سال هزار و نهصد و شصت و نه

1969

Suddenly, a whole new cast of characters was wandering in and out of the office. Rising sales enabled me to hire more and more reps. Most were ex-runners, and eccentrics, as only ex-runners can be. But when it came to selling they were all business. Because they were inspired by what we were trying to do, and because they worked solely on commission (two dollars a pair), they were burning up the roads, hitting every high school and college track meet within a thousand-mile radius, and their extraordinary efforts were boosting our numbers even more.

We’d posted $150,000 in sales in 1968, and in 1969 we were on our way to just under $300,000. Though Wallace was still breathing down my neck, hassling me to slow down and moaning about my lack of equity, I decided that Blue Ribbon was doing well enough to justify a salary for its founder. Right before my thirty-first birthday I made the bold move. I quit Portland State and went full-time at my company, paying myself a fairly generous eighteen thousand dollars a year.

Above all, I told myself, the best reason for leaving Portland State was that I’d already gotten more out of the school—Penny—than I’d ever hoped. I got something else, too; I just didn’t know it at the time. Nor did I dream how valuable it would prove to be.

IN MY LAST week on campus, walking through the halls, I noticed a group of young women standing around an easel. One of them was daubing at a large canvas, and just as I passed I heard her lamenting that she couldn’t afford to take a class on oil painting. I stopped, admired the canvas. “My company could use an artist,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“My company needs someone to do some advertising. Would you like to make some extra money?”

I still didn’t see any bang-for-the-buck in advertising, but I was starting to accept that I could no longer ignore it. The Standard Insurance Company had just run a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, touting Blue Ribbon as one of the dynamic young companies among its clients. The ad featured a photo of Bowerman and me . . . staring at a shoe. Not as if we were shoe innovators; more as if we’d never seen a shoe before. We looked like morons. It was embarrassing.

In some of our ads the model was none other than Johnson. See Johnson rocking a blue tracksuit. See Johnson waving a javelin. When it came to advertising, our approach was primitive and slapdash. We were making it up as we went along, learning on the fly, and it showed. In one ad—for the Tiger marathon flat, I think—we referred to the new fabric as “swooshfiber.” To this day none of us remembers who first came up with the word, or what it meant. But it sounded good.

People were telling me constantly that advertising was important, that advertising was the next wave. I always rolled my eyes. But if icky photos and made-up words—and Johnson, posed seductively on a couch—were slipping into our ads, I needed to start paying more attention. “I’ll give you two bucks an hour,” I told this starving artist in the hallway at Portland State. “To do what?” she asked. “Design print ads,” I said, “do some lettering, logos, maybe a few charts and graphs for presentations.”

It didn’t sound like much of a gig. But the poor kid was desperate. She wrote her name on a piece of paper. Carolyn Davidson. And her number. I shoved it in my pocket and forgot all about it.

HIRING SALES REPS and graphic artists showed great optimism, and I didn’t consider myself an optimist by nature. Not that I was a pessimist. I generally tried to hover between the two, committing to neither. But as 1969 approached, I found myself staring into space and thinking the future might be bright. After a good night’s sleep, after a hearty breakfast, I could see plenty of reason for hope. Aside from our robust and rising sales numbers, Onitsuka would soon be bringing out several exciting new models, including the Obori, which featured a feather-light nylon upper. Also, the Marathon, another nylon, with lines sleek as a Karmann Ghia. These shoes will sell themselves, I told Woodell many times, hanging them on the corkboard.

Also, Bowerman was back from Mexico City, where he’d been an assistant coach on the U.S. Olympic team, meaning he’d played a pivotal role in the U.S. winning more gold medals than any team, from any nation, ever. My partner was more than famous; he was legendary.

I phoned Bowerman, eager to get his overall thoughts on the Games, and particularly on the moment for which they would forever be remembered, the protest of John Carlos and Tommie Smith. Standing on the podium during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” both men had bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists, a shocking gesture, meant to call attention to racism, poverty, human rights abuses. They were still being condemned for it. But Bowerman, as I fully expected, supported them. Bowerman supported all runners.

