Steve Prefontaine, Phil Knight, and the Birth of Nike

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories up next. A sports story, an innovation story, and so much more. Since its start in nineteen seventy two, Nike has employed nearly a half a million people. Only four have outlasted our next storyteller. Steve Benz BNCE is Nike’s program director in Global Sourcing and Manufacturing. I was an All American runner under legendary track coach at Oregon Bill Bauerman, who became the co founder of Nike. Steve Benz is also the author of nineteen seventy two pre Uo Track, Nike Shoes and My Life with them All. Let’s take a listen.00:00:53
Speaker 2: HI, my name is Steve Bentz. I was born in Tennessee. I started kindergarten in Japan, and I graduated from high school in Spain. I went to the University of Oregon to run track and later started with Nike. The way I discovered running was during my junior year in high school. I went out for football in seventh grade because all my friends were going out for football, but at home we never watched sports, so even though I was on the football team, I really didn’t know the rules or the strategy. So I sat on the bench the whole time and the winner. I went out for basketball and sat the bench again, and when one of the games was out of hand, the coach put me in and four times I brought the basketball up court. Four times I was called for traveling. I looked over at my coach and he was just shaking his head. As luck would have it, coach was also the track coach, so we both knew from experience that I wasn’t an athlete, and he treated me that way. I still came out every day and worked out with the track guys, but when we had a track meet, on the bulletin board was a posting of all the entries, and every time I looked, my name was never on it. So I missed all the track meets until the last one. It was the district championships. I went and my name was on the four hundred meters, a quarter mile, one lap around the track, and I didn’t know if somebody was hurt or injured or what, but I was going to take advantage of this opportunity. So the last track meet that year, the district championships, I took second in the four hundred meters and the coach came springing across the field and gave me the biggest bear hug and looked me in the eyes advance, you’re a runner. In the spring of nineteen seventy nine, I was a sophomore and I had learned that my best race was a half mile. So I won our district championships, which qualified me to go to Los Angeles to run in the CIF Southern Section quarterfinals, which were some of the best athletes not only in our section but in the United States. So I went to the quarterfinals not expecting much. Nobody was expecting much out of me, and I qualified to move on to the next round. So next week was semifinals. I advanced again. I ran fast enough to get myself into the finals, and I went and I took third place, and I was on cloud nine right And then I found out my dad was going to transfer to Torjone Air Force Base near Madrid, Spain. I went to school on base. It was called Madrid American High School, and so I got to go to Germany where we ran against all the schools in the European area, and the big schools were in England and Germany. In the first he was actually the semifinals I won and one fine, which was a school record, and the first time I ever broke two minutes and one of the coaches from German school came over and talked to my coach because he didn’t know who I was. He said, where did this guy come from? Right? And we talked a little bit, and he has to see my shoes. And there were these clunky boordy leather spikes that my mom bought for me when I was a freshman, and there were size eleven at the time, I wore about size eight. The coach was saying, you broke two minutes in these shoes, and so he disappeared for a while and came back with a pair of shoes that pit me, probably one of the other runners, and I tried them on and just putting those shoes on made me feel faster. So in the finals the next day, I ran three seconds faster. So I was won fifty six, which broke the European record, and I learned the importance of a good pair of shoes in running. And so I had my final senior year living in the barracks. But the most important thing my senior year was trying to find a college in the United States where I could go, and I’d written to Ohio State, Kansas State, USC, and Oregon State. I was accepted academically at all schools, but there was very little interest in me running there. And perhaps the most blunt letter I got was from the USC coach who said, your time might be pretty good in Europe, but it’s a dime a dozen here in southern California. But I found out one of our dorm counselors through the javelin at Oregon said, have you considered Oregon? I pulled out the letters and everything. I showed him everything I had done to that point, and he go, why did you pick Kansas State? And I said, that’s where Jim Ryan went