سال هزار و نهصد و هفتاد و هشت

1978

Strasser was our five-star general, and I was ready to follow him into any fray, any fusillade. In our fight with Onitsuka his outrage had comforted and sustained me, and his mind had been a formidable weapon. In this new fight with the Feds he was doubly outraged. Good, I thought. He stomped around the offices like a pissed-off Viking, and his stomps were music to my ears.

We both knew, however, that rage wasn’t going to be enough. Nor was Strasser alone. We were taking on the United States of America. We needed a few good men. So Strasser reached out to a young Portland lawyer, a friend of his named Richard Werschkul.

I don’t remember ever being introduced to Werschkul. I don’t remember anyone asking me to meet him or hire him. I just remember suddenly being aware of Werschkul, extremely conscious of his presence, all the time. The way you’re aware of a big woodpecker in your front yard. Or on your head.

For the most part Werschkul’s presence was welcome. He had the kind of go-go motor we liked, and the credentials we always looked for. Stanford undergrad, University of Oregon Law. He also had a compelling personality, a presence. Dark, wiry, sarcastic, bespectacled, he possessed an uncommonly deep, plummy baritone, like Darth Vader with a head cold. Overall he gave the impression of a man with a plan, and the plan didn’t include surrender or sleep.

On the other hand, he also had an eccentric streak. We all did, but Werschkul had what Mom Hatfield might have called a “wild hair.” There was always something about him that didn’t quite . . . fit. For instance, though he was a native Oregonian, he had a baffling East Coast air. Blue blazers, pink shirts, bow ties. Sometimes his accent suggested summers in Newport, rowing for Yale—a string of polo ponies. Surpassing strange in a man who knew his way around the Willamette Valley. And while he could be very witty, even silly, he could change on a dime and become scary serious.

Nothing made him more serious than the topic of Nike vs. U.S. Customs.

Some inside Nike worried about Werschkul’s seriousness, fearing it bordered on obsession. Fine by me, I thought. Obsessives were the only ones for the job. The only ones for me. Some questioned his stability. But when it came to stability, I asked, who among us will throw the first stone?

Besides, Strasser liked him, and I trusted Strasser. So when Strasser suggested that we promote Werschkul, and move him to Washington, D.C., where he’d be closer to the politicians we’d need on our side, I didn’t hesitate. Neither, of course, did Werschkul.

ABOUT THE SAME time we dispatched Werschkul to Washington, I sent Hayes to Exeter to check on things at the factory, and to see how Woodell and Johnson were getting along. Also on his agenda was the purchase of something called a rubber mill. Allegedly it would help us do a better job of dictating the quality of our outer soles and midsoles. More, Bowerman wanted it for his experiments, and my policy was still WBW: Whatever Bowerman Wants. If Bowerman requisitions a Sherman tank, I told Woodell, don’t ask questions. Just dial the Pentagon.

But when Hayes asked Woodell about “these rubber mill gizmos,” and where to find one, Woodell shrugged. Never heard of them. Woodell referred Hayes to Giampietro, who knew everything worth knowing about rubber mills, of course, and days later Hayes found himself trekking with Giampietro into the backwoods of Maine, to the little town of Saco, and an auction of industrial equipment.

Hayes wasn’t able to find a rubber mill at the auction, but he did fall in love with the auction site, an old redbrick factory on an island in the Saco River. The factory was something out of Stephen King, but that didn’t spook Hayes. It spoke to him. I guess it was to be expected that a man with a bulldozer fetish would become enamored of a rusted-out factory. The surprising part was, the factory happened to be for sale. Price: $500,000. Hayes offered the factory owner $100,000, and they settled on $200,000.

“Congratulations,” Hayes and Woodell said when they phoned that afternoon.

“For what?”

“For only slightly more than the cost of a rubber mill you are the proud owner of a whole damn factory,” they said.

“The heck are you talking about?”

They filled me in. Like Jack telling his mother about the magic beans, they mumbled when they got to the part about the price. And about the factory needing tens of thousands of dollars in repairs.

I could tell they’d been drinking, and later Woodell would confess that, after stopping at a huge discount liquor outlet in New Hampshire, Hayes whooped: “At prices like this? A man can’t afford not to drink!”

I rose from my chair and yelled into the phone, “You dummies! What do I need with a nonworking factory in Saco, Maine?”

“Storage?” they said. “And one day it could be a complement to our factory in Exeter.”

In my best John McEnroe I screamed, “You cannot be serious! Don’t you dare!”

“Too late. We already bought it.”

Dial tone.

