Shoe Dog (26 page)

Next up was Kitami. As he walked to the stand the Onitsuka lawyers rose and told the judge they would need a translator. I cupped my ear. A
what
? Kitami spoke perfect English. I recalled him boasting about learning his English from a record. I turned to Cousin Houser, my eyes bulging, but he only extended his hands, palms facing the floor. Easy.

In two days on the stand Kitami lied, again and again, through his translator, through his teeth. He insisted that he'd never planned to break our contract. He'd only decided to do so when he discovered we'd done so by making Nikes. Yes, he said, he'd been in touch with other distributors before we manufactured the first Nike, but he was just doing market research. Yes, he said, there was some discussion of Onitsuka's buying Blue Ribbon, but the idea
was initiated by Phil Knight.

After Hilliard and Cousin Houser had given their closing arguments, I turned and thanked many of the spectators for coming. Then
Cousin Houser and Strasser and I went to a bar around the corner and loosened our neckties and drank several ice-cold beers. And several more. We discussed different ways it might have gone, different things we might have done. Oh, the things we might have done, we said.

And then we all went back to work.

IT WAS WEEKS
later. Early morning. Cousin Houser phoned me at the office. “James the Just is going to rule at eleven o'clock,” he said.

I raced to the courthouse and met him and Strasser at our old table. Oddly, the courtroom was empty. No spectators. No opposing counsel, except Hilliard. His fellow lawyers had been unable to get here on such short notice.

James the Just came barging through the side door and ascended the bench. He shuffled some papers and began speaking in a low monotone, as if to himself. He said favorable things about both sides. I shook my head. How could he have favorable things to say about Onitsuka? Bad sign. Bad, bad, bad. If only Bowerman had been more prepared. If only I hadn't melted under pressure. If only the orthopedist had kept his shoes in order!

The judge looked down at us, his protruding eyebrows longer and shaggier than when the trial began. He would not rule on the matter of the contract between Onitsuka and Blue Ribbon, he said.

I slumped forward.

Instead he would rule solely on the issue of trademarks. It seemed clear to him that this was a case of he-said, he-said. “We have here two conflicting stories,” he said, “and it's the opinion of this court that Blue Ribbon's is the more convincing.”

Blue Ribbon has been more truthful, he said, not only throughout the dispute, as evidenced by documents, but in this courtroom. “Truthfulness,” he said, “is ultimately all I have to go on, to gauge this case.”

He noted Iwano's testimony. Compelling, the judge said. It would
seem Kitami had lied. He then noted Kitami's use of a translator: During the course of Mr. Kitami's testimony, on more than one occasion, he interrupted the translator to correct him. Each time Mr. Kitami corrected him in perfect English.

Pause. James the Just looked through his papers. So, he declared, it's therefore my ruling that Blue Ribbon will retain all rights to the names Boston and Cortez. Further, he said, there are clearly damages here. Loss of business. Misappropriation of trademark. The question is, how to assign a dollar figure for those damages. The normal course is to name a special master to determine what the damages are. This I will do in the coming days.

He slammed down his gavel. I turned to Cousin Houser and Strasser.

We won?

Oh my . . .
we won
.

I shook hands with Cousin Houser and Strasser, then clapped their shoulders, then hugged them both. I allowed myself one delicious sidelong look at Hilliard. But to my disappointment he had no reaction. He was staring straight ahead, perfectly still. It had never really been his fight. He was just a mercenary. Coolly, he shut his briefcase, clicked the locks, and without a glance in our direction he stood and strolled out of the courtroom.

WE WENT STRAIGHT
to the London Grill at the Benson Hotel, not far from the courthouse. We each ordered a double and toasted James the Just. And Iwano. And ourselves. Then I phoned Penny from the pay phone. “We won!” I cried, not caring that they could hear me in all the rooms of the hotel. “Can you believe it—we won!”

I called my father and yelled the same thing.

Both Penny and my father asked
what
we'd won. I couldn't tell them. We still didn't know, I said. One dollar? One million? That was tomorrow's problem. Today was about relishing victory.

