Oregonian grit, eccentricity lay foundation for mega sportswear company Nike

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Nike co-founder Phil Knight
Updated 02 June 2017
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Oregonian grit, eccentricity lay foundation for mega sportswear company Nike

For a long time, one of the world’s biggest companies was known as Blue Ribbon. When it changed its name, nobody really liked it. Even the famous logo was settled on by default. It looks like a wing… a woosh of air. A symbol of grace and greatness, an icon known all over the world.

Whether you guessed or not, the company is Nike. “Shoe Dog” reveals what hardly anybody knows. For the first time Phil Knight, one of Nike’s founders, tells us how it all started with his “crazy idea” and how with a team of eccentric but exceptionally gifted people, they conquered the world. This is an inspiring story of hope, perseverance and unyielding courage in the face of hardship. It is an adventure that began in Oregon.

The book opens with a beautifully written foreword where Knight expresses his love for Oregon’s natural beauty. “Calm, green, tranquil.” He also remembers what one of his teachers said about a very old trail, “It’s our birthright,” he’d growl, “Our character, our fate, our DNA. The cowards never started, and the weak died along the way. That leaves us.” The teacher believed that Oregonians had retained a “unique strain of pioneer spirit, an outsized sense of possibility mixed with a diminished capacity for pessimism, and “it was our job as Oregonians to keep that strain alive,” wrote Knight.

On a foggy morning in 1962, Phil Knight was running faster and faster. He had just earned a Master’s degree from Stanford and he was thinking about his future. He wanted to leave a mark on the world. He wanted to win. He had this crazy idea, which was as crazy as his favorite thing, running. And suddenly it all made sense. He knew he had that innate fiber of Oregonian grit, “Let everyone else call your idea crazy… just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there… Whatever comes, don’t stop.” 

Phil had noticed that Japanese cameras had succeeded in entering a market once dominated by the Germans so he argued that Japanese-made running shoes could have the same effect.

Phil, like many American students, decided to travel around the world before he looked for a job. He had already made up his mind to include Japan on his itinerary. He had selected a brand called Tiger, manufactured by Onitsuka in Kobe. After his first stop in Honolulu, he headed for Japan where he met Ken Miyazaki. In the course of the conversation, he was asked a question he was not prepared to answer: “What company are you with?” Not knowing what to say, he first thought of his parent’s home. He pictured his room and saw the wall covered with blue ribbons he had won on the track. Yes! He had found the name of the company: “Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland, Oregon” and he made a first order for $50, which he borrowed from his father. Knight then continued his trip. He flew on around the world and arrived home on Feb. 24, 1963.

He was expecting the shoes but there was no trace of a shipment. The long awaited 12 pairs of shoes finally arrived 10 months later. “They were more than beautiful. I’d seen nothing in Florence, or Paris that surpassed them. I wanted to put them on marble pedestals, or in gilt-edged frames,” wrote Knight.

He immediately sent two pairs to Bill Bowerman, his coach, who was obsessed with footwear. He would spend days tearing running shoes apart and stitching them back up with some modification. He always dreamed of making shoes softer and lighter.

Knight had rightly predicted that the Japanese shoes would appeal to his coach. When they both met for lunch, Bowerman came straight to the point: “Those Japanese shoes, they’re pretty good. How about letting me in on the deal?” This partnership formed the heart and soul of a brand and a culture that changed everything.

Soon after, Blue Ribbon became the sole distributor for Tiger shoes in the western United States. When a number of sporting goods stores refused to sell his shoes, Knight used a different strategy: He decided to attend the track meets, and everyone he talked to wanted to buy his shoes.

Sometimes people wanted the shoes so badly that they wrote and ordered a pair to be sent COD. So, without even making an effort, a mail order business was born. Blue Ribbon’s assets were rising in value. And in 1964 Japan was hosting the Olympics. Bowerman had gone to Japan to support the team he had coached. Two of his runners received medals. After the Games, he visited Onitsuka and was given a VIP tour of the factory. From then on, Onitsuka made prototypes that corresponded to Bowerman’s vision of a more American shoe, with a soft inner sole, more arch support, and a heel wedge to reduce stress on the Achilles tendon.