I sat down. I didn’t even feel mad. I was too upset to be mad. The Feds were dunning me for $25 million I didn’t have and my men were running around the country writing checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars more, without even asking me. Suddenly I became calm. Quasi-comatose. I told myself, Who cares? When the government comes in, when they repossess everything, lock, stock, and barrel, let them figure out what to do with a nonworking factory in Saco, Maine.

Later Hayes and Woodell called back and said they’d only been kidding about buying the factory. “Pulling your chain,” they said. “But you do need to buy it. You must.”

Okay, I said wearily. Okay. Whatever you dummies think best.

WE WERE ON track in 1979 for sales of $140 million. Better yet, our quality was rising apace. People in the trade, industry insiders, were writing articles, praising us for “finally” putting out a better shoe than Adidas. Personally, I thought the insiders were late to the party. Other than a few early stumbles, our quality had been tops for years. And we’d never lagged in innovation. (Plus, we had Rudy’s air soles in the pipeline.)

Aside from our war with the government, we were in great shape.

Which seemed like saying: Aside from being on death row, life was grand.

Another good sign. We kept outgrowing our headquarters. We moved again that year, to a forty-thousand-square-foot building all our own, in Beaverton. My private office was sleek, and huge, bigger than our entire first headquarters next to the Pink Bucket.

And utterly empty. The interior decorator decided to go ­Japanese minimalist—with one touch of the absurd that everyone found hilarious. She thought it would be a hoot to set beside my desk a leather chair that was a giant baseball mitt. “Now,” she said, “you can sit there every day and think about your . . . sports things.”

I sat in the mitt, like a foul ball, and looked out the window. I should have reveled in that moment, savored the humor and the irony. Getting cut from my high school baseball team had been one of the great hurts of my life, and now I was sitting in a giant mitt, in a swank new office, presiding over a company that sold “sports things” to professional baseball players. But instead of cherishing how far we’d come, I saw only how far we had to go. My window looked onto a beautiful stand of pines, and I definitely couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

I didn’t understand what was happening, in the moment, but now I do. The years of stress were taking their toll. When you see only problems, you’re not seeing clearly. At just the moment I needed to be my sharpest, I was approaching burnout.

I OPENED THE final Buttface of 1978 with a rah-rah speech, trying to fire up the troops, but especially myself. “Gentlemen,” I said, “our industry is made up of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs! And next year . . . finally . . . one of the dwarfs is going to get into Snow White’s pants!”

As if the metaphor needed further explanation, I explained that Adidas was Snow White. And our time, I thundered, is coming!

But first we needed to start selling clothes. Aside from the plain numerical fact that Adidas sold more apparel than shoes, apparel gave them a psychological edge. Apparel helped them lure bigger athletes into sweeter endorsement deals. Look at all we can give you, Adidas would say to an athlete, pointing to their shirts and pants and other gear. And they could say the same thing when they sat down with sporting goods stores.

Besides, if we ever resolved our fight with the Feds, and if we ever wanted to go public, Wall Street wouldn’t give us the respect we deserved if we were just a shoe company. We needed to be diverse, which meant developing a solid line of apparel—which meant finding someone darned good to put in charge of it. At the Buttface I announced that someone would be Ron Nelson.

“Why him?” Hayes asked.

“Uh, well,” I said, “for starters, he’s a CPA . . .”

Hayes waved his arms over his head. “Just what we need,” he said, “another accountant.”

He had me there. I did seem to hire nothing but accountants. And lawyers. It wasn’t that I had some bizarre affection for accountants and lawyers, I just didn’t know where else to look for talent. I reminded Hayes, not for the first time, that there’s no shoe school, no University of Footwear from which we could recruit. We needed to hire people with sharp minds, that was our priority, and accountants and lawyers had at least proved that they could master a difficult subject. And pass a big test.

Most had also demonstrated basic competence. When you hired an accountant, you knew he or she could count. When you hired a lawyer, you knew he or she could talk. When you hired a marketing expert, or product developer, what did you know? Nothing. You couldn’t predict what he or she could do, or if he or she could do anything. And the typical business school graduate? He or she didn’t want to start out with a bag selling shoes. Plus, they all had zero experience, so you were simply rolling the dice based on how well they did in an interview. We didn’t have enough margin for error to roll the dice on anyone.

Besides, as accountants went, Nelson was a standout. He’d become a manager in just five years, which was ridiculously fast. And he’d been valedictorian at his high school. (Alas, we didn’t find out until later that he went to high school in eastern Montana; his class had five people.)

On the minus side of the ledger, because he’d become an accountant so fast, Nelson was young. Maybe too young to handle something as big as the launch of an apparel line. But I told myself that his youth wouldn’t be a critical factor, because starting an apparel line was relatively easy. After all, there wasn’t any technology or physics involved. As Strasser had once quipped, “There’s no such thing as air shorts.”

