#153 Bill Bowerman (Nike)

What I learned from reading Bowerman and the Men of Oregon: The Story of Oregon's Legendary Coach and Nike's Cofounder by Kenny Moore. ---- [0:01] 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. [0:25] You work too hard and you rest too little and get hurt. [1:38] You cannot just tell somebody what’s good for him. He won’t listen. He will not listen. First, you have to get his attention. [4:14] From the book Shoe Dog. Phil Knight on Bowerman: I look back over the decades and see him toiling in his workshop, Mrs. Bowerman carefully helping, and I get goosebumps. 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 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 he could conceive at that moment all that he'd done. All that would follow. I know I couldn't. [8:02] Are you in this simply to do mindless labor or do you want to improve? You can’t improve if you’re always sick or injured. [9:17] Bowerman was decades ahead of putting just as much of an importance on your recovery as you do on your training. [12:11] In theory, as a coach, he should have been as interested in motivating the lazy as in mellowing the mad, but he wasn’t. “I’m sorry I can’t make them switch brains,” he said. But I can’t.” That left him free to be absorbed by the eager. [17:00] One of the things that makes him so interesting is that he was willing to think from first principles. If he arrived at different collusion he thought was right it didn't matter if 90% of the people in his field were doing it another way. [17:21] Bowerman understood that paradox—the need for both abandoned effort and ironclad control. [18:47] He spent long hours in contented silence, solving a huge range of problems, and he was brutally eloquent when dissecting others’ psyches. Yet he kept the process of himself to himself. [20:42] In his approach to the world, he would take stock, give nothing away, circle to different vantage points, and keep an eye out for a sign of something he might exploit. [28:27] “Because of what he taught,” Bowerman would say, “I went from one of the slowest players to the second fastest. . . I learned from the master.” [30:40] Bill Hayward was Bill Bowerman’s blueprint: He took from his scrapbook a photograph of Hayward. He had it framed behind glass, to preserve what Hayward had written on it: “Live each day so you can look a man square in the eye and tell him to go to hell!” [32:29] Celebrate optimum rather than maximum. [33:23] He killed a 7-foot rattlesnake with a clipboard. [38:12] If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age seventeen by Bill Bowerman. Not simply the shock, but the way to respond. He attached such honor to not giving up, to doing my utmost. Most kids didn’t have that adjustment of standards, that introduction to true reality. [47:05] They shook hands on a partnership. Bill would test and design the shoes. Buck [Phil Knight] would run the company. [47:40] Bowerman knew Knight would give the new venture the ceaselessness of a runner. [49:45] Bowerman’s response to other coaches: “As a coach, my heart is always divided between pity for the men they wreck and scorn for how easy they are to beat.” [53:13] “I don’t believe in chewing on athletes,” he once said. “People are out there to do their best. If you growl at them and they’re not tigers, they’ll collapse. Or they’ll try to make like a tiger. But the tigers are tigers. All you have to do is cool them down a little bit so they don’t make some dumb mistake.” His view was that intelligent men will be taught more by the vicissitudes of life than by a host of artificial training rules. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

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• 0:00David Senra?

  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.

• 0:44David Senra?

  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.

• 1:24David Senra?

  It does help to have someone wise in the ways of candles to steady you as you grope 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.

• 1:59David Senra?

  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 two by four 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.

• 2:43David Senra?

  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 mullet's 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.

• 3:28David Senra?

  Okay, so before I jump into 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 founder, co-founder of Nike, his book Shoe Dog. I covered it, I think, back on like Founder's Number 10. And I forgot, you know, I haven't 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 then, 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.

• 4:12David Senra?

  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 goosebumps." He was Edison in Menlo Park, Da Vinci in Florence, Tesla in Wardencliff, divinely inspired. I wonder if he knew, if he had any clue that he was the, I think you pronounce it dat- datus, the datus of sneakers, that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations.

• 4:53David Senra?

  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 pair, or, excuse me, every chapter is in, the name of the chapter is the year. And he goes through chronological order from the very pre-history 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 to succeed at what they were doing.

• 5:37David Senra?

  So when I read that paragraph, I also had to look up the, that word, that he was, he was saying that he was the datus of sneakers. I don't know how, I'm most likely mispronouncing it. But it comes from Greek mythology, and it says, "In Greek mythology, datus was a skill for 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, is 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 datus of sneakers, that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for

• 6:22David Senra?

  generations. I wonder if he could conceive in that moment, all that he had done, all that would follow. I know that I couldn't." Okay, so that sets up how important he was. The guy lived an amazing life, and he's got a, he's a really interesting person. I'm gonna go ahead and jump into the book. I want to start with the author. So Kenny Moore was one of Bowerman's athletes. And so there's this great story that gives you a good sense of who Bowerman was as the person. So first is a quote at the beginning of the chapter, and it's some guy, I don't even know who it is. But this is the quote, it says, "A guru gives us himself and then his system. A teacher gives us his subject and then ourselves."

• 7:04David Senra?

  So remember that word "teacher," because that's the way Bowerman thought of himself. He hated the word "coach." He did not consider himself a coach. All right, so let me read the section two, and it gives you an insight into the relationship and the impact that Bowerman had on the author of this book, Kenny Moore. "In the spring of 1964, Bill Bowerman gave me his subject and stood back to see if I deserved it. Bowerman, then 53, had coached six sub-four-minute milers at the University of Oregon and had won the 1962 NCAA Track and Field Championship. I was 20, just finishing my first training run after being out with the flu. He put two fingers on my neck, taking my pulse from my carotid artery. 'Easy day,' he asked.

• 7:49David Senra?

  'Easy day, absolutely,' I said. '12 miles,' he said, as if he were my physician. He tilted my head back so he could look me in the eye. He was 6'2" and 200 pounds with a powerful upper body. 'An easy 12,' I said. 'Are you in this simply to do mindless labor,' he said, 'or do you want to improve?' 'To improve? Well, you can't improve if you're always out sick or injured.' 'I know, but Bill, that was an easy 12.' He closed great calloused hands around my throat. He did not lift me off the ground, but he did relieve my feet of much of their burden. That's hilarious. He brought my forehead to his.

• 8:30David Senra?

  'I'm going to ask you to take part in an experiment,' he said, 'with Medising Calm. For three weeks, you are not going to run a yard, except in my sight. You will do a three-mile jog here every morning and our regular afternoon workouts. If I or any of my spies see you trotting another step, you will never run for the University of Oregon again.' 'Bill, are we agreed?' 'Bill, agreed.' As I was feeling faint, I submitted.

• 9:03David Senra?

  And so now I'm gonna skip over a couple of paragraphs, but this goes into what his main, the main insight, and Phil Knight also talks about this in Shoe Dog, was that Bowerman was not only one of the most successful track coaches that ever lived, but he was also decades ahead of putting an importance, just as much importance on your recovery as on your training and your actual days of competition. And there's a lot of metaphors in this book where Bill's talking about optimizing performance for athletes that I think are transferable to whatever is your, that you do for work. So, and one of them is the idea that you can't burn yourself out, that to achieve great things, you have to be able to do those things over a long period of time.

• 9:47David Senra?

  And so I would summarize, and I don't wanna, summary's not the right word. I would say that Bowerman would, would agree in part with the statement that consistency over intensity. And he, this is what he's talking about here, where this guy is, for Kenny's running, you know, he's not healed all the way. He's still a little sick. His resting heart rate's too high and he's, he, Bowerman's, what he'll prioritize is rest and recovery. Yes, just like he was giving the speech, the speech I started the podcast with, that was a speech to the beginning of every, he'd give that speech at the beginning of every track season, talking about, you know, any, it's very simple, stress, recovery, growth. Okay, so it says, "It was the easy days that were humiliating, reporting

• 10:32David Senra?

  to Bowerman morning and evening on track, having him count my laps, barely feeling warmed up before he called, 'Three miles, go in.' I did not suffer this gladly." So he talks about like, any highly competitive, you know, these are, Phil Knight's no different, Bowerman's no different, Kenny Moore's no different. These are type A, super driven people. So this is extremely hard to realize that you may get farther by doing less. And it's not to be confused with being lazy. Bowerman didn't have a lazy bone in his body. This guy's an insane person, as you'll get to know him today. So it says, "I did not suffer this gladly." We're gonna see the initial reaction, you know, this is 1960s, when this is happening. This is a very common reaction that Bowerman would get, not only

• 11:15David Senra?

  from athletes, but from other coaches too, until he started kicking all their asses. "I did not suffer this gladly. I was tempted to do secret defiant runs, but he had enlisted the rest of the team and half the town. Every friend was a possible traitor, and the potential cost was too great." No one who knew Bill Bowerman doubted he would back up his ultimatum. No one who knew me doubted that I desperately wanted to be an Oregon runner. Moving forward, this was very, very interesting. I guess I'll tell you right up front. Bowerman prioritized the individual. And we're going to see that a lot of his thoughts were around that you have to tailor your, your teaching, your coaching, the, the training program to the individual.