Carlos and Smith were shoeless during the protest; they’d conspicuously removed their Pumas and left them on the stands. I told Bowerman I couldn’t decide if this had been a good thing or a bad thing for Puma. Was all publicity really good publicity? Was publicity like advertising? A chimera?

Bowerman chuckled and said he wasn’t sure.

He told me about the scandalous behavior of Puma and Adidas throughout the Games. The world’s two biggest athletic shoe companies—­run by two German brothers who despised each other—had chased each other like Keystone Kops around the Olympic ­Village, jockeying for all the athletes. Huge sums of cash, often stuffed in running shoes or manila envelopes, were passed around. One of Puma’s sales reps even got thrown in jail. (There were rumors that Adidas had framed him.) He was married to a female sprinter, and Bowerman joked that he’d only married her to secure her endorsement.

Worse, it didn’t stop at mere payouts. Puma had smuggled truckloads of shoes into Mexico City, while Adidas cleverly managed to evade Mexico’s stiff import tariffs. I heard through the grapevine they did it by making a nominal number of shoes at a factory in Guadalajara.

Bowerman and I didn’t feel morally offended; we felt left out. Blue Ribbon had no money for payouts, and therefore no presence at the Games.

We’d had one meager booth in the Olympic Village, and one guy working it—Bork. I didn’t know if Bork had been sitting there reading comic books, or just hadn’t been able to compete with the massive presence of Adidas and Puma, but either way his booth generated zero business, zero buzz. No one stopped by.

Actually, one person did stop by. Bill Toomey, a brilliant American decathlete, asked for some Tigers, so he could show the world that he couldn’t be bought. But Bork didn’t have his size. Nor the right shoes for any of his events.

Plenty of athletes were training in Tigers, Bowerman reported. We just didn’t have anybody actually competing in them. Part of the reason was quality; Tigers just weren’t good enough yet. The main reason, however, was money. We had not a penny for endorsement deals.

“We’re not broke,” I told Bowerman, “we just don’t have any money.”

He grunted. “Either way,” he said, “wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to pay athletes? Legally?”

Lastly, Bowerman told me he’d bumped into Kitami at the Games. He didn’t much care for the man. “Doesn’t know a damn thing about shoes,” Bowerman grumbled. “And he’s a little too slick. Little too full of himself.”

I was starting to have the same inklings. I’d gotten a sense from Kitami’s last few wires and letters that he might not be the man he’d seemed, and that he wasn’t the fan of Blue Ribbon he’d appeared to be when I was last in Japan. I had a bad feeling in my bones. Maybe he was getting ready to jack up our prices. I mentioned this to Bowerman, and told him I was taking measures to protect us. Before hanging up I boasted that, though I didn’t have enough cash or cachet to pay athletes, I did have enough to buy someone at Onitsuka. I had a man on the inside, I said, a man acting as my eyes and ears and keeping tabs on Kitami.

I sent out a memo saying as much to all Blue Ribbon employees. (By now we had around forty.) Though I’d fallen in love with Japanese culture—I kept my souvenir samurai sword beside my desk—I also warned them that Japanese business practices were thoroughly perplexing. In Japan you couldn’t predict what either your competition or your partner might do. I’d given up trying. Instead, I wrote, “I’ve taken what I think is a big step to keep us informed. I’ve hired a spy. He works full-time in the Onitsuka Export Department. Without going into a lengthy discussion of why I will just tell you that I feel he is trustworthy.

“This spy may seem somewhat unethical to you, but the spy system is ingrained and completely accepted in Japanese business circles. They actually have schools for industrial spies, much as we have schools for typists and stenographers.”

I can’t imagine what made me use the word “spy” so wantonly, so boldly, other than the fact that James Bond was all the rage just then. Nor can I understand why, when I was revealing so much, I didn’t reveal the spy’s name. It was Fujimoto, whose bicycle I’d replaced.

I think I must have known, on some level, that the memo was a mistake, a terribly stupid thing to do. And that I would live to regret it. I think I knew. But I often found myself as perplexing as Japanese business practices.

KITAMI AND MR. Onitsuka both attended the Games in Mexico City, and afterward they both flew to Los Angeles. I flew down from Oregon to meet them for dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Santa Monica. I was late, of course, and by the time I arrived they were full of sake. Like schoolboys on holiday: Each was wearing a souvenir sombrero, loudly woohooing.

