Shoe Dog (39 page)

Every Nike athlete wrote, emailed, phoned. Every single one. But the first was Tiger. His call came in at 7:30 a.m. I will never, ever forget. And I will not stand for a bad word spoken about Tiger in my presence.

Another early caller was Alberto Salazar, the ferociously competitive distance runner who won three straight New York City Mara
thons in Nikes. I will always love him for many things, but above all for that show of concern.

He's a coach now, and recently he brought a few of his runners to Beaverton. They were having a light workout, in the middle of Ro-naldo Field, when someone turned and saw Alberto on the ground, gasping for air. A heart attack. He was legally dead for fourteen minutes, until paramedics revived him and rushed him to St. Vincent's.

I know that hospital well. My son Travis was born there, my mother died there, twenty-seven years after my father. In his final six months I was able to take my father on a long trip, to put to rest the eternal question of whether he was proud, to show him that
I
was proud of
him
. We went around the world, saw Nikes in every country we visited, and with every appearance of a swoosh his eyes shone. The pain of his impatience, his hostility to my Crazy Idea—it had faded. It was long gone. But not the memory.

Fathers and sons, it's always been the same, since the dawn of time. “My dad,” Arnold Palmer once confided to me at the Masters, “did all he could to discourage me from being a professional golfer.” I smiled. “You don't say.”

Visiting Alberto, walking into the lobby of St. Vincent's, I was overcome with visions of both my parents. I felt them at my elbow, at my ear. Theirs was a strained relationship, I believe. But, as with an iceberg, everything was below the surface. In their house on Claybourne Street, the tension was concealed, and calm and reason almost always prevailed, because of their love for us. Love wasn't spoken, or shown, but it was there, always. My sisters and I grew up knowing that both parents, different as they were from each other, and from us, cared. That's their legacy. That's their lasting victory.

I walked to the cardiac unit, saw the familiar sign on the door:
No Admittance
. I sailed past the sign, through the door, down the hall, and found Alberto's room. He lifted his head off the pillow, managed a pained smile. I patted his arm and we had a good talk. Then I saw that he was fading. “See you soon,” I said. His hand shot out and
grabbed mine. “If something happens to me,” he said, “promise me you'll take care of Galen.”

His athlete. The one he'd been training. Who was just like a son to him.

I got it. Oh, how I got it.

“Of course,” I said. “Of course. Galen. Consider it done.”

I walked out of the room, barely hearing the beeping machines, the laughing nurses, the patient groaning down the hall. I thought of that phrase, “It's just business.” It's never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.

TIME FOR BED,
Penny says, packing up her needlepoint.

Yes, I tell her. I'll be along in a minute.

I keep thinking of one line in
The Bucket List
. “You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.” I forget if it was Nicholson or Freeman. The line is so true, so very true. And it transports me to Tokyo, to the offices of Nissho. I was there not long ago for a visit. The phone rang. “For you,” the Japanese receptionist said, extending the receiver. “Me?” It was Michael Johnson, the three-time gold medalist, holder of the world record in the 200 meters and 400 meters. He did it all in our shoes. He happened to be in Tokyo, he said, and heard I was, too. “Do you want to have dinner?” he asked.

I was flattered. But I told him I couldn't. Nissho was having a banquet for me. I invited him to come. Hours later we were sitting together on the floor, before a table covered with shabu-shabu, toasting each other with cup after cup of sake. We laughed, cheered, clinked glasses, and something passed between us, the same thing that passes between me and most of the athletes I work with. A transference, a camaraderie, a sort of
connection
. It's brief, but it nearly always happens, and I know it's part of what I was searching for when I went around the world in 1962.

To study the self is to forget the self.
Mi casa, su casa
.

Oneness—in some way, shape, or form, it's what every person I've ever met has been seeking.

I THINK OF
others who didn't make it this far. Bowerman died on Christmas Eve, 1999, in Fossil. He'd gone back to his hometown, as we always suspected he would. He still owned his house on the mountaintop above campus, but he chose to quit it, to move with Mrs. Bowerman to a Fossil retirement home. He needed to be where he started—did he tell someone that? Or am I imagining him muttering it to himself ?

I remember when I was a sophomore, we had a dual meet with Washington State, in Pullman, and Bowerman made the bus driver go through Fossil so he could show us. I immediately thought of that sentimental detour when I heard that he'd lain down on the bed and never got up.

It was Jaqua who phoned. I was reading the paper, the Christmas tree blinking blinking blinking. You always remember the strangest details from such moments. I choked into the phone, “I'll have to call you back,” then walked upstairs to my den. I turned out all the lights. Eyes shut, I replayed a million different moments, including that long-ago lunch at the Cosmopolitan Hotel.

Deal?

Deal.

An hour passed before I could go back downstairs. At some point that night I gave up the Kleenex and just draped a towel over my shoulder. A move I learned from another beloved coach—John Thompson.

Strasser passed suddenly, too. Heart attack, 1993. He was so young, it was a tragedy, all the more so because it came after we'd had a falling out. Strasser had been instrumental in signing Jordan, in building up the Jordan brand and wrapping it around Rudy's air
soles. Air Jordan changed Nike, took us to the next level, and the next, but it changed Strasser, too. He felt that he should no longer be taking orders from anyone, including me. Especially me. We clashed, too many times, and he quit.

It might have been okay if he'd just quit. But he went to work for Adidas. An intolerable betrayal. I never forgave him. (Though I did recently—happily, proudly—hire his daughter, Avery. Twenty-two years old, she works in Special Events, and she's said to be thriving. It's a blessing and a joy to see her name in the company directory.) I wish Strasser and I had patched things up before he died, but I don't know that it was possible. We were both born to compete, and we were both bad at forgiving. For both of us, betrayal was extra potent kryptonite.