• 11:59David Senra?

  There's not like a lot of, it's not very black and white. There's a lot of like customization. But he talks about the people that he does not want to coach or that he does not want to teach. So he says, "In theory, as a coach, he should have been as interested in motivating the lazy as mellowing the mad, but he wasn't. He regarded the most frustrating athlete as the gifted but casual, the gifted but casual as beyond any real help." So this is somebody, you know, is very talented, got by, has such an abundance of talent, maybe was really smart, that he didn't have to work as hard. And so this is what he says. "He would juggle their roommates to give them an example of ambition, but took no further steps to inspire. He never gave a pep talk.

• 12:44David Senra?

  'I'm sorry, I can't make them switch brains,' he said, 'but I can't.'" And this is the, the most important sentence, and I know what I left myself, it's just a hell of a sentence. "That left him free to be absorbed by the eager." And so I would say the way Bowerman, like, why is that section important? Because he doesn't believe motivation is his job. Like, if you're a driven individual, like, you, the motivation comes from, it's internal, it comes from within. And so his point is like, you know, we're, we're making Olympians here. That means you're uncommon amongst uncommon people. So if you don't wake up every day with that drive, then I'm not gonna, there's nothing I can say or do to you. He just said, "I can't switch your brain, but if you do have that drive, you have dedication, then I'll teach you lessons that I've learned that will get the most out of your ability

• 13:28David Senra?

  and hopefully bring you to the, you know, to, to the highest level in the sport or whatever endeavor that you choose." So I thought it was very interesting. And this, a few paragraphs later, gives us an insight into, you know, how he thought about this. "Bowerman thought of himself as an educator. He scorned recruiting and almost never gave full scholarships. 'Anyone can be taught,' he said. 'Those who don't expect a handout, best of all. I'd sure rather be teaching than blowing smoke up some spoiled brat's ass.'" Okay, so moving forward, there's a lot of things happening on this page. The author's still giving us some background before we get into the main story. There's two things I want to point out to you here. One, I think I already mentioned this, but Bill Knight said, "There is no Nike without Bowerman's innovations."

• 14:11David Senra?

  He designed, I mean, think about it, he had multiple decades of training some of the best runners. And that's how Nike started out. It started out as a company wanting to make the best running shoes, right? So just a little bit about that. It says, "Disdainful of the weight and nonexistent cushioning of running shoes in the 1950s, he had taken up cobbling and made us three-ounce spikes that lasted one race. We had no inkling that these were the beginning of Nike's vast success, but we knew we had better shoes than anyone else." And so that's something I also admire, and I'll just tell you right up front about Bowerman, is that there's a quote in that book, "The Fish That Ate the Whale," which I never forgot. And it says, "If you know your business," it's a quote from the main character of the book, Sam Zemurray, I think it's in founders, somewhere in the 30s. You can go back and listen to it if you haven't.

• 14:56David Senra?

  And read the book, it's absolutely crazy, fantastic story. But Sam Zemurray says something, he's like, "If you know your business from A to Z, there's no problem you can't solve." And Bowerman had that mindset because he was obsessed with trying to be the best track coach and having the best athletes in the world. And so not only would he want, you know, you had to be driven, you had to be naturally talented, you had to be receptive to his lessons, but he would make his, like, started cobbling, started making his own shoes. How many track coaches in the world could do that? It's just insane. And he didn't stop there. Then he starts designing clothes. He starts making some of the clothes out of like the same material parachutes are made out of. He would take like, I think it's, it might be nylon or whatever the, whatever the actual

• 15:40David Senra?

  fabric was, but I do know he used like old parachutes and started like sewing clothes. He did that, so he'd take care of your shoes, what you're wearing. He eventually starts experimenting later on with different mixtures of what track, what like, what tracks are made out of. And so at his house on the top of a hill, top of a mountain, he's got a cement mixer, the equivalent of like a cement mixer. He's doing all this, trying to figure out what's the best way I can, like, what's the best material? Maybe there's a better track I can make so we can go faster. He was completely obsessed. He knew his business, so to speak, from A to Z. So this goes, "I rolled my eyes." Now, we're talking about, the author's talking about, you know, wanting to push more and Bowerman trying to temper that natural instinct

• 16:23David Senra?

  to just overwork because it's not that he didn't want you to push. He does not want you to get injured because if you get injured, you might be out the entire year. You can't get that back. She says, "I rolled my eyes at Bowerman's patient studies of our strides and metabolism and especially his damn easy days." That's what he was talking about. He's like, "Hey, you're only going to jog three, you know, three miles and that's it," as an example of an easy day. "It felt demeaning to just rest." So, the reason I include this in the podcast, because these next two sentences is exactly what Bowerman had. This was the way everybody thought about athletics at the time. And so that's what makes Bill Bowerman so interesting. One of the things that makes him so interesting is that he was willing to think from first principles. And if he arrived at a different conclusion, he thought

• 17:07David Senra?

  was right, it didn't matter if 90% of the people in his, his field were doing it the other way. And he winds up being correct. So he says, "It felt demeaning to just rest. Work was righteous. Rest was weak-willed and ignoble. But Bowerman understood that paradox, the need for both abandoned effort and ironclad control." And finally, Bowerman's message starts to get through. We're still in the introduction. I know I'm in trouble because I have a ton of highlights in this book. I really enjoyed it and I'll tell you the impact it had me, had on me personally at the very end. "He had given me his subject. I had found myself. I finally began to penetrate, it finally began to penetrate my thick skull that I had to rise above the world's fixation with sheer

• 17:51David Senra?

  work. I had to tend to my own eccentric physiology. I accepted easy days into my life and I stopped counting miles. Over the next eight years, the one long run he permitted me every 10 days would turn me into a fourth place finisher in the 1972 Olympic marathon. It was the lesson of my life and it forces me now to consider with a shiver whether anyone besides Bowerman could have gotten through to me." Okay, so now I want to get a little bit into the personality to give you an idea of who this person was. One huge part of his personality, he's very laconic. He keeps his thoughts to himself. He's not up there, you know, some coaches might expect, they're giving a pep talk, giving a motivational speech. He preferred one-on-one. That's part

• 18:34David Senra?

  of the reason he started out as a football coach and gravitated towards track, because, even though there's a team, you can deal with your athletes on a one-on-one basis. So that was his preferred method. But he says he spent long hours in contented silence, solving a huge range of problems, and he was brutally eloquent when dissecting other psyches. Yet he kept the process of himself to himself. As Barbara Bowerman, that's his wife, they were married for 70 years. By the time he dies, he dies at 88, she had known him for 70 years. As Barbara Bowerman would recall, "I can't tell you how frustrating

• 19:14David Senra?

  it was to love him and trust him and know he loved me and trusted me, and still he would never tell me what he was thinking." His family, they got to Oregon by crossing the Oregon Trail, something that he spoke of often, and this quote that he's going to have here in a minute just makes me laugh every time. It's also in Shoe Dog. But he says, "Almost all who traveled the Oregon Trail were on the only trip of their lives. It was a defining ordeal, a winnowing out of the non-industrious, the non-enduring, the inflexible, and the uncooperative. Bowerman was pioneer stock and had a right to cackle, as he did, that the cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us."

• 19:59David Senra?

  So that gives you an insight into some of his personality. This story from when he was a young boy will also give you an insight into his desire to live life on his own terms, one of the things I most admire about him. "On the first day of first grade, the teacher asked, 'Can you write your name?' Bill cried out, 'That's what I came here to learn,' an early warning that he meant to go through life on his own terms." So it talks about, he grew up in this tiny, tiny town, I think it was like a population of like 500. It's called Fossil Oregon. And I just want to read one sentence from this. "He seemed to imply that he was so fired by his own wild yearnings, so temper torn, that obedience had been impossible."

• 20:37David Senra?

