Shoe Dog (20 page)

I felt sick at heart as I turned a corner and came upon a scorched shoe, under glass, the footprint of its owner still visible.

The next morning, these ghastly images still fresh in my head, I was somber, heavily subdued as I drove with Sumeragi and Sole Jr. into the countryside, and I was almost startled by the good cheer of the factory officials. They were delighted to meet us, to show us their wares. Also, they said forthrightly, they were most eager to do a deal. They'd long been hoping to crack the U.S. market.

I showed them the Cortez, asked how long it might take to produce a sizable order of this shoe.

Six months, they said.

Sole Jr. stepped forward. “You'll do it in
three
,” he barked.

I gasped. With the exception of Kitami, I'd always found the Japanese unfailingly polite, even in the heat of disagreement or intense negotiation, and I'd always strived to reciprocate. But in Hiroshima of all places I felt that politeness was that much more essential. Here, if nowhere else on earth, humans should be gentle and kind with one another. Sole Jr. was anything but. The ugliest of Americans.

It got worse. As we made our way across Japan he was brusque, boorish, strutting, swaggering, condescending to everyone we met. He embarrassed me, embarrassed all Americans. Now and then Sumeragi and I exchanged pained looks. We wanted desperately to scold Sole Jr., to leave him—but we needed his father's contacts. We needed this horrid brat to show us where the factories were.

In Kurume, just outside Beppu, in the southern islands, we visited a factory that was part of a vast industrial complex run by the Bridgestone Tire Company. The factory was called Nippon Rubber. It was the biggest shoe factory I'd ever seen, a kind of Shoe Oz, capable of handling any order, no matter how big or complicated. We sat with factory officials in their conference room, just after breakfast, and this time, when Sole Jr. tried to speak, I didn't let him. Each time he opened his mouth I spoke up, cut him off.

I told officials the kind of shoe we wanted, showed them the Cortez. They nodded gravely. I wasn't sure they understood.

After lunch we returned to the conference room and there before me on the table was a brand-new Cortez, Nike side stripe and all, hot off the factory floor. Magic.

I spent the rest of the afternoon describing the shoes I wanted. Tennis, basketball, high top, low top, plus several more models of running shoes. The officials insisted they would have no trouble making any of these designs.

Fine, I said, but before placing an order I'll need to see samples. The factory officials assured me that they could blast out samples and ship them within days to Nissho's offices in Tokyo. We bowed to each other. I went back to Tokyo and waited.

Days and days of crisp fall weather. I walked around the city, drank Sapporo and sake, ate yakitori, and dreamed of shoes. I revisited the Meiji gardens, and sat beneath the ginkgos beside the torii gate. Portal to the sacred.

On Sunday I got a notice at my hotel. The shoes had arrived. I went down to the offices of Nissho, but they were closed. They had trusted me enough to give me a pass, however, so I let myself in, and sat in a big room, amid rows and rows of empty desks, inspecting the samples. I held them to the light, turned them this way and that. I ran my fingers along the soles, along the check or wing or whatever our new side stripe would be called. They were not perfect. The logo on this shoe wasn't quite straight, the midsole on that shoe was a bit too thin. There should be more lift on this other one.

I made notes for the factory officials.

But minor imperfections aside, they were very good.

At last the only thing to do was think up names for the different models. I was panicked. I'd done such a poor job thinking up a name for my new brand—

Dimension Six? Everyone at Blue Ribbon still mocked me. I'd only gone with Nike because I was out of time, and because I'd trusted Johnson's savant-like nature. Now I was on my own, in an empty office building in downtown Tokyo. I'd have to trust myself.

I held up the tennis shoe. I decided to call it . . . the Wimbledon.

Well. That was easy.

I held up another tennis shoe. I decided to call it . . . the Forest Hill. After all, that was the setting for the first U.S. Open.

I held up a basketball shoe. I called it the Blazer, after my hometown
NBA
team.

I held up another basketball shoe. I named it the Bruin, because the best college basketball team of all time was John Wooden's Bruins. Not too creative, but.

Now the running shoes. Cortez, of course. And Marathon. And Obori. And Boston and Finland. I was feeling it. I was in the zone. I
started dancing around the room. I heard a secret music. I held up a running shoe. I named it the Wet-Flyte. Boom, I said.

