Shoe Dog (28 page)

WHEN I GOT
home from Nissho it was about 9:00 p.m. Penny said Holland had phoned. “Holland?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “He left instructions that you should call whenever you got home. He left his home number.”

He answered on the first ring. His voice was . . . off. He'd been stiff earlier in the day, while carrying out orders from his bosses, but now he sounded more like a human being. A sad, stressed human being. “Phil,” he said, “I feel I ought to tell you . . . we've had to notify the
FBI
.”

I gripped the phone tighter. “Say that again,” I whispered. “Say that again, Perry.”

“We had no choice.”

“What are you telling me?”

“It's—well, it looks to us like fraud.”

I WENT INTO
the kitchen and fell into a chair. “What is it?” Penny said.

I told her. Bankruptcy, scandal, ruin—the works.

“Is there no hope?” she asked.

“It's all up to Nissho.”

“Tom Sumeragi?”

“And his bosses.”

“No problem, then. Sumeragi loves you.”

She stood. She had faith. She was completely ready for whatever may come. She even managed to turn in.

Not me. I sat up all night, playing out a hundred different scenarios, castigating myself for taking such a risk.

When I finally crawled into bed, my mind wouldn't stop. Lying in the dark I thought over and over: Am I going to jail?

Me? Jail?

I got up, poured myself a glass of water, checked on the boys. They were both sprawled on their tummies, dead to the world. What would they do? What would become of them? Then I went into the den and researched the homestead laws. I was relieved to learn that the Feds couldn't take the house. They could take everything else, but not this little sixteen-hundred-square-foot sanctuary.

I sighed, but the relief didn't last. I started thinking about my life. I scrolled back years, questioning every decision I'd ever made that led to this point. If only I'd been better at selling encyclopedias, I thought. Everything would be different.

I tried to give myself the standard catechism.

What do you know?

But I didn't know anything. Sitting in my recliner I wanted to cry out:
I know nothing!

I'd always had an answer, some kind of answer, to every problem. But this moment, this night, I had no answers. I got up, found a yellow legal pad, started making lists. But my mind kept drifting; when I looked down at the pad there were only doodles. Check marks, squiggles, lightning bolts.

In the eerie glow of the moon they all looked liked angry, defiant swooshes.

Don't go to sleep one night
.
What you most want will come to you then.

I MANAGED TO
fall asleep for an hour or two, and I spent most of that bleary Saturday morning on the phone, reaching out to people for advice. Everyone said Monday would be the critical day. Perhaps the most critical of my life. I would need to act swiftly and boldly. So, to prepare, I organized a summit for Sunday afternoon.

We all gathered in the conference room at Blue Ribbon. There was Woodell, who must have caught the first flight out of Boston, and Hayes, and Strasser, and Cale flew up from Los Angeles. Someone brought doughnuts. Someone sent out for pizzas. Someone dialed Johnson and put him on the speakerphone. The mood in the room, at first, was somber, because that was my mood. But having my friends around, my team, made me feel better, and as I lightened up, they did, too.

We talked long into the evening, and if we agreed on anything, we agreed there wasn't an easy solution. There usually isn't when the
FBI
has been notified. Or when you've been ousted by your bank for the second time in five years.

As the summit drew to a close the mood shifted again. The air in the room grew stale, heavy. The pizza looked like poison. A consensus formed. The resolution of this crisis, whatever it might be, is in the hands of others.

And of all those others, Nissho was our best hope.

We discussed tactics for Monday morning. That's when the men
from Nissho were due to arrive. Ito and Sumeragi were going to pore through our books, and while there was no telling what they might think of our finances, one thing was pretty much preordained. They were going to see right away that we'd used a big chunk of their financing not to purchase shoes from overseas but to run a secret factory in Exeter. Best case, this would make them mad. Worst case, it would make them lose their minds. If they considered our accounting sleight of hand a full-fledged betrayal, they would abandon us, faster than the bank had, in which case we'd be out of business. Simple as that.