  The ranch life of Fossil taught its children to close off no options, to presume nothing is impossible. In his approach to the world, he would take stock, give nothing away, circle to different vantage points, and keep an eye out for a sign of something he might exploit. That's actually a really good one-sentence summary of his approach to life. So an early Bill Bowerman was like a hell raiser. His dad dipped out, left his family for another, for his secretary, didn't have anything to do with really raising his kids at all. And Bowerman had a twin brother that was killed right in front of him when he was real young, maybe five, six years old, something like that, and he was crushed in an elevator,

• 21:22David Senra?

  an elevator accident. And so, you know, he got in fights, he was very disobedient, just, you know, just a crazy uncontrollable kid. And that changed one day when he meets his Mule Skinner. And this person has a huge impact on the trajectory of his life, not very different than the way Bowerman would influence the trajectory of the people that, like his athletes. So he's getting in trouble, this is, he's waiting outside of the principal's office. And it says, "Then, as Bowerman himself would always remember, the voice emanated from the inner sanctum. Is that hell-raising son of a bitch still out there? Ursul Hedrick was then 30.

• 22:03David Senra?

  He had graduated from Oregon in 1916 and been a World War I Marine, Mule Skinner, and artillery officer. Standing above a stack of Bill's teacher reports, he said, I think Bill at this time is 15, 15 or 16, around that age, "This is ridiculous. You're good in band, good in journalism, so you're not stupid. You're just a hell-raising son of a bitch." "Bowerman," Hedrick went on, "here's how life is going to go for you. You'll keep up this goddamn fighting, and you'll not only be out of Medford," that's where the school he's at, "you'll be out of goddamn everywhere." Nobody, so he got suspended and almost expelled multiple times because he just could not stop getting fistfights. Nobody is going to stand for this shit.

• 22:48David Senra?

  And that's the way it should be. You'll fight and I'll be rid of you. You'll fight and everybody else will be rid of you. Fight here, fight there, die in prison, or on some barroom floor. I could give a royal oozing shit. That's just, that's justice. That's just dying by your own goddamn sword. And this is where he gets his attention. Remember the whole, he starts off, he's like, "Listen, I'm only here. The first thing you have to do before I can teach you is I have to get your attention. I have to make sure you have an open mind so my lessons can actually get in." And this is what Ursula, what's it, yeah, Ursula's doing for him right here. And he gets him with this sentence. "The only thing wrong with that," meaning dying, dying in a fight in a barroom, "is

• 23:32David Senra?

  that you'll dishonor a goddamn worthwhile human being." Bill's head came up. "Who?" "Elizabeth Hoover Bowerman." Bill stopped breathing. "You will bring eternal shame upon the name of your mother," Hendrick said. "What, what should I do?" Bill finally croaked. "What do you want me to do?" "Control yourself," roared Hendrick. "Cut the crap and channel that goddamn energy. Go back to that school and be of use. Make your mother proud. Because I swear to you, Bowerman, I never want to hear your goddamn name again." And so this is the result after this talk. He began to channel.

• 24:16David Senra?

  Systematically, he threw himself into his studies, sports, the band, drama, and the school paper. Hendrick's two-by-four between his eyes would be the lesson of his life. "Hendrick got my attention." That's Bill, that's a quote from Bill 50 years after this happened. That's insane that, you know, think about how important this was in his life that you could remember it five decades later. "Whether Bill swore to himself that he would never lose control again isn't known, but this was the beginning of the self-possession." Another word to think about is discipline, that Bowerman definitely has over himself, self-discipline. "The beginning of the self-possession that would strike anyone who met him thereafter." Bill's turnaround was so dramatic that Hendrick would, in fact, hear his goddamn name again.

• 25:01David Senra?

  But instead of hell-raising and fighting, it's because he winds up being a world-famous coach.

• 25:09David Senra?

  And one of the best to ever do what he did. So moving forward, I think one of, we've seen this several times, that seeing something done the wrong way can be, sometimes you learn more from seeing something done the wrong way than you even do by seeing it done the right way. And he realizes that this, he's got a terrible football coach and he's like, this, I want to be the opposite of this guy. And that leads him to finding what I would say like his blueprint, the person that he follows. So he says, "Bill at once grasped the nature of his head coach. Doc Spears was dictatorial, abrasively vocal, and resembled a bloodthirsty infantry commander. The varsity had a good team almost in spite of him, Bowerman will recall. He was cruel, and he was a windbag."

• 25:50David Senra?

  He has, to this day, says, "Bowerman has an intense dislike of blowhards. The man's bellowing insistence on being called 'coach' turned Bill against the word forever." So it goes, that gives you an insight into why he refused to want to be called coach. So he winds up meeting another, so that's the football coach. He winds up meeting a track coach. And it's this guy named Bill Hayward who winds up becoming Bowerman's blueprint. And so it says, they start talking and he says, "But I hear people call you Colonel," said Bill, Bowerman. "Well, just call me Bill." Remember, that's how he started out, how he started giving the speech to the, to the track team at the beginning of the year. You know, "Don't call me Coach, just call me Bill." "Just call me Bill," said Oregon's head athletic trainer and track coach, 62-year-old Bill

• 26:35David Senra?

  Hayward. Hayward had invented state-of-the-art splints, casts, straps, pads, slings, and braces to keep injured bodies in the lineup and allow them some movement and protection while they healed. The device is fascinating, Bowerman, and I know I left myself on that page, and the reason I'm including that here is because that's exactly, Bowerman does the same thing at Nike. He's making things to go faster, but he also does it for protection to make sure you don't get injured. Very much so, he copied a lot of Heywood's ideas. In fact, when they want to, later on in life, they want to induct Bowerman into the Track and

• 27:17David Senra?

  Field Hall of Fame. And he refused. He says, "I'm not going in until you induct Heywood in first." So it gives you an idea of the love of respect and the love that he had for his coach. And so I'm going to read you some description of Heywood, but essentially, I'm reading, I'm doing so so you learn about Bowerman, because he copied this to the T. "Heywood declared his personal life off limits. We dilute the word and usually demean the subject when we call someone a character, but Heywood's eccentricity invited it, and he didn't seem to mind." Remember, everything I'm reading to you applies to Bowerman. "Heywood wasn't especially fatherly towards his charges, towards his athletes, and treated each one differently, characteristics Bill Bowerman would emulate. Heywood also preceded Bowerman

• 28:00David Senra?

  in being a practical joker." And so they start spending a great deal of time together. As they're spending time together, Heywood's just telling him, essentially, he's filling him in on the history of the sport. He says, "Listening to these litany's of the great, it dawned on Bill that Heywood had enabled, witnessed, or photographed about two-thirds of Olympic track and field history. There was no more experienced village elder if the village was the Olympic ones." This is something that Bowerman was kind of wanted to aspire to. "Because of what he taught me," Bowerman would say, "I went from one of the slowest players on the team to the second fastest." "Bill was grateful to have a guide to good form in his career as well as his stride, but he also came to revere

• 28:45David Senra?

  Heywood because he was logical. It is not just a condensation of hindsight to say that sports in the 1930s was a mishmash of ignorance." Talks about different coaches put arbitrary authority ahead of common sense. "Heywood, by contrast, looked for the underlying reasons." This is really going to hone in on the way Bowerman approached his craft. Again, I would say he tried to think of things in first principles, was not willing to just accept the dogma of his sport of his day. And by questioning that, he went to finding ways where the accepted dogma was inaccurate and where he could prove on it. It's very interesting. "Heywood, by contrast, looked for the underlying reasons. He applied almost all his lessons to himself."

• 29:29David Senra?

  Tiny changes made all the difference. This fitted with Bill's growing interest in the sciences and what we now term biomechanics. How the levers are moved by the muscles, how the body properly aligned performs at its optimum. That's his entire life work, right? Hayward was half doctor, half inventor. You could say the same thing about Bowerman. Bowerman began to mold himself into one tune. "I learned from the master," he would say. So it's this relationship with Hayward that Bowerman realizes, hey, I want to do exactly what he does. I want to eventually be the field and track coach of Oregon. So Hayward actually makes sure Bowerman is the successor and then dies.

• 30:13David Senra?

  And this is how important he was to Bowerman. So this is his mom. This is Bowerman's mom, Lizzie, writing a letter to Hayward. Lizzie Bowerman had sent a letter to Hayward. "I asked my son which of his instructors he considered had done the most for him, and without a moment's hesitation, he named you. I am sure there are many boys who feel the same way as Bill does, and I hope they have told you so. You are a teacher who is a friend and who impart spiritual development and inspiration." Bowerman took from his scrapbook a photograph of Hayward. He had it framed behind glass to preserve what Hayward had written on it. And this is a quote from Hayward now. "Live each day so you can look a man square in the eye and tell him to go to hell." Signed, Bill.

• 30:56David Senra?