I tried hard to mirror their festive mood. I matched them shot for shot, helped them finish off several platters of sushi, and generally bonded with them both. At my hotel that night I went to bed thinking, hoping, I’d been paranoid about Kitami.

The next morning we all flew to Portland so they could meet the gang at Blue Ribbon. I realized that in my letters to Onitsuka, not to mention my conversations with them, I might have overplayed the grandeur of our “worldwide headquarters.” Sure enough I saw Kitami’s face drop as he walked in. I also saw Mr. Onitsuka looking around, bewildered. I hastened to apologize. “It may look small,” I said, laughing tightly, “but we do a lot of business out of this room!”

They looked at the broken windows, the javelin window closer, the wavy plywood room divider. They looked at Woodell in his wheelchair. They felt the walls vibrating from the Pink Bucket jukebox. They looked at each other, dubious. I told myself: Whelp, it’s all over.

Sensing my embarrassment, Mr. Onitsuka put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “It is . . . most charming,” he said.

On the far wall Woodell had hung a large, handsome map of the United States, and he’d put a red pushpin everywhere we’d sold a pair of Tigers in the last five years. The map was covered with red pushpins. For one merciful moment it diverted attention from our office space. Then Kitami pointed at eastern Montana. “No pins,” he said. “Obviously salesman here not doing job.”

DAYS WENT SWOOSHING by. I was trying to build a company and a marriage. Penny and I were learning to live together, learning to meld our personalities and idiosyncrasies, though we agreed that she was the one with all the personality and I was the idiosyncratic one. Therefore it was she who had more to learn.

For instance, she was learning that I spent a fair portion of each day lost in my own thoughts, tumbling down mental wormholes, trying to solve some problem or construct some plan. I often didn’t hear what she said, and if I did hear I didn’t remember it minutes later.

She was learning that I was absentminded, that I would drive to the grocery store and come home empty-handed, without the one item she’d asked me to buy, because all the way there and all the way back I’d been puzzling over the latest bank crisis, or the most recent Onitsuka shipping delay.

She was learning that I misplaced everything, especially the important things, like wallets and keys. Bad enough that I couldn’t multitask, but I insisted on trying. I’d often scan the financial pages while eating lunch—and driving. My new black Cougar didn’t remain new for long. As the Mr. Magoo of Oregon, I was forever bumping into trees and poles and other people’s fenders.

She was learning that I wasn’t housebroken. I left the toilet seat up, left my clothes where they fell, left food on the counter. I was effectively helpless. I couldn’t cook, or clean, or do even the simplest things for myself, because I’d been spoiled rotten by my mother and sisters. All those years in the servants’ quarters, I’d essentially had servants.

She was learning that I didn’t like to lose, at anything, that losing for me was a special form of agony. I often flippantly blamed Bowerman, but it went way back. I told her about playing Ping-Pong with my father when I was a boy, and the pain of never being able to beat him. I told her that my father would sometimes laugh when he won, which sent me into a rage. More than once I’d thrown down my paddle and run off crying. I wasn’t proud of this behavior, but it was ingrained. It explained me. She didn’t really get it until we went bowling. Penny was a very good bowler—she’d taken a bowling class at Oregon State—so I perceived this as a challenge, and I was going to meet the challenge head-on. I was determined to win, and thus everything other than a strike made me glum.

Above all, she was learning that marrying a man with a start-up shoe company meant living on a shoestring budget. And yet she thrived. I could give her only twenty-five dollars a week for groceries, and still she managed to whip up delicious meals. I gave her a credit card with a two-thousand-dollar limit to furnish our entire apartment, and she managed to buy a dinette table, two chairs, a Zenith TV, and a big couch with soft arms, perfect for napping. She also bought me a brown recliner, which she stuck in a corner of the living room. Now, each night, I could lean back at a forty-five-­degree angle and spin inside my own head all I wanted. It was more comfortable, and safer, than the Cougar.

