How did Nike become a $100 billion global powerhouse? Its founder Phil Knight refused to let his crazy idea die.
Do you know who won the most medals at the Rio Olympics? It wasn’t the United States. It was Nike, whose athletes worldwide won more than 200 total medals and all 32 of the U.S. track and field golds. It wasn’t always this way. If you roll the tape back to, say, the 1964 games in Tokyo, you can watch Bob Hayes win the 100-meter sprint in 10 seconds flat wearing the three bands of Adidas, the dominant, and dominating, athletic shoe company in the world at that time. Same thing again in 1968 in Mexico City, when Bob Beamon destroyed the long jump record in Adidas.
One of the avid fans of those Games was a middle-distance runner named Phil Knight—Buck, to his family—who once raced for the vaunted University of Oregon Ducks track team. Knight never won an Olympic medal in Adidas shoes—or anybody else’s, for that matter. Instead, he would, with his iconoclastic college coach Bill Bowerman, create the shoes and the brand that would later demolish Adidas in the marketplace and supplant the German outfit as the world’s top athletic shoe company. With that No. 1 status would come the attendant challenges and headaches of having gone from the cool challenger brand to the corporate colossus of footwear. Last year’s sales line: Nike, $32.4 billion; Adidas, $19.2 billion.
Knight would build Nike—known first as Blue Ribbon Sports—with the help of the oddest collection of shoe warriors you could possibly assemble. And he wouldn’t feel insulted being included in that description. They simply wouldn’t let the young company die, despite having their local bank yank their credit line without warning. “Even though we knew we could fail—the odds were we probably would fail—none of the early Nike group doubted that we would succeed,” Knight told Maxim. “We reinforced each other. A total David vs. Goliath mentality.”
This story is from the October 2016 edition of Maxim.
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This story is from the October 2016 edition of Maxim.
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