  Then he hung it outside of his office door where he could see it at the beginning and end of each day. Okay, so now we get to where Bowerman starts coaching and we really see his philosophy. So as Bowerman began exhorting Oregon runners to finish their workouts exhilarated, not exhausted. His credo was that it was better to underdo than overdo. He was adamant that he trained individuals and not teams. And he came to believe that group workouts could even be counterproductive. "The best man loafes; the worst tears himself down," he would say. Maybe only one guy in the middle gets the optimum work. All of this was the genesis of his annual welcoming line to freshmen. Stress, recover, improve. That's all training is, he'd say.

• 31:40David Senra?

  When Bowerman first articulated the hard easy method. That's the way they classify this throughout the whole book. Hard, easy. He was widely despised for it. The anthem of most coaches then was the more you put in, the more you get out. When Bowerman chided them, "Come on. The greatest improvement is made by the man who works most intelligently." They were morally affronted. His easy days were derided. The intentional tailoring of stress to the individual was called coddling. And so one way to summarize what he's going for. He's trying to optimize for optimum rather than maximum. So this paragraph tells us a little bit about that. This was not a matter of intellect, but of trying to monitor driving hunger. A hunger not confined to coaches.

• 32:25David Senra?

  Driven runners really think 200 miles per week is doing them good. But if a coach wishes to rise above damn foolishness, he must celebrate optimum rather than maximum. And Bowerman did. And this next little anecdote gives you a good idea of the maniac that we're dealing with here. This guy named John, who's a friend and neighbor, winds up being an attorney and advisor to Nike as well. Is driving home and he sees Bowerman's entangled with some kind of, something's going on with Bowerman's house. So it says, "John saw Bill's car stopped at the Bowerman driveway, dust rising. Bowerman had a thick-bodied, hissing, writhing diamondback rattlesnake pressed to the gravel with a clipboard."

• 33:10David Senra?

  "Need any help?" John asked. "Nope," said Bowerman. "Just taken him a while to quit." In the newspaper that week, there was a photo of the clipboard and the seven-foot snake, the largest ever killed in Lane County. Bowerman killed the seven-foot rattlesnake with a clipboard. And this is a description of the relationship Bowerman had with his athletes, which I thought was very interesting. "We were not his kids. We were, in that phrase he took for medicine, 'in his care,' and the necessary distance of a doctor was part of that. He didn't love us as sons. He cared for us as patients, administering to our needs. He could issue edicts and hammer us when we needed it."

• 33:53David Senra?

  And it's funny, because even though Phil Knight is technically his boss, he always, he talks about in his great, in his autobiography, he's like, you know, I'm terrified of the guy. Like, I was scared of him, but I also, at the same time, loved him and had a deep desire for him to approve of me and to, you know, to basically say, hey, I'm doing a good job. He said, outside of his father, Bill Bowerman and his father were the two male influences of life that he craved. Their, the words on appreciation, what's the word I'm looking for? Their acceptance and admiration is maybe a way to put that. All right, so now we get to the part in the story where he's starting to make shoes. And he starts making shoes way before Nike. And he does it again because he thinks it's the best way to accomplish his goal, which

• 34:36David Senra?

  is, you know, he's trying to make his athletes the best athletes in the world. So it says, "He found himself in the campus shoe shop. 'I don't want to demean your artistry,' Bowerman said. 'But how hard is it to make a pair of shoes? I mean, really.' 'You cannot make your own shoes,' erupted the repairman. 'Trust me, you cannot make shoes without a factory.' 'Let us stipulate that you are absolutely right. Of course I can't make shoes. But if you were going to make a shoe and you had the right equipment, how would you go about it?' Bowerman said later, 'It was wonderful to watch the repairman morph into a grouchy professor, professor of cobbling science 101.' His workshop at home began to resemble the cobbler shop. And so this is where we get into like one of the main tenets of Bowerman's philosophy,

• 35:21David Senra?

  and that's the speed. To go, the lighter you are, the faster you will go. And I think this is a metaphor that can be applied to a lot of things. I'm sure there's things in, in our lives that we're doing that we actually don't need to, that are actually weighing us down. Let's rid ourselves of that. Let's go faster." He says, "I wanted the shoes as light as if I drove nails through your bare feet," he would recall with some relish. He obsessed about weight for a simple mathematical reason. If a miler has an average two-yard stride, he takes 880 steps in his race. Save an ounce from his shoe and you save him 880 ounces. That's 55 pounds of hard labor. At the time, American shoes weighed from seven to 10 ounces. So that's another reason why Nike was so successful because I covered the founder of Adidas. I think the book's called Sneaker Wars.

• 36:06David Senra?

  I don't remember which founders it is, but his name is Adidasler. Dude was a straight-up genius. I think he has like 700 and something patents, if I remember correctly, just on innovations he did for shoes. So Adidas is like the Rolls-Royce of shoes, but they're expensive and they're a little heavier than Bill thinks they need to be. American shoes are crap. They're really heavy. They're cheap, but they fall apart. They're just useless. So Bowerman's like, okay, Adidas is expensive and hard to get my hands on, and American shoes suck. So that's why I need to make my own. Phil Knight is going to take that one step further with his thesis that he wrote at Stanford Business School, where he's like, hey, the same way the Japanese were able to

• 36:48David Senra?

  take market share away from the Germans in electronics and cameras, they could probably do the same thing in athletic shoes. That was the thesis on which he built Nike on, which wound up being correct. So let me go back to where we're at here. So he's saying, "The first Oregon runner for whom he made a pair of spikes was Phil Knight in 1958." I skipped over something. Let me go back. "At the time, American shoes weighed from seven to 10 ounces, half a pound on average. Even the lightest Adidas weighed five ounces. I beat that by two ounces pretty quick." Bill would crow. And before I get into where Nike came from, because this is a really interesting quote here from Phil Knight, something I think is also really important to know is that, let me read this sentence to you. It's really, "Bill was focused on small improvements over time."

• 37:33David Senra?

  So he's talking about that in running, but think about that when he's designing products, because that's what he's doing. He's making a product. He's just making it by hand. "Bill's designs grew organically over time. Breakthroughs were brilliant but rare." So he's just doing small improvements. He'd make custom shoes and then he's in a unique position of being able to... Test out his prototype because he's your track coach and you're wearing his shoes and he realizes, okay, well, that's too hot light, or that's too heavy, or that makes you over pronate, or that doesn't give you enough support, that causes injuries. And so he's constantly going back and just do trial and error over and over again, making the best shoes, what's wind up being the best track shoes in the world. Now, this is where Phil Knight talks about where Nike came from. And I have not heard this anywhere else. I thought this was

• 38:17David Senra?

  very fascinating. As a freshman, he would say four decades later, I had to make one hell of an adjustment. Phil Knight was a crazy good runner. I think he was like the second best runner in his state, something like that, like really good when he, when he, when he came to Oregon. So he says, as a freshman, I had to make one hell of an adjustment. I had to go from being a good high school competitor to a locker room with three Olympians. If you were to ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age 17 by Bill Bowerman. Not simply the shock, but the way to respond. He attached such honor to not giving up to doing my utmost. So think about that sentence. He attached such honor to not giving up to doing my utmost.

• 39:01David Senra?

  Read True Dog. It is insane what, what Phil Knight, Phil Knight had to go through to make sure that Nike survived, like almost every other book that we read, right? It's not like, oh, I have this great idea. And now I'm a Fortune 500 company and a billionaire. No, that doesn't happen. I mean, think about in Phil Knight's case, it was five years before he was able to work on his company full time. He was, I think he was like, he was doing, he was an accountant, if I remember correctly. I knew he was a professor, teacher in there as well. It's just insane. Five years before he can even start, start working on his business full time. Okay, let me go back to this. Not simply the shock, but the way to respond. He attached such honor to not giving up to doing my utmost. Most kids didn't have that adjustment of standards. That introduction to true reality continues

• 39:45David Senra?

  on the next page. Knight graduated from Oregon in 1959, masking his relentlessness with his quiet demeanor. He is, if you read True Dog. I think everybody's gonna agree, Phil Knight is relentless. Same way he was a relentless runner, he applied that to... Again, that's why I think there's so many metaphors between this. Between athletics and whatever craft or work, whatever you want to call it. Masking his relentlessness with his quiet demeanor. He would not rest until he competed to the ultimate level in something. And that was his... I had forgotten that his goal was, "I'm going to overtake Adidas." It's like starting... I'm trying to put in, like, what would that be comparable today?

• 40:28David Senra?