I got into the habit every night of phoning my father from my recliner. He’d always be in his recliner, too, and together, recliner to recliner, we’d hash out the latest threat confronting Blue Ribbon. He no longer saw my business as a waste of my time, apparently. Though he didn’t say so explicitly, he did seem to find the problems I faced “interesting,” and “challenging,” which amounted to the same thing.

IN THE SPRING of 1969 Penny began to complain of feeling poorly in the mornings. Food didn’t sit well. By midday she was often a little wobbly around the office. She went to the doctor—the same doctor who’d delivered her—and discovered she was pregnant.

We were both overjoyed. But we also faced a whole new learning curve.

Our cozy apartment was now completely inappropriate. We’d have to buy a house, of course. But could we afford a house? I’d just started to pay myself a salary. And in which part of town should we buy? Where were the best schools? And how was I supposed to research real estate prices and schools, plus all the other things that go into buying a house, while running a start-up company? Was it even feasible to run a start-up company while starting a family? Should I go back to accounting, or teaching, or something more stable?

Leaning back in my recliner each night, staring at the ceiling, I tried to settle myself. I told myself: Life is growth. You grow or you die.

WE FOUND A house in Beaverton. Small, only sixteen hundred square feet, but it had an acre of land around it, and a little horse corral, and a pool. There was also a huge pine tree in the front and a Japanese bamboo out back. I loved it. More, I recognized it. When I was growing up my sisters asked me several times what my dream house would look like, and one day they handed me a charcoal pencil and a pad and made me draw it. After Penny and I moved in, my sisters dug out the old charcoal sketch. It was an exact picture of the Beaverton house.

The price was thirty-four thousand dollars, and I popped my shirt buttons to discover that I had 20 percent of that in savings. On the other hand, I’d pledged those savings against my many loans at First National. So I went down to talk to Harry White. I need the savings for a down payment on a house, I said—but I’ll pledge the house.

“Okay,” he said. “On this one we don’t have to consult Wallace.”

That night I told Penny that if Blue Ribbon failed we’d lose the house. She put a hand on her stomach and sat down. This was the kind of insecurity she’d always vowed to avoid. Okay, she kept saying, okaaaay.

With so much at stake, she felt compelled to keep working for Blue Ribbon, right through her pregnancy. She would sacrifice everything to Blue Ribbon, even her deeply held goal of graduating from college. And when she wasn’t physically in the office, she would run a mail order business out of the new house. In 1969 alone, despite morning sickness, swollen ankles, weight gain, and constant fatigue, Penny got out fifteen hundred orders. Some of the orders were nothing more than crude tracings of a human foot, sent in by customers in far-flung places, but Penny didn’t care. She dutifully matched the tracing to the correct shoe and filled the order. Every sale counted.

AT THE SAME time that my family outgrew its home, so did my business. One room beside the Pink Bucket could no longer contain us. Also, Woodell and I were tired of shouting to be heard above that jukebox. So each night after work we’d go out for cheeseburgers, then drive around looking at office space.

Logistically, it was a nightmare. Woodell had to drive, because his wheelchair wouldn’t fit in my Cougar, and I always felt guilty and uncomfortable, being chauffeured by a man with so many limitations. I also felt crazed with nerves, because many of the offices we looked at were up a flight of stairs. Or several flights. This meant I’d have to wheel Woodell up and down.

At such moments I was reminded, painfully, of his reality. During a typical workday, Woodell was so positive, so energetic, it was easy to forget. But wheeling him, maneuvering him, upstairs, downstairs, I was repeatedly struck by how delicate, how helpless he could be. I’d pray under my breath. Please don’t let me drop him. Please don’t let me drop him. Woodell, hearing me, would tense up, and his tension would make me more nervous. “Relax,” I’d say, “I haven’t lost a patient yet—haha!”

No matter what happened, he’d never lose his composure. Even at his most vulnerable, with me balancing him precariously at the top of some dark flight of stairs, he’d never lose touch with his essential philosophy: Don’t you dare feel sorry for me. I’m here to kill you.

(The first time I ever sent him to a trade show, the airline lost his wheelchair. And when they found it, the frame was bent like a pretzel. No problem. In his mutilated chair, Woodell attended the show, ticked off every item on his to-do list, and came home with an ear-to-ear mission-accomplished smile on his face.)

