before the swoosh: the american founder story in running | syndicate running

last week was about collabs. three of them, happening right now. what we didn't say is that one of the most famous running brands on earth started as one.

1962, japan

phil knight was twenty-four. fresh out of stanford business school. he'd written a paper there about whether japanese running shoes could do to the american sneaker market what japanese cameras had done to germany's. when he presented his paper in class, nobody asked a single question.

he sold his car, took a loan from his dad, and flew to japan on what was supposed to be a side trip on his tour around the world. he wasn't sure he was going to even have a meeting until he was already on the train to kobe.

phil asked for a tour of the onitsuka tiger factory. he met the executives afterward. one of them asked what company he represented. knight, on the spot, reflected back to the wall of blue sports ribbons he'd been collecting since high school. blue ribbon sports of portland, oregon, he said. it was a company that did not exist.

the executives stood up and left the room. knight thought he'd blown it. they came back a few minutes later and offered him the american distribution rights for the onitsuka tiger. knight paid $50 for samples and went home to wait.

he formed blue ribbon sports two years later, in 1964, with $1,200 and a handshake with his old oregon track coach, bill bowerman. for the next seven years, they sold tigers out of the back of a green plymouth at track meets across the pacific northwest. knight had a day job as an accountant. he sold shoes nights and weekends. his mother bought a pair for $7 and wore them around the house to prove a point to phil's dad that this sneaker idea wasn't just jack ass-ing around.

the breakup

by 1971, blue ribbon was hitting $1.3 million in sales. they had stores, employees, a real business. and then knight found out, through a leak, that an onitsuka executive was quietly meeting with other american distributors. the same partner who'd shipped him samples nine years earlier was now planning to buy out blue ribbon at a 51% controlling split, or replace it entirely if knight didn't agree.

he could've taken the buyout. instead he started something new. in the winter of 1971, blue ribbon became nike.

the breakup almost killed them. cash was so tight they bounced paychecks. the bank cut them off entirely. at one point, the box company that made nike's shoe boxes essentially fronted them money to keep operating, because if nike went under, the box company went with it. a paper-goods supplier holding up a shoe company because nobody else would. that's the indie running ecosystem of 1971.

pre

most of us know pre, steve prefontaine grew up in coos bay, ran for bowerman at oregon, and as a nineteen-year-old freshman in 1970 was on the cover of sports illustrated as america's distance prodigy. in 1973, he signed with nike for $5,000 a year and became the company's first paid athlete.

what he did with the deal is the part most people skip. pre, on his own initiative, started mailing pairs of nikes with personalized notes to the best runners on earth. mary decker in san diego. john walker in new zealand. brendan foster in england. kip keino in kenya. in april of 1975, he sent a pair of '73 nike bostons to a then-unknown marathoner in boston named bill rodgers. a one-person sales operation, run by a twenty-four-year-old at the height of his powers, because he believed in the shoes.

a month after he mailed those bostons to bill rodgers, pre died in a car crash outside eugene. he was twenty-four. he was holding every american outdoor record from 2,000m to 10,000m.

knight wrote in shoe dog that pre's line, somebody may beat me, but they're going to have to bleed to do it, became his mindset for running nike. the athlete gave the founder his mantra.

why we're writing about this

the indie running industry, weirdly, still has the texture of the world that built nike. founders still answer their own emails. athletes still mail gear to other athletes because they believe in it. suppliers and partners still hold each other up the way blue ribbon's box guy held them up in 1971. we wrote a short piece on the journal this week giving nike its due and making the case for what comes next.

we'll leave you with this. knight told himself something on a morning in 1962, on his way to a meeting that would change his life and didn't know it yet:

something to lean into. wherever you're putting in the miles right now. just don't stop.

if you want to hear more of knight's story, check out his authoritative autobiography on the early days of nike: shoe dog.

if you've got a brand or a founder we should know selling gear out of their trunk, hit reply and tell us.

midwest grit meets pacific northwest rain.

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