnson and inadvertently revealed some troubling news. The kid said his track coach had recently been talking about acquiring Tigers from a new source . . . some wrestling coach in Valley Stream or Massapequa or Manhasset.

The Marlboro Man was back. He’d even placed a national ad in an issue of Track and Field. While Johnson was busy poaching on the Marlboro Man’s turf, the Marlboro Man was poaching our poaching. Johnson had done all this marvelous groundwork, had built up this enormous customer base, had spread the word about Tigers through his doggedness and crude marketing, and now the Marlboro Man was going to swoop in and capitalize?

I’m not sure why I hopped on the next plane to Los Angeles. I could have phoned. Maybe, like Johnson’s customers, I needed a sense of community, even if it was a community of just two.

THE FIRST THING we did was go for a long, punishing run on the beach. Then we bought a pizza and brought it back to his apartment, which was your standard Divorced Guy Pad, only more so. Tiny, dark, sparse—it reminded me of some of the no-frills hostels where I’d stayed on my trip around the world.

Of course there were a few distinctly Johnsonian touches. Like shoes everywhere. I thought my apartment was filled with shoes, but Johnson basically lived inside a running shoe. Shoved into every nook and cranny, spread across every surface, were running shoes, and more running shoes, most in some state of deconstruction.

The few nooks and crannies that didn’t hold shoes were filled with books, and more books, piled on homemade bookshelves, rough planks laid on cinder blocks. And Johnson didn’t read trash. His collection was mostly thick volumes of philosophy, religion, sociology, anthropology, and the classics of Western literature. I thought I loved to read; Johnson was next level.

What struck me most was the eerie violet light that suffused the whole place. Its source was a seventy-five-gallon saltwater fish tank. After clearing a place for me on the sofa, Johnson patted the tank and explained. Most newly divorced guys like to prowl singles bars, but Johnson spent his nights prowling under the Seal Beach pier, looking for rare fish. He captured them with something called a “slurp gun,” which he waved under my nose. It looked like a prototype for the first-ever vacuum cleaner. I asked how it worked. Just stick this nozzle into shallow water, he said, and suck up the fish into a plastic tube, then into a small chamber. Then shoot it into your bucket and schlep it home.

He’d managed to accumulate a wide variety of exotic creatures—seahorses, opal-eye perch—which he showed me with pride. He pointed out the jewel of his collection, a baby octopus he’d named Stretch. “Speaking of which,” Johnson said. “Feeding time.”

He reached into a paper sack and pulled out a live crab. “Come on, Stretch,” he said, dangling the crab over the tank. The octopus didn’t stir. Johnson lowered the crab, legs wriggling, onto the tank’s sand-strewn floor. Still no reaction from Stretch. “He dead?” I asked. “Watch,” Johnson said.

The crab danced left and right, panicking, seeking cover. There was none, however. And Stretch knew it. After a few minutes something emerged tentatively from Stretch’s undercarriage. An antenna or tentacle. It unfurled toward the crab and lightly tapped its carapace. Yoo-hoo? “Stretch just injected poison in the crab,” Johnson said, grinning like a proud dad. We watched the crab slowly stop dancing, stop moving altogether. We watched Stretch gently wrap his antenna-tentacle around the crab and drag it back to his lair, a hole he’d dug into the sand beneath a big rock.

It was a morbid puppet show, a dark kabuki play, starring a witless victim and a micro-kraken—was it a sign, a metaphor for our dilemma? One living thing being eaten by another? This was nature, wet in tooth and claw, and I couldn’t help wondering if it was also to be the story of Blue Ribbon and the Marlboro Man.

We spent the rest of the evening sitting at Johnson’s kitchen table and going over the letter from his Long Island informant. He read it aloud, and then I read it silently, and then we debated what to do.

“Get thee to Japan,” Johnson said.

“What?”

“You gotta go,” he said. “Tell them about the work we’ve done. Demand your rights. Kill this Marlboro Man once and for all. Once he starts selling running shoes, once he really gets going, there will be no stopping him. Either we draw a line in the sand, right now, or it’s over.”

I’d just come back from Japan, I said, and I didn’t have the money to go again. I’d poured all my savings into Blue Ribbon, and I couldn’t possibly ask Wallace for another loan. The thought nauseated me. Also, I didn’t have time. Price Waterhouse allowed two weeks’ vacation a year—unless you needed that two weeks for the Reserves, which I did. Then they gave you one extra week. Which I’d already used.

Above all, I told Johnson, “It’s no use. The Marlboro Man’s relationship with Onitsuka predates mine.”

Undaunted, Johnson pulled out his typewriter, the one he’d been using to torture me, and began drafting notes, ideas, lists, which we could then turn into a manifesto for me to deliver to the executives at Onitsuka. While Stretch finished off the crab, we munched our pizza and guzzled beer and plotted late into the night.

BACK IN OREGON the next afternoon, I went straight in to see the office manager at Price Waterhouse. “I’ve got to have two weeks off,” I said, “right now.”

He looked up from the papers on his desk and glared at me, and for one hellishly long moment I thought I was going to be fired. Instead, he cleared his throat and mumbled something . . . odd. I couldn’t make out every word but he seemed to think . . . from my intensity, my vagueness . . . I’d gotten someone pregnant.

I took a step back and started to protest, then shut my mouth. Let the man think what he wants. So long as he gives me the time.

