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1992-10-19
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BOOKS, Page 53America's Rubber Soul
By RICHARD STENGEL
SWOOSH: THE STORY OF NIKE AND THE MEN WHO PLAYED THERE
By J.B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $24.95
Sneakers -- or what some people still call tennis shoes
and most everyone now refers to as athletic shoes -- are an
American icon. The sneaker is not so much an object as an idea,
a symbol of values that America has always taken pride in:
social and physical mobility, practicality, informality, even
rebellion (such as when Woody Allen wore a pair of Converse
high-tops to escort First Lady Betty Ford to the ballet in
1975). It has only been since the 1960s that sneakers have
become the shoe of everyday life, the U.S. form of mass
transportation. Worn by bums and billionaires, All-Stars and
klutzes, the sneaker is a quintessentially democratic shoe, the
rubber soul of America.
The secret of the success of the Nike corporation, which
began to make its famous footwear in 1971 and grew from an
unknown also-ran in the shoe business to the universally
familiar $3 billion institution of today, is that it understood
that sneakers embodied the values of the people who wore them.
Americans wanted a well-made, high-tech athletic shoe not
because it was a necessity but because the consciousness of the
country had changed. "Jogging," "getting in shape," "working
out" were part of the new life-style (another '70s concept), and
Nike gave customers a stylish shoe in which to pursue the good
life every American believes is his due. Keds were passe;
Converse was clunky; Adidas was too serious; but Nikes were fun
and practical -- the perfect American combination.
The chairman and founder of Nike Inc. and the protagonist
of Swoosh is Phil Knight, a former distance runner at the
University of Oregon and a laconic accountant who thought it
would be more enjoyable to sell shoes than balance checkbooks.
He started out representing a Japanese running shoe called Tiger
but realized he could create and hawk his own American shoe.
Nike was named for the winged Greek goddess of victory and given
the now familiar "Swoosh" logo (at the time, someone said it
resembled an upside-down Puma insignia). At first Nike made
shoes for serious runners, but as millions of Americans began
to run seriously, it became a shoe not just for wiry
steeplechasers but also for ladies wheeling shopping carts.
Swoosh, a readable if overlong history of Nike, follows
the familiar trajectory of entrepreneurial success. A group of
hell-raising, antiauthority types have a dream. (The Nike
founders called their annual meetings Buttfaces, engaged in food
fights and gleefully refused to give one another corporate
titles.) The dream succeeds beyond their imaginings, and the
small revolutionary company becomes a large and conservative
one. Even now that Nike is a corporate giant, it still fosters
the image of irreverent hipness with its striking advertising
and superstar endorsers: the magical Michael Jordan, the
bodacious Bo Jackson and those rebels with racquets, John
McEnroe and Andre Agassi. The authors tell this tale with a
mixture of gee-whiz cheerleading and nostalgic regret. (Strasser
is the wife of an ex-Nike executive; Becklund is her sister and
a writer at the Los Angeles Times.)
In the genre of business books, Swoosh is the Blues
Brothers meet In Search of Excellence. What Swoosh does is chart
the course of how a few men in Eugene, Ore., sensed a shift in
the national zeitgeist and then created a company, an idea
really, to complement that change. Like relay runners who deftly
grasp the baton handed to them, Phil Knight and Nike caught the
spirit of the times, and then ran with it.