Shoe Dog (34 page)

Fortune favors the brave, that sort of thing.

I also liked the idea of a change of scenery.

Maybe, I thought, it will initiate a change of luck.

We were sad to leave the old house, of course. Both boys had taken their first steps there, and Matthew had lived for that swimming pool. He was never so at peace as when frolicking in the water. I recall Penny shaking her head and saying, “One thing's for certain. That boy will never drown.”

But both boys were getting so big, they desperately needed more room, and the new place had plenty. It sat on five acres high above Hillsboro, and every room felt spacious and airy. From the first night we knew we'd found our home. There was even a built-in niche for my recliner.

To honor our new address, our new start, I tried to keep a new schedule. Unless I was out of town, I tried to attend all the youth basketball games, and youth soccer games, and Little League games. I spent whole weekends teaching Matthew to swing a bat, though both of us wondered why. He refused to keep his back foot still. He refused to listen. He argued with me constantly.

The ball's moving, he said, why shouldn't I?

Because it's harder to hit that way.

That was never a good enough reason for him.

Matthew was more than a rebel. He was, I discovered, more than a contrarian. He positively couldn't abide authority, and he perceived authority lurking in every shadow. Any opposition to his will was oppression and thus a call to arms. In soccer, for instance, he played
like an anarchist. He didn't compete against the opponent so much as against the rules—the structure. If the other team's best player was coming toward him on a breakaway, Matthew would forget the game, forget the ball, and just go for the kid's shins. Down went the kid, out came the parents, and pandemonium would ensue. During one Matthew-­sparked melee, I looked at him and realized he didn't want to be there any more than I did. He didn't like soccer. For that matter, he didn't care for sports. He was playing, and I was watching him play, out of some sense of obligation.

Over time his behavior had a suppressive effect on his younger brother. Though Travis was a gifted athlete and loved sports, Matthew had turned him off. One day little Travis simply retired. He would no longer go out for any teams. I asked him to reconsider, but the only thing he had in common with Matthew, and maybe his father, was a stubborn streak. Of all the negotiations in my life, those with my sons have been the most difficult.

On New Year's Eve, 1977, I went around my new house, putting out the lights, and I felt a kind of fissure deep within the bedrock of my existence. My life was about sports, my business was about sports, my bond with my father was about sports, and neither of my two sons wanted anything to do with sports.

Like the American Selling Price, it all seemed so unjust.

1978

S
trasser was our five-star general, and I was ready to follow him into any fray, any fusillade. In our fight with Onitsuka his outrage had comforted and sustained me, and his mind had been a formidable weapon. In this new fight with the Feds he was doubly outraged. Good, I thought. He stomped around the offices like a pissed-off Viking, and his stomps were music to my ears.

We both knew, however, that rage wasn't going to be enough. Nor was Strasser alone. We were taking on the United States of America. We needed
a few
good men. So Strasser reached out to a young Portland lawyer, a friend of his named Richard Werschkul.

I don't remember ever being introduced to Werschkul. I don't remember anyone asking me to meet him or hire him. I just remember suddenly being
aware
of Werschkul, extremely conscious of his presence, all the time. The way you're aware of a big woodpecker in your front yard. Or on your head.

For the most part Werschkul's presence was welcome. He had the kind of go-go motor we liked, and the credentials we always looked for. Stanford undergrad, University of Oregon Law. He also had a compelling personality, a presence. Dark, wiry, sarcastic, bespectacled, he possessed an uncommonly deep, plummy baritone, like Darth Vader with a head cold. Overall he gave the impression of a man with a plan, and the plan didn't include surrender or sleep.

On the other hand, he also had an eccentric streak. We all did, but Werschkul had what Mom Hatfield might have called a “wild hair.” There was always something about him that didn't quite . . . fit. For instance, though he was a native Oregonian, he had a baffling East Coast air. Blue blazers, pink shirts, bow ties. Sometimes his accent suggested summers in Newport, rowing for Yale—a string of polo ponies. Surpassing strange in a man who knew his way around the Willamette Valley. And while he could be very witty, even silly, he could change on a dime and become scary serious.

Nothing made him more serious than the topic of Nike vs. U.S. Customs.

Some inside Nike worried about Werschkul's seriousness, fearing it bordered on obsession. Fine by me, I thought. Obsessives were the only ones for the job. The only ones for me. Some questioned his stability. But when it came to stability, I asked, who among us will throw the first stone?

Besides, Strasser liked him, and I trusted Strasser. So when Strasser suggested that we promote Werschkul, and move him to Washington, D.C., where he'd be closer to the politicians we'd need on our side, I didn't hesitate. Neither, of course, did Werschkul.