We talked about hiding the factory from them. But everyone around the table agreed that we needed to play this one straight. As in the Onitsuka trial, full disclosure, total transparency, was the only course. It made sense, strategically and morally.

Throughout this summit the phones rang constantly. Creditors from coast to coast were trying to find out what was going on, why our checks were bouncing like Super Balls. Two creditors in particular were livid. One was Bill Shesky, head of Bostonian Shoes. We owed him a cool half million dollars, and he wanted to let us know that he was boarding a plane and coming to Oregon to get it. The second was Bill Manowitz, head of Mano International, a trading company in New York. We owed him one hundred thousand dollars, and he, too, was coming to Oregon to force a showdown. And to cash out.

After the summit adjourned I was the last to leave. Alone, I staggered out to my car. In my lifetime I had finished many races on sore legs, gimpy knees, zero energy, but that night I wasn't altogether sure I had the strength to drive home.

ITO AND SUMERAGI
were right on time. Monday morning, 9:00 a.m. sharp, they pulled up to the building, each wearing a dark suit and dark tie, each carrying a black briefcase. I thought of all the samurai movies I'd seen, all the books I'd read about ninjas. This was how it always looked before the ritual killing of the bad shogun.

They walked straight through our lobby and into our conference room and sat down. Without a word of small talk we stacked our books in front of them. Sumeragi lit a cigarette, Ito uncapped a fountain pen. They commenced. Pecking at calculators, scratching at legal pads, drinking bottomless cups of coffee and green tea, they slowly peeled back the layers of our operation and peered inside.

I walked in and out, every fifteen minutes or so, to ask if they needed anything. They never did.

The bank auditor arrived soon after to collect all our cash receipts. A fifty-thousand-dollar check from United Sporting Goods really
had
been in the mail. We showed him: It was right on Carole Fields's desk. This was the late check that set all the dominoes in motion. This, plus the normal day's receipts, covered our shortfall. The bank auditor telephoned United Sporting Goods' bank in Los Angeles and asked that their account be charged immediately, the funds transferred to our account at Bank of California. The Los Angeles bank said no. There were insufficient funds in the United Sporting Goods account.

United Sporting Goods had also been playing the float.

Already feeling a splitting headache coming on, I walked back into the conference room. I could smell it in the air. We'd reached that fateful moment. Leaning over the books, Ito realized what he was looking at and did a slow double-take. Exeter. Secret factory. Then I saw the realization dawn that he was the sucker who'd paid for it.

He looked up at me and pushed his head forward on his neck, as if to say: Really?

I nodded.

And then . . . he smiled. It was only a half smile, a mohair sweater smile, but it meant everything.

I gave him a weak half smile in return, and in that brief wordless exchange countless fates and futures were decided.

PAST MIDNIGHT, ITO
and Sumeragi were still there, still busy with their calculators and legal pads. When they finally left for the day they promised to return early the next morning. I drove home and found Penny waiting up. We sat in the dining room, talking. I gave her an update. We agreed that Nissho was done with their audit; they'd known everything they needed to know before lunch. What followed, and was yet to follow, was simply punishment. “Don't let them push you around like this!” Penny said.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “Right now they can push me around all they want. They're my only hope.”

“At least there are no more surprises,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “No more shoes to drop.”

ITO AND SUMERAGI
were back at 9:00 a.m. the next morning, and took up their places in the conference room. I went around the office and told everyone, “It's almost over. Just hang on. Just a little longer. There's nothing else for them to find.”

Not long after they'd arrived, Sumeragi stood, stretched, and looked as if he was going to step outside for a smoke. He motioned to me.
A word?
We walked down the hall to my office. “I fear this audit is worse than you realize,” he said. “What—why?” I said. “Because,” he said, “I delayed . . . I sometimes did not put invoices through right away.” “You did what now?” I said.

