Founders - #153 Bill Bowerman (Nike)

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

What I learned from reading Bowerman and the Men of Oregon: The Story of Oregon's Legendary Coach and Nike's Cofounder by Kenny Moore. ----Come see a live show with me and Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like The Best on October 19th in New York City. Get your tickets here! ----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can ask me questions directly which I will answer in Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes ---[0:01] Take a primitive organism, any weak, pitiful organism. Say a freshman. Make it lift, or jump or run. Let it rest. What happens? A little miracle. It gets a little better. It gets a little stronger or faster or more enduring. That's all training is. Stress. Recover. Improve. You would think any damn fool could do it, but you won't.[0:25] You work too hard and you rest too little and get hurt. [1:38] You cannot just tell somebody what’s good for him. He won’t listen. He will not listen. First, you have to get his attention.  [4:14] From the book Shoe Dog. Phil Knight on Bowerman: I look back over the decades and see him toiling in his workshop, Mrs. Bowerman carefully helping, and I get goosebumps. He was Edison in Menlo Park, Da Vinci in Florence, Tesla in Wardenclyffe. Divinely inspired. I wonder if he knew, if he had any clue, that he was the Daedalus of sneakers, that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations. I wonder if he could conceive at that moment all that he'd done. All that would follow. I know I couldn't. [8:02] Are you in this simply to do mindless labor or do you want to improve? You can’t improve if you’re always sick or injured. [9:17] Bowerman was decades ahead of putting just as much of an importance on your recovery as you do on your training.  [12:11] In theory, as a coach, he should have been as interested in motivating the lazy as in mellowing the mad, but he wasn’t. “I’m sorry I can’t make them switch brains,” he said. But I can’t.” That left him free to be absorbed by the eager. [17:00] One of the things that makes him so interesting is that he was willing to think from first principles. If he arrived at different collusion he thought was right it didn't matter if 90% of the people in his field were doing it another way. [17:21] Bowerman understood that paradox—the need for both abandoned effort and ironclad control. [18:47] He spent long hours in contented silence, solving a huge range of problems, and he was brutally eloquent when dissecting others’ psyches. Yet he kept the process of himself to himself. [20:42] In his approach to the world, he would take stock, give nothing away, circle to different vantage points, and keep an eye out for a sign of something he might exploit. [28:27] “Because of what he taught,” Bowerman would say, “I went from one of the slowest players to the second fastest. . . I learned from the master.”  [30:40] Bill Hayward was Bill Bowerman’s blueprint: He took from his scrapbook a photograph of Hayward. He had it framed behind glass, to preserve what Hayward had written on it: “Live each day so you can look a man square in the eye and tell him to go to hell!” [32:29] Celebrate optimum rather than maximum.[33:23] He killed a 7-foot rattlesnake with a clipboard. [38:12] If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age seventeen by Bill Bowerman. Not simply the shock, but the way to respond. He attached such honor to not giving up, to doing my utmost. Most kids didn’t have that adjustment of standards, that introduction to true reality.  [47:05] They shook hands on a partnership. Bill would test and design the shoes. Buck [Phil Knight] would run the company. [47:40] Bowerman knew Knight would give the new venture the ceaselessness of a runner. [49:45]  Bowerman’s response to other coaches: “As a coach, my heart is always divided between pity for the men they wreck and scorn for how easy they are to beat.” [53:13] “I don’t believe in chewing on athletes,” he once said. “People are out there to do their best. If you growl at them and they’re not tigers, they’ll collapse. Or they’ll try to make like a tiger. But the tigers are tigers. All you have to do is cool them down a little bit so they don’t make some dumb mistake.” His view was that intelligent men will be taught more by the vicissitudes of life than by a host of artificial training rules. ----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can ask me questions directly which I will answer in Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Bowerman seemed to have been through some mythic struggle. He spit when someone called him coach. Just call me Bill, he said. But few would, or could, at first. This accorded with why we were here. We were to be cultivated, refined. Bowerman was about to ask us to put aside the things of a child. Not by accident did he begin.

Men of Oregon, take a primitive organism, any weak, pitiful organism, say a freshman. Make it lift, or jump, or run. Let it rest. What happens? A little miracle. It gets a little better. It gets a little stronger, or faster, or more enduring. That's all training is. Stress,

recover, improve. You would think any damn fool could do it, but you won't. You work too hard and you rest too little and you get hurt. You yield to the temptations of a liberal education and burn your candle at both ends, and then you get mono. Every angelic lying face I see here is poised to screw up, to overtrain, to fall in love, to flunk out. We have no hard and fast training rules. The vicissitudes of life usually teach an intelligent person what he can handle. It does help to have someone wise in the ways of candles to steady you as you grope toward the light. That would be me. But I regret to inform you, he added, his tone not the least regretful. You cannot just tell somebody what's good for him. He won't listen. He will not listen. First, first, you have to get his attention. Bowerman did not have a central organizing principle. He had this, a central

organizing parable. Farmer can't get his mule to plow, he said. Can't even get him to eat or drink. Finally, he calls in a mule skinner. Guy comes out, doesn't even look at the mule, goes in the barn, gets a two by four, and hits the mule as hard as he can between the ears. The mule goes to his knees. The mule skinner hits him again between the eyes. The farmer drags him off. That's supposed to get him to plow? That's supposed to get him to drink? I can see you don't know a damn thing about mules, said the Skinner. First, you have to get their attention. In the hush that followed, Bowerman's grin was not far from fiendish. This was his allegory, his rationale, his fair warning. He was our mule skinner, and all he would do to us constituted the two-by-four he would use to

crack open our mullish skulls so the lessons might be inserted. Leaving that first meeting, I felt only baffled disquiet. Even men who had trained under him for years were edgy. Bowerman, one of them said, is ruled by a need to unsettle, to disturb. The man lives to get you. That was an excerpt from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Bowerman, the story of Oregon's legendary coach and Nike's co-founder. And it was written by Kenny Moore. Okay. So before I jump into the book, I want to tell you how I came, like why I selected this book to cover this week. I was actually rereading through my highlights from Phil Knight, the founder, co-founder of Nike, his book, Shoe Dog. I covered it, I think back on like founders number 10. And I forgot, you know,

I haven't read the book I think two or three years ago and as I was reading through my notes I forgot how important Bowerman was to Phil Knight and to the founding of Nike and how much Phil Knight admired him I want to read one quote uh one paragraph from Shoe Dog to you and then um and that really pushed me over the edge to try to find a biography and made me really excited to dive deeper into the life and the career and the ideas of Bill Bowerman. He's an extremely accomplished individual. So this is Phil Knight writing in Shoe Dog about his one-time coach and then business partner. I look back over the decades and see him toiling in his workshop, Mrs. Bowerman carefully helping, and I get goosebumps. He was Edison in Menlo Park, Da Vinci in Florence, Daedalus? The Daedalus of sneakers.

That he was making history. Remaking an industry. Transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations. I wonder if he could conceive in that moment all that he had done. All that would follow. I know I couldn't. And one of the great things about Shoe Dog is, I wish all biographies were formatted very similar. He does not spend a lot of time on his ancestors. He talks about his early life,

where he came up with the idea from Nike. And then every chapter is in, the name of the chapter is the year. And he goes through chronological order from the very prehistory of Nike all the way up until it IPOs and then it ends. And as a byproduct of the way it's structured is, it's what I think most people find most interesting about reading biographies, and that's the struggle, the early life, how they came up with the idea, what they had to go through to actually accomplish and to succeed at what they were doing. So when I read that paragraph, I also had to look up that word that he was saying, that he was the Daedalus of sneakers.

I don't know how to, I'm most likely mispronouncing it, but it comes from Greek mythology and it says, in Greek mythology, Daedalus was a skillful architect, craftsman, and artist, and was seen as a symbol of wisdom, knowledge, and power. And I think the fact that Phil Knight used that word, used that as a description of the way he saw the role Bowerman played. He said over and over again that there would be no Nike without Bowerman. So let me just read that part to you.