  Like, saying right now, "Hey, I'm gonna start a company that makes phones better than Apple." Like, that's how far... Adidas was the benchmark. It was the largest company, it was the best company, it had the best shoes. And Phil Knight's like, "Yeah, I'm gonna run them down. I'm gonna beat them." And he did. Now, another thing I admire about Bowerman. You know, he spent a lot of time in solitude, came up with a lot of his ideas. But he also was relentless in learning the best of what other people figured out. He's very... Reminds me of Sam Walton. You know how Sam Walton would constantly go to all different retail stores and take all their good ideas? Bowerman does the same thing. So he meets this coach in New Zealand. And he says, "I thought a cross-country race was going on," Bowerman would recall. "But there were men, women, children, all ages, all sizes."

• 41:12David Senra?

  This guy's name is Lydiard. "Lydiard had told me that he'd begun the Auckland Joggers Club about a year earlier. We found that the best thing for my champions was also the best thing for everyone else. A great, long, Sunday run." Everyone... So Bowerman goes over there. And he starts... He's going over to learn from Lydiard. But he's also... Lydiard's making him run. And Bowerman's getting his ass kicked by just these old, normal people. And he's like, "I don't understand what's happening here." "Everyone had left me," he would say, "except one old fellow moved back and said, 'I see you're having trouble.' I didn't say anything. I couldn't." He's out of breath. Then he said, "I know a shortcut." Bowerman's savior was this guy named Andrew Steedman, who was then 73.

• 41:56David Senra?

  "Steedman kept stopping and waiting for Bill, encouraging him to keep going. It gave Bill the bloody shock of his life. A second jolt was discovering Stevens' medical history." "I'm a coach of athletes," Lydiard would remember Bowerman saying. "And that old guy has had three coronaries, and he had to wait for me." Bowerman didn't need a two by four twice. He would run almost every day during the six weeks in the country. He pumped Lydiard for information. Lydiard's famous dictum was, "Train, don't strain." And it's from the trip to New Zealand that another, it's really hard if you go back and look at all the accomplishments Bowerman had in his life, just how hard to believe that

• 42:39David Senra?

  one person accomplished all this. He's about to write, you know jogging, the sport jogging? Bowerman is credited with popularizing that back in America. He took the ideas he saw in New Zealand, brought it back, wrote like a hundred page book called Jogging, and sold over a million copies in the 60s. So it says, "The next morning, a sports writer from the local paper, who had been following the tour, phoned to ask Bowerman to sum up his experience. Bill told him that the competition was great, but the biggest thing that had happened was his realizing that his idea of exercise was way, way low." He's talking about exercise for a normal people too. "In New Zealand, thousands of people jog," Bill said. "The women jog, the kids jog, everybody jogs." The reporter asked him, "What do you think we could do here?"

• 43:21David Senra?

  And Bowerman said, "Why don't we find out?" Continues, "Originally, a nation of pioneers accustomed to hard physical labor, America in the mid 20th century had become a society that actively condemned adult fitness. It may be hard for anyone born after 1960 to believe, but runners in those days were regarded as eccentric, at best, subversive and dangerous at worst." Phil talks about, Phil Knight talks about this, going on runs and people get so mad that they'd throw like things out of their car. You know, you're running on the road right next to the highway and it's just kind of funny. And you know, people just throw things at you. It's hard for us to believe, you know, because that's not the world that we live in today. During the day, cars were, oh, here we go.

• 44:04David Senra?

  "During the day, cars would routinely swerve to try to drive a runner off the road. And running at night was deemed suspicious enough to warrant being stopped by a police cruiser and held until phone calls ascertained that there had been no burglaries in the area." And if you really think about it, that makes the story of Nike even more remarkable. But Nike started in this environment. One thing that Phil Knight said that I was reminded of is that when he started Nike, he said that he believed, like, the reason he started Nike, remember, they started with running shoes, that if, he believed that if everyone got out and ran a few miles a day, the world would be a better place. And Bowerman helped millions of people go out and jog a few miles a day.

• 44:45David Senra?

  I think he printed, he did like a follow-up to the book, so it was sold probably a couple million copies. I know the first version sold over a million copies, so. All right, so let me go back. Now, we're going to the birth of the company that's going to form into Nike. It's called Blue Ribbon Sports. So this is the beginning of Blue Ribbon and great advice that Bowerman gives Knight. "I worked up a little speech about what Bill meant to me," Knight would say. "But when I went to give it, I kind of got choked up. Somehow, he grasped my intent and made it to me, made it to me instead." A speech about what I had meant to the team, to the team and to the University of Oregon. Then Bowerman delivered the final line. "Never underestimate yourself." Knight would deem that moment my true commencement ceremony.

• 45:30David Senra?

  "Being Bill Bowerman's guinea pig," Knight would say, "I had naturally absorbed why Bill had to make our shoes. American running shoes were still made by offshoots of tire companies." That's crazy, I didn't know that. "They were cheap and terrible. They cost $5 and gave you blood blisters after five miles. Adidas was taking advantage, and at $30 a pair, Adidas was making a killing." Knight proposed a new company that would import first-rate athletic shoes, not from Germany, but from Japan, where his research had shown skilled labor was far cheaper. The paper was called "Can Japanese sports shoes do to German sports shoes what Japanese cameras have done to German cameras?" And it sketched out a high, it sketched out a track shoe distribution, distribution in the western states and projected sales to high school and college teams of up to 20,000 per year.

• 46:15David Senra?

  So that's exactly what Blue Ribbon does. They start selling, they don't make their own shoe. They start reselling, they're called Tigers. They're lightweight Japanese running shoes. And so the very first incarnation of Nike, Phil Knight goes over to Tokyo, convinces them to, for him to have, to be first started out to be the sole, the exclusive reseller in the West and eventually I think gets the rights to the entire United States. They wind up later on reneging on that deal and that leads them to producing their own shoe, which they called Nike. And this is the beginning of the partnership between Bowerman and Phil Knight. I like to look, this is Bowerman writing Knight, "I like the looks of your tiger shoe. I've heard of these, but never

• 46:59David Senra?

  been able to get a hold of a pair. If you can set some kind of contractual agreement with these people, for goodness sakes, do it." Bill was already tinkering in his mind. "I have some ideas for a flat shoe," he added. "I'll pass on some of my ideas to you, but of course, I'll expect you to make some kind of arrangement with cutting your old coach in too." They shook hands on a partnership. Bill would test and design the shoes and if they deserved it, pitch them to other coaches. Buck, that's, that's, so in the book, Buck is Phil Knight's nickname. So sometimes he calls him Buck, sometimes he calls him Phil, just so you know, he's talking about there. Buck, by virtue of a 51 to 49% division of voting control, would run the company. And there's one sentence on why Bowerman,

• 47:43David Senra?

  who's been presented opportunities like this before, chose to partner with Knight. He said, "He knew Knight would give the venture the ceaselessness of a runner." Moving on now, here's advice that Bowerman's giving his runner, but I think he's talking directly to us in this case, and it's the importance of focus, that you can only focus on one thing at a time. We, so the athlete's talking about, "We'd spend an hour, an hour in the old indoor arena mastering one element at a time." And now there's, here's the quote from Bowerman, "You can only think of one thing at a time," he'd say. "I thought he meant just me, but later, later on, I found it applied to most people." So again, he's not going to try to, "I'm meeting with you one-on-one, that's his coaching style. I'm not going to try to tackle half a dozen things in each, I know what you need to prove. We're

• 48:26David Senra?

  going to do one at a time. And then once you have that mastered, I'm going to move on to the next thing. There's also a story in the book where the author could have been an early investor in Nike. And so I'm going to read it to you, but not, I mean, he turns it down. And you know, that's a very expensive mistake, but it really illustrates how tentative the early days of Nike were. He won, the author had won some kind of like scholarship and some grants. So he got an extra $2,000. He says, "I whooped about this to Bowerman. It being the first time in my life, I was, in my life, the first time in my life, I had more than 50 bucks. Interesting," he said. "Buck and I have a shipment of shoes on the dock in Portland and need some cash to pay the duty. This might be a fine time for you to take

• 49:06David Senra?

  a thousand or two, to invest a thousand or two, a thousand or 2,000 in stock. Seriously, Bill," I said, man to man, "what are the chances of this business really panning out? Kenny, here's how I see it. It's a good idea. Buck's a good partner. The Cortez is a good shoe." That's the one that he, one of the first designs, the Bowerman designed. "I wish I could guarantee you will turn 2,000 into a lot more, but I can't. It's a risk. I thanked him and ran for the airport. I used my windfall for a Christmas vacation in Hawaii instead." So I mentioned earlier how, you know, his, his training style and his approach to his craft was vastly different from his peers. And this was Bowerman's response to other coaches not understanding the need for rest and recovery. I love this, I was getting

• 49:51David Senra?

  insight into his personality. I wrote Bowerman about it, talking about this guy just beating the hell out of his athletes. He's not letting them recover. They're getting injured. And so he says, and this is what Bowerman says, "As a coach, my heart is always divided between pity for the men they wreck and scorn for how easy, for how easy they are to beat." And this next paragraph is really what I was talking about earlier, that he values consistency over intensity. The name of the athlete's not important. This book is full of, you know, there's probably 50 different athletes they talk about, but the idea is important. "Even though they work together daily on technique, it would take them months to get comfortable with each other, because the change Bowerman knew Steinhauer most needed to make was the hardest for him to accept. His basic lesson, both in throwing

• 50:35David Senra?

  and in life," Neil, that's Neil Steiner, Steinhauer, I guess, Neil would say, was "don't rush it." Pace yourself. Take it slow in the beginning. In training, don't go too hard or fast for your body. Do what you can and don't expect to get there all in one day. It was interesting, this part, I was listening to a trainer who trained some of the best athletes in the world. He's on a podcast one time. And he's talking about when he was younger, he's from Canada and there's this, there's this famous boxer in Canada, I think his name was Otis Grant. And he was training at the famous Grant Brothers Gym. And he didn't, you know, he's young, very similar to what the author Kenny was talking about, he's driven, you know, he's doing this hard, intense workout.