The shoes were selling so well that more salesmen were hired and among them were Jeff Johnson, a student Knight had known at Stanford. Johnson became part of the nucleus of wholly committed employees. He worked seven days a week. Each new customer had his own index card with the shoe size and shoe preference. There were customers in 37 states. By the end of June 1966, he had sold 3,250 pairs of Tigers and then the first retail store was opened.

“Suddenly, a whole new cast of characters was wandering in and out of the office. Rising sales enabled me to hire more and more reps. Most were ex-runners, and eccentrics, as only ex-runners can be. But when it came to selling they were all business. Because they were inspired by what we were trying to do… they were burning up the roads, hitting every high school and college track meet within a thousand-mile radius and their extraordinary efforts were boosting our numbers even more,” wrote Knight. Onitsuka, feigning disappointment with Blue Ribbon sales, offered to buy the company or else it would look for better distributors.

This gave Knight the opportunity to look for a replacement knowing that his deal with Onitsuka said nothing about importing someone else’s shoes. He signed a contract with a Mexican factory, which required a new name for the brand and a new logo. 

The names he had in mind were falcon, Dimension Six, Condor. On the day a decision had to be taken, Johnson phoned saying that a new name had come to him in a dream: “Nike.”

Eventually, Nike would sign deals with factories all around the world. It has 124 plants in China, 34 in Vietnam, 73 in Thailand, 35 in South Korea, and others in South Africa, Australia, Canada, Italy, Mexico, Turkey and the US.

A defining moment in the history of Nike was on Dec. 2, 1980, the date of the offering when the company was to go public. Knight was bent on selling for $22 a share. That same week, Apple was going public and selling for $22 a share and Knight was convinced Nike was worth as much Apple. He was ready to walk away if he didn’t get $22 a share. He got it and proved to all those who doubted and those who were even hostile that he had been right all along.

life.style@arabnews.com


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Stoic Mindset’

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Updated 12 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Stoic Mindset’

  • Tuitert’s narrative begins with his own crucible: the pressure-cooker world of elite athletics, where injuries and setbacks threatened his career

Author: Mark Tuitert

Olympic champion speed skater Mark Tuitert merges ancient philosophy with modern resilience in “The Stoic Mindset,” published in 2024.

The guide transcends typical self-help tropes, offering strategies to transform adversity into strength through the principles of Stoicism. 

This ancient philosophy provides a tool kit for staying calm, focused, and strong in the face of life’s chaos. Emerging in Ancient Greece and later popularized in Rome, it is less about dusty theories and more about how to live well.

Tuitert’s narrative begins with his own crucible: the pressure-cooker world of elite athletics, where injuries and setbacks threatened his career. His discovery of Stoicism became his mental armor. The book meticulously unpacks core tenets, focusing on actionable responses, reframing obstacles as opportunities, and cultivating “amor fati” (love of fate). 

What resonates most is Tuitert’s rejection of passive acceptance. Instead, he advocates active resilience, using journaling, mindfulness, and preemptive adversity training to fortify mental agility.

His chapter on failure dissects how embracing vulnerability fuels growth, illustrated by his comeback from a career-threatening injury to clinch gold at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

Tuitert’s prose is refreshingly pragmatic. He avoids academic jargon, grounding Seneca and Marcus Aurelius’ wisdom in relatable anecdotes — from navigating corporate burnout to parenting challenges. His emphasis on practice over theory stands out as well. 

Some may criticize the athletic parallels as niche, but Tuitert universalizes them deftly.

While examining Tuitert’s practical Stoicism, I happened to contrast his Olympic-forged resilience with Nietzsche’s fiery critique of Stoic detachment, revealing how one stabilizes storms while the other ignites revolutions.

I found that Tuitert seeks mastery through emotional discipline, whereas Nietzsche champions vitality through embracing chaos.