At the end of each night’s search for new office space, Woodell and I would always have a big belly laugh about the whole debacle. Most nights we’d wind up at some dive bar, giddy, almost delirious. Before parting we’d often play a game. I’d bring out a stopwatch and we’d see how fast Woodell could fold up his wheelchair and get it and himself into his car. As a former track star, he loved the challenge of a stopwatch, of trying to beat his personal best. (His record was forty-four seconds.) We both cherished those nights, the silliness, the sense of shared mission, and we mutually ranked them among the solid gold memories of our young lives.

Woodell and I were very different, and yet our friendship was based on a selfsame approach to work. Each of us found pleasure, whenever possible, in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind. And each of us recognized that this small task of finding a bigger office meant we were succeeding. We were making a go of this thing called Blue Ribbon, which spoke to a deep desire, in each of us, to win. Or at least not lose.

Though neither of us was much of a talker, we brought out a chatty streak in each other. Those nights we discussed everything, opened up to each other with unusual candor. Woodell told me in detail about his injury. If I was ever tempted to take myself too seriously, Woodell’s story always reminded me that things could be worse. And the way he handled himself was a constant, bracing lesson in the virtue, and value, of good spirits.

His injury wasn’t typical, he said. And it wasn’t total. He still had some feeling, still had hopes of marrying, having a family. He also had hopes of a cure. He was taking an experimental new drug, which had shown promise in paraplegics. Trouble was, it had a garlicky aroma. Some nights on our office-hunting expeditions Woodell would smell like an old-school pizzeria, and I’d let him hear about it.

I asked Woodell if he was—I hesitated, fearing I had no right—happy. He gave it some thought. Yes, he said. He was. He loved his work. He loved Blue Ribbon, though he sometimes cringed at the irony. A man who can’t walk peddling shoes.

Not sure what to say to this, I said nothing.

Often Penny and I would have Woodell over to the new house for dinner. He was like family, we loved him, but we also knew we were filling a void in his life, a need for company and domestic comforts. So Penny always wanted to cook something special when Woodell came over, and the most special thing she could think of was Cornish game hen, plus a dessert made from brandy and iced milk—she got the recipe from a magazine—which left us all blotto. Though hens and brandy put a serious dent in her twenty-­five-dollar grocery budget, Penny simply couldn’t economize when it came to Woodell. If I told her that Woodell was coming to dinner, she’d reflexively gush: “I’ll get some capons and brandy!” It was more than wanting to be hospitable. She was fattening him up. She was nurturing him. Woodell, I think, spoke to her newly activated ­maternal streak.

I struggle to remember. I close my eyes and think back, but so many precious moments from those nights are gone forever. Numberless conversations, breathless laughing fits. Declarations, revelations, confidences. They’ve all fallen into the sofa cushions of time. I remember only that we always sat up half the night, cataloging the past, mapping out the future. I remember that we took turns describing what our little company was, and what it might be, and what it must never be. How I wish, on just one of those nights, I’d had a tape recorder. Or kept a journal, as I did on my trip around the world.

Still, at least I can always call to mind the image of Woodell, seated at the head of our dinette, carefully dressed in his blue jeans, his trademark V-neck sweater over a white T. And always, on his feet, a pair of Tigers, the rubber soles pristine.

By then he’d grown a long beard, and a bushy mustache, both of which I envied. Heck, it was the sixties, I’d have had a beard down to my chin. But I was constantly needing to go to the bank and ask for money. I couldn’t look like a bum when I presented myself to Wallace. A clean shave was one of my few concessions to The Man.

WOODELL AND I eventually found a promising office, in Tigard, south of downtown Portland. It wasn’t a whole office building—we couldn’t afford that—but a corner of one floor. The rest was occupied by the Horace Mann Insurance Company. Inviting, almost plush, it was a dramatic step up, and yet I hesitated. There had been a curious logic in our being next door to a honky-tonk. But an insurance company? With carpeted halls and water coolers and men in tailored suits? The atmosphere was so button-down, so corporate. Our surroundings, I felt, had much to do with our spirit, and our spirit was a big part of our success, and I worried how our spirit might change if we were suddenly sharing space with a bunch of Organization Men and automatons.