ABOUT THE SAME
time we dispatched Werschkul to Washington, I sent Hayes to Exeter to check on things at the factory, and to see how Woodell and Johnson were getting along. Also on his agenda was the purchase of something called a rubber mill. Allegedly it would help us do a better job of dictating the quality of our outer soles and midsoles. More, Bowerman wanted it for his experiments, and my policy was still
WBW
: Whatever Bowerman Wants. If Bowerman requisitions a Sherman tank, I told Woodell, don't ask questions. Just dial the Pentagon.

But when Hayes asked Woodell about “these rubber mill gizmos,” and where to find one, Woodell shrugged. Never heard of them.
Woodell referred Hayes to Giampietro, who knew everything worth knowing about rubber mills, of course, and days later Hayes found himself trekking with Giampietro into the backwoods of Maine, to the little town of Saco, and an auction of industrial equipment.

Hayes wasn't able to find a rubber mill at the auction, but he did fall in love with the auction site, an old redbrick factory on an island in the Saco River. The factory was something out of Stephen King, but that didn't spook Hayes. It spoke to him. I guess it was to be expected that a man with a bulldozer fetish would become enamored of a rusted-out factory. The surprising part was, the factory happened to be for sale. Price: $500,000. Hayes offered the factory owner $100,000, and they settled on $200,000.

“Congratulations,” Hayes and Woodell said when they phoned that afternoon.

“For what?”

“For only slightly more than the cost of a rubber mill you are the proud owner of a whole damn factory,” they said.

“The heck are you talking about?”

They filled me in. Like Jack telling his mother about the magic beans, they mumbled when they got to the part about the price. And about the factory needing tens of thousands of dollars in repairs.

I could tell they'd been drinking, and later Woodell would confess that, after stopping at a huge discount liquor outlet in New Hampshire, Hayes whooped: “At prices like this? A man can't afford
not
to drink!”

I rose from my chair and yelled into the phone, “You dummies! What do I need with a
nonworking
factory in
Saco, Maine
?”

“Storage?” they said. “And one day it could be a complement to our factory in Exeter.”

In my best John McEnroe I screamed, “You cannot be
serious
! Don't you dare!”

“Too late. We already bought it.”

Dial tone.

I sat down. I didn't even feel mad. I was too upset to be mad. The Feds were dunning me for $25 million I didn't have and my men were running around the country writing checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars more, without even asking me. Suddenly I became calm. Quasi-comatose. I told myself, Who cares? When the government comes in, when they repossess everything, lock, stock, and barrel, let
them
figure out what to do with a nonworking factory in Saco, Maine.

Later Hayes and Woodell called back and said they'd only been kidding about buying the factory. “Pulling your chain,” they said. “But you do need to buy it. You must.”

Okay, I said wearily. Okay. Whatever you dummies think best.

WE WERE ON
track in 1979 for sales of $140 million. Better yet, our quality was rising apace. People in the trade, industry insiders, were writing articles, praising us for “finally” putting out a better shoe than Adidas. Personally, I thought the insiders were late to the party. Other than a few early stumbles, our quality had been tops for years. And we'd never lagged in innovation. (Plus, we had Rudy's air soles in the pipeline.)

Aside from our war with the government, we were in great shape.

Which seemed like saying: Aside from being on death row, life was grand.

Another good sign. We kept outgrowing our headquarters. We moved again that year, to a forty-thousand-square-foot building all our own, in Beaverton. My private office was sleek, and huge, bigger than our entire first headquarters next to the Pink Bucket.

And utterly empty. The interior decorator decided to go ­Japanese minimalist—with one touch of the absurd that everyone found hilarious. She thought it would be a hoot to set beside my desk a leather chair that was a giant baseball mitt. “Now,” she said, “you can sit there every day and think about your . . . sports things.”

I sat in the mitt, like a foul ball, and looked out the window. I should
have reveled in that moment, savored the humor and the irony. Getting cut from my high school baseball team had been one of the great hurts of my life, and now I was sitting in a giant mitt, in a swank new office, presiding over a company that sold “sports things” to professional baseball players. But instead of cherishing how far we'd come, I saw only how far we had to go. My window looked onto a beautiful stand of pines, and I definitely couldn't see the forest for the trees.

I didn't understand what was happening, in the moment, but now I do. The years of stress were taking their toll. When you see only problems, you're not seeing clearly. At just the moment I needed to be my sharpest, I was approaching burnout.

I OPENED THE
final Buttface of 1978 with a rah-rah speech, trying to fire up the troops, but especially myself. “Gentlemen,” I said, “our industry is made up of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs! And next year . . . finally . . . one of the dwarfs is going to get into Snow White's pants!”

As if the metaphor needed further explanation, I explained that Adidas was Snow White. And our time, I thundered, is coming!

But first we needed to start selling clothes. Aside from the plain numerical fact that Adidas sold more apparel than shoes, apparel gave them a psychological edge. Apparel helped them lure bigger athletes into sweeter endorsement deals. Look at all we can give you, Adidas would say to an athlete, pointing to their shirts and pants and other gear. And they could say the same thing when they sat down with sporting goods stores.