to school. Jim Ryan was my hero. He was a world record holder in the mile, and he goes he didn’t go to Kansas State. He went to Kansas You got the wrong school, right then he asked me, why did you write to Oregon State. I said, because they’re a good running school. He says, no, no, Oregon’s a good running school, not Oregon State. So I have picked the wrong school. And he saw the letter I got from USC, but he contacted coach Dollinger back in Eugene and told him I was interested in going there. And the answer I got was that that would be fine because Bill Barman allowed walk ons. Anybody that wanted to walk on and train with the team was fine. You know, you never knew who’s going to be good enough to run, and they said, if you do really well, maybe you’ll get into a race or two, but there would be no scholarship. That was fine with me because Bill Barman he coached Oregon from nineteen forty eight to nineteen seventy two. Bill wrote the book on jogging. He brought jogging first to Eugene and had spread across Oregon, across the United States, and then across the world. He’s in the Hall of Fame four times for a track coach and one time as an inventor. He invented the modern day athletic shoot. So I flew space available on military flight to Dover, Delaware, and then I worked my way across the United States and got to Eugene. I had two suitcases in my hand, found a motel six close to the university, and Delager had told me, when you get to Eugene, come see me in my office. And so there were people there already, so I didn’t know if I should go in or not, and Build signaled me in. And in his office was Jim Ryan looking in a phone book for something. My high school hero who I wrote my term paper for was there. Sitting in a chair with was Steve Prefontein. You know, the greatest American distance run of the United States. When he died in nineteen seventy five. He held everymeric record from the two thousand meters to the ten thousand meters. There’s been a book written about him, the documentary and two different movies. And in the doorway was Phil Knight, Phil Knight, who with Bill Barman, co founded Nike in nineteen sixty four. I had my camera with me, so I took a picture in the office, which I have in my book. And so I was just like in awe of the people I’ve met. And I shook hands with him and said, should I even wash my hands after this? But the guy in the doorway, that Phil Knight, I’ll tell you a minute. He was probably the most important person in that room because he’s the one that co founded Nike and would later change my life. I walked out of that office, thinking wow, what I had just seen, But at the same time was am I an over my head? Can I rise up to this level? I was a walk on who was rejected by all the other universities that I had written to. Two weeks later, Barman had the freshman in the stands. It was a freshman meeting and I looked around when I got there and there was about fifty people in the stands, all wanting to run track. And I asked someone if who’s on scholarship, and he said, there’s only three people on scholarship, and it turned out to be Mark five. There was Russ Francis who threw the javelin, and the third person was Tinker Hatfield who some people might recognize that name. He’s the world famous designer that designs Nike shoes for us now. But Bill Barman came out and he said, statistically, based on all the years that he coached, only three of us of the fifty would actually make it to our senior year. Everybody else would drop out of school, quit and he would be proven right. It was two of those guys. It turned out to be me as well. It was the only three that made it our senior years. He also told us you can only do two things well, and he says one of them has to be a student. You have to be a good student, because if you plunk out, everything else doesn’t matter. But he said the second thing, based on what he observed, was you could either be a good athlete or you could be he said, a good lover. You can’t do both. And he said you’re just going to have to pick. And I remember looking around and a few heads were looking down, like, e is that true? You know? And he said something profound. He said, if you can find meaning and what it takes to stay on this track team, you’ll probably find meaning in another absurd pastime life, you know. And that was in the movie Without Limits. If you’ve seen that and.

00:09:34
Speaker 1: You’re listening to Steve Ben’s tell one heck of a story, imagine being a young kid, a college freshman, in the same room with Phil Knight and Pre and Jim Ryan and Bauerman. Well, I think most of us would just cry or leave when we come back more of this remarkable story me Pre and the birth of Nike. Here on our American story, and we continue here on our American stories. And we’ve been listening to Steve Bnce and the book he’s written nineteen seventy two pre Uo Track, Nike Shoes and My Life with them All. Let’s continue with Bence and his story.

