Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

A soldier in shoes is only a soldier. But in boots he becomes a warrior.

Driving back to Portland I’d puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out

Another thing I often heard from those same professors was the old maxim: “When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will.”

And of all the great fighting men in history I found MacArthur the most compelling. Those Ray-Bans, that corncob pipe—the man didn’t lack for confidence. Brilliant tactician, master motivator, he also went on to head the U.S. Olympic Committee. How could I not love him? Of course, he was deeply flawed. But he knew that. You are remembered, he said,

She was learning that I was absentminded, that I would drive to the grocery store and come home empty-handed, without the one item she’d asked me to buy, because all the way there and all the way back I’d been puzzling over the latest bank crisis, or the most recent Onitsuka shipping delay.

The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.

I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.

When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.

He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to—equally important qualities in a friend. Essential in a travel companion.