Besides, if we ever resolved our fight with the Feds, and if we ever wanted to go public, Wall Street wouldn't give us the respect we deserved if we were just a shoe company. We needed to be diverse, which meant developing a solid line of apparel—which meant finding someone darned good to put in charge of it. At the Buttface I announced that someone would be Ron Nelson.

“Why him?” Hayes asked.

“Uh, well,” I said, “for starters, he's a
CPA
 . . .”

Hayes waved his arms over his head. “Just what we need,” he said, “another accountant.”

He had me there. I did seem to hire nothing but accountants. And lawyers. It wasn't that I had some bizarre affection for accountants and lawyers, I just didn't know where else to look for talent. I reminded Hayes, not for the first time, that there's no shoe school, no University of Footwear from which we could recruit. We needed to hire people with sharp minds, that was our priority, and accountants and lawyers had at least proved that they could master a difficult subject. And pass a big test.

Most had also demonstrated basic competence. When you hired an accountant, you knew he or she could count. When you hired a lawyer, you knew he or she could talk. When you hired a marketing expert, or product developer, what did you know? Nothing. You couldn't predict what he or she could do, or if he or she could do anything. And the typical business school graduate? He or she didn't want to start out with a bag selling shoes. Plus, they all had zero experience, so you were simply rolling the dice based on how well they did in an interview. We didn't have enough margin for error to roll the dice on anyone.

Besides, as accountants went, Nelson was a standout. He'd become a manager in just five years, which was ridiculously fast. And he'd been valedictorian at his high school. (Alas, we didn't find out until later that he went to high school in eastern Montana; his class had five people.)

On the minus side of the ledger, because he'd become an accountant so fast, Nelson was young. Maybe too young to handle something as big as the launch of an apparel line. But I told myself that his youth wouldn't be a critical factor, because starting an apparel line was relatively easy. After all, there wasn't any technology or physics involved. As Strasser had once quipped, “There's no such thing as air shorts.”

Then, during one of my first meetings with Nelson, right after I'd hired him, I noticed . . . he had absolutely no sense of style. The more I looked him over, up and down, side to side, the more I realized that he might have been the worst dresser I'd ever met. Worse than Strasser. Even Nelson's car, I noticed one day in the parking lot, was a hideous shade of brown. When I mentioned this to Nelson, he laughed. He had the nerve to brag that every car he'd ever owned had been the same brown.

“I might have made a mistake with Nelson,” I confided to Hayes.

I WAS NO
fashion plate. But I knew how to wear a decent suit. And because my company was launching an apparel line, I now started paying closer attention to what I wore, and what those around me wore. On the second front I was appalled. Bankers and investors, reps from Nissho, all kinds of people we needed to impress, were passing through our new halls, and whenever they saw Strasser in his Hawaiian shirts, or Hayes in his bulldozer-driving outfits, they did triple-takes. Sometimes our eccentricity was funny. (A top executive at Foot Locker said, “We think of you guys as gods—until we see your cars.”) But most times it was embarrassing. And potentially damaging. Thus, around Thanksgiving, 1978, I instituted a strict company dress code.

The reaction wasn't terribly enthusiastic. Corporate bullshit, many grumbled. I was mocked. Mostly I was ignored. To even a casual observer, it became clear that Strasser started dressing
worse
. When he showed up to work one day in baggy-seated Bermuda shorts, as if he were walking a Geiger counter down the beach, I couldn't stand by. This was rank insubordination.

I intercepted him in the halls and called him out. “You need to wear a coat and tie!” I said.

“We're not a coat-and-tie company!” he shot back.

“We are now.”

He walked away from me.

In the coming days Strasser continued to dress with a studied, confrontational casualness. So I fined him. I instructed the bookkeeper to deduct seventy-five dollars from Strasser's next paycheck.

He threw a fit, of course. And he plotted. Days later he and Hayes came to work in coats and ties. But preposterous coats and ties. Stripes and plaids, checks with polka dots, all of it rayon and polyester—and burlap? They meant it as a farce, but also as a protest, a gesture of civil disobedience, and I was in no mood for two fashion Gandhis staging a dress-in. I disinvited them both from the next Buttface. Then I ordered them both to go home and not to come back until they could behave, and dress, like adults.

“And—you're fined again!” I yelled at Strasser.

“Then you're fucked!” he yelled back.

Just then, at that exact moment, I turned. Coming toward me was Nelson, dressed worse than the lot of them. Polyester bell-bottoms, a pink silk shirt open to his navel. Strasser and Hayes were one thing, but where the heck did this new guy get off protesting my dress code? After I'd
just hired
him? I pointed at the door and sent him home, too. From the confused, horrified look on his face I realized he wasn't protesting. He was just naturally unstylish.