In Greek mythology, the winged goddess Nike was the personification of victory in all fields, not merely athletic endeavours. It seems highly appropriate therefore that, when Blue Ribbon Sprots, a business formed by a handshake in January 1969, between an athletics coach and one of his former charges, was renamed in 1971, it chose that particular celestial appellation. Now one of the most iconic brands in the arena of sportswear, the Nike organisation has fully lived up to not only to the goddess’s virtuous reputation, but also to their own slogan – “Just Do It.” They just did.

The son of a former governor in Oregon, Bill Bowerman was born in Portland on the Pacific Northwest coast of the USA three years before the outbreak of World War One. Progressing through schools in Medford and Seattle, he completed his education at the University of Oregon, studying journalism and football. He then entered the world of work as a teacher at Portland’s Franklin High School in 1934, focusing on biology and, more significantly coaching the school’s football team. The latter would lead him to great success. Bowerman returned to his former school in Medford the following year, again taking up the role of coaching, and led his team to a state title. 

As was the case for so many of his generation, the outbreak of World War Two brought an abrupt halt to his career. Bowerman served in the US Army until the end of the conflagration, before being honourably discharged in 1945. He resumed his career at Medford High School, before moving on to become head coach of the University of Oregon’s athletics team. Further success followed as the team blossomed under his tutelage, many using the foundations supplied by Bowerman to build into flourishing careers on the athletics track. One of the athletes benefitting from Bowerman’s coaching – or ‘teaching’ as Bowerman preferred to describe his methods ­– was Phil Knight.

Along with Bowerman, Knight was the other party of that famous handshake agreement in 1964. He had been an accounting student at the university and an aspiring middle-distance runner under Bowerman’s guidance. By the time he had shook hands on that deal however, he had graduated and, after a year in the army, enrolled at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before launching into a career in accountancy. He would later become a Professor of Accounting at Portland State University.

For an assignment in his Small Business Class, during his time at Stamford, Knight produced a paper portentously entitled “Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?” He left Stanford in 1962 with a Master’s Degree in Business Administration, and then sought to find the answer to the question posed by his paper by visiting Kobe in Japan as part of a world tour.

The Onitsuka sportswear company, later to become Asics, was based in Kobe and, after being impressed by the quality and low cost of the running shoes they produced, Knight struck a deal with the company to sell their shoes in America. At first, the relationship seemed to be stuck in the mud, as the first samples of the Onitsuka Tiger brand shoes took a year to arrive with Knight back in America, where he began working as an accountant at Coopers & Lybrand, before later moving to Price Waterhouse.

When the samples arrived, one of Knight’s first moves was to send two pairs of the Tiger shoes to his old university coach Bill Bowerman, hoping for a sale and possibly even an endorsement. He received far more than that though. As well as buying both pairs of shoes, Bowerman suggested forming a partnership to sell the shoes and produce design suggestions.

A trip to New Zealand in 1962 had added fuel to Bowerman’s interest in running when he was introduced to the concept of using it as an aid to improved health and well-being, especially among older people. The idea took root and, when returning to America, he sought to develop the concept, writing articles for athletics magazines and published a three-page pamphlet titled “The Jogger’s Manual”. Three years later, partnering up with cardiologist WE Harris, Bowerman published “Jogging” a 90-page book that sold well over a million copies. The book is widely regarded as being the trigger that fired the starting gun on the American obsession with running for health and pleasure. Such was the book’s success, that the following year, a follow up – now grown to 127 pages – was published.

It was in this same period that Bowerman and Knight formed Blue Ribbon Sports. Knight would use his accounting and administration skills to run the business end of the enterprise based at the company’s office in Portland, while Bowerman, still working as a coach for the University of Oregon, would continue to experiment and develop his ideas of how to improve the design of running shoes.

Otis Davis, a double gold medal winner in the 1960 Olympic Games where he broke the world record for the 400 metres event, clocking 44.90 seconds and becoming the first man to dip under the 45 second barrier, was another of Bowerman’s athletes at Oregon. He insistently claimed to have been the first recipient of a pair of Bowerman’s custom designed running shoes, despite popular folklore suggesting it was Knight who first slipped his feet into a Bowerman creation. Davis tells the now legendary story of how Bowerman used his wife’s Waffle Grill to create the patterned soles of the shoes that would be lightweight, but also increase grip. He was, however, far less impressed with the outcome than millions of others would be with more traditionally created Bowerman inspired footwear of later decades. “I didn’t like the way they felt on my feet,” Davis recalled. “There was no support and they were too tight. But I saw Bowerman made them from the waffle iron, and they were mine.” The designs would improve.

