Shoe Dog

The Library Essay

Nike Nearly Failed Every Year

Phil Knight's memoir begins in 1962 with a borrowed fifty dollars from his father and what he called his crazy idea, importing Japanese running shoes to a country that did not yet jog. Blue Ribbon Sports, founded with his old coach Bill Bowerman, ran for years on bank overdrafts and nerve, one supplier crisis from extinction, until the partners began making shoes under their own mark in 1971 and called it Nike.

Published in 2016, the book was received as something rare in founder memoirs, a confession rather than a victory lap. Knight dwells on the doubt, the debts and the friends, and the swoosh does not conquer the world so much as survive into it, which is why entrepreneurs pass the book around.