The long run that built Nike

In 1962 Phil Knight flew to Japan with fifty dollars and a half-formed idea: that the cheap, high-quality running shoes coming out of Japanese factories could do to the American market what Japanese cameras had done to German ones. He was twenty-four, unknown, and not entirely sure of himself. That meeting with the Onitsuka company in Kobe became the seed of Nike.

Shoe Dog, published in 2016, covers the years from that first trip through Nike's IPO in 1980. It is a business memoir that reads more honestly than most, because Knight does not shy away from how close his company came to collapse, repeatedly. Banks called in loans. Suppliers tried to cut deals behind his back. The US customs authority pursued a multi-million dollar bill that nearly finished everything.

What is most striking is Knight's account of the people: the early employees who were less a workforce than a tribe of misfits who believed in running when most of America didn't much think about it. His portraits of co-founder Bill Bowerman, who poured rubber into a waffle iron to make a new sole, and the early sales team are vivid and affectionate.

Knight is also honest about his failures as a husband and father during those years — the absences, the obsession, the way building something can consume a person. The book does not resolve these tensions neatly.

Shoe Dog succeeds because Knight writes with genuine vulnerability about the terror of building something you cannot afford to lose. The famous brand is almost beside the point; this is a book about the strange compulsion to make something exist that did not exist before.