To drive the business, Bowerman and Knight would visit various athletic meetings around the state, selling the Japanese shoes from the back of Knight’s green Plymouth Valiant car. Originally, a 50-50 partnership, Bowerman later insisted that agreement was amended to 51-49, in favour of Knight, to avoid the potential of any divergence of opinion stymying the company’s progress. Any new enterprise is always vulnerable to failure, but Blue Ribbon Sports enjoyed a successful first year in business selling more than 1,000 pairs of Onitsuka Tiger shoes, generating more than $8,000 in sales. The following year, that had grown to $20,000 and, in 1966, Blue Ribbon Sports opened their first retail outlet in Santa Monica, California.  By 1969, Knight was able to wave goodbye to his accountancy work and devote his full attention to Blue Ribbon.

The business was growing but, merely being distributors for another company’s produce was never the long-term plan. Bowerman’s designs had graduated from leaving Otis Davis unfulfilled and utilising – and ultimately destroying – his wife’s Waffle Grill. In 1966, he produced a running shoe that was ultimately christened as the Nike Cortez. It sold well and, to this day, remains an iconic design in sports footwear. By 1971, Bowerman’s designed shoes were selling well. It was time for a change of direction for the business. Bowerman and Knight felt confident enough to launch a company solely based on their own produce and the partnership with Onitsuka was ended. A new company was about to be born and its first employee, Jeff Johnson, is credited with suggesting the name that it would carry on its journey to fame and great fortune. Nike was about to be born.

Two years earlier, Knight had met Carolyn Davidson during his time lecturing at PSU. The young Graphic Design student was struggling to find the funds to pursue a passion for oil painting. Knight agreed to offer her some freelance design work for Blue Ribbon Sports, at a reported rate of $2 per hour, producing charts and graphs for meetings with the company’s Japanese supplies. It was hardly felt like a life-changing engagement at the time, but Blue Ribbon was still a relatively young business and the money allowed Davidson to indulge her oil painting pursuits and, as the proverb suggests, “Mighty oaks from small acorns grow.”  

Two year later, when Knight and Bowerman were looking to launch their new enterprise, Knight asked Davidson if she’d be interested in a project to produce a logo for them. Knight’s brief to the designer was hardly comprehensively packed out with detail, but that afforded Davidson a measure of creative freedom. He was looking for a something that would fit into the space available on the side of the shoe, suggestive of movement, or similar, and was identifiably different from the three-striped logo of Adidas. Davidson took on the task, and used sheets of tracing paper positioned across the side of a shoe to develop her ideas.

Legend has it that, given her other commitments, t Davidson was unsure precisely how long the project had taken her, and eventually charged it out at 17.50 hours, even though she was fully convinced that this was an underestimate. The fee for producing what would later become one of the world’s most recognised logos was invoiced out at precisely $35 – albeit a figure that, adjusted for inflation, would now be reaching towards $250.

For that sum, she produced a number of different options and visited the company’s office in Tigard, Oregon to present her concepts to a selection team comprising of Knight, and two fellow executives, Bob Woodell and the christener of Nike, Jeff Johnson. As in all good stories of this type, the initial reaction was hardly overwhelmingly enthusiastic. After rejecting the other concepts out of hand, the decision was made to go with what would become known as the Nike Swoosh, a concept Davidson had based on an adapted ‘tick’ with an echo of one of the wings from a statue of the Nike goddess. At the time of presenting to Knight and his colleagues, Davidson’s concept had the swoosh as an outlined shape, clear on the inside with ‘nike’ in lower case lettering overwriting it.

