I met Phil Knight (you know, the shoe guy) in 1975 after my adventures in working with the World Football League's Portland Storm which got called for permanent delay of game. Knowing I was out of a job, my good friend Bill Bowerman arranged a lunch date for me with his partner Phil Knight in the startup shoe company, Nike. Phil told me of the company's plan to make a major move upward by signing top athletes in professional football and basketball as Nike endorsers. He offered me the job of recruiting the athletes. I had agreed to go to work for another company two days before our lunch and I thanked Phil for the offer but didn't accept it. I should have.
We remained friends over the years and when I suggested to Bowerman that a book should be written about his amazing life, Phil underwrote my expenses for the research (I accrued 24 hours of taped interviews with Bowerman) on the biography that onetime track star and Sports Illustrated journalist Kenny Moore wrote: BOWERMAN AND THE MEN OF OREGON.
The last few days I've been viewing the NCAA Track & Field Championships and the US Olympic Trials in the magnificent stadium Knight had constructed on Oregon's Hayward Field and it occured to me that a case could be made for citizen Knight being recognized as the state of Oregon's Most Valuable Player (MVP). Phil, by the way, is a skilled writer and I attended a breakfast on the University of Oregon campus where he was being honored for his book, Shoe Dog. I told him that morning it was unfortunate he got distracted making sneakers when he could have been celebrated as a famous author.
As a history major at Oregon I did a lot of reading related to our state and Phil would rank with just a few other men and women for that MVP award. From selling shoes out of the trunk of his car to building the most powerful sports marketing Goliath in the world is in itself an incredible story. But even more than that achievement and the charities he and his wife, Penny, have funded in both academic and medical gifts, it is the projection world wide of the Oregon mystique that is worthy of celebration. Phil Knight absorbed that spiritual essence that Bowerman taught as coming from the pioneers who blazed the Oregon Trail. The cowards stayed home, Bowerman said, the weak ones died on the trail and the survivors became the men of Oregon (and, of course, the pioneer women of Oregon).
I'm proud of our friendship.