• 51:18David Senra?

  And then he sees, you know, I think he was a multiple champion, might have even been an Olympian. And he's like, what's happening here? He's like, I'm training way harder than this guy. And he didn't understand, he's like, yeah, but this is my 10th workout. That's his millionth workout. And it finally clicked to him. He's like, if I keep training this way and I keep getting injured, or I keep having to take time off, I'll never get to my million, you know, million is an exaggeration, obviously, but the point still stands. Like, I can do that through 10 workouts, maybe I can do it through 100 workouts, but I can't do this level of intensity to a million. And the fact is that the improvement happens over time, the knowledge, not only does your body improve over time, but hopefully your mind and the way you analyze, in their case, their sport improves over time. I never forgot about that.

• 52:03David Senra?

  And so he says, it's consistency over intensity. Get, you set yourself up so you can do consistent efforts, you can get to that millionth rep, that millionth workout. I thought it was very interesting. So in addition to this, this priority of consistency over intensity, it's, Baumann's understood that independence is empowering. Okay, we're partners, but I'm not going to do the work for you. So he says, "It was typical of how Baumann taught. He gave us our workouts, our lessons, our tactics, but then he gave us the freedom to execute them ourselves." Morrison believed this flowed from Baumann's not being a father figure. "My high school coach was like a member of the family," he would say, "looking out for us, keeping us from harm. Boy, was Bill ever not like that.

• 52:48David Senra?

  He expected us to be independent adults and make our own way. I believe that gave us more self-knowledge. We could run well for the rest of our lives because his teaching us how to do it on our, because he was teaching us how to do it on our own." Bill once told me he was proudest that all his Olympians set their personal best records years after they were out of school. And now we hear more about this philosophy from Bowerman himself. "I don't believe in chewing on athletes," he once said. "People are out there to do their best. If you growl at them and they're not tigers, they'll collapse, or they'll try to make like a tiger. But tigers are tigers. All you have to do is cool them down a little so that they don't make some dumb mistake."

• 53:31David Senra?

  Though no, I left myself in this page, there's two things happening here, or two things he's saying here. He says Bowerman's sounding a lot like Charlie Munger here. What is he saying? He's like, "I'm not trying to make you a genius. I'm trying you to avoid being stupid." That's something that Munger talks about all the time. "All you have to do is cool them down a little bit so they don't make some dumb mistakes." And this is the second thing that sounds like Munger. "His view was that intelligent men will be taught more by the vicissitudes of life than by a host of artificial training rules." That word "vicissitudes" even in the book, the title of Charlie Munger, describing why Munger calls himself a biographer and not, why he's read hundreds of biographies. He says, "Reading personal biographies allows one to experience multiple lives and successes and failures. Reading business biographies allows one to experience the vicissitudes of a business and learn how problems are solved."

• 54:16David Senra?

  So a lot of echoing between the philosophy of Munger there, or Bowerman on that page, and Munger. So something that Bowerman had to deal with is, he's got a lot of, there's a lot of giant egos. The people that come to University of Oregon have, you know, been the best runners in their state, in their school, they've won championships when they were younger, and a lot of them are like, some of them are hot heads and hard to control. So that's what he was talking about there. He's like, "Listen, I'm just trying to cool them down so they don't do dumb things." But he said, there was a great quote, I'm just gonna read one sentence, but I thought it was interesting. This is like this dust-up, talking about, "Oh, you know, I don't want to pace myself, I'm gonna run all the way." And Bowerman said, "Ah, with the talent, Bowerman's side, comes the temperament."

• 54:57David Senra?

  I had some highlights about the early days of Nike. Just gives you an idea of how unorganized and it's just crazy to study the early days of any company, especially Nike though. Think about how, you know, how large and it's known for the quality of its products and everything else and just did not start out like that. There's also this really interesting guy, I wish I could find a book on. His name's Jeff Johnson. He was the first employee of Nike. He's all over Shoe Dog. It's hilarious. This is Phil Knight talking about him. Jeff was a real shoe nut, but it turned out he was also just bright as hell and really into business and he soon became a lot more than just a shoe peddler. So the author is actually running in some of the shoes that they're designing and he runs into Jeff Johnson at a track meet. And so Jeff comes over to him and he points at his shoe and he says, "I sell all the Tigers

• 55:41David Senra?

  down here, but this is the first time I've seen those." And so the author's like, "Well, they're called the Cortez. They don't keep in the loop." And this was hilarious. Jeff says, "I worked for the company two years before I had my first phone call." That's not an exaggeration. "It sounds preposterous now, but it was true," he said. Knight never communicated. Knight talks about this in Shoe Dog. Jeff's writing him letters every day, updates. He just never responds. Jeff is completely enthusiastic about what they're doing. Phil Knight's trying to like, "No, don't be so excited. This is nothing. This is nothing." Because, you know, for many years it wasn't anything. Knight never communicated. The Blue Ribbon Office, which was his house where he still lived with his parents, never called, never called me. And when I called there, they said he was never home.

• 56:24David Senra?

  "Sometimes I learned about my company's shoes by seeing them on athletes' feet. The head office wouldn't alert me to a thing." And the head office at the time, I think, is Phil Knight and his sister. "He remembered the time as thrilling in its absorption. The problems were obvious," he would say, "but the solutions were too. We just had to not let our growing pains kill us." And one of the most, you know, when you're reading a biography, you're seeing the entire arc of their life. And as such, you feel you get to know these people, you become emotionally invested in their lives. And one of like the most emotionally provocative paragraphs in Shoe Dog is Knight talking about these early days.

• 57:06David Senra?

  And he's like, "I wish, how I wish I had just written down what was happening, took more documentation." I can't remember, I don't have the quote in front of me, but basically the paragraph is just saying, You know, everything, it was so important to me and you think you're gonna remember everything. And now, you know, I'm seventy something years old when I'm writing this book. Fifty years later and I've forgotten all this. And he says something that's like falling through the quarters, falling through. I can't remember the words he used. It's a really great writing, but it's just, you're like, damn. And then he talks about at around that same time, he's like, I, how I wish I could just do it all over again. And it just really hits you because you know, at that point, you've read through multiple years of struggle.

• 57:49David Senra?

  And you just realize how much of his life and how much effort he put into what he was doing. It's very, very admirable. Um, going back to this though, the first office Knight opened up was in a narrow storefront next to Pink Bucket Tavern. If I'm not mistaken, they didn't have AC. The windows were broken, so it was like freezing cold in there. Uh, Knight's early hires were friends and family members who had no background in the task of importing and warehousing. Inventory counts rarely matched. Business expenses were put on personal credit cards. Sales were limited to by, uh, by how many shoes we had, Knight would recall. And shoes were limited by how much dollars we had to order them. Um, he says, he and Penny, that's his wife, married in nineteen sixty-eight. I was still teaching accounting, but the next year I told Penny, if we sell three hundred thousand dollars worth of product, I'm gonna go full-time. She was pregnant and a little anxious.

• 58:34David Senra?

