Shoe Dog: Young Readers Edition

The origins of Nike date to 1964 when former University of Oregon track athlete Phil Knight began importing Onitsuka athletic shoes from Japan and selling them out of his car. He named his one-man company Blue Ribbon Sports and soon brought on legendary Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman as his partner. Blue Ribbon saw increasing sales each year and opened its first retail store on the West Coast in 1966, and it expanded retail and distribution to the East Coast the following year. By 1969, Blue Ribbon posted nearly $300,000 in sales, but Knight found out that Onitsuka was looking for other American distributors. Because of this, Knight began manufacturing shoes himself, and his contract with Onitsuka was terminated. The Nike brand, with its familiar swoosh logo, was born in 1972 and debuted at the Sporting Goods Show in Chicago.

While Nike did not have a strong presence with athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, it did line up a major endorsement deal with Romanian tennis star Ilie Nãstase, the US Open champion that year and the French Open champion the following year. Originally, the Nike brand appealed mostly to runners, especially distance runners. In 1974, Nike signed an endorsement deal with Steve Prefontaine, the former Oregon star who had appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and who held countless NCAA and national records. In Shoe Dog, Knight writes that Nike “resolved to be like Pre: resilient, courageous” (235). The partnership was not to be, however, because Prefontaine died in an automobile accident while training for the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal.

Nike’s close association with distance running became even more entrenched during the US Olympic Trials in 1976, when athletes wearing Nikes dominated the distance events.

After this success, Nike expanded its cultural reach from track and field into basketball. In 1977, Nike began a partnership with Sonny Vaccaro, a sports marketer who ran one of the largest all-star games for high school players in the country. Vaccaro had tremendous connections to college basketball coaches, and he and Nike devised a plan to skirt NCAA regulations by endorsing some high-profile coaches rather than the athletes themselves. Naturally, the coaches’ players ended up in Nikes, and with that, the company’s longstanding relationship with basketball was born. The end result of this expansion into the world of basketball was not only that players were now wearing Nikes but also that the brand was becoming culturally important in major urban centers with the urban youth market.

Perhaps the most important and transcendent endorsement deal in the history of sports and possibly even fashion in general was the result of Vaccaro convincing Nike to sign only one basketball player entering the 1984 NBA Draft: Michael Jordan. Vaccaro and George Raveling, then the head coach at Iowa and under contract with Nike, convinced Jordan to sign with Nike by telling him that the company planned to name a shoe after him. The Air Jordan shoe was designed for him in 1984 and released to the public the following April. Air Jordan sales in its first year totaled $126 million. From that point on, Air Jordans, and Nike apparel in general, including sweatsuits and caps, became a symbol of status within the urban and hip-hop fashion industries.