00:10:30
Speaker 2: Nike was born on May first of nineteen seventy two. I didn’t know it when I was at the University of Oregon running. I was on the track team, and I was kind of oblivious to everything going on around me. But I gradually started to learn that the Tiger shoes that I was wearing was actually Blue Riven Sports shoes and Blue Riven Sports was a handshake deal between Bill Bowerman, the coach and Phil Knight, the athlete. In nineteen sixty four. Barrierman was a coach, but he was also experimented. He always loved problem solving and so he’s always trying to come up with stuff to make athletes better. And it could be anything like he worked on track surfaces and of course shoes and even apparel, and so people would be wearing handmade shoes that he did. But he didn’t have a really a good business sense. Phil had that business sense. He was an athlete, he was a runner. He was coached by Barronman and so the two got together to create a new company. At the first it was Blue Ribbon Sports, and Phil had written a paper in college at Stanford University. Just like cameras were very good cameras were coming out of Germany and they were expensive, but they were able to get good cameras out of Japan at a much cheaper price. And at the time, all the shoes were the good shoes. The competitive shoes were made in Germany. It was Adidas in Puma, and Phil speculated that you could make just as good shoes in Japan at a much cheaper price, and so they paired up and they went to Japan to find somebody to make the shoes. Bottom were designed by Bill Barman, and so they were able to mass produce good shoes for kids in high school at an affordable price, and that was the Tiger’s shoe. But Phil picked May one, nineteen seventy two. It’s a birthday of Nike. The Nike brand was starting to evolve, but that was the day the letter he received from Japan on Nitska Tiger that they would no longer allow him to sell Tiger shoes in the United States. And so when most of the company at the time heard that news. They thought, this is the worst day of our life. We’re all out of jobs. But Phil said, no, this is the best day of our life. You know, we can create our own brand and control our own destiny. So that’s when the Nike brand was born again. I was a little bit oblivless to the business part of it. I was just running. But Barrenman twice had me wear test shoes, and the first time, you know, I wore a pair of his test shoes. You know, he came in the locker room and said, hey, Bence, you wear size and nine. Don’t you go? Yeah? And he goes, try these out. So I was going out for a six small run, and about two miles into it, my achilles was really sore and my calf. I said, just my luck. When I’m supposed to be testing these shoes, I get hurt, right. So I went back to the trainer and explained what was going on. He said, let me see those shoes, and he looked at him and environment flipped the bottoms. Instead of the padding under the heel, he put it under the forefoot. So every time I took a step, I was putting his train on my Achilles, and the trainer was saying, you can’t be a guinea pig for him. Your career and track is just a little bit too important. So why don’t you take these shoes back to Bill and tell them you can’t test anymore. And I didn’t want to do that first, but I waited for a week and I felt confident and I went into the office and I said, here’s the shoes and he said what do you think And I said, well, I got hurt wearing them, and he goes, well, what happened? And I said, we’ll send my Achilles and caf area and goes, ah, that’s great. That’s what I thought would happen. And that was it. And I was thinking, like, what, he’s either mad scientists, you know, or he’s testing me out, or maybe he’s just hazing a freshman. I didn’t know what it was. But anyway, I didn’t want to deal with any of that anymore, so I didn’t do that. But that was my lesson in he was motivated to try to find the best things to make athletes better, and he wasn’t afraid to fail. You know a lot of company cultures, you know, failure is not good. You know there’s backstabbing and politics that goes into it. But Tom Clark at Nike at one point had a poster in his office that said, the company that makes the most mistakes wins. You know, problems are good. The story about the waflf iron and Bill Barrman making souls in his kitchen is partially true, but there’s a lot of truth to the fact that he was constantly looking for ways to improve performance for athletes and wait take weight out. So he did that the first I understood. The first time he used the waff liron. He put some rubber or whatever in there and he closed it and when it’s stuck, you know, just kept the upper head and throw that thing out. So he had a couple steps before he actually figured out how to do it. But the waff lion was intriguing to him and he was trying to get that. But if you think about what a waffle looks like, there are indentations, and if you look at the outsole, it’s the mirror of that. It goes the other direction. But it was the concept that he had, and then he worked locally with rubber makers and he was able to experiment with that until he got it right, but then they just got sheets of rubber with the waffle outsold that they made and they’d just die cut it to go into the bottom of the shoes. There’s four of us that we went to talk to Tom Barman, Bill’s son, who lives in Eugene, in the house where Barman used to live. And we told Tom first question. We said, when he got up in the morning, what was it like for him to innovate? And Tom said, Bill wouldn’t even know what the word innovation means. He was a problem solver, he said. If he didn’t have a problem to solve, you know, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself in innovation. The word innovation’s overused these days, and even our innovation group product Innovation at Nike, they took the word innovation out of their title because it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Track seasons started and there were nine people listed in the newspaper that could run eight hundred meters or the half mile back then, and out of the nine half milers with their personal best times in there, out of the nine, I was number nine, So I was at the ninth person on the team going into the track season and where I’d been promised maybe I could run a few races if I was good enough. I ended up winning my first seven races there, and the seniors and juniors and sophomores weren’t all that excited about it, and I went to the Pack eight Championships. It was the Pack eight, not the Pac twelve back then. I ended up taking second place at the Pack eight Championships, and they made note of where the USC guy was the first USC guy. I looked behind me and he was in fourth place. In nineteen seventy four, I was a junior, and pre Fontaine by then was a good friend and teammate of mine, but he was competing on his own now. The previous year he was still a University or Oregon student, having a scholarship, and he was on the USA national team, which paid for all of his transportation, room and board and so forth as he competed around Europe for the United States. And he said they also gave him four dollars a day for spending money. But what he found out when he was running over there after one of their races that he won, one of the competitors suggested that they pick up their prize money and go out and have a few beers. And Priest was like, what prize money? Right? All the money that came in for US athletes went to the AAU, the federation that athletes that he had to compete against in Europe were getting prize money from the meets and their governing bodies were supporting them financially. And so he was pissed and he said, why should I care about the AAU. They don’t care about me. So in nineteen seventy four he decided he was going to go to Europe, not compete in any AAU meets and get his prize money. But he talked some of us to join them, including me, And I was kind of excited, you know, like I didn’t know if I can continue my track season after my junior season, but I wanted to go to Europe and compete and see how I do. So I accepted that.