After the concept was selected, Davidson explained that the design was still in the raw state and requested more time to refine it to a final state, now that Knight and his team had made a decision. Knight however rejected the request, citing deadlines that had to be met and that the company would proceed with the design as it was. Feeling pressured by time, Knight felt the decision was necessary, if less than perfect. Somewhat less than enthusiastically, as stated on Nike’s own website, he confessed that, “I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.” It did. In 1972, the logo was carried on the side of Nike Cortez running shoe, and was registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in January 1974

Davidson continued to work for the new Nike business for a further four years, producing ads, posters and leaflets, whilst completing her studies and collecting a Batchelors Degree in design. After graduation and as the demands for work at Nike outgrew the capacity of a single designer, she left to work from home as a freelance designer, still unaware of how celebrated her $35 design project would become. The Nike corporate logo continued to carry the name of the company up until 1994, when the word, now set in all-capital Futura Bold font, was dropped, leaving the Swoosh to live on in splendid isolation.

The Nike Cortez was hardly the end of Bowerman’s development of sports footwear. He had an obsession about improving the efficiency of sporting shoes; one that would exact a tragic price in later life. With the target of reducing the weight of the shoe, and reducing drag from the design wherever possible, he could help the runner to increase speed, and energy efficiency. He calculated that, assuming the runner was six feet tall, removing just a single ounce from the weight of a running shoe would result in a reduction of 55 pounds in the effort of foot lift per mile run. Those thoughts drove his inspiration and innovation.

In 1972, he produced what came to be known as the ‘Moon Shoe’ due to its waffle inspired tread bearing a resemblance to the footprints left on the moon by astronauts’ steps. Two years later, the “Waffle Trainer” was launched, honouring Mrs Bowerman’s long- deceased kitchen gadget. It helped fuel the meteoric rise in Nike’s market share and continuing developments of the design go on to this day.

Sadly, there would be a price to pay for Bowerman’s diligence to the cause of sports shoe design. When experimenting with ideas, he would work in a small and poorly ventilated workshop, often using rubber compounds, glues and solvents containing toxic components. The long-term effect was to cause irreparable nerve damage resulting in severe mobility problems, and an inability to run, as the nerves in his legs were damaged. The sad irony of Bowerman eventually being unable to benefit from the shoes he designed was not lost in Kenny Moore’s book “Bowerman and the Men of Oregon.” In the late 1970s, surely guided by his diminishing health, Bowerman began to cut back his active involvement with Nike, but his legacy lives on with the company. Its headquarters are located in Bill Bowerman Drive and Nike have launched a range of high-performance running shoes labelled as the “Bowerman Series”. He passed away aged 88 and in declining health, in 1999.

In September 1983, three years after Nike had gone public, and a dozen since delivering the $35 design project for Knight, Carolyn Davidson was invited to a Nike company reception, where her erstwhile client presented her with a diamond ring made of gold, engraved with the Swoosh, and an envelope filled with 500 shares of Nike stock.  The value of which has been reported to exceed $1,000,000 in contemporary values. The payment may have been a little late in coming, but it was delivered in full. Davidson later remarked upon Knight’s generosity, because she had “originally billed him and he paid that invoice.”

Phil Knight would continue to serve as CEO of Nike until November 18, 2004, a few months after the tragic death of his son Matthew’s funeral, following a heart attack whilst scuba diving in El Salvador, but retained the position of chairman of the board. He would relinquish that post in June 2016, a couple of months after publishing his memoirs in a book titled “Shoe Dog”. The following month, the book hit fifth spot on The New York Times Best Seller list. In 2021, Knight’s fortune was estimated at some $80 billion.

In 1988, Nike’s first ad using the slogan “Just Do It” was screened, after being pitched to the company by Dan Wieden of Wieden+Kennedy who had become Nike’s advertising agency after Carolyn Davidson had left. It featured an 80-year-old Californian named Walt Slack who spoke of how he took a 17-mile daily jog across the Golden Gate Bridge, and kept his teeth from chattering in the cold weather by leaving them in his locker at home. By this time Bowerman’s ill health had taken him away from the business, but the echoes of his promotion of running as an aid to health and well-being were clear.  

There was also perhaps another, more subliminal reference to the early days of Bowerman and Knight’s partnership, and the early days of Blue Ribbon Sports. Anyone watching Knight and Bowerman driving around Oregon, hawking Japanese running shoes out of the back of a car at local athletics meetings, would consider it a long way from developing into a globally renowned organisation and accumulating such wealth. Sometimes however, you have to “Just Do It.”

(This article was originally produced for the ‘Nike’ magazine from These Football Times).