Then, during one of my first meetings with Nelson, right after I’d hired him, I noticed . . . he had absolutely no sense of style. The more I looked him over, up and down, side to side, the more I realized that he might have been the worst dresser I’d ever met. Worse than Strasser. Even Nelson’s car, I noticed one day in the parking lot, was a hideous shade of brown. When I mentioned this to Nelson, he laughed. He had the nerve to brag that every car he’d ever owned had been the same brown.

“I might have made a mistake with Nelson,” I confided to Hayes.

I WAS NO fashion plate. But I knew how to wear a decent suit. And because my company was launching an apparel line, I now started paying closer attention to what I wore, and what those around me wore. On the second front I was appalled. Bankers and investors, reps from Nissho, all kinds of people we needed to impress, were passing through our new halls, and whenever they saw Strasser in his Hawaiian shirts, or Hayes in his bulldozer-driving outfits, they did triple-takes. Sometimes our eccentricity was funny. (A top executive at Foot Locker said, “We think of you guys as gods—until we see your cars.”) But most times it was embarrassing. And potentially damaging. Thus, around Thanksgiving, 1978, I instituted a strict company dress code.

The reaction wasn’t terribly enthusiastic. Corporate bullshit, many grumbled. I was mocked. Mostly I was ignored. To even a casual observer, it became clear that Strasser started dressing worse. When he showed up to work one day in baggy-seated Bermuda shorts, as if he were walking a Geiger counter down the beach, I couldn’t stand by. This was rank insubordination.

I intercepted him in the halls and called him out. “You need to wear a coat and tie!” I said.

“We’re not a coat-and-tie company!” he shot back.

“We are now.”

He walked away from me.

In the coming days Strasser continued to dress with a studied, confrontational casualness. So I fined him. I instructed the bookkeeper to deduct seventy-five dollars from Strasser’s next paycheck.

He threw a fit, of course. And he plotted. Days later he and Hayes came to work in coats and ties. But preposterous coats and ties. Stripes and plaids, checks with polka dots, all of it rayon and polyester—and burlap? They meant it as a farce, but also as a protest, a gesture of civil disobedience, and I was in no mood for two fashion Gandhis staging a dress-in. I disinvited them both from the next Buttface. Then I ordered them both to go home and not to come back until they could behave, and dress, like adults.

“And—you’re fined again!” I yelled at Strasser.

“Then you’re fucked!” he yelled back.

Just then, at that exact moment, I turned. Coming toward me was Nelson, dressed worse than the lot of them. Polyester bell-bottoms, a pink silk shirt open to his navel. Strasser and Hayes were one thing, but where the heck did this new guy get off protesting my dress code? After I’d just hired him? I pointed at the door and sent him home, too. From the confused, horrified look on his face I realized he wasn’t protesting. He was just naturally unstylish.

My new head of apparel.

I retreated that day to my baseball-mitt chair and stared out the window for a long, long time. Sports things.

I knew what was coming. And, oh, it came.

A few weeks later Nelson stood before us and made his formal presentation of the first-ever line of Nike apparel. Beaming with pride, grinning with excitement, he laid all the new clothes on the conference table. Soiled workout shorts, ragged T-shirts, wrinkled hoodies—each putrid item looked as if it had been donated to, or pilfered from, a Dumpster. The topper: Nelson pulled each item from a dirty brown paper bag, which looked as if it also contained his lunch.

At first we were in shock. None of us knew what to say. Finally, someone chuckled. Strasser, probably. Then someone haw-hawed. Woodell, maybe. Then the dam burst. Everyone was laughing, rocking back and forth, falling out of their chairs. Nelson saw that he’d goofed, and in a panic he started stuffing the clothes back into the paper bag, which ripped apart, which made everyone laugh harder. I was laughing, too, harder than anyone, but at any moment I felt as if I might start sobbing.

Shortly after that day I transferred Nelson to the newly formed production department, where his considerable accounting talents helped him do a great job. Then I quietly shifted Woodell to apparel. He did his typically flawless job, assembling a line that gained immediate attention and respect in the industry. I asked myself why I didn’t just let Woodell do everything.

Including my job. Maybe he could fly back east and get the Feds off my back.

AMID ALL THIS turmoil, amid all this uncertainty about the future, we needed a morale booster, and we got it at the tail end of 1978, when we finally brought out the Tailwind. Developed in Exeter, made in Japan, the brainchild of M. Frank Rudy was more than a shoe. It was a work of postmodern art. Big, shiny, bright silver, filled with Rudy’s patented air soles, it featured twelve different product innovations. We hyped it to the heavens, with a splashy ad campaign, and tied the launch to the Honolulu Marathon, where many runners would be wearing it.