I took to my recliner, gave it some thought, and decided a corporate vibe might be asymmetrical, contrary to our core beliefs, but it might also be just the thing with our bank. Maybe when Wallace saw our boring, sterile new office space, he’d treat us with respect. Also, the office was in Tigard. Selling Tigers out of Tigard—maybe it was meant to be.

Then I thought about Woodell. He said he was happy at Blue Ribbon, but he’d mentioned the irony. Maybe it was more than ironic, sending him out to high schools and colleges to sell Tigers out of his car. Maybe it was torture. And maybe it was a poor use of his talents. What suited Woodell best was bringing order to chaos, problem-solving. One small task.

After he and I went together to sign the Tigard lease, I asked him if he’d like to change jobs, become operations manager for Blue Ribbon. No more sales calls. No more schools. Instead he’d be in charge of dealing with all the things for which I didn’t have the time and patience. Like talking to Bork in L.A. Or corresponding with Johnson in Wellesley. Or opening a new office in Miami. Or hiring someone to coordinate all the new sales reps and organize their reports. Or approving expense accounts. Best of all, Woodell would have to oversee the person who monitored company bank accounts. Now, if he didn’t cash his own paychecks, he’d have to explain the overage to his boss: himself.

Beaming, Woodell said he liked the sound of that very much. He reached out his hand. Deal, he said.

Still had the grip of an athlete.

PENNY WENT TO the doctor in September 1969. A checkup. The doctor said everything looked fine, but the baby was taking its time. Probably another week, he said.

The rest of that afternoon Penny spent at Blue Ribbon, helping customers. We went home together, ate an early dinner, turned in early. About 4:00 a.m. she jostled me. “I don’t feel so good,” she said.

I phoned the doctor and told him to meet us at Emanuel Hospital.

In the weeks before Labor Day I’d made several practice trips to the hospital, and it was a good thing, because now, “game time,” I was such a wreck that Portland looked to me like Bangkok. Everything was strange, unfamiliar. I drove slowly, to make sure of each turn. Not too slowly, I scolded myself, or you’ll have to deliver the baby yourself.

The streets were all empty, the lights were all green. A soft rain was falling. The only sounds in the car were Penny’s heavy breaths and the wipers squeaking across the windshield. As I pulled up to the entrance of the emergency room, as I helped Penny into the hospital, she kept saying, “We’re probably overreacting, I don’t think it’s time yet.” Still, she was breathing the way I used to breathe in the final lap.

I remember the nurse taking Penny from me, helping her into a wheelchair, rolling her down a hall. I followed along, trying to help. I had a pregnancy kit I’d packed myself, with a stopwatch, the same one I’d used to time Woodell. I now timed Penny’s contractions aloud. “Five . . . four . . . three . . .” She stopped panting and turned to me. Through clenched teeth she said, “Stop . . . doing . . . that.”

A nurse now helped her out of the wheelchair and onto a gurney and rolled her away. I stumbled back down the hall into something the hospital called “The Bullpen,” where expectant fathers were expected to sit and stare into space. I would have been in the delivery room with Penny, but my father had warned me against it. He’d told me that I’d been born bright blue, which scared the daylights out of him, and he therefore cautioned me, “At the decisive moment, be somewhere else.”

I sat in a hard plastic chair, eyes closed, doing shoe work in my mind. After an hour I opened my eyes and saw our doctor standing before me. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. He was saying something. That is, his lips were moving. But I couldn’t hear. Life’s a joy? Here’s a toy? Are you Roy?

He said it again: It’s a boy.

“A—a—boy? Really?”

“Your wife did a superb job,” he was saying, “she did not complain once, and she pushed at all the right times—has she taken many Lamaze classes?”

“Lemans?” I said.

“Pardon?”

“What?”

He led me like an invalid down a long hall and into a small room. There, behind a curtain, was my wife, exhausted, radiant, her face bright red. Her arms were wrapped around a quilted white blanket decorated with blue baby carriages. I pushed back a corner of the blanket to reveal a head the size of a ripe grapefruit, a white stocking cap perched on top. My boy. He looked like a traveler. Which, of course, he was. He’d just begun his own trip around the world.

