Shoe Dog (38 page)

“Gentlemen,” the loud voice said. “We have a deal. We'll send it out to market this Friday.”

I drove home. I remember the boys were outside playing. Penny was standing in the kitchen. “How was your day?” she said.

“Hm. Okay.”

“Good.”

“We got our price.”

She smiled. “Of course you did.”

I went for a long run
.

Then I took a hot, hot shower.

Then I had a quick dinner.

Then I tucked in the boys and gave them a story.

The year was 1773. Privates Matt and Travis were fighting under the command of General Washington. Cold, tired, hungry, their uniforms in
tatters, they camped for the winter at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. They slept in log huts, wedged between two mountains: Mount Joy and Mount Misery. Morning till night, bitter cold winds sliced through the mountains and barreled through the chinks in the huts
. Food was scarce; only a third of the men had shoes.

Whenever they walked outside, they left bloody footprints in the snow.

Thousands died. But Matt and Travis held on.

Finally, spring came. The troops got word that the British had retreated, and the French were coming to the aid of the colonists. Privates Matt and Travis knew from then on that they could live through anything. Mount Joy, Mount Misery.

The end.

Good night, boys.

Night, Dad.

I turned out the light and went and sat in front of the
TV
with Penny. Neither of us was really watching. She was reading a book and I was doing calculations in my head.

By this time next week Bowerman would be worth $9 million.

Cale—$6.6 million.

Woodell, Johnson, Hayes, Strasser—each about $6 million.

Fantasy numbers. Numbers that meant nothing. I never knew that numbers could mean so much, and so little, at the same time.

“Bed?” Penny said.

I nodded.

I went around the house, turning off lights, checking doors. Then I joined her. For a long time we lay in the dark. It wasn't over. Far from it. The first part, I told myself, is behind us. But it's only the first part.

I asked myself: What are you feeling?

It wasn't joy. It wasn't relief. If I felt
anything
, it was . . . regret?

Good God, I thought. Yes. Regret.

Because I honestly wished I could do it all over again.

I fell asleep for a few hours. When I woke it was cold and rainy. I
went to the window. The trees were dripping water. Everything was mist and fog. The world was the same as it had been the day before, as it had always been. Nothing had changed, least of all me. And yet I was worth $178 million.

I showered, ate breakfast, drove to work. I was at my desk before anyone else.

NIGHT

W
e love going to the movies. We always have. But tonight we have a dilemma. We've seen all the violent movies, which Penny likes best, so we're going to have to venture outside our comfort zone, try something different. A comedy, maybe.

I leaf through the paper. “How about
The Bucket List
—at the ­Century? Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman?”

She frowns: I guess.

It's Christmastime, 2007.

THE BUCKET LIST
turns out to be anything but a comedy. It's a movie about mortality. Two men, Nicholson and Freeman, both terminally ill with cancer, decide to spend their remaining days doing all the fun things, the crazy things, they've always wanted to do, to make the most of their time before they kick the bucket. An hour into the movie, there's not a chuckle to be had.

There are also many strange, unsettling parallels between the movie and my life. First, Nicholson always makes me think of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
, which makes me think of Kesey, which takes me back to my days at the University of Oregon. Second, high on the bucket list of Nicholson's character is seeing the Himalayas, which transports me to Nepal.

Above all, Nicholson's character employs a personal assistant—a
sort of surrogate son—named Matthew. He even looks a bit like my son. Same scruffy goatee.

When the movie ends, when the lights come up, Penny and I are both relieved to stand and return to the bright glare of real life.

The theater is a new sixteen-screen colossus in the heart of Cathedral City, just outside Palm Springs. These days we spend much of the winter there, hiding from the chilly Oregon rains. Walking through the lobby, waiting for our eyes to adjust, we spot two familiar faces. At first we can't place them. We're still seeing Nicholson and Freeman in our minds. But these faces are equally familiar—equally famous. Now we realize. It's Bill and Warren. Gates and Buffett.

We stroll over.

Neither man is what you'd call a
close
friend, but we've met them several times, at social events and conferences. And we have common causes, common interests, a few mutual acquaintances. “Fancy meeting you here!” I say. Then I cringe. Did I really just say that? Is it possible that I'm
still
shy and awkward in the presence of celebrities?

“I was just thinking about you,” one of them says.

We shake hands, all around, and talk mostly about Palm Springs. Isn't this place lovely? Isn't it wonderful to get out of the cold? We talk about families, business, sports. I hear someone behind us whisper, “Hey, look, Buffett and Gates—who's that other guy?”

I smile. As it should be.

In my head I can't help doing some quick math. At the moment I'm worth $10 billion, and each of these men is worth five or six times more.
Lead me from the unreal to the real.