  We hit two hundred and ninety thousand and I said, that's close enough. In the fall of nineteen sixty-nine, this is wild, this is insane. I don't remember this from Shoe Dog. Check this out. In the fall of nineteen sixty-nine, Knight had at last become a full-time employee of his five-year-old company. There were some nervous moments Knight would remember. Every time I brought a fresh letter of credit home and it said, Mr. and Mrs. Knight guaranteed liabilities to the tune of three hundred thousand dollars. Penny would say, we don't have three hundred thousand dollars. And I'd say, I don't care, just sign the thing. And so the book goes into more detail about the early days of Nike, uh, them getting screwed over by their, uh, the people, uh, their distributor, the people that were reselling shoes. So they did something smart and, and Bowerman played a huge role in here too. It's like, okay, I'm gonna resell your Tigers, but these guys are getting a little shady.

• 59:18David Senra?

  It looks like they're gonna, uh, they're gonna cancel the contract. And if they cancel the contract, all the years you put into the company, like we don't own the trademark, we don't own the shoes, we're screwed. So They start in parallel, developing what eventually becomes Nike. They didn't have a name. They named it like, the very deadline when the shoeboxes had to be printed, they came up with the name Nike. And it was actually Jeff Johnson, who came up with that name. Phil Knight wanted to call Nike Dimension Six, which everybody's like, "That's a terrible name. We're not calling it that." But anyways, during this time, you know, Phil has to give a speech to the small group of employees, right on the cusp of renaming the company Nike, saying, you know,

• 1:00:00David Senra?

  that essentially, everything we've built up over the past few years, we're gonna go into a lawsuit over this, but there, you know, we basically cannot resell Tigers anymore. We've gotta go down our own path. And, you know, it's do or die. If we succeed, the company, you know, we'll all have jobs and we'll move forward. If we don't, we're gonna fail and we're out of business. But the reason I bring that up to you is because I loved Phil Knight's perspective. And we talked about this last week, and I feel I've talked about it in a bunch of other books, but we're Phil and Catherine Graham. Catherine was talking about, "Oh, my God, can you believe, you know, that we had the bad luck of living at the same time that Hitler did?" You know, just one of history's worst human beings, you know, but they don't have, Phil Graham changed the perspective. He's like, "Yeah, that sucks,

• 1:00:45David Senra?

  but we don't have control. We didn't make Hitler. We have no control over what he's doing." But he's like, "Why don't we look at it from a different perspective?" And he said essentially like, "Yeah, okay, it sucks that we're alive during Hitler, but look at it from the positive perspective. It's like, we get to fight and beat and eventually kill the biggest son of a bitch in history," I think is the quote he said. Well, Phil Knight is saying the same thing that Jeff Johnson here. He's like, "Yeah, it's scary, but we got it right where we want them." So he says, "But Knight had had a little longer to assess the situation. He amazed Johnson when he said in all earnestness, 'Jeff, we have them right where we want them.'" On its succa, which I don't think that's the right way to pronounce that, "It's too slow to react to product development ideas we give them.

• 1:01:27David Senra?

  They never ship what we order. And they'll probably yank the distribution at the end of the contract in 1972 anyway. What we need is a brand we can control because we have everything else, the shoes and the top runners. This is the best thing that could ever happen to us." And I love that. "You got a problem? That's fine. Let's just look at it from a different perspective. Let's flip a problem into opportunity." It's fantastic by Phil Knight there. So one of, not one of, the way, Bowerman, so Bowerman's role in the company, he has his own lab, it's in Eugene, Oregon. And, but a lot of the manufacturing is taking place in, across the country, in, I think, New Jersey. And that Jeff Johnson guy is now moved from the West Coast over, Phil Knight sent him over to Jersey to run everything.

• 1:02:11David Senra?

  And him and Bowerman keep having these dustups and disagreements. You know, Bowerman's, as you can imagine, is a very hard person to get along with, especially when he's, you know, a generation or two older. So eventually, Johnson realizes, they, there's something, there's a, there's, the story I'm about to tell you is what leads them to repair their relationship. Because Johnson realized how much Bowerman cares. And that's what Bowerman, you know, Phil Knight's like, we have to focus on making money, because if we make money, then the company survives. And Bowerman's like, yes, that's fine, but I, I'm only going to do so if we have the very best shoes. He tried to resign from Nike, I think, like 30 different times. That's not an exaggeration. Like, he kept, anytime something would go, he's, that's it, I'm leaving.

• 1:02:55David Senra?

  And Buck, and Phil Knight would have to come back and talk him back into, like, no, no, we need you, we gotta keep him happy. It was just hilarious. But this is Bowerman and Johnson, real quick. One morning at 6:30 in the morning, the phone rang. It was Bowerman, calmly asking about some unremembered aspect of the shoes they were planning. Johnson, realizing it was three hours earlier in Oregon, thought, goddamn, this man is serious about shoes. They got along better after that. Bowerman came to appreciate that Johnson was far from just a shoe dog. Johnson most appreciated Bowerman for his indifference to those who opposed him on the worth of his hard, easy approach. Bill simply asked, who are you gonna believe? Those who don't want to change are the, those who don't want to change are the evidence

• 1:03:40David Senra?

  before your own eyes, Jeff would say. Bowerman seemed born to be brave that way, to stand firm in defense of simple, humiliating truths.

• 1:03:53David Senra?

  So this is more, this is Phil Knight, more on the highly disagreeable nature of Bill Bowerman. He's not like, but he's also, here's the thing, he's disagreeable, yes, but he's also extremely generous with his time, his money. Like, there's two sides to this coin. He's not just a jerk. Like, people that, people that knew Bowerman loved him. And if you read this book, you'll come to love him too. It's really remarkable. Phil Knight always knew it was gonna be tough. To this day, he would say, years later, "I'm not sure I didn't start this company to please Bill Bowerman. Old teammates have said to me, 'You did it to spend a lifetime with him, not just four years.' And I can't disagree." But when they say, "Bill must make it seem like two lifetimes," and I can't disagree

• 1:04:34David Senra?

  with that either. "Bill basically just railed at us all the time as a company. We made the worst shoes, except for all the others." Barbara, his wife, once said, "I don't know how you put up with him." And I said, "I don't know how you do." So there's a story in here where Kenny, the author, takes this, this guy, he was a runner from Great Britain, he winds up breaking the mile, the 1500, and the 800 records. So he was the first person to own all those records at the same time. And so he's, he's visiting from Great Britain, and he's, he's visiting Oregon, and Kenny takes him to meet

• 1:05:16David Senra?

  and to spend an afternoon with Bowerman. And I'm gonna read this to you, the highlights from the conversation they have. What's happening here is Bowerman discovers a kindred spirit. And so, his name's Coet? Coe, Coe, C-O-E. It's Sebastian Coe. And we're, really what Coe is saying is what he learned from his father. And what he learned from his father is, even though Bowerman has already had, you know, by this point in the story, multiple decades of success, it's like reaffirming that, like, he's not the only one that, the only- That his ideas actually work, that they worked in Oregon and they're also working in Great Britain. And so he's finding his kindred spirit. And really, what, the reason

• 1:05:58David Senra?

  this spoke to me so much is because, if you remember, I always talk about the Henry Singleton, which is like the proto Warren Buffett. So Warren Buffett before Warren Buffett, right? Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, when you read their shareholder letters, hear their speeches, they talk over and over again about the operators and the people they admire. And I've done a podcast on a bunch of them, right? But one of them, the person they most admire, they say, you know, you could take the top 100 business school graduates and add up their record and still wouldn't be good as Henry Singleton's. Charlie Munger said, you know, his returns were just utterly ridiculous. They were a mile higher than anyone else. And something you learn by studying Henry Singleton is that he shut, he shut the world off from himself, right? He'd sit in his office and think, and it's very similar to how Baumann and other people, other people have this trait. It's not just, just Henry

• 1:06:42David Senra?

  Singleton. But the singular, like, mind he had, really, I would say, is like, you can be the best by going on your, by going your own way, right? You're not going to be the best by fitting in. You're not going to be the best by just copying to the T. Doesn't mean you don't borrow good ideas. Of course, Singleton borrowed good ideas. He had a lot of smart people around him. But he found a way to, to, to come up with his own unique ideas. And again, it's usually not done in a group setting, which Baumann says, like, I don't like group workouts. Like, you got, one person's loafing around, one person's pushing too hard, maybe one in the middle gets, gets the right mix. So that's why I do individual things. Sebastian Co. trains by himself. There's a lot of, there's just

• 1:07:25David Senra?

  a lot of similarities. So let me read this to you. Soon he had Co. describing his training in detail. My father is my coach, and the basic foundations have been consistent. Essentially, it has been 100% quality, not quantity. Everything I'm, I'm highlighting here could come out of Baumann's mouth, okay? In winters, I have very seldom run more than 50 miles per week, less in the spring. This is the time where people are running hundreds of miles. Co. somehow had defied middle distance wisdom that pure speed work was destructive and led to staleness. My father, Co. said, that you might not know the accepted lore of athletics, but if you know people and can sense individual needs, it can make all the difference. At the words "individual needs," Baumann closed his eyes. "Here, here," he said.