Hangdog, Sumeragi explained that he'd been worried about us, that he'd tried to help us manage our credit problems by hiding Nissho's invoices in a drawer. He'd held them back, not sent them on through to his accounting people, until he felt we had enough cash to pay them, which in turn made it appear on the Nissho books that their credit exposure to us was much lower than it actually was. In other words, all this time we'd been stressing about paying Nissho on time, and we were
never
paying them on time, because Sumeragi wasn't invoicing us on time, thinking he was
helping.
“This is bad,”
I said to Sumeragi. “Yes,” he said, relighting a Lucky Strike, “is bad, Buck. Is very very bad.”

I marched him back to the conference room and together we told Ito, who was, of course, appalled. At first he suspected Sumeragi of acting at our behest. I couldn't blame him. A conspiracy was the most logical explanation. In his place I would've thought the same thing. But Sumeragi, who looked as if he was about to prostrate himself before Ito, swore on his life that he'd been acting independently, that he'd gone rogue.

“Why you do such a thing?” Ito demanded.

“Because I think Blue Ribbon could be great success,” Sumeragi said, “maybe $20 million account. I shake hands many times with Mr. Steve Prefontaine. I shake hands with Mr. Bill Bowerman. I go many times to Trail Blazer game with Mr. Phil Knight. I even pack orders at warehouse. Nike is my
business child
. Always it is nice to see one's
business child
grow.”

“So then,” Ito said, “you hide invoices because . . . you . . .
like these men
?”

Deeply ashamed, Sumeragi bowed his head.
“Hai,”
he said.
“
Hai.”

I HAD NO
idea what Ito might do. But I couldn't stick around to find out. I suddenly had another problem. My two angriest creditors had just landed. Shesky from Bostonian and Manowitz from Mano were both on the ground, in Portland, headed our way.

Quickly, I gathered everyone in my office and gave them their final orders. “Folks—we're going to Code Red. This building, this forty-five-hundred-square-foot building, is about to be swarming with people to whom we owe money. Whatever else we do today, we cannot let any of them bump into each other. Bad enough that we owe them money. If they cross paths in the hall, if one unhappy creditor meets another unhappy creditor, and if they should have a chance to compare notes, they will freak out. They could team up
and decide on some sort of collaborative payment schedule! Which would be Armageddon.”

We drew up a plan. We assigned a person to each creditor, someone who would keep an eye on him at all times, even escorting him to the restroom. Then we assigned a person to coordinate everything, to be like air traffic control, making sure the creditors and their escorts were always in separate airspace. Meanwhile, I would scurry from room to room, apologizing and genuflecting.

At times the tension was unbearable. At other times it was a bad Marx Brothers movie. In the end, somehow, it worked. None of the creditors met any of the others. Both Shesky and Manowitz left the building that night feeling reassured, even murmuring nice things about Blue Ribbon.

Nissho left a couple hours later. By then Ito had accepted that Sumeragi was acting unilaterally, hiding invoices on his own initiative, unbeknownst to me. And he had forgiven me my sins, including my secret factory. “There are worse things,” he said, “than ambition.”

ONLY ONE PROBLEM
remained. And it was The Problem. All else paled by comparison. The
FBI
.

Late the next morning Hayes and I drove downtown. We said very little in the car, very little in the elevator ride up to Nissho. We met Ito in his outer office and he said nothing. He bowed. We bowed. Then the three of us rode the elevator silently down to the ground floor and walked across the street. For the second time in a week I saw Ito as a mythic samurai, wielding a jeweled sword. But this time he was preparing to defend—me.

If only I could count on his protection when I went to jail.

We walked into the Bank of California, shoulder to shoulder, and asked to speak with Holland. A receptionist told us to have a seat.

Five minutes passed.

Ten.

Holland came out. He shook Ito's hand. He nodded to me and Hayes and led us into the conference room in the back, the same conference room where he'd lowered the boom days before. Holland said we were going to be joined by a Mr. So-and-So and a Mr. Such-and-Such. We all sat in silence and waited for Holland's cohorts to be released from whatever crypt they were kept in. Finally they arrived and sat on either side of him. No one was sure who should start. It was the ultimate high-stakes game. Only aces or better.