The Swoosh, Then and Now

At the time, I had just started reading a new book by Phil Knight, who cofounded Nike in 1964 with Bill Bowerman, his former track coach at the University of Oregon. Shoe Dog is a terrific read, in large part because it paints such a vivid contrast between the $30 billion juggernaut Nike is today and what it started out as: an upstart shoe importer kept afloat by diehard running geeks selling product out of the trunks of their cars. There are several larger-than-life characters in the Nike origin story, none bigger than Steve Prefontaine, who ran at U of O a few years after Knight did. Our excerpt from Shoe Dog explains how that stubborn, gifted frontrunner became one of Nike’s first celebrity endorsers as well as its North Star. The way Pre ran the 5,000-meter final at the 1972 Olympic Trials on his home track in Eugene, and the way the crowd reacted to his epic effort, inspired Knight. “I knew that race…would forever be part of me, and I vowed it would also be part of Nike,” Knight writes. “In our coming battles…we’d be like Pre. We’d compete as if our lives depended on it.”