I wonder if he knew if he had any clue that he was the Daedalus of sneakers, that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations. I wonder if he could conceive in that moment all that he had done, all that would follow. I know that I couldn't. Okay, so that sets up how important he was. The guy lived an amazing life and he's got a really interesting person. I'm going to go ahead and jump into the book. I want to start with the author. So Kenny Moore was one of Bowerman's so we're he there's this great story that gives you a good sense of who bowerman was uh as the person so first is a quote at the beginning of the chapter and it's some guy i don't even know who it is but this is the quote it says a guru gives us himself and then his system a teacher gives us his subject and then ourselves. So remember that word teacher,

because that's the way Bowerman thought of himself. He hated the word coach. He did not consider himself a coach. All right, so let me read the section to you, and it gives you an insight into the relationship that, and the impact that Bowerman had on the author of this book, Kenny Moore. In the spring of 1964, Bill Bowerman gave me his subject

and stood back to see if I deserved it. Bowerman, then 53, had coached six sub-four-minute milers at the University of Oregon and had won the 1962 NCAA Track and Field Championship. I was 20, just finishing my first training run after being out with the flu. He put two fingers on my neck, taking my pulse from my corduroy artery. Easy day, he asked. Easy day, absolutely, I said. Twelve miles, he said, as if he were my physician. He tilted my head back so he could look me in the eye.

He was six feet two and two hundred pounds with a powerful upper body. An easy twelve, I said. Are you in this simply to do mindless labor, he said? Or do you want to improve? To improve? Well, you can't improve if you're always out sick or injured. I know, but Bill, that was an easy 12. He closed great calloused hands around my throat. He did not lift me off the ground, but he did relieve my feet of much of their burden. That's hilarious. He brought my forehead to his. I'm going to ask you to take part in an experiment, he said, with menacing calm. For three weeks, you are not going to run a yard

except in my sight. You will do a three-mile jog here every morning and our regular afternoon Bill, are we agreed? Bill, agreed. As I was feeling faint, I submitted. And so now I'm going to skip over a couple paragraphs, but this goes into what his main, the main insight, and Phil Knight also talks about this in Shoe Dog, was that Bowerman was not only one of the most successful track coaches that ever lived, but he was also decades ahead of putting an importance, just as much importance on your recovery as on your training

and your actual days of competition. And there's a lot of metaphors in this book where Bill's talking about optimizing performance for athletes that I think are transferable to whatever it is that you do for work. And one of them is the idea that you can't burn yourself out, that to achieve great things, you have to burn yourself out, um, that to achieve great things, you have to be able to do those things over a long period of time. And so I would summarize, uh, and I don't want to, summary's not the right word. I would say that Bowerman would, would agree in part with the statement that consistency over intensity.

Um, and he, this is what he's talking about here, where this guy is, where Kenny's running, you know, he's not healed all the way. He's still a little sick. talking about here where this guy is where kenny's running you know he's not healed all the way he's still a little sick um his resting heart rate's too high and he's he he the bowerman's what he'll prioritize is rest and recovery yes just like he was giving the speech the speech i started the podcast with that was a speech to the beginning of every he'd give that speech at the beginning of every track season talking about you know, any is very simple stress recovery growth. OK, so it says it was the easy days that were humiliating.

Reporting to Bowerman morning and evening on track, having him count my laps, barely feeling warmed up before he called three miles. Go in. I did not suffer this gladly. So he talks about like any highly competitive, you know, these are Phil Knight's no different. Bowerman's no different. Kenny Moore's no different. These are type a super driven people. So this is extremely hard to realize that you may get farther by doing less. And it's not to be confused with being lazy. Bowerman didn't have a lazy bone in his body. This guy's an insane person, as you'll get to know him today. So he says, I did not suffer this gladly.

We're going to see the initial reaction. You know, this is 1960s when this is happening. This is a very common reaction that Bowerman would get, not only from athletes, but from other coaches too, until he started kicking all their asses. I did not suffer this gladly. I was tempted to do secret defiant runs, but he had enlisted the rest of the

team in half the town. Every friend was a possible traitor and the potential cost was too great. No one who knew Bill Bowerman doubted he would back up his ultimatum. No one who knew me doubted that I desperately wanted to be an Oregon runner. Moving forward, this was very, very interesting. I guess I'll tell you right up front. Bowerman prioritized the individual. And we're going to see that a lot of his thoughts were around that you have to tailor your teaching, your coaching, the training program to the individual. There's not like a lot of, it's not very black and white. There's a lot of customization. But he talks about the people that he does not want to coach or that he does not want to teach.

So he says, in theory, as a coach, he should have been as interested in motivating the lazy as mellowing the mad. But he wasn't. He regarded the most frustrating athlete as the gifted but casual, the gifted but casual as beyond any real help uh so this is somebody you know is very talented uh got by had such an abundance of talent maybe was really smart they didn't have to work as hard um and so this is what he says he would juggle their roommates to give them an example of ambition but took no further steps to inspire he never gave a pep talk i'm sorry i, I can't make them switch brains, he said, but I can't. And this is the most important sentence, and I know it out of myself, this is a hell of a sentence.

That left him free to be absorbed by the eager. And so I would say the way Bowerman, like, why is that section important? Because he doesn't believe motivation is his job. Like, if you're a driven individual, like, the motivation comes from, it's internal. It comes from within. And so his point is, like, you know, we're making Olympians here. That means you're uncommon amongst uncommon people. So if you don't wake up every day with that drive, then I'm not going to, there's nothing I can say or do to you.

He just said, I can't switch your brain. But if you do have that drive, if you have that dedication, then I'll teach you lessons that I've learned that will get the most out of your ability and hopefully bring you to the highest level in the sport or whatever endeavor that you choose. So I thought it was very interesting. And this, a few paragraphs later, gives us an insight into how he thought about this. Bowerman thought of himself as an educator. He scorned recruiting and almost never gave full scholarships. Anyone can be taught, he said. Those who don't expect a handout, best of all.

I'd sure rather be teaching than blowing smoke up some spoiled brat's ass. Okay, so moving forward, there's a lot of things happening on this page. The author is still giving us some background before we get into the main story. There's two things I want to point out to you here. One, I think I already mentioned this, but Bill Knight said there is no Nike without Bowerman's innovations. He designed, I mean,

think about it. He had multiple decades of training some of the best runners. And that's how Nike started out. It started out as a company wanting to make the best running shoes, right? So just a little bit about that. It says, disdainful of the weight and non-existent cushioning of running shoes in the 1950s, he had taken up cobbling and made us three-ounce spikes that lasted one race. We had no inkling

that these were the beginning of Nike's vast success, but we knew we had better shoes than anyone else. And so that's something I also admire, and I'll just tell you right up front about Bowerman, is that there's a quote in that book, The Fish That Ate the Whale, which I never forgot. And so that's something I also admire. And I'll just tell you right up front about Bowerman is that there's a, there's a quote in that book, uh, the fish, they ate the whale,

which I never forgot. And it says, if you know, your business is quote for the main character of the book, Sam's a Murray. I think it's in founders somewhere in the thirties. Uh, you can go back and listen to it if you haven't and read the book. It's absolutely crazy, fantastic story. But Sam's a Murray says something. He's like, if you know your business from A to Z, there's no problem. You can't solve. And Bowerman had that mindset because he was he was obsessed with trying to be the best track coach and having the best athletes in the world. And so not only would he want, you know, you had to be driven, you had to be naturally talented, you had to be receptive to his lessons. But he would make it like he started cobbling, started making his own shoes. How many track coaches in the world could do that?

It's just insane. And he didn't stop there. Then he starts designing clothes. He starts making some of the clothes out of like the same material parachutes are made out of. He would take like, I think it might be nylon or whatever the actual fabric was. But I do know he used like old parachutes and started like sewing clothes. He did that. So he'd take care of your shoes, what you're wearing. He eventually starts experimenting later on with different mixtures of what track, what like, what tracks are made out of.

And so at his house on the top of a hill, top of a mountain, he's got a cement mixer, the equivalent of a cement mixer. He's doing all this trying to figure out what's the best way i can like what's the best material maybe there's a better uh track i can make so we can go faster he was completely obsessed he knew his business so to speak from a to z uh so this goes i rolled my eyes now we're talking about the author's talking about you know wanting to push more and bowerman trying to temper that natural instinct to just overwork because it's not that he didn't want you to push. He does not want you to get injured because if you get injured, you might be out the entire year. You can't get that back. She says, I rolled my eyes at

Bowerman's patient studies of our strides and metabolism and especially his damn easy days. That's what he was talking about. He's like, hey, you're only going to jog three, you know, three miles and that's it as an example of an easy day. It felt demeaning to just rest. So the reason I include this in the podcast, because these next two sentences is exactly what Bowerman had. This was the way everybody thought about athletics at the time. And so that's what makes Bill Bowerman so interesting. One of the things that makes it so interesting is that he was willing to think from first principles. And if he arrived at a different conclusion

he thought was right, it didn't matter if 90% of the people in his field were doing it the other way. And he winds up being correct. So he says, It felt demeaning to just rest. Work was righteous. Rest was weak-willed and ignoble.