To this day I don't know where that name came from.

It took a half hour to name them all. I felt like Coleridge, writing “Kubla Khan” in an opium daze. I then mailed my names off to the factory.

It was dark as I walked out of the office building, into the crowded Tokyo street. A feeling came over me, unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I felt spent, but proud. I felt drained, but exhilarated. I felt everything I ever hoped to feel after a day's work. I felt like an artist, a
creator
. I looked back over my shoulder, took one last look at Nissho's offices. Under my breath I said, “We made this.”

I'D BEEN IN
Japan three weeks, longer than I expected, which posed two problems. The world was large, but the shoe world was small, and if Onitsuka got wind that I was in their “neighborhood,” and didn't stop by, they'd know I was up to something. It wouldn't take much for them to find out, or figure out, that I was lining up their replacement. So I needed to go down to Kobe, make an appearance at Onitsuka's offices. But extending my trip, being gone from home another week, was unacceptable. Penny and I had never been apart that long.

I phoned her and asked her to fly over and join me for this last leg.

Penny jumped at the chance. She'd never seen Asia, and this might be her last chance before we were out of business and out of money. It might also be her last chance to use that matching pink luggage. And Dot was available for babysitting.

The flight was long, though, and Penny didn't like planes. When I went to the Tokyo airport to meet her, I knew I'd be collecting a fragile woman. I forgot, however, how intimidating Haneda Airport could be. It was a solid mass of bodies and baggage. I couldn't move, couldn't find Penny. Suddenly she appeared at the
sliding glass doors of customs. She was trying to push forward, trying to get through. There were too many people—and armed police—on every side of her. She was trapped.

The doors slid open, the crowd surged forward, and Penny fell into my arms. I'd never seen her so exhausted, not even after she gave birth to Matthew. I asked if the plane had a flat tire and she'd gotten out to change it.
Joke?
Kitami? Remember?
She didn't laugh. She said the plane hit turbulence two hours outside Tokyo and the flight was a roller coaster.

She was wearing her best lime-green suit, now badly wrinkled and stained, and she was the same shade of lime-green. She needed a hot shower, and a long rest, and some fresh clothes. I told her we had a suite waiting at the wonderful Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

A half hour later, when we pulled up to the hotel, she said she was going to use the ladies' room while I checked us in. I hurried to the front desk, got our room keys, and sat on one of the lobby sofas to wait.

Ten minutes.

Fifteen minutes.

I went to the door of the ladies' room and cracked it open. “Penny?”

“I'm frozen,” she said.

“What?”

“I'm on the floor of the ladies' room . . . and I am frozen.”

I went in and found her on the cold tiles, lying on her side, ladies stepping over and around her. She was having a panic attack. And severe leg cramps. The long flight, the chaos at the airport, the months of stress about Kitami—it was too much for her. I spoke calmly, told her everything would be fine, and gradually she unclenched. I helped her to her feet, guided her upstairs, and asked the hotel to send up a masseuse.

As she lay on the bed, a cold washcloth on her forehead, I was
worried, but a little bit grateful. I'd been on the edge of panic for weeks. Months. The sight of Penny in this state gave me a shot of adrenaline. One of us had to keep it together, for the sake of Matthew. This time it would have to be me.

THE NEXT MORNING
I phoned Onitsuka and told them my wife and I were in Japan. Come on down, they said. Within an hour we were on the train for Kobe.

Everyone came out to meet us, including Kitami and Fujimoto and Mr. Onitsuka. What brings you to Japan? I told them we were vacationing. Spur-of-the-moment thing. “Very good, very good,” Mr. Onitsuka said. He made a big fuss over Penny, and we sat down to a hastily arranged tea ceremony. For a moment, amid all the small talk, all the laughter and pleasantries, it was possible to forget that we were on the edge of war.

Mr. Onitsuka even offered a car and driver to take Penny and me around and show us Kobe. I accepted. Then Kitami invited us to dinner that night. Again I reluctantly said yes.