In an era of digital overload and anxiety, “The Stoic Mindset” is a tactical manifesto for clarity.

Tuitert’s genius lies in making a 2,000-year-old philosophy feel urgently contemporary, proving that true victory is not avoiding storms but learning to dance in the rain.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Following the Bend’

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Updated 12 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Following the Bend’

  • In this accessible and uniquely personal book, Ellen Wohl explains how to “read” a river, blending the latest science with her own personal experiences as a geologist and naturalist who has worked on rivers for more than three decades

Author: ELLEN WOHL 

When we look at a river, either up close or while flying over a river valley, what are we really seeing? “Following the Bend” takes readers on a majestic journey by water to find answers, along the way shedding light on the key concepts of modern river science, from hydrology and water chemistry to stream and wetland ecology.

In this accessible and uniquely personal book, Ellen Wohl explains how to “read” a river, blending the latest science with her own personal experiences as a geologist and naturalist who has worked on rivers for more than three decades.

 


What We Are Reading Today: The West: The History of an Idea

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Updated 11 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The West: The History of an Idea

  • The need for the use of the term “the West” emerged to avoid the confusing or unwanted consequences of the use of “Europe”

Author: Georgios Varouxakis

How did “the West” come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? When did “Westerners” begin to refer to themselves in this way? Was the idea handed down from the ancient Greeks, or coined by 19th-century imperialists? 

Neither, writes Georgios Varouxakis in “The West,” his ambitious and fascinating genealogy of the idea. “The West” was not used by Plato, Cicero, Locke, Mill, or other canonized figures of what we today call the Western tradition. It was not first wielded by empire-builders.

It gradually emerged as of the 1820s and was then, Varouxakis shows, decisively promoted in the 1840s by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (whose political project, incidentally, was passionately anti-imperialist). 

The need for the use of the term “the West” emerged to avoid the confusing or unwanted consequences of the use of “Europe.” The two overlapped, but were not identical, with the West used to  differentiate from certain “others” within Europe as well as to include the Americas.

 


Book Review: The AI-Centered Enterprise

Updated 11 July 2025
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Book Review: The AI-Centered Enterprise

What lies beyond ChatGPT for businesses?

In The AI-Centered Enterprise: Reshaping Organizations with Context-Aware AI, authors Ram Bala, Natarajan Balasubramanian and Amit Joshi argue that the next leap in artificial intelligence is not about flashy prompts, but rather perception, reasoning, and organizational transformation.

The book, published earlier this year, introduces the concept of “context-aware AI,” systems that do not just process information but understand it in real-time business scenarios.

These are tools that adjust to their environment, collaborate across teams, and make decisions with nuance; a significant step forward from today’s mostly predictive systems.

The authors, all professors and practitioners in the AI and analytics space, offer a clear roadmap for businesses to prepare.

Their proposed model, the “3Cs” — “Calibrate, Clarify, Channelize” — breaks down how leaders can align AI tools with company values, ensure teams understand how to use them, and direct efforts where they will have the most impact.

For readers in Saudi Arabia, where AI is central to Vision 2030 initiative, this book can serve as a strategic lens.

While it does not focus on the region, its practical insights are useful for decision-makers looking to scale AI responsibly across sectors such as healthcare, logistics, and government services.

More guidebook than manifesto, “The AI-Centered Enterprise” avoids jargon and balances case studies with actionable ideas.

It will not dazzle readers chasing science-fiction futures, but it is a timely read for professionals who want to lead, not just react, in the age of intelligent systems.
 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Wild Orcas’

Updated 10 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Wild Orcas’

Author:  Hanne Strager & Catherine Denardo

Of the world’s iconic predatory species, orcas are among the most fearsome. Their awesome physical power combined with their cooperative hunting skills and ability to problem-solve make them uniquely efficient killers. Yet orcas also celebrate births, grieve losses, and maintain lifelong family bonds. This stunningly illustrated book draws on five decades of field research and cutting-edge science to provide an incomparable look at the biology, natural history, culture, and conservation of these awe-inspiring marine animals.