Running a hand through his thinning hair, he finally sighed and said: “Go. Good luck. Hope it all works out.”

I PUT THE airfare on my credit card. Twelve months to pay. And unlike my last visit to Japan, this time I wired ahead. I told the executives at Onitsuka that I was coming, and that I wanted a meeting.

They wired back: Come ahead.

But their wire went on to say that I wouldn’t be meeting with Morimoto. He was either fired or dead. There was a new export manager, the wire said.

His name was Kitami.

KISHIKAN. Japanese for déjà vu. Again I found myself boarding a flight for Japan. Again I found myself underlining and memorizing my copy of How to Do Business with the Japanese. Again I found myself taking the train to Kobe, checking into the Newport, pacing in my room.

At zero hour I took a cab over to Onitsuka. I expected that we’d go into the old conference room, but no, they’d done some remodeling since my last visit. New conference room, they said. Sleeker, bigger, it had leather chairs instead of the old cloth ones, and a much longer table. More impressive, but less familiar. I felt disoriented, intimidated. It was like prepping for a meet at Oregon State and learning at the last minute that it had been moved to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

A man walked into the conference room and extended his hand. Kitami. His black shoes were brightly polished, his hair equally polished. Jet black, swept straight back, not a strand out of place. He was a great contrast to Morimoto, who always looked as if he’d dressed blindfolded. I was put off by Kitami’s veneer, but suddenly he gave me a warm, ready smile, and encouraged me to sit, relax, tell him why I’d come, and now I got the distinct sense that, despite his slick appearance, he wasn’t altogether sure of himself. He was in a brand-new job, after all. He didn’t yet have much—equity. The word sprang to mind.

It occurred to me also that I had high value for Kitami. I wasn’t a big client, but I wasn’t small, either. Location is everything. I was selling shoes in America, a market vital to the future of Onitsuka. Maybe, just maybe, Kitami didn’t want to lose me just yet. Maybe he wanted to hold on to me until they’d transitioned to the Marlboro Man. I was an asset, I was a credit, for the moment, which meant I might be holding better cards than I thought.

Kitami spoke more English than his predecessors, but with a thicker accent. My ear needed a few minutes to adjust as we chatted about my flight, the weather, sales. All the while other executives were filing in, joining us at the conference table. At last Kitami leaned back. “Hai . . .” He waited. “Mr. Onitsuka?” I asked. “Mr. Onitsuka will not be able to join us today,” he said.

Damn. I was hoping to draw upon Mr. Onitsuka’s fondness for me, not to mention his bond with Bowerman. But no. Alone, without allies, trapped in the unfamiliar conference room, I plunged ahead.

I told Kitami and the other executives that Blue Ribbon had done a remarkable job thus far. We’d sold out every order, while developing a robust customer base, and we expected this solid growth to continue. We had forty-four thousand dollars in sales for 1966, and projected to have eighty-four thousand dollars in 1967. I described our new store in Santa Monica, and laid out plans for other stores—for a big future. Then I leaned in. “We would very much like to be the exclusive U.S. distributor for Tiger’s track-and-field line,” I said. “And I think it is very much in Tiger’s interest that we become that.”

I didn’t even mention the Marlboro Man.

I looked around the table. Grim faces. None grimmer than Kitami’s. He said in a few terse words that this would not be possible. Onitsuka wanted for its U.S. distributor someone bigger, more established, a firm that could handle the workload. A firm with offices on the East Coast.

“But, but,” I spluttered, “Blue Ribbon does have offices on the East Coast.”

Kitami rocked back in his chair. “Oh?”

“Yes,” I said, “we’re on the East Coast, the West Coast, and soon we may be in the Midwest. We can handle national distribution, no question.” I looked around the table. The grim faces were becoming less grim.

“Well,” Kitami said, “this change things.”

He assured me that they would give my proposal careful consideration. So. Hai. Meeting adjourned.

I walked back to my hotel and spent a second night pacing. First thing the next morning I received a call summoning me back to Onitsuka, where Kitami awarded me exclusive distribution rights for the United States.

He gave me a three-year contract.

I tried to be nonchalant as I signed the papers and placed an order for five thousand more shoes, which would cost twenty thousand dollars I didn’t have. Kitami said he’d ship them to my East Coast office, which I also didn’t have.

I promised to wire him the exact address.

ON THE FLIGHT home I looked out the window at the clouds above the Pacific Ocean and thought back to sitting atop Mount Fuji. I wondered how Sarah would feel about me now, after this coup. I wondered how the Marlboro Man would feel when he got word from Onitsuka that he was toast.

I stowed away my copy of How to Do Business with the Japanese. My carry-on was stuffed with souvenirs. Kimonos for my mother and sisters and Mom Hatfield, a tiny samurai sword to hang above my desk. And my crowning glory—a small Japanese TV. Spoils of war, I thought, smiling. But somewhere over the Pacific the full weight of my “victory” came over me. I imagined the look on Wallace’s face when I asked him to cover this gigantic new order. If he said no, when he said no, what then?

On the other hand, if he said yes, how was I going to open an office on the East Coast? And how was I going to do it before those shoes arrived? And who was I going to get to run it?

I stared at the curved, glowing horizon. There was only one person on the planet rootless enough, energetic enough, gung-ho enough, crazy enough, to pick up and move to the East Coast, on a moment’s notice, and get there before the shoes did.

I wondered how Stretch was going to like the Atlantic Ocean.