00:18:30
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Steve Benz tell the story of in essence, the founding of Nike, and it’s a heck of a story about running in sports and commerce and in the end, this thing that well, let’s face it, Bauerman, as we already learned, didn’t like the word innovation, and most innovators don’t because they’re just trying to solve a problem. And indeed it was a problem right in front of them that had to do with his coaching and with winning. And then that’s what he really wanted to do, have an advantage over everyone, and net benefit was he created this remarkable sneaker company. When we come back, more of the story of me pre and the birth of Nike, and we’re listening to author Steve Bentz here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories and the story of Nike and how it came to be, and so much more about the running world in the nineteen seventies in its infancy that would spawn what we now know as the modern world of track and field, and so much more, including marathons, which before the seventies were barely anything anyth one knew about. In nineteen seventy four, running phenom Steve pre Prefontaine decided to take a stand against the Amateur Athletic Union the AAU, which demanded that athletes who wished to remain amateur for the Olympics not be paid for appearances in track meets, even though they drew large crowds that generated millions of dollars. At this time, the AAU was taking away the amateur status of athletes who were endorsed in any way. Because pre was accepting free gear from Nike, he was subjected to the aau’s rulings and he found himself living on food stamps. He spoke very publicly against the AAU and asked his friend and Oregon track teammate Steve Bentz to join him in Europe to race in defiance against the AAU. Here again is Steve Bentz.

00:20:50
Speaker 2: We started in Finland. Prefontaine had to help us get into a meet. In the first three track meets, I won and I got my prize money, which was twenty seven dollars at each meet, so you know, I had three times twenty seven dollars for my first three races, so it wasn’t much, but it was illegal, for it’s against the rules of NCAA and THEAU. Now that the European competitors picked up their prize money, but we weren’t supposed to do that. So I was being rebellious because of Pre. He was talking us in to do that and we were supporting him. Probably he thought they’re safety in numbers. And in nineteen seventy eight, this is after Prefontaine died, Congress passed a law that changed the whole thing and abolished the AAU and allowed athletes to start being able to win money, which changed the whole sport and in a way vindicated us in my opinion. The next story I’ll tell is on May twenty ninth, nineteen seventy five, And anybody that knows Prefontain history knows that he died on May thirtieth, nineteen seventy five. So this is the Thursday. There was a track meet that evening and Pre had invited the finish national team to come to Oregon to compete. But the last race of this tour was going to be at Hayward Field and it was going to be that evening May twenty ninth. But Pre came into our apartment with Mark and I. We left the door unlocked and he just felt at home, so he always come in and out, and he insisted that we go over to his house and played spades, played cards because he was so hyper, you know, because he had to have a good meet that evening to be able to recover some of the money and he had promised that he was going to try to break the American record in the five thousand meters to get as many people in the stands as possible. That pre ran his race, and then afterwards we went back to our dorms shower and pre had graduated, so he went to be with the Finns at a party. Went to bed that night. I had a final exam the next day, so I knew I had to get up and study. And at six o’clock in the morning, the phone rang and it was a friend who had graduated the previous year, said, I just heard on the radio that Prefonte died. And I was like, no, he could. You know, we were just with him all day yesterday. He was just here last night, you know that kind of thing. So I called the radio station and they said it was true that he was in a single car accident and that he was dead. And I just remember taking my books and going over to the student union because I had to study, and I remember there was music in the background playing, and I remember it was wishing you were here. Yeah, had hit me see me again, And I thought about what inspired me most about him, and it was reflecting back to the Europe and defining the AAU. And even in that track meet the night before, he was defined the AAU by putting that on. He wasn’t allowed to put on a meat, but they backed off the last minute. But just his rebellious spirit, you know, and his fight for justice. I wanted to be that. I wanted to live that, and so that became a part of who I was or who I am. And Phil Knight later said, if Nike could have the personality of any human being, the personality he’d want is that of Steve Prefontaine. There’s a place called Prieze Rock in Eugene, which is where Prefontaine died, where his car flipped and it killed him. And people will go to Prieze Rock to honor them, and they leave stuff. They leave shoes, they leave clothing and all those kinds of things. He was twenty four years old when he died. It was nineteen seventy