Finish line in sight for Nike founder’s career
PERHAPS the $1 200 that Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman bet on Blue Ribbon Sports back in 1964 was the greatest gamble in sports history. Perhaps in investing history too.
A name change to Nike, a $35 swoosh logo and Michael Jordan helped, but it was Knight’s vision for sports and sports marketing that was arguably the greatest input. That money is now worth about $93bn (R1.1 trillion). Knight’s stake is a staggering $22.3bn.
Knight, 77, said on Tuesday that he would step down next year as chairman of Nike, the company he founded with Bowerman, his former university running coach.
Bowerman – credited with using a waffle iron to create the sole of the ubiquitous sports running shoe – died in 1999, so it will be the first time neither founder is involved in running the company.
Knight said: “Nike… has been my life’s passion. I have long felt a great responsibility to provide clar- ity and certainty for the long-term governance and leadership of Nike and my ultimate transition from chairman.”
Knight recommended that chief executive Mark Parker succeed him. His son, Travis Knight, is to join the board of directors.
While Bowerman might have been the driving force behind Nike’s shoe innovations, it was Knight who took on the business side, selling shoes to stores and persuading budding and established Olympic-quality athletes to wear them.
Michael Armstrong, buying director at JD Sports, the UK’s largest retailer of sports clothing and footwear, said Knight’s legacy could not be overstated.
“He has been the most influential person in sports and sports technology since Adi Dassler (founder of adidas). He changed everything about sports and equipment without changing the vision he started with – making better shoes to run in. He never stopped pushing design and marketing boundaries, but always considered athletes the priority.”
It was as a journalism student and athlete at the University of Oregon, a mile runner with unfulfilled dreams of Olympic glory, that Knight began to take an interest in the shoes in which he was running.
His vision expanded when he was a graduate business student at Stanford University in California. In a marketing paper, he noted: “Japanese sports shoes can do to German sports shoes what Japanese cameras did to German cameras.” Adidas has been fighting a rearguard action almost ever since.
At first Blue Ribbon did not make its own shoes, instead importing shoes made by a Japanese company, Onitsuka, now known as Asics.
Although Nike grew fast in the 1970s, the brand did not explode until Knight stepped in when adidas passed up the opportunity to sponsor a young Chicago Bulls basketball player, Michael Jordan. It was arguably his best business decision. Jordan became the greatest player in basketball history and more than 5 million pairs of the Air Jordan shoes have been sold.
“Just Do It”, the slogan Nike began running in 1988, was inspired by the last words murderer Gary Gilmore spoke before his execution.
In 1998, Knight vowed to improve working conditions following a Time exposé about Nike’s entanglement in dubious labour practices by off-shoring of production. “The Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuses,” he said, vowing to end child labour.
He has also been a generous philanthropist. – The Independent