I felt that same sense of betrayal when Nike came under attack for conditions in our overseas factories—the so-called sweatshop controversy. Whenever reporters said a factory was unsatisfactory, they never said how much better it was than the day we first went in. They never said how hard we'd worked with our factory partners to upgrade conditions, to make them safer and cleaner. They never said these factories weren't ours, that we were renters, one among many tenants. They simply searched until they found a worker with complaints about conditions, and they used that worker to vilify us, and only us, knowing our name would generate maximum publicity.

Of course my handling of the crisis only made it worse. Angry, hurt, I often reacted with self-righteousness, petulance, anger. On some level I knew my reaction was toxic, counterproductive, but I couldn't stop myself. It's just not easy to remain even-keeled when you wake up one day, thinking you're creating jobs and helping poor countries modernize and enabling athletes to achieve greatness, only to find yourself being burned in effigy outside the flagship retail store in your own hometown.

The company reacted as I did. Emotionally. Everyone was reel
ing. Many late nights in Beaverton, you'd find all the lights on, and soul-searching conversations taking place in various conference rooms and offices. Though we knew that much of the criticism was unjust, that Nike was a symbol, a scapegoat, more than the true culprit, all of that was beside the point. We had to admit: We could do better.

We told ourselves: We must do better.

Then we told the world: Just watch. We'll make our factories shining examples.

And we did. In the ten years since the bad headlines and lurid exposés, we've used the crisis to reinvent the entire company.

For instance. One of the worst things about a shoe factory used to be the rubber room, where uppers and soles are bonded. The fumes are choking, toxic, cancer-causing. So we invented a water-based bonding agent that gives off no fumes, thereby eliminating 97 percent of the carcinogens in the air. Then we gave this invention to our competitors, handed it over to anyone who wanted it.

They all did. Nearly all of them now use it.

One of many, many examples.

We've gone from a target of reformers to a dominant player in the factory reform movement. Today the factories that make our products are among the best in the world. An official at the United Nations recently said so: Nike is the gold standard by which we measure all apparel factories.

Out of the sweatshop crisis also came the Girl Effect, a massive Nike effort to break the generational cycles of poverty in the bleakest corners of the world. Along with the United Nations and other corporate and government partners, the Girl Effect is spending tens of millions of dollars in a smart, tough, global campaign to educate and connect and lift up young girls. Economists, sociologists, not to mention our own hearts, tell us that, in many societies, young girls are the most economically vulnerable, and vital, demographic. So helping them helps all. Whether striving to end child marriage
in Ethiopia, or building safe spaces for teenage girls in Nigeria, or launching a magazine and radio show that deliver powerful, inspiring messages to young Rwandans, the Girl Effect is changing millions of lives, and the best days of my week, month, year, are those when I receive the glowing reports from its front lines.

I'd do anything to go back, to make so many different decisions, which might or might not have averted the sweatshop crisis. But I can't deny that the crisis has led to miraculous change, inside and outside Nike. For that I must be grateful.

Of course, there will always be the question of wages. The salary of a Third World factory worker seems impossibly low to Americans, and I understand. Still, we have to operate within the limits and structures of each country, each economy; we can't simply pay whatever we wish to pay. In one country, which shall be nameless, when we tried to raise wages, we found ourselves called on the carpet, summoned to the office of a top government official and ordered to stop. We were disrupting the nation's entire economic system, he said. It's simply not right, he insisted, or feasible, that a shoe worker makes more than a medical doctor.

Change never comes as fast as we want it.

I think constantly of the poverty I saw while traveling the world in the 1960s. I knew then that the only answer to such poverty is entry-level jobs. Lots of them. I didn't form this theory on my own. I heard it from every economics professor I ever had, at both Oregon and Stanford, and everything I saw and read thereafter backed it up. International trade always,
always
benefits both trading nations.

Another thing I often heard from those same professors was the old maxim: “When goods don't pass international borders, soldiers will.” Though I've been known to call business war without bullets, it's actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity. That's why, haunted as I was by the Vietnam War, I always vowed that someday Nike would have a factory in or near Saigon.

By 1997 we had four.

I was very proud. And when I learned that we were to be honored and celebrated by the Vietnamese government as one of the nation's top five generators of foreign currency, I felt that I simply had to visit.

What a wrenching trip. I don't know if I'd appreciated the full depth of my hatred for the war in Vietnam until I returned twenty-­five years after the peace, until I joined hands with our former antagonists. At one point my hosts graciously asked what they could do for me, what would make my trip special or memorable. I got a lump in my throat. I didn't want them to go to any trouble, I said.

But they insisted.

Okay, I said, okay, I'd like to meet eighty-six-year-old General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the Vietnamese MacArthur, the man who single-­handedly defeated the Japanese, the French, the Americans, and the Chinese.

My hosts stared in amazed silence. Slowly they rose and excused themselves and stood off in a corner, conversing in frantic Vietnamese.

After five minutes they came back. Tomorrow, they said. One hour.

I bowed deeply. Then counted the minutes until the big meeting.

The first thing I noticed as General Giáp entered the room was his size. This brilliant fighter, this genius tactician who'd organized the Tet Offensive, who'd planned those miles and miles of underground tunnels, this giant of history, came up to my shoulders. He was,
maybe
, five foot four.

And humble. No corncob pipe for Giáp.

I remember that he wore a dark business suit, like mine. I remember that he smiled as I did—shyly, uncertainly. But there was an intensity about him. I'd seen that kind of glittery confidence in great coaches, and great business leaders, the elite of the elite. I never saw it in a mirror.

He knew I had questions. He waited for me to ask them.

I said simply: “How did you do it?”

I thought I saw the corners of his mouth flicker. A smile? Maybe?

He thought. And thought. “I was,” he said, “a professor of the jungle.”