But Bowerman understood that paradox. The need for both abandoned effort and ironclad control. And finally, Bowerman's message starts to get through. We're still in the introduction. I know I'm in trouble because I have a ton of highlights in this book. I really enjoyed it. And I'll tell you the impact it had on me personally at the very end. He had given me his subject. I had found myself. I finally began to penetrate, it finally began to penetrate my thick skull that I had to rise above the world's fixation with sheer work. I had to tend to my own eccentric physiology. I accepted easy days into my life,

and I stopped counting miles. Over the next eight years, the one long run he permitted me every 10 days would turn me into a fourth place finisher in the 1972 Olympic marathon. It was the lesson of my life. And it forces me now to consider with a shiver whether anyone besides Bowerman could have gotten through to me. OK, so now I want to get a little bit into the personality, give you an idea of who this person was. One huge part of his personality is very laconic. He keeps his thoughts to himself. He's not up there. You know, some coaches might expect they're giving a pep talk, giving a motivational speech.

He preferred one-on-one. That's part of the reason he started out as a football coach and gravitated towards track. Because, you know, even though there's a team, you can deal with your athletes on a one-on-one basis. So that was his preferred method. But he says he spent long hours in contented silence, solving a huge range of problems, and he was brutally eloquent when dissecting other psyches. Yet he kept the process of himself to himself. As Barbara Bowerman, that's his wife, they were married for 70 years.

By the time he dies, he dies at 88. She had known him for 70 years. As Barbara Bowerman would recall, I can't tell you how frustrating it was to love him and trust him and know he loved me and trusted me. And still, he would never tell me what he was thinking. His family, they got to Oregon by crossing the Oregon Trail, something that he spoke of often. And this quote that he's going to have here in a minute just makes me laugh every time. It's also in Shoe Dog. But he says, almost all who traveled the Oregon Trail were on the only trip of their lives. It was a defining ordeal, a winnowing out of the non-industrious, non-enduring the inflexible and the uncooperative bowerman was pioneer stock and had a right to cackle as he did that the cowards never started

and the weak died along the way that leaves us so that gives you an insight into some of his personality this story from when he was a young boy will also give you an insight into to desire to live life on his own terms. One of the things I most admire about him on the on the first day of first grade, the teacher asked, can you write your name? Bill cried out. That's what I came here to learn. An early warning that he meant to go through life on his own terms. So it talks about he grew up in this tiny, tiny town. I think it was like a population like 500. It's called Fossil, Oregon. And I just want to read one sentence from this. He seemed to imply that he was so fired by his own wild yearnings,

so temper torn that obedience had been impossible. The ranch life of Fossil taught its children to close off no options, to presume nothing is impossible. In his approach to life. So an early Bill Bowerman was like a hellraiser. His dad dipped out, left his family for another, for his secretary.

Didn't have anything to do with really raising his kids at all. And he, Bowerman had a twin brother that was killed right in front of him when he was really young. Maybe five, six years old, something like that.

And he was crushed in an elevator, an elevator accident. And so, you know, he got into fights. He was very disobedient, just, you know, just a crazy, uncontrollable kid. And that changed one day when he meets his Mule Skinner. And this person has a huge impact on the trajectory of his life. Not very different than the way Bowerman would influence the trajectory of the people that like his athletes.

So he's getting in trouble. This is he's waiting outside of the principal's office. And it says then, as Bowerman himself would always remember, the voice emanated from the inner sanctum. Is that hell raising son of a bitch still out there? Ursel Hedrick was then 30. He had graduated from Oregon in 1916 and been a world war one marine mule skinner and artillery officer standing above a stack of bill's teacher reports he said i think bill at this time is 15 15 or 16 around that age this is ridiculous you're good in band good in

journalism so you're not stupid you're just a hell-raising son of a bitch. Bowerman, Hendrick went on, here's how life is going to go for you. You'll keep up this goddamn fighting, and you'll not only be out of Medford, that's where the school he's at, you'll be out of goddamn everywhere. So he got suspended and almost expelled multiple times because he just could not stop getting fistfights. Nobody is going to stand for this shit. And that's the way it should be.

You'll fight and I'll be rid of you. You'll fight and everybody else will be rid of you. Fight here. Fight there. Die in prison or on some barroom floor. I could give a royal oozing shit. That's just that's justice justice that's just dying by your own goddamn sword and this is where he he gets his attention remember the whole he starts off

he's like listen i'm only here the first thing you have to do before i can teach you is i have to get your attention i have to make sure you have an open mind so my lessons can actually get in and this is what uh ursel what's it yeah ursel is doing for him right here and he gets him with this sentence the only thing wrong with that meaning dying uh dying in a fight in a bar room is that you'll dishonor a goddamn worthwhile human being bill's head came up who elizabeth hoover bowerman bill stopped breathing you will bring eternal shame upon the name of your mother, Hendrick said. What should I do? Bill finally croaked. What do you want me to do?

Control yourself, roared Hendrick. Cut the crap and channel that goddamn energy. Go back to that school and be of use. Make your mother proud. Because I swear to you, Bowerman, I never want to hear your goddamn name again. And so this is the result after this talk. He began to channel. Systematically, he threw himself into his studies, sports, the band, drama, and the school paper. Hedrick's two by four between his eyes would be the lesson of his life. Hedrick got my attention. That's a quote from Bill 50 years after this happened. That's insane. Think about how important this was in his life that you could remember it five decades later.

Whether Bill swore to himself that he would never lose control again isn't known, but this was the beginning of the self-possession another word to think about is discipline that bowerman definitely has over himself self-discipline at the beginning of the self-possession that would strike anyone who met him thereafter bill's turnaround was so dramatic that hedrick would in fact hear his goddamn name again but instead of hell raising and fighting it's because he winds up being a world famous coach and one of the best to ever do what he did so moving forward i think one um we've seen this several times that seeing something done the wrong way can be sometimes you learn more from seeing something done the wrong way than you even do by seeing it done the right way and he realizes

that this he's got a terrible football coach, and he's like, I want to be the opposite of this guy. And that leads him to finding, what I would say, his blueprint, the person that he follows. So he says, Bill at once grasped the nature of his head coach. Doc Spears was dictatorial, abrasively vocal, and resembled a bloodthirsty infantry commander. The varsity had a good team almost in spite of him, Bauer would recall. He was cruel, and he was a bloodthirsty infantry commander the varsity had a good team almost

in spite of him bowerman recall he was cruel and he was a windbag he has on to this day says bowerman has an intense dislike of blowhards the man's bellowing insistence on being called coach turned bill against the word forever so it goes that gives you an insight into why he refused to want to be called coach so he winds up meeting another so that's the football coach he winds up meeting a track coach and it's this guy named bill hayward who winds up becoming uh bowerman's blueprint and so it says uh they start talking he says but i hear people call you colonel said bill bowerman well just call me bill remember that's how he started out the how he started giving the speech to the track team at the beginning of the year. Don't call me coach, just call me Bill.

Just call me Bill, said Oregon's head athletic trainer and track coach, 62-year-old Bill Hayward. Hayward had invented state-of-the-art splints, casts, straps, pads, slings, and braces to keep injured bodies in the lineup and allow them some movement and protection while they healed. The device has fascinated Bowerman. And to note, I left myself on the page. And the reason I'm including that here is because that's exactly, Bowerman does the same thing at Nike. He's making things to go faster, but he also does it for protection

to make sure you don't get injured. Very much so, he copied a lot of Haywood's ideas. In fact, when they want to later on in life, they want to induct Bowerman into the track and field Hall of Fame. And he refused. He says, I'm not going in until you induct Haywood in first. So it gives you an idea of the level of respect and the love that he had for his coach. And so I'm going to read you some description of Haywood, but essentially I'm reading. I'm doing so. So you learn about Bowerman because he copied this to the T.

Hayward declared his personal life off limits. We dilute the word and usually demean the subject when we call someone a character. But Hayward's eccentricity invited it. And he didn't seem to mind. Remember, everything i'm reading to you applies to bowerman uh hayward wasn't especially fatherly towards his charges uh towards his athletes and treated each one differently characteristics bill bowerman would emulate uh hayward also preceded bowerman in being a practical joker and so they start spending a great deal of time together. As they're spending time together, Hayward's just telling them, essentially he's filling them in on the history of the sport.