Back in the bar Cousin Houser and Strasser and I had one more stiff one. Then I phoned the office to find out the daily pair count.

A WEEK LATER
we got a settlement offer: four hundred thousand dollars. Onitsuka knew full well that a special master might come up with any kind of number, so they were seeking to move preemptively, contain their losses. But four hundred thousand dollars seemed low to me. We haggled for several days. Hilliard wouldn't budge.

We all wanted to be done with this, forever. Especially Cousin Houser's overlords, who now authorized him to take the money, of which he'd get half, the largest payment in the history of his firm. Sweet vindication.

I asked him what he was going to do with all that loot. I forget what he said. With ours, Blue Ribbon would simply leverage Bank of California into greater borrowing. More shoes on the water.

THE FORMAL SIGNING
was scheduled to take place in San Francisco, at the offices of a blue-chip firm, one of many on Onitsuka's side. The office was on the top floor of a high-rise downtown, and our party arrived that day in a loud, raucous mood. We were four—me, Cousin Houser, Strasser, and Cale, who said he wanted to be present for all the big moments in Blue Ribbon history. Present at the Creation, he said, and present now for the Liberation.

Maybe Strasser and I had read too many war books, but on the way to San Francisco we talked about famous surrenders through history. Appomattox. Yorktown. Reims. It was always so dramatic, we agreed. The opposing generals meeting in a train car or abandoned farmhouse, or on the deck of an aircraft carrier. One side contrite, the other stern but gracious. Then the fountain pens scratching across the “surrender instrument.” We talked about MacArthur accepting the Japanese surrender on the USS
Missouri
, giving the speech of a
lifetime. We were getting carried away, to be sure, but our sense of history, and martial triumph, was underscored by the date. It was July 4.

A clerk led us into a conference room crammed full of attorneys. Our mood abruptly changed. Mine did, anyway. At the center of the room was Kitami. A surprise.

I don't know why I was surprised to see him. He needed to sign the papers, cut the check. He reached out his hand. A bigger surprise.

I shook it.

We all took seats around the table. Before each of us stood a stack of twenty documents, and each document had dozens of dotted lines. We signed until our fingers tingled. It took at least an hour. The mood was tense, the silence profound, except for one moment. I recall that Strasser let forth with a huge sneeze. Like an elephant. And I also recall that he was begrudgingly wearing a brand-new navy-­blue suit, which he'd had tailored by his mother-­in-law, who put all the extra material into the breast pocket. Strasser, affirming his status as the world's foremost antisartorialist, now reached into his pocket and pulled out a long string of extra gabardine and used it to blow his nose.

At last a clerk collected all the documents, and we all capped our pens, and Hilliard instructed Kitami to hand over the check.

Kitami looked up, dazed. “I have no check.”

What did I see in his face at that moment? Was it spite? Was it defeat? I don't know. I looked away, scanned the faces around the conference table. They were easier to read. The lawyers were in total shock. A man comes to a settlement conference without a check?

No one spoke. Now Kitami looked ashamed; he knew he'd erred. “I will mail check when I return to Japan,” he said.

Hilliard was gruff. “See that it's mailed as soon as possible,” he told his client.

I picked up my briefcase and followed Cousin Houser and Strasser out of the conference room. Behind me came Kitami and the other lawyers. We all stood and waited for the elevator. When the doors
opened we all crowded on, shoulder to shoulder, Strasser himself taking up half the car. No one spoke as we dropped to the street. No one breathed. Awkward doesn't begin to describe it. Surely, I thought, Washington and Cornwallis weren't forced to ride the same horse away from Yorktown.

STRASSER CAME TO
the office some days after the verdict, to wind things down, to say good-bye. We steered him into the conference room and everyone gathered around and gave him a thunderous ovation. His eyes were teary as he raised a hand and acknowledged our cheers and thanks.

“Speech!” someone yelled.

“I've made so many close friends here,” he said, choking up. “I'm going to miss you all. And I'm going to miss working on this case. Working on the side of
right
.”

Applause.

“I'm going to miss defending this wonderful company.”

Woodell and Hayes and I looked at each other. One of us said: “So why don't you come work here?”