Everyone flew out to Hawaii for the launch, which turned into a drunken bacchanal, and a mock coronation of Strasser. I was transitioning him from legal to marketing, moving him out of his comfort zone, as I liked to do with everyone now and then, to prevent them from growing stale. Tailwind was Strasser’s first big project, so he felt like Midas. “Nailed it,” he kept saying, and who could begrudge him a bit of chest-thumping. After its wildly successful debut, Tailwind became a sales monster. Within ten days we thought it might have a chance of eclipsing the waffle trainer.

Then the reports began to trickle in. Customers were returning the shoe to stores, in droves, complaining that the thing was blowing up, falling apart. Autopsies on the returned shoes revealed a fatal design flaw. Bits of metal in the silver paint were rubbing against the shoe’s upper, acting like microscopic razors, slicing and shredding the fabric. We issued a recall, of sorts, and offered full refunds, and half of the first generation of Tailwinds ended up in recycling bins.

What began as a morale booster ended up being a body blow to everyone’s confidence. Each person reacted in his own way. Hayes drove in frantic circles on a bulldozer. Woodell stayed longer each day at the office. I toggled dazedly between my baseball mitt and my recliner.

In time we all agreed to pretend it was no big deal. We’d learned a valuable lesson. Don’t put twelve innovations into one shoe. It asks too much of the shoe, to say nothing of the design team. We reminded each other that there was honor in saying, “Back to the drawing board.” We reminded each other of the many waffle irons Bowerman had ruined.

Next year, we all said. You’ll see. Next year. The dwarf is going to get Snow White.

But Strasser couldn’t get past it. He started drinking, showing up late to work. His mode of dress was now the least of my problems. This might have been his first real failure, ever, and I’ll always remember those dreary winter mornings, seeing him shamble into my office with the latest bad news about his Tailwind. I recognized the signs. He, too, was approaching burnout.

The only person who wasn’t depressed about the Tailwind was Bowerman. In fact, its catastrophic debut helped pull him out of the slump in which he’d been mired since retiring. How he loved being able to tell me, to tell us all, “Told you so.”

OUR FACTORIES IN Taiwan and Korea were humming along, and we opened new ones that year in Heckmondwike, England, and Ireland. Industry watchers pointed to our new factories, and our sales, and said we were unstoppable. Few imagined we were broke. Or that our head of marketing was wallowing in a depression. Or that our founder and president was sitting in a giant baseball mitt with a long face.

The burnout spread around the office like mono. And while we were all burning out, our man in Washington was flaming out.

Werschkul had done everything we’d asked of him. He’d buttonholed politicians. He’d petitioned, lobbied, pleaded our cause with passion, if not always with sanity. Day after day he’d run up and down the halls of Congress, handing out free pairs of Nikes. Swag, with a side of swoosh. (Knowing that representatives were legally bound to report gifts worth more than $35, Werschkul always included an invoice for $34.99.) But every pol told Werschkul the same thing. Give me something in writing, son, something I can study. Give me a breakdown of your case.

So Werschkul spent months writing a breakdown—and in the process suffered a breakdown. What was supposed to be a summary, a brief, had ballooned into an exhaustive history, The Decline and Fall of the Nike Empire, which ran to hundreds of pages. It was longer than Proust, longer than Tolstoy, and not a fraction as readable. It even had a title. Without a shred of irony Werschkul called it: Werschkul on American Selling Price, Volume I.

When you thought about it, when you really thought about it, what really scared you was that Volume I.

I sent Strasser back east to rein in Werschkul, check him into a psych ward if necessary. Just calm the kid down, I said. That first night they went to a local pub in Georgetown for a cocktail or three, and at the end of the night Werschkul wasn’t any calmer. On the contrary. He got up on a table and delivered his stump speech to the patrons. He went full Patrick Henry. “Give me Nike or give me death!” The patrons were ready to vote for the latter. Strasser tried to coax Werschkul down off the chair, but Werschkul was just getting warmed up. “Don’t you people realize,” he shouted, “that freedom is on trial here? FREEDOM! Did you know that Hitler’s father was a customs inspector?”

On the plus side, I think Werschkul scared Strasser straight. He seemed like the old Strasser when he returned and told me about Werschkul’s mental condition.

We had a good laugh, a healing laugh. Then he handed me a copy of Werschkul on American Selling Price, Volume I. Werschkul had even had it bound. In leather.

I looked at the title: WASP. How perfect. How Werschkul.

“Are you going to read it?” Strasser said.

“I’ll wait for the movie,” I said, plopping it on my desk.

I knew right then that I’d have to start flying back to Washington, D.C., take on this fight myself. There was no other way.

And maybe it would cure my burnout. Maybe the cure for any burnout, I thought, is to just work harder.