five, and people still go to the rock and kids are still inspired by him. And when I’ve been up there sometimes I’ve talked to people. For example, one time I talked to a husband wife who were coaching in the Midwest somewhere, and I said what is it about Pre that your athletes love which inspires them the most? And she said, it’s because he’s so blue collar. He works so hard, he was so competitive. The kids just believe that they do the same thing. You know, if they work hard and do what they have to do, that they can excel as well. And you know, it’s not his accomplishments that people admire him for, although he had every American record from two thousand meters up to ten thousand meters, it’s not the accomplishments that the people talk about. It’s how he lived his life and how he competed. And many times runners runners will just sit in the back until the last half lap and then kick in and win the race. Pre wanted to go out and be in front. Every race that he ran he called a performance, and he was doing it for the people in the stands. And he would say, if you run in the back and just kick at the last two hundred meters, that’s chicken. He just did not believe that that was the right way to run a race. The only way to really run races in the front, flat out as hard as you can go and run as fast as you can every time. But also one of the things that coach Dellinger Bill Dellinger, who was the assistant coach for the Runners at the University of Oregon, he said, the one thing he noticed about pri is he never missed a workout, He never missed a race. He was there all the time and pre confided, you know, there were times that he wasn’t feeling good, but he wouldn’t tell anybody. He would go out there and run anyway. So it’s just that honorable, competitive, hard working ethic, I think is what young people today look up to now. When I started with Nike, to me, it was just a bunch of runners getting together and moving into the next part of our life. And I was trying to figure out what was I going to do. I was teaching and coaching, and maybe I could have done that for my whole life, but I was looking for that job that inspired me, that kind of was meaningful to me, purposeful to me, and I didn’t know Nike was going to be it. But when the company started, when BRS started importing Tiger’s shoes from Japan, Phil placed his first order to Japan for three hundred pair of shoes. So that was nineteen sixty four Tiger’s shoes and then you know, maybe I don’t know where we got up to about a million pair. I’m really only talking about footwear because that’s what I have my experience, and we usually talking perage. And when I told my to back up, when I told my mother I was working for Nike, and she asked me what’s Nike? And I told her about Bill Barrman and Phil Knight and we’re making shoes for runners and stuff. She says, you went to college. I’m gonna tell my friends that you’re shoe salesman or whatever you know, And she says, why don’t you work for a company that makes something that a lot of people will buy? Right, That’s the way she was thinking back then. That’s the way we were all thinking. You know, it was a small market, but because of jogging in particular runners and average every day people started getting running shoes to run in because now we were starting to jogging. It just wasn’t for elite runners, and people were wearing them to knock around and walk around in because they were comfortable in lightweight. So we didn’t start wanting to change the world. We were just trying to improve performance for runners. But the thing was taking off. So when people find out that it was a group of runners that started this company and that’s the culture that we have, it makes sense. You know, no one can imagine a bunch of football players getting together and doing this, or basketball players or whatever, but a bunch of runners we pulled it off, and so the culture that we have as a company comes from that. I’m now settled down in the Virginal Oregon. I’ve lived in my house for over thirty years. I adopted a girl in Taiwan when we were there. We adopted a girl in Korea when we were there. I had a Sunday the United States. We moved back to Korea. My youngest was born in Korea, and they’ve all grown up here in this house. Now. I have four grandchildren, you know, ages zero, two, four, and six. They’re over here all the time, you know, talking. So there’s a big group, my four kids and those four grandchildren. And looking back on a career that has been incredibly rewarding and being a part you know, I never claimed to be a full knight or you know, anything major. I mean, I was just a guy getting the job done, a math nerd that was excited about being a part of running, still about a part of the running culture. And when you have an opportunity to do something bigger than yourself and genuinely enjoy working with people, it’s a pretty rewarding experience. And that’s where I am right now in my life.

00:29:49
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the storytelling in production by Greg Hangler and a special thanks to Steve Bentz, author of nineteen seventy two pre uo track Nike Shoes and My Life with Them All. Go to a bookstore and buy this book or wherever you get your books online. Phil Knight, the founder all the way through. We love founders here on this show, the story of Nike, here on our American Stories,