#153 Bill Bowerman (Nike)

**David Senra** (0:00)
Bowerman seemed to have been through some mythic struggle. He spit when someone called him Coach. Just call me Bill, he said. But few would or could at first.
This accorded with why we were here. We were to be cultivated, refined. Bowerman was about to ask us to put aside the things of a child. Not by accident did he begin. Men of Oregon. Take a primitive organism. Any weak, pitiful organism. Say a freshman. Make it lift, or jump, or run. Let it rest. What happens?
A little miracle. It gets a little better. It gets a little stronger, or faster, or more enduring. That's all training is. Stress, recover, improve. You would think any damn fool could do it. But you won't.
You work too hard, and you rest too little, and you get hurt. You yield to the temptations of a liberal education, and burn your candle at both ends, and then you get mono.
Every angelic lying face I see here is poised to screw up, to overtrain, to fall in love, to flunk out.
We have no hard and fast training rules. The vicissitudes of life usually teach an intelligent person what he can handle.
It does help to have someone wise in the ways of candles to steady you as you groped toward the light.
That would be me.
But I regret to inform you, he added, his tone not the least regretful. You cannot just tell somebody what's good for him. He won't listen. He will not listen. First, first, you have to get his attention.
Bowerman did not have a central organizing principle. He had this, a central organizing parable.
Farmer can't get his mule to plow, he said. Can't even get him to eat or drink. Finally, he calls in a mule skinner. Guy comes out, doesn't even look at the mule, goes in the barn, gets a 2x4, and hits the mule as hard as he can between the ears.
The mule goes to his knees.
The mule skinner hits him again between the eyes.
The farmer drags him off. That's supposed to get him to plow? That's supposed to get him to drink?
I can see you don't know a damn thing about mules, said the skinner. First, you have to get their attention.
In the hush that followed, Bowerman's grin was not far from fiendish.
This was his allegory, his rationale, his fair warning. He was our mule skinner. And all he would do to us constituted the two by four he would use to crack open our mullish skulls so the lessons might be inserted.
Leaving that first meeting, I felt only baffled disquiet. Even men who had trained under him for years were edgy. Bowerman, one of them said, is ruled by a need to unsettle, to disturb.
The man lives to get you. That was an excerpt from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Bowerman, the story of Oregon's legendary coach and Nike's co-founder. And it was written by Kenny Moore. Okay, so before I jump in the book, I want to tell you how I came, like why I selected this book to cover this week. I was actually rereading through my highlights from Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike, his book Shoe Dog. I covered it, I think, back on Founders No. 10 And I forgot, you know, I read the book, I think, two or three years ago. And as I was reading through my notes, I forgot how important Bowerman was to Phil Knight and to the founding of Nike, and how much Phil Knight admired him. I want to read one quote, one paragraph from Shoe Dog to you. And that really pushed me over the edge to try to find a biography and made me really excited to dive deeper into the life and the career and the ideas of Bill Bowerman. He's an extremely accomplished individual. So this is Phil Knight writing in Shoe Dog about his one-time coach and then business partner. I look back over the decades and see him toiling in his workshop, Mrs. Bowerman carefully helping. And I get goose bumps. He was Edison in Menlo Park, Da Vinci in Florence, Tesla in Wardenclyffe, divinely inspired. I wonder if he knew, if he had any clue that he was the, I think you pronounce it, Datalus? The Datalus of sneakers, that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations. I wonder if he could conceive in that moment all that he had done, all that would follow. I know I couldn't. And one of the great things about Shoe Dog is, it's one of the, I wish all biographies were formatted very similarly. He does not spend a lot of time on his ancestors, talks about his early life, where he came up with the idea from Nike, and then every chapter is in, the name of the chapter is the year. And he goes through chronological order from the very prehistory of Nike, all the way up until it IPOs and then it ends. And as a byproduct of the way it's structured is, it's what I think most people find most interesting about reading biographies, and that's the struggle, the early life, how they came up with the idea, what they had to go through to actually accomplish and succeed at what they were doing. So when I read that paragraph, I also had to look up that word that he was saying that he was the Daedalus of sneakers. I don't know how to, I'm most likely mispronouncing it, but it comes from Greek mythology, and it says in Greek mythology, Daedalus was a skillful architect, craftsman and artist, and was seen as a symbol of wisdom, knowledge and power. And I think the fact that Phil Knight used that word, used that as a description of the way he saw the role Bowerman played. He said over and over again that there would be no Nike without Bowerman. So let me just read that part to you. I wonder if he knew if he had any clue that he was the Daedalus of sneakers, that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations. I wonder if you could see in that moment all that he had done, all that would follow. I know that I couldn't.