He says, listening to these litanies of the great, it dawned on Bill that Hayward had enabled, witnessed, or photographed about two-thirds of Olympic track and field history. There was no more experienced village elder if the village was the Olympic ones. This is something that Bowerman was going to want to aspire to. Because of what he taught me, Bowerman would say, I went from one of the slowest players on the team to the second fastest. Bill was grateful to have a guide to good form in his career as well as his stride. But he also came to revere Heywood because he was logical.

It is not just a condensation of hindsight to say that sports in the 1930s was a mishmash of ignorance. He talks about different coaches put arbitrary authority ahead of common sense. Heywood, by contrast, looked for the underlying reasons. This is really going to hone in on the way Bowerman approached his craft. Again, I would say he tried to think of things from first principles. He was not willing to just accept the dogma of his sport of his day. And by questioning that, he went on to finding ways where the accepted dogma was inaccurate and where he could improve on it.

It's very interesting. Haywood, by contrast, looked for the underlying reasons he applied almost all his lessons to himself tiny changes made all the difference this fit in with bill's growing interest in the sciences and what we now term biomechanics how the levers are moved by the muscles how the body properly aligned performs at its optimum that's his that's his entire life work, right? Hayward was half doctor, half inventor. You could say the same thing about Bowerman. Bowerman began to mold himself into one tune.

I learned from the master, he would say. So it's this relationship with Hayward that Bowerman realizes, hey, I want to do exactly what he does. I want to eventually be the field and track coach of Oregon. So Hayward actually makes sure Bowerman is his successor and then dies. And this is how important he was to Bowerman. So this is his mom. This is Bowerman's mom, Lizzie, writing a letter to Hayward. Lizzie Bowerman had sent a letter to Hayward. I asked my son which of his instructors he considered had done the most for him. And without a moment's hesitation, he named you. I am sure there are many boys who feel the same way as Bill does, and I hope they have told you so. You are a teacher who is a friend and who imparts spiritual development and inspiration.

Bowerman took from his scrapbook a photograph of Haywood. He had a frame behind glass to preserve what Haywood had written on it. And it's a quote from Haywood now. Live each day so you can look a man square in the eye and tell him to go to hell. Signed, Bill. Then he hung it outside of his office door where he could see it at the beginning and end of each day. Okay, so now we get to where Bowerman starts coaching and we really see his philosophy. He says, Bowerman began exhorting Oregon runners to finish their workouts exhilarated, not exhausted. His credo was that it was better to underdo than overdo. He was adamant that he trained individuals and not teams. And he came to believe that group

workouts could even be counterproductive. The best man loafs. The worst tears himself down, he would say. Maybe only one guy in the middle gets the optimum work. All of this was the genesis of his annual welcoming line to freshmen. Stress, recover, improve. That's all training is, he'd say. When Bowerman first articulated the hard-easy method, that's the way they classify this throughout the whole book, hard, easy,

he was widely despised for it. The anthem of most coaches then was, the more you put in, the more you get out. When Bowerman chided them, come on, the greatest improvement is made by the man who works most intelligently, they were morally affronted. His easy days were derided. The intentional tailoring of stress to the individual was called coddling.

And so one way to summarize what he's going for, he's trying to optimize for optimum rather than maximum. So this paragraph tells us a little bit about that. This was not a matter of intellect, but of trying to monitor driving hunger, a hunger not confined to coaches. Driven runners really think 200 miles per week is doing them good. But if a coach wishes to rise above damn foolishness, he must celebrate optimum rather than maximum. And Bowerman did. And this next little antidote gives you a good idea of the maniac that we're dealing with here.

This guy named John, who's a friend and neighbor, winds up being an attorney, an advisor to Nike as well, is driving home. And he sees Bowerman's entangled with some kind of something's going on with Bowerman's house. So it says, John saw Bill's car stopped at the Bowerman driveway, dust rising. Bowerman had a thick bodied, hissing, writhing diamondback rattlesnake pressed to the gravel with a clipboard. Need any help? John asked. Nope, said Bowerman, just taking him a while to quit. In the newspaper that week, there was a photo of the clipboard and the seven-foot snake, the largest ever killed in Lane County. Bowerman killed the seven-foot rattlesnake with a clipboard.

And this is a description of the relationship Bowerman had with his athletes, which I thought was very interesting. We were not his kids. We were, in that phrase he took for medicine, in his care. And the necessary distance of a doctor was part of that. He didn't love us as sons. He cared for us as patients, administering to our needs. He could issue edicts and hammer us when we needed it.

And it's funny because even though Phil Knight is technically his boss, he talks about this in his autobiography. He's like, you know, I'm terrified of the guy. Like I was scared of him, but I also at the same time loved him and had a deep desire for him to approve of me. And to, you know, to basically say, hey, I'm doing a good job. He said outside of his father, Bill Bowerman and his father

were the two male influences in life that he craved their, the word's not appreciation. What's the word I'm looking for? Their acceptance and admiration is maybe a way to put that. All right, so now we get appreciation, what's the word I'm looking for? Their acceptance and admiration is maybe a way to put that. All right, so now we get to the part in the story where he's starting to make shoes and he starts making shoes way before Nike. And he does it again, because he thinks it's the best way to accomplish his goal, which is, you know, he's trying to make

his athletes the best athletes in the world. So it says, he found himself in the campus shoe shop. I don't want to demean your artistry, Bowerman said, but how hard is it to make a pair of shoes? I mean, really? You cannot make your own shoes, erupted the repairman. Trust me, you cannot make shoes without a factory. Let us stipulate that you are absolutely right. Of course I can't make shoes. But if you were going to make a shoe and you had the right equipment, how would you go about it?

Bowerman said later it was wonderful to watch the repairman morph into a grouchy professor of cobbling science 101. His workshop at home began to resemble the cobbler shop. And so this is where we get into like one of the main tenets of Bowerman's philosophy, and that's speed. The lighter you are, the faster you will go. And I think this is a metaphor that can be applied to a lot of things. I'm sure there's things in our lives that we're doing that we actually don't need to, that are actually weighing us down. Let's rid ourselves of that. Let's go faster.

He says, I wanted the shoes as light as if I drove nails through your bare feet. He would recall with some relish. He obsessed about weight for a simple mathematical reason. If a miler has an average two-yard stride, he takes 880 steps in his race. Save an ounce from his shoe, and you save him 880 ounces. That's 55 pounds of hard labor. At the time, American shoes weighed from 7 to 10 ounces. So that's another reason why Nike was so successful, because I covered the founder of Adidas.

I think the book's called Sneaker Wars. I don't remember which founders it is, but his name is Adi Dossler. He was a straight-up genius. I think he has like 700 and something patents, if I remember correctly, just on innovations he did for shoes. So Adidas is like the Rolls Royce of shoes, but they're expensive and they're a little heavier than Bill thinks they need to be. American shoes are crap. They're really heavy. They're cheap, but they're expensive and they're a little heavier than Bill thinks they need to be. American shoes are crap.

They're really heavy. They're cheap, but they fall apart. They're just useless. So Bowerman's like, okay, Adidas are expensive and hard to get my hands on, and American shoes suck. So that's why I need to make my own. Phil Knight is going to take that one step further with his thesis that he wrote at Stanford Business School,

where he's like, hey, the same way the Japanese were able to take market share away from the Germans in electronics and cameras, they could probably do the same thing in athletic shoes. That was the thesis in which he built Nike on, which wound up being correct. So let me go back to where we're at here. So he's saying, the first Oregon runner for whom he made a pair of spikes was Phil Knight in 1958. I skipped over something. Let me go back. At the time, American shoes weighed from seven to 10 ounces, half a pound on average. Even the lightest Adidas weighed five ounces. I beat that by two ounces pretty quick, Bill would crow. And before I get into where Nike came from,

because this is a really interesting quote here from Phil Knight something I think is is also really important to know is that let me read the sentence to you it's really Bill was focused on small improvements over time so he's talking about that in running but think about that when he's designing products because that's what he's doing he's making a product he's just making it by hand Bill's designs grew organically over time breakthroughs were brilliant but rare so he's just doing small improvements he'd make custom shoes and then you know he can he he's in a unique position of being able to test out his prototype because he's your track coach and you're wearing his shoes and he

realizes okay well that's too hot light or that's too heavy or that makes you over pronate or that doesn't give you enough uh support that causes injuries and so he's constantly going back and just do trial and error over and over again, making the best shoes. What's wind up being the best track shoes in the world. Now, this is where Phil Knight talks about where Nike came from. And I have not heard this anywhere else. I thought it was very fascinating. As a freshman, he would say four decades later, I had to make one hell of an adjustment. Phil Knight was a crazy good runner. I think he was like the second best runner in his state, something like that. Like really good when he came to Oregon. So he says, as a freshman, I had to make one hell of an adjustment. I had

to go from being a good high school competitor to a locker room with three Olympians. If you were to ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age 17 by Bill Bowerman. Not simply the shock, but the way to respond. He attached such honor to not giving up, to doing my utmost. So think about that sentence. He attached such honor to not giving up, to doing my utmost. Read Shoe Dog. It is insane what Phil Knight had to go through to

make sure that Nike survived, like almost every other book that we read, right? It's not like, oh, I have this great idea, and now I'm a Fortune 500 company, and I'm a billionaire. No, that doesn't happen. I mean, think about it. In Phil Knight's case, it was five years before he was able to work on his company full-time, he was an accountant, if I remember correctly. I knew he was a professor, a teacher in there as well. It's just insane. Five years before he can even start, start working on his business full time. Okay, let me go back to this. Not simply a shock, but the way to respond.

