Nike's founder finally tells his story

SHOE DOG
A memoir by the creator of Nike
Phil Knight
Simon & Schuster UK
386 pages; Rs 599

Phil Knight is a reticent individual who is rarely seen in public. His colleagues at Nike, much like their co-founder, seldom talk to the media. The company's annual board meeting is like a sweeping tornado that goes past you before you know it - a hasty hour-long conversation that seeks to chalk out a winning formula for its myriad brands whose sales top $30 billion. And all its trade secrets are tightly guarded.

So, when Mr Knight confessed that he was writing a memoir, many associated with the sportswear giant expressed disbelief. Mr Knight, an aloof public figure for much of his life, was finally about to set off on a long overdue tell-all spree. The result is a revealing and suspenseful book, quite the effervescent antithesis of the self-aggrandising memoirs that we've become accustomed to reading. Shoe Dog is a brave attempt by Mr Knight at unveiling himself to the world. Not only does he openly share Nike's success story but also unhesitatingly acknowledges his shortcomings as a manager.

Mr Knight's was an unconventional dream: the thought of importing Japanese sports shoes to the fledgling American market was met with the most tepid response from his classmates at Stanford. Some shrugged awkwardly, others laughed uncontrollably. "No one asked a single question. They greeted my passion and intensity with labored sighs and vacant stares," he writes.

But Mr Knight was hardly someone to give up. Fresh out of business school, he borrowed a couple of thousand dollars from his father and embarked on a trip across continents that took him to Athens, Kathmandu, Hong Kong, Nairobi, Calcutta (as it was known then) - where he contracted diarrhoea - and, finally, Tokyo. He even spent a couple of months selling useless encyclopaedias with a friend in Honolulu. His father felt that this multi-continent sojourn would help his son complete his education.

In Tokyo, Mr Knight showed up at the factory of Onitsuka, a shoe company that had dominated the Japanese shoe market for decades. This meeting is the scene of one of the more amusing passages in the book. Asked which company he represents, Mr Knight blurts out "Blue Ribbon Sports" - the name that Nike first took when it was officially founded in 1964. The name came from the blue ribbons awarded to him for his successes on the running track in college and that now bedecked his room at his Oregon home.

The year 1991 saw the release of Swoosh, an unofficial biography of Nike. The authors, J B Strasser and Laurie Becklund, managed to interview every Nike executive apart from Mr Knight. Here, Mr Knight seems to have more than made up for that lost opportunity. He candidly talks about his relationship with William Bowerman, his athletics coach at the University of Oregon, and later his business partner. More intriguing is the story behind how Mr Knight failed wretchedly at so many things in his youth, and how Nike got kicked out of two of Portland's biggest banks.

Mr Knight movingly talks about the physical and mental trauma that a budding entrepreneur goes through while starting a business. Nike may seem like a runaway success but embedded deep in Shoe Dog is the blood and sweat that made the company such a phenomenon. He uses light prose coupled with beautifully-crafted sentences, making Shoe Dog a very readable story. The humour is profound but not overpowering, and Mr Knight's affable honesty is what makes this such a thrilling read.

Where Shoe Dog fails is in telling Nike's whole story. The book starts in 1962 and grinds to a halt in 1980 - the year Nike went public. By concluding speedily, Mr Knight chooses to ignore the years - the 1990s and the early 2000s - when the Nike sensation truly took flight, reaching unfathomable heights. There is no mention of the human billboard that was Michael Jordan, who helped Nike leapfrog Adidas and left its biggest competitor in a daze it is still struggling to live with.

There is no mention of the launch of Air Jordan, Tiger Woods or LeBron James either. Also, greater details about the controversies that devoured the company in the early '90s would have been appreciated. Essentially, Shoe Dog stumbles not on the things that Mr Knight mentions, but on the details he has comfortably left out. The acknowledgements at the end of the book reserve a puny space for ghost writer J R Moehringer, who made Open, Andre Agassi's autobiography, such a gripping read.

Even then, Shoe Dog is a sincere, brilliantly strung together book that mystically captures the Nike growth story. If Shoe Dog were to be made into a film, then the audience would be thoroughly enchanted. We are delighted that Phil Knight has finally spoken.