Shoe dog A memoir by the creator of Nike

*Starred Review* How long do you think you're going to keep jackassing around with these shoes? That's what Phil Knight's father said in 1964, when his 26-year-old son asked for money to help pay for $1,000 worth of Tiger running shoes, manufactured by a Japanese company that improbably had agreed to make Knight its West Coast distributor (it helped that Knight's partner in the venture was legendary University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman, whose wife had written Knight a check for $500 from her Christmas fund). After stowing the shoes in his parents' Portland, Oregon, basement, under and around the ping pong table (leaving room on top for his mother to fold laundry), Knight began driving to high-school track meets and selling his Tigers from the trunk of his Plymouth Valiant. So begins the story of how the multibillion-dollar Nike empire was born. Knight's memoir of his early years as an entrepreneur extends from his whirlwind, post-grad school trip around the world, including the crucial stop-off in Tokyo to make the distributorship deal, to 1980, when Nike went public. Much of the story he tells will be familiar to those who have read the several, previously published Nike histories (Donald Katz's Just Do It, 1994, among them), but this is a very different kind of book, adding Knight's immediately ingratiating personal voice to the mix and offering a rare and revealing look at the notoriously media-shy man behind the swoosh. We learn about Knight's own, ultimately frustrating career as a middle-distance runner, during which first in high school and then, under Bowerman, at Oregon he was always good but never great; we hear about his nearly life-long efforts to please his father and about his own difficulties as a parent; we are treated to intimate portraits of his closest colleagues, especially the enigmatic bookworm Jeff Johnson, employee number one, who came up with the name Nike; and, perhaps most revealing, we hear Knight's personal mea culpa for the 1990s sweatshop scandal (after chastising himself for his initial reaction to the charges, he does credit his company's later efforts to improve factory conditions worldwide). Most of all, though, what makes this book so very different from nearly every other billionaire memoir is the writing itself. Knight cites various authors in his acknowledgements for their help in making him a writer notably, Abraham Verghese and J. R. Moehringer and whatever they did, it worked. This book is no plodding recital of one great deal after another cha-ching, cha-ching but rather reads with real narrative flair and surprising eloquence. And never more so than when he is writing about shoes the selling of them, yes, but also the making of them. Take this snippet from his portrait of Bowerman, retired as a track coach but forever tinkering in his workshop to build a better running shoe the shoe that became the waffle-soled trainer, which launched Nike into a whole new stratosphere: I wonder if he knew, if he had any clue, that he was the Daedalus of sneakers, that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations. I wonder if he could conceive in that moment all that he'd done. All that would follow. I know I couldn't. But now and again Knight has his own moments of prescience: Watching the waffle trainer evolve from popular accessory to cultural artifact, I had a thought. People might start wearing this to class. And the office. And the grocery store. And throughout their daily lives. Has anyone else ever written as evocatively about selling shoes? Well, George Pelecanos wrote a crime novel called Shoedog, and there's a character in it who sells shoes with a definite flair, but that's really something very different. And, yet, maybe not. Pelecanos brings his street characters to vivid life and makes us care about them. Remarkably, Knight does the same thing for a giant corporation certainly an even more formidable task. And he's surely the only billionaire businessman ever to merit even a mention in the same paragraph as the great Pelecanos.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2016 Booklist

Nike mogul Knight charts the rise of his business empire, a world leader in athletic wear.The title of the memoir is apt, for much of it is a rather dogged struggle through the minutiae of shoe distributorship and manufacture, with all the deals and lawsuits that entails. Knight began that journey more than half a century ago, when, as a young entrepreneur-in-training, it occurred to him that there might be room in the American marketplace for Japanese running shoes. He wrote a paper to that effect. "Being a business buff," he recounts, "I knew that Japanese cameras had made deep cuts into the camera market, which had once been dominated by Germans. Thus, I argued in my paper that Japanese running shoes might do the same thing." There was much hope in that thesis, for this was back in the day before Steve Prefontaine came along to help Knight press his case to runners everywhere. From that start, Knight built what has been reckoned to be a $30 billion-per-year business. He is proud to tell that story, as one might expect, but there's some score-settling to do: the bad guys include a Japanese shoe manufacturer who couldn't make a straight deal, a competitor called the Marlboro Man (who, admittedly, was "poaching our poaching"), tennis ace Jimmy Connors (whose agent, backing away from an endorsement agreement, insisted, "I don't remember any deal. We've already got a deal three times better than your deal, which I don't remember"), and a few other such impediments. The story, though with many merits, is rather listless. Unfortunately, much of the book conforms to the dry formulas of business writing, borrowing in turn from business speechifying: tell a joke, show a slide, read the text and expand on the bullet points, move to the next slide. By the numbers, to be sure, but students of business, for whom Nike is a well-established case study, may want to have this view straight from the source. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.