He attached such honor to not giving up, to doing my utmost. Most kids didn't have that adjustment of standards. That introduction to true reality continues on the next page. Knight graduated from Oregon in 1959, masking his relentlessness with his quiet demeanor. He is, if you read True Dog, I think everybody's going to agree, Phil Knight is relentless. Same way he was a relentless runner, he applied that to, again, that's why I think there's so many metaphors between this. Between, you know, athletics and whatever, craft craft or work whatever you want to call it uh masking his relentlessness with his quiet demeanor he would not rest until he competed to the ultimate level

in something and that was his i i had forgotten that his goal was i'm going to overtake adidas it's like starting i i'm trying to put it, like, what would that be comparable today? Like, saying right now, hey, I'm going to start a company that makes phones better than Apple. Like, that's how far ahead, Adidas was the benchmark. It was the largest company, it was the best company, it had the best shoes.

And Phil Nutt's like, yeah, I'm going to run them down. I'm going to beat them. And he did. Now, another thing I admire about Bowerman, he spent a lot of time in solitude, came up with a lot of his ideas, but he also was relentless in learning the best of what other people figured out.

He's very, reminds me of Sam Walton. Sam Walton would constantly go to all different retail stores and take all their good ideas. Bowerman does the same thing. So he meets this coach in New Zealand. And he says, I thought a cross-country race was going on, Bowerman would call. But there were men, women, children, all ages, all sizes. This guy's name is Lyddiard.

Lyddiard had told me that he'd begun the Auckland Joggers Club about a year earlier. We found that the best thing for my champions was also the best thing for everyone else. A great long Sunday run. Everyone. So, so Bowerman goes over there and he starts, he's going over to learn from Lyddiard, but he's also Lyddiard is making him run.

And Bowerman's getting his ass kicked by just these old normal people. And he's like, I don't understand what's happening here. Everyone had left me. He would say, except one old fellow moved back and said, I see you're having trouble. I didn't say anything. I couldn't. He's out of breath. Then he said, I know a shortcut. Bowerman's savior was this guy named Andrew Steedman, who was then 73. Steedman kept stopping

and waiting for Bill, encouraging him to keep going. It gave Bill the bloody shock of his life. A second jolt was discovering Stephen's medical history. I'm a coach of athletes, Lydiard would remember Bowerman saying, and that old guy has had three coronaries and he had to wait for me. Bowerman didn't need a two by four twice. He would run almost every day during the six weeks in the country. He pumped Lyddiard for information. Lyddiard's famous dictum was, train, don't strain. And it's from the trip to New Zealand that another, it's really hard if you go back and look at all the accomplishments Bowerman had in his life, just how hard to believe that one person accomplished all this. He's about to write, you know, jogging, the sport jogging.

Bowerman is credited with popularizing that back in America. He took the ideas he saw in New Zealand, brought it back, wrote like a 100-page book called Jogging, and sold over a million copies in the 60s. So it says, the next morning, a sports writer from the local paper who had been following the tour phoned to ask Bowerman to sum up his experience. Bill told him that the competition was great,

but the biggest thing that had happened was his realizing that his idea of exercise was way way low he's talking about exercise for normal people too in new zealand thousands of people jog bill said uh the women jog the kids jog everybody jogs uh the reporter asked him what do you think we could do here and bow Barrowman said, why don't we find out? Continues, originally a nation of pioneers accustomed to hard physical labor, America in the mid-20th century had become a society that actively condemned adult fitness. It may be hard for anyone born after 1960 to believe, but runners in those days were regarded as eccentric, at best, subversive, and dangerous at worst. Phil Knight talks about this going on runs and people get so mad that they throw like things out of their car. You know, you're running on the road right next to the highway. And it's kind of funny. And, you know, people just throw things at

you. It's hard for us to believe, you know, because that's not the world that we live in today. During the day, cars are here we go. During the day, cars were routinely swerved to try to drive a runner off the road. And running at night was deemed suspicious enough to warrant being stopped by a police cruiser and held until phone calls ascertained that there had been no burglaries in the area. And if you really think about it, that makes the story of Nike even more remarkable. That Nike started in this environment. One thing that Phil Knight said that I was reminded of um is that he's when he started nike he said that he believed like the reason he started nike remember he they started

with running shoes that if he believed that if everyone got out and ran a few miles a day the world would be a better place and bowerman helped millions of people go out and jog a few miles. I think he did a follow-up to the book. So it was sold probably a couple million copies. I know the first version sold over a million copies. All right, so let me go back. Now we're going to the birth of the company that's going to form into Nike. It's called Blue Ribbon Sports.

So this is the beginning of Blue Ribbon and great advice that Bowerman gives Knight. I worked up a little speech about what Bill meant to me, Knight would say. But when I went to give it, I kind of got choked up. Somehow he grasped my intent and made it to me instead. A speech about what I had meant to the team and to the University of Oregon. Then Bowerman delivered the final line. Never underestimate yourself. Knight would deem that moment my true commencement ceremony. Being Bill Bowerman's guinea pig, Knight would say, I had naturally absorbed why Bill had to make our shoes. American running shoes were still made by offshoots of tire companies. That's crazy. I didn't know that. They were cheap and terrible. They cost five bucks and gave you blood blisters after five miles.

Adidas was taking advantage. And at $30 a pair, Adidas was making a killing. Knight proposed a new company that would import first rate athletic shoes, not from Germany, but from Japan, where his research had shown skilled labor was far cheaper. The paper was called Can Japanese sports shoes due to German sports shoes what Japanese cameras have done to German cameras? And it sketched out a high sketched out a track shoe distribution distribution in the Western states and projected sales to high school and college teams of up to 20,000 per year. So that's exactly what Blue Ribbon does. They start selling. They don't make their own shoe. They start reselling.

They're called Tigers. They're lightweight Japanese running shoes. And so the very first incarnation of Nike, Phil Knight goes over to Tokyo, convinces them for him to have, to be first started out to be the sole, the exclusive reseller in the West. And eventually, I think, gets the rights to the entire United States. They wind up later on reneging on that deal, and that leads them to producing their own shoe, which they call Nike. And this is the beginning of the partnership between Bowerman and Phil Knight. I like the looks. This is Bowerman writing Knight. I like the looks of your Tiger shoe. I've heard of these, but never been able to get a hold of a pair. If you can set some kind of contractual agreement with these people, for goodness s do it bill was already tinkering in his mind i have some ideas for a flat

shoe he added i'll pass on some of my ideas to you but of course i'll expect you to make some kind of arrangement with cutting your old coach in too they shook hands on a partnership bill would test and design the shoes if and if they deserved it pitch them to other coaches buck that's uh that's so in the book buck is is phil knight's nickname so sometimes he calls him buck sometimes he calls him phil just so you know uh he's talking about their buck by virtue of a 51 to 49 percent division uh division of voting control would run the company uh and there's one sentence on why bowerman who's been presented opportunities like this before, chose to partner with Knight.

He said he knew Knight would give the venture the ceaselessness of a runner. Moving on now, here's advice that Bowerman's giving his runner, but I think he's talking directly to us in this case. And it's the importance of focus, that you can only focus on one thing at a time. So the athlete's talking about, we'd spend an hour in the old indoor arena mastering one element at a time. And now here's the quote from Bowerman. You can only think of one thing at a time. He'd say, I thought he meant just me, but later on I found it applied to most people.