Penny asks if they enjoyed the movie. Yes, they both say, looking down at their shoes, though it was a bit depressing. What's on your bucket lists? I nearly ask, but I don't. Gates and Buffett seem to have done everything they've ever wanted in this life. They have no bucket lists, surely.

Which makes me ask myself: Have I?

AT HOME PENNY
picks up her needlepoint and I pour myself a glass of wine. I pull out a yellow legal pad to look at my notes and lists for tomorrow. For the first time in a while . . . it's blank.

We sit in front of the eleven o'clock news, but my mind is far, far away. Drifting, floating, time-traveling. A familiar feeling of late.

I'm apt to spend long stretches of the day walking around in my childhood. For some reason I think a lot about my grandfather, Bump Knight. He had nothing, less than nothing. And yet he managed to scrimp and save and buy a brand-new Model T, in which he moved his wife and five kids from Winnebago, Minnesota, all the way to Colorado, then on to Oregon. He told me that he didn't bother to get his driver's license, he just up and went. Descending the Rockies in that rattling, shuddering piece of tin, he repeatedly scolded it. “Whoa, WHOA, you son of a bitch!” I heard this story so many times from him, and from aunts and uncles and cousins, I feel as though I was there. In a way, I was.

Bump later bought a pickup, and he loved putting us grandkids in the back of it, driving us into town on errands. Along the way he'd always stop by Sutherlin Bakery and buy us a dozen glazed doughnuts—­each. I need only look up at the blue sky or the white ceiling (any blank screen will do) and I see myself, dangling my bare feet over his truck bed, feeling the fresh green wind on my face, licking glaze off a warm doughnut. Could I have risked as much, dared as much, walked the razor's edge of entrepreneurship between safety and catastrophe, without the early foundation of that feeling, that bliss of safety and contentment? I don't think so.

After forty years I've stepped down as Nike
CEO
, leaving the company in good hands, I think, and good shape, I trust. Sales last year, 2006, were $16 billion. (Adidas was $10 billion, but who's counting?) Our shoes and clothes are in five thousand stores worldwide, and we have ten thousand employees. Our Chinese operation in Shanghai
alone has seven hundred. (And China, our second-largest market, is now our largest producer of shoes. I guess that 1980 trip paid off.)

The five thousand employees at the world headquarters in Beaverton are housed on an Edenic collegiate campus, with two hundred acres of wooded wilderness, laced by rolling streams, dotted by pristine ball fields. The buildings are named after the men and women who have given us more than their names and endorsements. Joan Benoit Samuelson, Ken Griffey Jr., Mia Hamm, Tiger Woods, Dan Fouts, Jerry Rice, Steve Prefontaine—they've given us our identity.

As chairman I still go most days to my office. I look around at all those buildings, and I don't see buildings, I see temples. Any building is a temple if you make it so. I think often of that momentous trip when I was twenty-four. I think of myself standing high above Athens, gazing at the Parthenon, and I never fail to experience the sensation of time folding in on itself.

Amid the campus buildings, along the campus walkways, there are enormous banners: action photos of the super athletes, the legends and giants and titans who've elevated Nike to something more than a brand.

Jordan.

Kobe.

Tiger.

Again, I can't help but think of my trip around the world.

The River
Jordan
.

Mystical
Kobe
, Japan.

That first meeting at Onitsuka, pleading with the executives for the right to sell
Tigers
 . . .

Can this all be a coincidence?

I think of the countless Nike offices around the world. At each one, no matter the country, the phone number ends in 6453, which spells out Nike on the keypad. But, by pure chance, from right to left it also spells out Pre's best time in the mile, to the tenth of a second: 3:54.6.

I say by pure chance, but is it really? Am I allowed to think that some coincidences are more than coincidental? Can I be forgiven for thinking, or hoping, that the universe, or some guiding daemon, has been nudging me, whispering to me? Or else just playing with me? Can it really be nothing but a fluke of geography that the oldest shoes ever discovered are a pair of nine-thousand-year-old sandals . . . salvaged from a cave in Oregon?

Is there nothing to the fact that the sandals were discovered in 1938, the year I was born?

I ALWAYS FEEL
a thrill, a shot of adrenaline, when I drive through the intersection of the campus's two main streets, each named after a Nike Founding Father. All day, every day, the security guard at the front gate gives visitors the same directions.
What you wanna do is take Bowerman Drive all the way up to Del Hayes Way . . .
I also take great pleasure in strolling past the oasis at the center of campus, the Nissho Iwai Japanese Gardens. In one sense our campus is a topographical map of Nike's history and growth; in another it's a diorama of my life. In yet another sense it's a living, breathing expression of that vital human emotion, maybe the most vital of all, after love. Gratitude.