Strasser turned red and laughed. That laugh—I was struck again by the incongruous falsetto. He waved his hand, pshaw, as if we were kidding.

We weren't kidding. A short while later I invited Strasser to lunch at the Stockpot in Beaverton. I brought along Hayes, who by now was working full-time for Blue Ribbon, and we made a hard pitch. Of all the pitches in my life, this might have been the most carefully prepared and rehearsed, because I wanted Strasser, and I knew there would be pushback. He had before him a clear path to the very top of Cousin Houser's firm, or any other firm he might choose. Without much effort he could become partner, secure a life of means, privilege, prestige. That was the known, and we were offering him The Unknown. So Hayes and I spent days role-playing, polishing
our arguments and counterarguments, anticipating what objections Strasser might raise.

I opened by telling Strasser that it was all a foregone conclusion, really. “You're one of us,” I said.
One of us
. He knew what those words meant. We were the kind of people who simply couldn't put up with corporate nonsense. We were the kind of people who wanted our work to be play. But meaningful play. We were trying to slay Goliath, and though Strasser was bigger than two Goliaths, at heart he was an utter David. We were trying to create a brand, I said, but also a culture. We were fighting against conformity, against boringness, against drudgery. More than a product, we were trying to sell an idea—a spirit. I don't know if I ever fully understood who we were and what we were doing until I heard myself saying it all that day to Strasser.

He kept nodding. He never stopped eating, but he kept nodding. He agreed with me. He said he'd gone directly from our battle royal with Onitsuka to working on several humdrum insurance cases, and every morning he'd wanted to slit his wrists with a paper clip. “I miss Blue Ribbon,” he said. “I miss the clarity. I miss that feeling, every day, of getting a win. So I thank you for your offer.”

Still, he wasn't saying yes. “What's up?” I said.

“I need . . . to ask . . . my dad,” he said.

I looked at Hayes. We both guffawed. “Your dad!” Hayes said.

The same dad who'd told the cops to haul Strasser away? I shook my head. The one argument Hayes and I hadn't prepared for. The eternal pull of the old man.

“Okay,” I said. “Talk to your father. Get back to us.”

Days later, with his old man's blessing, Strasser agreed to become the first-ever in-house counsel for Blue Ribbon.

WE HAD ABOUT
two weeks to relax and enjoy our legal victory. Then we looked up and saw a new threat looming on the horizon.
The yen. It was fluctuating wildly, and if it continued to do so it would spell certain doom.

Before 1972 the yen-to-dollar rate had been pegged, constant, unvarying. One dollar was always worth 360 yen, and vice versa. You could count on that rate, every day, as sure as you could count on the sun rising. President Nixon, however, felt the yen was undervalued. He feared America was “sending all its gold to Japan,” so he cut the yen loose, let it float, and now the yen-to-dollar rate was like the weather. Every day different. Consequently, no one doing business in Japan could possibly plan for tomorrow. The head of Sony famously complained: “It's like playing golf and your handicap changes on every hole.”

At the same time, Japanese labor costs were on the rise. Combined with a fluctuating yen, this made life treacherous for any company doing the bulk of its production in Japan. No longer could I envision a future in which most of our shoes were made there. We needed new factories, in new countries, fast.

To me, Taiwan seemed the next logical step. Taiwanese officials, sensing Japan's collapse, were rapidly mobilizing to fill the coming void. They were building factories at warp speed. And yet the factories weren't yet capable of handling our workload. Plus, their quality control was poor. Until Taiwan was ready, we'd need to find a bridge, something to hold us over.

I considered Puerto Rico. We were already making some shoes there. Alas, they weren't very good. Also, Johnson had been down there to scout factories, in 1973, and he'd reported that they weren't much better than the dilapidated ones he saw all over New England. So we talked about some sort of hybrid solution: taking raw materials from Puerto Rico and sending them to New England for lasting and bottoming.

Toward the end of 1974, that impossibly long year, this became our plan. And I was well prepared to implement it. I'd done my homework. I'd been making trips to the East Coast, to lay the
groundwork, to look at various factories we might lease. I'd gone twice—first with Cale, then with Johnson.