I leaned down, kissed Penny’s cheek. I pushed away her damp hair. “You’re a champion,” I whispered. She squinted, uncertain. She thought I was talking to the baby.

She handed me my son. I cradled him in my arms. He was so alive, but so delicate, so helpless. The feeling was wondrous, different from all other feelings, though familiar, too. Please don’t let me drop him.

At Blue Ribbon I spent so much time talking about quality control, about craftsmanship, about delivery—but this, I realized, this was the real thing. “We made this,” I said to Penny. We. Made. This.

She nodded, then lay back. I handed the baby to the nurse and told Penny to sleep. I floated out of the hospital and down to the car. I felt a sudden and overpowering need to see my father, a hunger for my father. I drove to his newspaper, parked several blocks away. I wanted to walk. The rain had stopped. The air was cool and damp. I ducked into a cigar store. I pictured myself handing my father a big fat robusto and saying, “Hiya, Grandpa!”

Coming out of the store, the wooden cigar box under my arm, I bumped straight into Keith Forman, a former runner at Oregon. “Keith!” I cried. “Heya, Buck,” he said. I grabbed him by the lapels and shouted, “It’s a boy!” He leaned away, confused. He thought I was drunk. There wasn’t time to explain. I kept walking.

Forman had been on the famous Oregon team that set the world record in the four-mile relay. As a runner, as an accountant, I always remembered their stunning time: 16:08.9. A star on Bowerman’s 1962 national championship team, Forman had also been the fifth American ever to break the four-minute mile. And to think, I told myself, only hours ago I’d thought those things made a champion.

FALL. THE WOOLEN skies of November settled in low. I wore heavy sweaters, and sat by the fireplace, and did a sort of self-inventory. I was all stocked up on gratitude. Penny and my new son, whom we’d named Matthew, were healthy. Bork and Woodell and Johnson were happy. Sales continued to rise.

Then came the mail. A letter from Bork. After returning from Mexico City, he was suffering some sort of mental Montezuma’s Revenge. He had problems with me, he told me in the letter. He didn’t like my management style, he didn’t like my vision for the company, he didn’t like what I was paying him. He didn’t understand why I took weeks to answer his letters, and sometimes didn’t answer at all. He had ideas about shoe design, and he didn’t like how they were being ignored. After several pages of all this he demanded immediate changes, plus a raise.

My second mutiny. This one, however, was more complicated than Johnson’s. I spent several days drafting my reply. I agreed to raise his salary, slightly, and then I pulled rank. I reminded Bork that in any company there could only be one boss, and sadly for him the boss of Blue Ribbon was Buck Knight. I told him if he wasn’t happy with me or my management style, he should know that quitting and being fired were both viable options.

As with my “spy memo,” I suffered instant writer’s remorse. The moment I dropped it in the mail I realized that Bork was a valuable part of the team, that I didn’t want to lose him, that I couldn’t afford to lose him. I dispatched our new operations manager, Woodell, to Los Angeles, to patch things up.

Woodell took Bork to lunch and tried to explain that I wasn’t sleeping much, with a new baby and all. Also, Woodell told him, I was feeling tremendous stress after the visit from Kitami and Mr. Onitsuka. Woodell joked about my unique management style, telling Bork that everyone bitched about it, everyone pulled their hair out about my nonresponses to their memos and letters.

In all Woodell spent a few days with Bork, smoothing his feathers, going over the operation. He discovered that Bork was stressed, too. Though the retail store was thriving, the back room, which had basically become our national warehouse, was in shambles. Boxes everywhere, invoices and papers stacked to the ceiling. Bork couldn’t keep pace.

When Woodell returned he gave me the picture. “I think Bork’s back in the fold,” he said, “but we need to relieve him of that warehouse. We need to transfer all warehouse operations up here.” Moreover, he added, we needed to hire Woodell’s mother to run it. She’d worked for years in the warehouse at Jantzen, the legendary Oregon outfitter, so it wasn’t nepotism, he said. Ma Woodell was perfect for the job.

I wasn’t sure I cared. If Woodell was good with it, I was good with it. Plus, the way I saw it: The more Woodells the better.