The youngest employees at Nike seem to have it. In abundance. They care deeply about the names on the streets and buildings, and about the bygone days. Like Matthew begging for his bedtime story, they clamor for the old tales. They crowd the conference room whenever Woodell or Johnson visits. They've even formed a discussion group, an informal think tank, to preserve that original sense of innovation. They call themselves The Spirit of 72, which fills my heart.

But it's not just the young people within the company who honor the history. I think back to July 2005. In the middle of some event, I can't recall which, LeBron James asks for a private word.

“Phil, can I see you a moment?”

“Of course.”

“When I first signed with you,” he says, “I didn't know all that much about the history of Nike. So I've been studying up.”

“Oh?”

“You're the founder.”

“Well. Cofounder. Yes. It surprises a lot of people.”

“And Nike was born in 1972.”

“Well. Born—? Yes. I suppose.”

“Right. So I went to my jeweler and had them find a Rolex watch from 1972.”

He hands me the watch. It's engraved:
With thanks for taking a chance on me
.

As usual, I say nothing. I don't know what to say.

It wasn't much of a chance. He was pretty close to a sure thing. But taking a chance on people—he's right. You could argue that's what it's all been about.

I GO OUT
to the kitchen, pour another glass of wine. Returning to my recliner, I watch Penny needlepoint for a while and the mental images come tumbling faster and faster. As if I'm needlepointing memories.

I watch Pete Sampras crush every opponent at one of his many Wimbledons. After the final point he tosses his racket into the stands—to me! (He overshoots and hits the man behind me, who sues, of course.)

I see Pete's archrival, Andre Agassi, win the U.S. Open, unseeded, and come to my box after the final shot, in tears. “We did it, Phil!”

We?

I smile as Tiger drains the final putt at Augusta—or is it St. Andrews? He hugs me—and holds on for many seconds longer than I expect.

I roll my mind back over the many private, intimate moments I've shared with him, and with Bo Jackson, and with Michael Jordan.
Staying at Michael's house in Chicago, I pick up the phone next to the bed in the guestroom and discover that there's a voice on the line.
May I help you?
It's room service. Genuine, round-the-clock, whatever-your-heart-desires room service.

I set down the phone, my mouth hanging open.

They're all like sons, and brothers—family. No less. When Tiger's father, Earl, dies, the church in Kansas holds fewer than one hundred, and I'm honored to be included. When Jordan's father is murdered, I fly to North Carolina for the funeral and discover with a shock that a seat is reserved for me in the front row.

All of which leads me back, of course, to Matthew.

I think of his long, difficult search for meaning, for identity. For me. His search often looked so familiar, even though Matthew didn't have my luck, or my focus. Nor my insecurity. Maybe if he'd had a little more insecurity . . .

In his quest to find himself, he dropped out of college. He experimented, dabbled, rebelled, argued, ran away. Nothing worked. Then, at last, in 2000, he seemed to enjoy being a husband, a father, a philanthropist. He got involved in Mi Casa, Su Casa, a charity building an orphanage in El Salvador. On one of his visits there, after a few days of hard, satisfying work, he took a break. He drove with two friends to Ilopango, a deep-water lake, to go scuba diving.

For some reason he decided to see how deep he could go. He decided to take a risk that even his risk-addicted father would never take.

Something went wrong. At 150 feet my son lost consciousness.

If I were to think about Matthew in his final moments, fighting for air, I believe my imagination could get me very close to how he must have felt. After the thousands of miles I've logged as a runner, I know that feeling of fighting for that next breath. But I won't let my imagination go there, ever.

Still, I've talked to the two friends who were with him. I've read
everything I've been able to get my hands on about diving accidents. When things go wrong, I've learned, a diver often feels something called “the martini effect.” He thinks everything is okay. Better than okay. He feels euphoric. That must have happened to Matthew, I tell myself, because at the last second he pulled out his mouthpiece. I choose to believe this euphoria scenario, to believe that my son didn't suffer at the end. That my son was happy. I choose, because it's the only way I can go on.

Penny and I were at the movies when we found out. We'd gone to the five o'clock showing of
Shrek 2.
In the middle of the movie we turned and saw Travis standing in the aisle. Travis.
Travis?

He was whispering to us in the dark. “You guys need to come with me.”

We walked up the aisle, out of the theater, from darkness to light. As we emerged he said, “I just got a phone call from El Salvador . . .”

Penny fell to the floor. Travis helped her up. He put his arm around his mother and I staggered away, to the end of the hallway, tears streaming. I recall seven strange unbidden words running through my head, over and over, like a fragment of some poem:
So this is the way it ends.

BY THE NEXT
morning the news was everywhere. Internet, radio, newspapers,
TV
, all blaring the bare facts. Penny and I pulled the blinds, locked the doors, cut ourselves off. But not before our niece Britney moved in with us. To this day I believe that she saved our lives.