Fujimoto came along, which added an extra layer of complexity. I looked around the table and thought: my bride, my enemy, my spy. Some life. Though the tone was friendly, cordial, I could feel the tangled subtext of every remark. It was like a loose wire buzzing and sparking in the background. I kept waiting for Kitami to come out with it, press me for an answer to his offer to buy Blue Ribbon. Oddly, he never brought it up.

Around nine o'clock he said he needed to be getting home. Fujimoto said he'd stay and have a nightcap with us. The moment Kitami was gone, Fujimoto told us everything he knew of the plan to cut off Blue Ribbon. It wasn't much more than I'd gleaned from the folder in Kitami's briefcase. Still, it was nice to sit with an ally, so we had several nightcaps, and a few laughs, until Fujimoto looked at his watch and let out a scream. “Oh no! It is after eleven. The train stop running!”

“Ah, no problem,” I said. “Come stay with us.”

“We have a big tatami in our room,” Penny said. “You can sleep on that.”

Fujimoto accepted, with many bows. He thanked me yet again for the bicycle.

An hour later, there we were, in one small room, pretending there was nothing out of the ordinary about the three of us bedding down together.

At sunrise I heard Fujimoto get up, cough, and stretch. He went to the bathroom, ran the water, brushed his teeth. Then he put on his clothes from the night before and slipped out. I fell back asleep but a short while later Penny went to the bathroom and when she came back to bed she was—laughing? I rolled over. Nope, she was crying. She looked as if she was on the verge of another panic attack. “He used . . . ,” she rasped. “What?” I said. She buried her head in the pillows. “He used . . . my toothbrush.”

AS SOON AS
I got back to Oregon I invited Bowerman up to Portland to meet with me and Woodell, talk about the state of the business.

It seemed like any old meeting.

At some point, in the course of conversation, Woodell and I pointed out that the outer sole of the training shoe hadn't changed in fifty years. The tread was still just waves or grooves across the bottom of the foot. The Cortez and Boston were breakthroughs in cushioning and nylon, revolutionary in upper construction, but there hadn't been a single innovation in outer soles since before the Great Depression. Bowerman nodded. He made a note. He didn't seem all that interested.

As I recall, once we'd covered all the new business on the agenda, Bowerman told us that a wealthy alum had just donated a million dollars to Oregon, earmarked for a new track—the world's finest.
His voice rising, Bowerman described the surface he'd created with that windfall. It was polyurethane, the same spongy surface that was to be used in Munich in the 1972 Olympics, where Bowerman was on tap to be head coach of the track team.

He was pleased. And yet, he said, he was far from satisfied. His runners still weren't getting the full benefit of this new surface. Their shoes still weren't gripping it right.

On the two-hour drive back to Eugene, Bowerman mulled what Woodell and I had said, and mulled his problem with the new track, and these two problems simmered and congealed in his thoughts.

The following Sunday, sitting over breakfast with his wife, Bowerman's gaze drifted to her waffle iron. He noted the waffle iron's gridded pattern. It conformed with a certain pattern in his mind's eye, a pattern he'd been seeing, or seeking, for months, if not years. He asked Mrs. Bowerman if he could borrow it.

He had a vat of urethane in his garage, left over from the installation of the track. He carried the waffle iron out to the garage, filled it with urethane, heated it up—and promptly ruined it. The urethane sealed it shut, because Bowerman hadn't added a chemical releasing agent. He didn't know from chemical releasing agents.

Another person would have quit right then. But Bowerman's brain also didn't have a releasing agent. He bought another waffle iron, and this time filled it with plaster, and when the plaster hardened the jaws of the waffle iron opened, no problem. He took the resulting mold to the Oregon Rubber Company, and paid them to pour liquid rubber into it.

Another failure. The rubber mold was too rigid, too brittle. It broke right away.

But Bowerman felt he was getting closer.

He gave up the waffle iron altogether. Instead he took a sheet of stainless steel and punched it with holes, creating a waffle-like surface, and brought this back to the rubber company. The mold they made from that steel sheet was pliable, workable, and Bower
man now had two foot-sized squares of hard rubber nubs, which he brought home and sewed to the sole of a pair of running shoes. He gave these to one of his runners. The runner laced them on and ran like a rabbit.