So again, he's not going to try to, I'm meeting with you one-on-one. That's how it's coaching style. I'm not going to try to tackle half a dozen things in the, I know you need to prove. We're going to do one at a time. And then once you have that mastered, I'm going to move on to the next thing. There's also a story in the book where the author could have been an early investor in Nike. And so I'm going to read it to you, but not, I mean, he turns it down and, you know, that's

very expensive stake, but it really illustrates how tentative the early days of Nike were. The author had won some kind of scholarship and some grants. He got an extra $2,000. He says, I whooped about this to Bowerman. It being the first time in my life I had more than 50 bucks. Interesting, he said. Buck and I have a shipment of shoes on the dock in Portland and need some cash to pay the duty. This might be a fine time for you to take a thousand or two to invest a thousand or two thousand or two thousand in stock.

Seriously, Bill, I said, man to man, what are the chances of this business really panning out? Kenny, here's how I see it. It's a good idea. Buck's a good partner. The Cortez is a good shoe. That's the one that he, um, the one of the first designs the Bowerman designed. I wish I could guarantee you will turn 2000 into a lot more, but I can't. It's a risk. I thanked him and ran for the airport. I used my windfall for a Christmas vacation in Hawaii instead. So I mentioned earlier how, you know, his, his training style and his approach to his craft was vastly different from his peers. And this is Bowerman's response to other coaches not understanding the need for rest and recovery. I love this. I was going to give you an insight into his personality.

I wrote Bowerman about it, talking about this guy just beating the hell out of his athletes. He's not letting them recover. They're getting injured. And so he says, and this is what Bowerman says, As a coach, my heart is always divided between pity for the men they wreck and scorn for how easy they are to beat. In this next paragraph is really what I was talking about earlier, that he values consistency over intensity. The name of the athlete is not important. This book is full of, you know, there's probably 50 different athletes they talk about, but the idea is important.

Even though they work together daily on technique, it would take them months to get comfortable with each other because the change Bowerman knew Steinhauer most needed to make was the hardest for him to accept. His basic lesson, both in throwing and in life, Neil, that's Neil Steiner, Steinhauer, I guess, Neil would say was don't rush it. Pace yourself.

Take it slow in the beginning in training don't go too hard or fast for your body do what you can and don't expect to get there all in one day it was interesting this part i was listening to a trainer who trained some of the best athletes in the world he's on a podcast one time and he's talking about when he was younger he's from canada and there's this uh there's this famous boxer in canada i think his name was otis grant and he was training at the famous grant brothers gym and he didn't he you know he's young very similar to what the author kenny was talking about it's like driven you know he's doing this hard intense workout and then he sees you know i think he was a multiple champion might have even been olympian and he's like what what's happening here? He's like, I'm training way harder than this guy. And he didn't understand.

He's like, yeah, but this is my 10th workout. That's his millionth workout. And it finally clicked to him. He's like, if I keep training this way and I keep getting injured or I keep having to take time off, I'll never get to my million, you know, million is an exaggeration, obviously, but the point still stands. Like I can do that through 10 workouts. Maybe we can do it to a hundred workouts, but I can't do this in level of intensity to a million. an exaggeration, obviously, but the point still stands. Like, I can do that through 10 workouts. Maybe I can do it through 100 workouts. But I can't do this level of intensity to a million. And the fact is that the improvement happens over time. The knowledge, not only does your body improve over time, but hopefully your mind and the

way you analyze, in their case, their sport improves over time. And I never forgot about that. And so he says it's consistency over intensity. You set yourself up so you can do consistent efforts. You can get to that millionth rep, that millionth workout. I thought it was very interesting. So in addition to this priority of consistency over intensity, it's Bowerman's understood that independence is empowering.

Okay, we're partners, but I'm not going to do the work for you. So he says, it was typical of how Bowerman taught. He gave us our workouts, our lessons, our tactics, but then he gave us the freedom to execute them ourselves. Morrison believed this flowed from Bowerman's not being a father figure. My high school coach was like a member of the family, he would say, looking out for us, keeping us from harm. Boy, was Bill ever not like that. He expected us to be independent adults and make our own way. I believe they gave us more self-knowledge. We could run well for the rest

of our lives because he was teaching us how to do it on our own. Bill once told me he was proudest that all his Olympians set their personal best records years after they were out of school. And now we hear more about this philosophy from Bowerman himself. I don't believe in chewing on athletes, he once said. People are out there to do their best. If you growl at them and they're not tigers, they'll collapse or they'll try to make like a tiger. But tigers are tigers. All you have to do is cool they're not tigers, they'll collapse or they'll try to make like a tiger. But tigers are tigers. All you have to do is cool them down a little so they don't make some dumb mistake. There's two things he's saying here.

He says, Bowerman's sounding a lot like Charlie Munger here. What is he saying? He's like, I'm not trying to make you a genius. I'm trying to avoid being stupid. That's something that Munger talks about all the time. All you have to do is cool them down a little bit so they don't make some dumb mistakes. And this is the second thing that sounds like Munger. His view was that intelligent men will be taught more by the vicissitudes of life than by a host of artificial training rules. That word vicissitudes even in the book, The Tale of Charlie Munger, describing why Munger calls himself a biography

or not, why he's read hundreds of biographies he says reading personal biographies allows one to experience multiple lives and successes and failures reading business biographies allows one to experience the vicissitudes of a business and learn how problems are solved so a lot of echoing between the philosophy of Munger there on that power man on that page and Munger so something that Bowerman had to deal with is he's got a lot of, there's a lot of giant egos. The people that come to University of Oregon have, you know, been the best runners in their state, in their school.

They've won championships when they were younger. And a lot of them are like, some of them are hotheads and hard to control. So that's what he was talking about there. He's like, listen, I'm just trying to cool them down so they don't do dumb things. But he said, there was a great quote. I'm just going to read one sentence. I thought it was interesting. It was like this dust up talking about there. He's like, listen, I'm just trying to cool them down so they don't do dumb things. But he said, there was a great quote. I'm just going to read one sentence because I thought it was interesting. It was like this dust up talking about,

oh, you know, I don't want to pace myself. I'm going to run all the way. And Bowerman said, ah, with the talent, Bowerman's side, comes the temperament. I had some highlights about the early days of Nike. Just gives you an idea of how unorganized and it's just crazy to study the early days of any company. Especially Nike though. Think about how, you know, how large and it's known for the quality of its

products and everything else and just did not start out like that there's also this really interesting guy i wish i could find a book on his name is jeff johnson he was the first employee of nike he's all over shoe dog it's hilarious uh this is phil knight talking about him jeff was a real shoe nut but it turned out he was also just bright as hell and really into business. And he soon became a lot more than just a shoe peddler. So the author is actually running in some of the shoes that they're designing and he runs into Jeff Johnson at a track meet.

And so Jeff comes over to him and he points at his shoe and he says, I saw all the tigers down here, but this is the first time I've seen those. And so the author's like, well, they're called the Cortez. They don't keep in the loop. And this is hilarious. Jeff says, I worked for the company two years before I had my first phone call.

That's not an exaggeration. It sounds preposterous now, but it was true, he said. Knight never communicated. Knight talks about this in Shoe Dog. Jeff's writing him letters every day, updates. He just never responds. Jeff is completely enthusiastic about what they're doing. Phil Knight's trying to, like, no, don't be so excited.

This is nothing. This is nothing. Because, you know, for many years it wasn't anything. Knight never communicated. The Blue Ribbon office, which was his house, where he still lived with his parents, never called me. And when I called there, they said he was never home. Sometimes I learned about my company's shoes by seeing them on athlete's feet

the head office the head office wouldn't alert me to a thing in the head office at the time i think is phil knight and his sister uh he remembered the time as thrilling uh as thrilling in its absorption the problems were obvious he would say but the solutions were too we just uh had to not let our growing pains kill us and one of the the most, you know, when you're reading a biography, you're seeing the entire arc of their life. And as such, you feel you get to know these people, you become emotionally invested in their lives. provocative paragraphs in Shoe Dog is Knight talking about these early days and he's like I wish how I wish I had just written down what I was what we were like what was happening took more documentation I can't remember I don't have the quote in front of me but basically the paragraph is just saying you know everything it was so important to me and you think you're going to remember everything and now you know I'm 70 something years old when I'm writing this book

50 years later and I've forgotten all this. He says something is like falling through the quarters, falling through. I can't remember the words he used. It's a really great writing, but it's just you're like, damn. And then he talks about around the same time. He's like, how I wish I could just do it all over again. And it just really hits you because, you know, at that point, you've read through multiple years of struggle. And you just realize how much of his life and how much effort he put into what he was doing.

It's very, very admirable. Going back to this, though, the first office Knight opened up was in a narrow storefront next to a pink bucket tavern, if I'm not mistaken. They didn't have AC. The windows were broken, so it was like freezing cold in there. Knight's early hires were friends and family members who had no background in the task of importing and warehousing. Inventory accounts rarely matched. Business expenses were put on personal credit cards. Sales were limited by how many shoes we had, Knight would recall, and shoes were limited by how much dollars we had to order them. He says he and Penny, that's his wife, married in 1968.

I was still teaching accounting, but the next year I told Penny, if we sell $300,000 worth of product, I'm going to go full time. She was pregnant and a little anxious. We hit $290,000 and I said, that's close enough. In the fall of 1969, this is wild. This is insane. I don't remember this from Shoe Dog. Check this out.

In the fall of 1969, Knight had at last become a full-time employee of his five-year-old company. There were some nervous moments Knight would remember. Every time I brought a fresh letter of credit home and it said, Mr. and Mrs. Knight guarantee liabilities to the tune of $300,000, Penny would say, we don't have $300,000. And I'd say, I don't care. Just sign the thing. And so the book goes into more detail about the early days of Nike, them getting screwed over by their distributor, the people that are reselling shoes. So they did something smart and Bowerman played a huge role in here too. It's like, okay, I'm going to resell your Tigers, but these guys are getting a little shady. It looks like they're going to cancel the contract. And if they cancel the contract, all the users who've been to the

company, we don't own the trademark, we don't own the trademark, we don't own the shoes, we're screwed. So they start in parallel developing what eventually becomes Nike. They didn't have a name. They named it like the very deadline when the shoe boxes had to be printed. They came up with the name Nike.

And it was actually Jeff Johnson who came up with that name. Phil Knight wanted to call Nike Dimension 6, which everybody's like, that's a terrible name. We're not calling it that. But anyways, during this time, you know, Phil has to give a speech to the small group of employees right on the cusp of renaming the company Nike,

saying, you know, that essentially everything we've built over the past few years, we're going to go into a lawsuit over this, but we basically cannot resell Tigers anymore. We've got to go down our own path. And it's do or die. If we succeed the company, we'll all have jobs and we'll move forward. If we don't, we're going to fail and we're out of business. But the reason I bring that up to you is because I loved Phil Knight's perspective.

And we talked about this last week, and I feel I've talked about a bunch of other books, but where Phil and Catherine Graham, Catherine was talking about, oh my God, can you believe that we had the bad luck of living at the same time that Hitler did? One of history's worst human beings.

But they don't have Phil Graham change their perspective. He's like, yeah, that sucks, but we don't have control. We didn't we didn't make Hitler. We have no control over what he's doing. But he's like, why don't we look at it from a different perspective? And he said essentially, like, yeah, OK, it sucks that we're alive during Hitler. But look at it from the positive perspective. Like we get to fight and beat and eventually kill the biggest son of a bitch in history, I think is the quote he said.

Well, Phil Knight is saying the he said well phil knight is saying the same thing that jeff johnson here's like yeah it's scary but we got it right where we want him so he says but knight had uh had had a little longer to assess the situation he amazed johnson when he said in all earnestness jeff we have them right where we want them uh on its sucka which i don't i don't think that's the right uh way to pronounce that, is too slow to react to product development ideas we give them. They never ship what we order, and they'll probably yank the distribution at the end of the contract in 1972 anyway. What we need is a brand we can control because we have everything else,

the shoes and the top runners. This is the best thing that could ever happen to us, and I love that. You got a problem? That's fine. Let's just look at it from a different perspective. Let's flip a problem into opportunity. It's fantastic by Phil Knight there. So one of, not one of, the way Bowerman,

so Bowerman's role in the company, he has his own lab. It's in Eugene, Oregon. But a lot of the manufacturing is taking place across the country in, I think, New Jersey. And that Jeff Johnson guy is now moved from the West Coast the country in, I think, New Jersey. And that Jeff Johnson guy is now moved from the West Coast over. Phil Knight sent him over to Jersey to run everything.

And him and Bowerman keep having these dust-ups and disagreements. Bowerman, as you can imagine, is a very hard person to get along with, especially when he's a generation or two older. So eventually,son realizes they they there's something there's a there's the story i'm about to tell you is what leads them to repair their relationship because johnson realized how much bowerman cares and that's what bowerman you know phil knight's like i we have to focus on making money because if we make money then the company survives and bowerman, yes, that's fine. But I'm only going to do so if we have the very best shoes. He tried to resign from Nike, I think, like 30 different times. That's not an exaggeration.

Like he kept, anytime something would go, he'd say, that's it, I'm leaving. And Buck and Phil Knight would have to come back and talk him back into like, no, no, we need you. We got to keep him happy. It was just hilarious. But this is Bowerman and Johnson real quick. One morning at 630 in the morning, the phone rang. It was Bowerman, calmly asking about some unremembered aspect of the shoes they were planning.

Johnson, realizing it was three hours earlier in Oregon, thought, God damn, this man is serious about shoes. They got along better after that. Bowerman came to appreciate that Johnson was far from just a shoe dog. Johnson most appreciated Bowerman for his indifference to those who opposed him on the worth of his hard, easy approach. Bill simply asked, who are you going to believe? Those who don't want to change are the evidence before your own eyes, Jeff would say. Bowerman seemed born to be brave that way, to stand firm in defense of simple, humiliating truth. So this is more, this is Phil Knight,

more on the highly disagreeable nature of Bill Bowerman. He's not like, but he's also, here's the thing, he's disagreeable, yes, but he's also extremely generous with his time, his money. There's two sides to this coin. He's disagreeable, yes, but he's also extremely generous with his time, his money. There's two sides to this coin. He's not just a jerk. People that knew Bowerman loved him. And if you read this book, you'll come to love him too. It's really remarkable. Phil Knight always knew it was going to be tough.

To this day, he would say years later, I'm not sure I didn't start this company to please Bill Bowerman. Old teammates have said to me, you did it to spend a lifetime with them, not just four years. And I can't disagree. But when they say Bill must make it seem like two lifetimes, and I can't disagree with that either. Bill basically just railed at us all the time as a company.

We made the worst shoes except for all the others. Barbara, his wife, once said, I don't know how you put up with him. And I said, I don't know how you do. So there's a story in here where Kenny, the author, takes this guy. He was a runner from Great Britain. He winds up breaking the mile, the 1,500, and the 800 records. So he's the first person to own all the those records at the same time. And so he's he's visiting from Great Britain and he's he's visiting Oregon.

And Kenny takes him to meet and to spend an afternoon with Bowerman. And I'm going to read this to you. The highlights from their conversation conversation. What's happening here is Bowerman discovers a kindred spirit. And so his name is Coe, C-O-E, Sebastian Coe. And really what Coe is saying is what he learned from his father. And what he learned from his father is even though Bowerman has already had, by this point in the story multiple decades of success it's like reaffirming that like he's not the only one that the only that his ideas actually work that they worked in oregon and they're also working in great britain um and so he's finding his kindred spirit and really what what the reason this spoke to me so much is because if you remember

um i always talk about the henry singleton which is like the proto warren buffett so warren buffett before warren buffett right um charlie munger and warren buffett when you read their shareholder letters hear their speeches they talk over and over again about the operators and the people they admire and i've done a podcast on a bunch of them right um but one of them the person they most admire they say you know you could take the top 100 business school graduates and add up their record and still wouldn't be good as as henry singleton's uh charlie munger said you know his his returns were just utterly ridiculous they were a mile higher than anyone else and something you learn by studying henry singleton is that he shut him he shut the world off from himself right he'd sit in his office and think and it's very

similar to how bowerman and other people other people have this trait. It's not just, just Henry Singleton, but the singular like mind he had, um, really I would say is like, you can be the best by going on your, by going your own way, right? You're not going to be the best by fitting in. You're not going to be the best by just copying to the T. It doesn't mean you don't borrow good ideas. Of course, Singleton borrowed good ideas. He had a lot of smart people around him um but he found a way to to uh to come up with his own unique ideas um and again it's usually not done in a group setting which bowerman says like i don't like group workouts like you got one person's loafing around one person's pushing too hard maybe one in the middle gets gets the right mix so that's why i do individual things sebastian ko trains by himself there's a lot of um there's just a lot of similarities so let me read this to you suny ed ko describing

his training in detail my father is my coach and the basic foundations have been consistent essentially it has been 100 quality not quantity everything i'm highlighting here could come out of bowerman's mouth okay in winters i have very seldom run more than 50 miles per week less in the spring. This is at a time where people are running hundreds of miles. Coe somehow had defied middle distance wisdom that pure speed work was destructive and led to staleness. My father, Coe said, that you might not know the accepted lore of athletics, but if you know people and can sense individual needs, it can make all the difference. At the words individual needs, Back to Coe. father felt the first race when I was 13 my father felt you ought not to smash a kid on the road so he kept a distance low as a junior I averaged 28 miles per week and ran successfully I placed

third in the European junior tournament against juniors running 80 or 90 miles so he's doing a third of what they're doing and he beats almost all of them he beats all of them except two so Bowerman's listening to this and this is what he says and this is them. He beats all of them except two. So Bowerman's listening to this, and this is what he says. And this is the part that reminds me of Henry Singleton. So you developed a methodology that isn't at all dependent on what others do. That takes a certain sort of man. So if you remember at the end of Henry Singleton's life, he's like 80-something years old. He's about to die from brain cancer.

And he pioneered stock buybacks way before people were doing it. And sometimes it was smart to do way before people were doing it. And sometimes it was smart to do it. Sometimes it's not. And so it wound up turning where he would advise against it. But he was asked by, he's like, hey, you know, all these people are now doing what you were doing 15 years ago. And he says, well, it must be wrong if everybody's doing it. So think about what Singleton said. Now let's go back to what Bowerman just said here. So you developed a methodology that isn't at all dependent on what others do, that takes a certain sort of man. So he says, how do you avoid racing when you're training? Sebastian says, I've always trained alone.

Singleton worked alone. Yes, he had partners. Yes, he had employees. But he spent most of his time in his office alone. You see, the day I started running was the day that my father started coaching. After that, it was bringing his science to bear. This goes back to speaking to Bowerman's emphasis on the individual. After that, it was bringing his science to bear, studying everything he could find. He's gotten rid, he says, of 95% of what he learned. That's his father, his coach. The 5% he kept is very specific.

He has no other runners. People ask if he will coach them and he says, I don't know enough about you. I'd have to move in with you. All right, so moving back to Bowerman's issue with Nike, Bill felt stymied by the company as it grew as his nature was so opposite to the corporate. He hated big companies. Knight would lose count of Bill's attempted resignations. It was a bunch, he would say. Each time it happened, Knight would grit his teeth, count to 15, and go on. He never let the resignations take effect. I had been trained by him, said Knight. I knew him. I loved him. I simply never took it personally. If I had anything to say about it, he was not going to leave. Bowerman was supposed to do his Bowowerman thing which was to be a genius

a process which knows no supervision or deadlines that's just really great writing there uh one of the most devastating things is his working distance caused nerve damage um so he winds up having like a limp they couldn't figure out why and it says it didn't take long to find out i had been sniffing glue for 23 years from 1958 to 1981 bowerman had been laboring in tight unventilated quarters assembling his shoes with rubber contact cement he had permanent nerve damage to this from then on he would walk with a pronounced drop foot which caused a limp i mean this last sentence here is just a great summary of, again, good writing. It was hard to see this without thinking of the price Bill had paid.

Bowerman, giver of soft, light shoes to the runners of the world, had in the process rendered himself unable to run in them. I thought this part was hilarious. Imagine being the co-founder of Nike and then being called to diversify this is john his uh lawyer neighbor and advisor uh guy that caught him killing that rattlesnake with uh with a clipboard and it says it was john whom bill always blamed for advising him not to keep his nike eggs in one basket to diversify in other stocks he told me late this is john not talking he told me later that he thought i probably kept him from being one of the wealthiest people in America today if he hadn't diversified he'd be he'd be over twice as wealthy maybe more imagine that I mean it works out because Bill didn't care about money anyways he said even

after the Nike stock he owned appreciated he was just donating it to athletics building things you wouldn't notice he didn't buy new cars new clothes he didn't give he didn't care about that stuff at all but I just thought it was hilarious just imagining the co-founder of nike and being told to diversify away from that investment just a few more things before we close i love this part um talks about more about the the you know nike's now leading the pack by far but they overtook adidas then overtook reebok and then reebok overtakes them but really this section reminds me something i learned from uh reading uh reading about and studying Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he says his personal mottos work like hell and advertise.

So we see Nike had to adapt to that model. We used to say that if we had the best athletes in the best shoes, we couldn't lose, Phil Knight would say. But guess what? Reebok went by us with what we thought were terrible shoes they were soft and they ripped apart the day it was announced that reebok sales had overtaken nike night uh knight closed himself in his office faced the wall and sat there weak and sick and devastated for hours so that just gives you an idea of you know how crazy competitive phil knight was he's a very like he's a very calm guy he's calm personality from the outside you hear him speak he sounds like a normal person inside is a raging competitive maniac right as competitive as Phil Knight was. He's a very calm guy. He's a calm personality from the outside. You hear him speak, he sounds like a normal person.

Inside is a raging competitive maniac, right? Mark Parker, whose strength was design and appearance, said Knight, led the company back, not by asking consumer focus groups what was best, but by finding it out in the lab and then telling people in advertising. For one such promotion, this is the 1984 Olympics, Nike paid Michael Jordan $500,000 to develop and promote a special line of Air Jordan shoes. Bowerman rolled his eyes. Bill thought we were overpaying prima donna athletes, Knight said. And now 20 years later, Michael Jordan sounds a lot like Bowerman when he rails at how high we have to pay the new guys. I thought that was funny.

So that's what I mean about, really, you could sum up the section with Arnold's motto, work like hell and advertise. Bill may have grumbled about the need for such ads, but he loved the actual results. The essential Nike phrase, just do it, had certainly been uttered by Bill to all of us. And I'll close on this. In June 1999, Bowerman stepped down as a member of the Nike board of directors. Over 31 years, he had made countless attempts at this. Now with sales creeping towards $6 billion a year, Buck had finally permitted it.

Six months later, Bill died beneath Barbara's favorite photo of him, taken at their wedding on this June day in 1936. His face was calm with a knowing, almost smug look of victory. One imagines the same look on his face on the day he departed at 88 years old, lying comfortably in his bed. When Barbara came out of the shower and found him gone, oh, it's just like you, she said, to go on ahead with absolutely no warning. He had pulled it off. Bill managed a perfect ending to his life. In the months and years after Bill died, Barbara slowly went through chests of documents and photos. In them, she found a letter Bill had begun to write to Knight, but never sent.

Bill had jotted some thoughts down on a yellow legal pad, roughing out a first draft. It read, Dear Buck, I want to tell my partner in sports how much I admire your leadership and the crew or team you have assembled and direct. The road has had some sharp curves, yes, and some major obstacles to get around or over. I have never availed myself of the opportunity to express my admiration for your leadership and accomplishments in the growth from the small blue ribbon to International Nike Incorporated. Your leadership has been phenomenal. Barbara joins me in appreciation and admiration. A few days later, Barbara delivered the entire legal pad tonight. Am I going to cry?

He asked her. She nodded. So he took it away to read it alone. That resides in a sacred drawer, he would say later, knowing at last that Bill Bowerman

had judged him worthy. So by the time I reached that point, you're talking about 400 plus pages, hours of having a one-on-one conversation about the life of Bill Bowerman. I came to know him. I came to love him. And it's just devastating.

I had tears in my eyes when I got to that part because you really do feel like you lost somebody that you knew just like Phil Knight said I think that he thought the world that he started Nike because he thought the world would be a better place if everybody got out and run a few miles every day I sincerely believe the world would be a better place if everybody read biographies if we learn from the lives of great people that came before us. So to that end, if you want to read the book, I'd highly recommend reading this book,

reading Shoe Dog, any of the books. Leave a link in the show notes. And if you buy that book using that link, the podcast benefits at the same time. You can also go to founderspodcast.com. The link's there. Or you can just go directly to the URL. It's amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash founders podcast, maybe. I don't know. I forgot. I cannot believe I forgot the URL.'s amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash founders podcast maybe I don't know

I forgot I cannot believe I forgot the URL you'll find it you're smart if you cut this far all right with that that's where I leave the story that is 153 books down 1,000 to go and I'll talk to you again soon