• 1:08:14David Senra?

  Back to Coe. It was a happy accident that from the first, when I was 13, my father felt, the first race, when I was 13, my father felt you ought not to smash a kid on the road. So he kept a distance low. As a junior, I averaged 28 miles per week and ran successfully. I placed third in the European Junior Tournament against juniors running 80 or 90 miles. So he's doing a third of what they're doing. And he beats almost all of them. He beats all of them except two. So Bowerman's listening to this, and this is what he says. And this is the part that reminds me of Henry Singleton. So you developed a methodology that isn't at all dependent on what others do. That takes a certain sort of man. So if you remember at the end of Henry Singleton's life, he's like 80 something years old.

• 1:08:59David Senra?

  He's about to die from brain cancer. And he pioneered stock buybacks way before people were doing it. And sometimes it was smart to do it, sometimes it's not. And so it wound up turning where he would advise against it. But he was asked by, he's like, hey, you know, all these people are now doing what you were doing 15 years ago. And he says, well, it must be wrong if everybody's doing it. So think about what Singleton said. Now, let's go back to what Bowerman just said here. So you developed a methodology that isn't at all dependent on what others do. That takes a certain sort of man. So he says, how do you avoid racing when you're training? Sebastian says, I've always trained alone. Singleton worked alone. Yes, he had partners, yes, he had employees, but he spent most of his time in his office alone. You see, the day I started running was the day that my father started coaching.

• 1:09:43David Senra?

  After that, it was bringing his science to bear. This goes back to speaking to Bowerman's emphasis on the individual. After that, it was bringing his science to bear, studying everything he could find. He's gotten rid, he says, of 95% of what he learned. That's his father, his coach. The 5% he kept is very specific. He has no other runners. People ask if he will coach them, and he says, I don't know enough about you. I'd have to move in with you. All right, so moving back to Bowerman's issue with Nike. Bill felt stymied by the company as it grew, as his nature was so opposite to the corporate. He hated the companies. Knight would lose count of Bill's attempted resignations. It was a bunch, he would say.

• 1:10:25David Senra?

  Each time it happened, Knight would grit his teeth, count to 15, and go on. He never let the resignations take effect. I had been trained by him, said Knight. I knew him. I loved him. I simply never took it personally. If I had anything to say about it, he was not going to leave.

• 1:10:43David Senra?

  Bowerman was supposed to do his Bowerman thing, which was to be a genius, a process which knows no supervision or deadlines. That's just really great writing there. One of the most devastating things is his working distance caused nerve damage. So he winds up having like a limp that couldn't figure out why. And it says, "It didn't take long to find out I had been sniffing glue. For 23 years, from 1958 to 1981, Bowerman had been laboring in tight, unventilated quarters, assembling his shoes with rubber contact cement. He had permanent nerve damage, as this. From then on, he would walk with a pronounced drop foot, which caused the limp." I mean, this last sentence here is just a great summary of, again, good writing. "It was hard to see this without thinking of the price Bill had paid.

• 1:11:28David Senra?

  Bowerman, giver of soft, light shoes to the runners of the world, had in the process rendered himself unable to run in them." I thought this part was hilarious. Imagine being the co-founder of Nike and then being told to diversify. This is John, his lawyer, neighbor, and advisor, a guy that caught him killing that rattlesnake with a clipboard. And it says, "It was John whom Bill always blamed for advising him not to keep his Nike eggs in one basket, to diversify in other stocks." He told me later, this is John not talking, "He told me later that he thought I probably kept him from being one of the wealthiest people in America today. If he hadn't diversified, he'd be over twice as wealthy, maybe more. Imagine that." I mean, it works out because Bill didn't care about money anyways.

• 1:12:12David Senra?

  He said, "Even after the Nike stock he owned appreciated, he was just donating it to athletics, building things. You wouldn't notice. He didn't buy new cars, new clothes. He didn't care about that stuff at all." But I just thought it was hilarious. Just imagine being the co-founder of Nike and being told to diversify away from that investment. Just a few more things before we close. I love this part. Talks about more about the, you know, Nike's now leading the pack by far, but they overtook Adidas, then overtook Reebok, and then Reebok overtakes them. But really, this section reminds me of something I learned from reading about and studying Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he says, his personal motto is, "Work like hell and advertise." So we see Nike had to adapt to that model.

• 1:12:55David Senra?

  "We used to say that if we had the best athletes in the best shoes, we couldn't lose," Phil Knight would say. But guess what? Reebok went by us with what we thought were terrible shoes. They were soft and they ripped apart. The day it was announced that Reebok's sales had overtaken Nike, Knight closed himself in his office, faced the wall, and sat there, weak and sick and devastated for hours. So that just gives you an idea of how crazy competitive Phil Knight was. He's a very calm guy, calm personality from the outside. You hear him speak, he sounds like a normal person. Inside is a raging competitive maniac, right? Mark Parker, whose strength was design and appearance, said Knight, "Led the company back, not by asking consumer-focused groups what was best,

• 1:13:39David Senra?

  but by finding it out in the lab and then telling people in advertising." For one such promotion, this was the 1984 Olympics, Nike paid Michael Jordan $500,000 to develop and promote a special line of Air Jordan shoes. "Bowman rolled his eyes. Bill thought we were overpaying pre-Madonna athletes," Knight said. "And now, 20 years later, Michael Jordan sounds a lot like Bowman when he rails at how high we have to pay the new guys." I thought that was funny. "The Air Jordan shoes and campaigns were amazingly successful and brought the company back to preeminence. After Reebok, said Knight, it was the best athletes, the best shoes, and the best ads." So that's what I mean about, it's really, you could sum up this section with Arnold's motto, "Work like hell and advertise." "Bill may have grumbled about the need for such ads, but he loved the actual results.

• 1:14:24David Senra?

  The essential Nike phrase, 'Just do it,' had certainly been uttered by Bill to all of us." And I'll close on this. In June 1999, Bowman stepped down as a member of the Nike Board of Directors. Over 31 years, he had made countless attempts at this. Now, with sales creeping towards $6 billion a year, Buck had finally permitted it. Six months later, Bill died beneath Barbara's favorite photo of him, taken at their wedding on this June day in 1936. His face was calm, with a knowing, almost smug, look of victory. One imagines the same look on his face on the day he departed at 88 years old,

• 1:15:08David Senra?

  lying comfortably in his bed. When Barbara came out of the shower and found him gone, "Oh, it's just like you," she said, to go on ahead with absolutely no warning. He had pulled it off. Bill managed a perfect ending to his life. In the months and years after Bill died, Barbara slowly went through chests of documents and photos. In them, she found a letter Bill had begun to write to Knight, but never sent. Bill had jotted some thoughts down on a yellow legal pad, roughing out a first draft. It read, "Dear Buck, I want to tell my partner in sports how much I admire your leadership

• 1:15:51David Senra?

  and the crew or team you have assembled and direct. The road has had some sharp curves, yes, and some major obstacles to get around or over. I have never availed myself of the opportunity to express my admiration for your leadership and accomplishments in the growth, from the small blue ribbon to international Nike Incorporated. Your leadership has been phenomenal. Barbara joins me in appreciation and admiration." A few days later, Barbara delivered the entire legal pad to Knight. "Am I going to cry?" he asked her. She nodded, so he took it away to read it alone.

• 1:16:34David Senra?

  "That resides in a sacred drawer," he would say later, knowing at last that Bill Bowerman had judged him worthy. So by the time I reached that point, you're talking about 400-plus pages, hours of having a one-on-one conversation about the life of Bill Bowerman. I came to know him, I came to love him, and it's just devastating. I had tears in my eyes when I got to that part, because you really do feel like you lost somebody that you knew. Just like Phil Knight said, I think that he thought the world, that he started Nike because he thought the world would be a better place if everybody got out and run a few miles every day.

• 1:17:18David Senra?

  I sincerely believe the world would be a better place if everybody read biographies, if we learned from the lives of great people that came before us. So to that end, if you want to read the book, I'd highly recommend reading this book, reading Shoe Dog, any of the books, I'll leave a link in the show notes. And if you buy that book using that link, the podcast benefits at the same time. You can also go to founderspodcast.com. The link's there, or you can just go directly to the URL. It's amazon.com/shop/founderspodcast, maybe? I don't know. I forgot. I cannot believe I forgot the URL. You'll find it. You're smart if you got this far. All right, with that, that's where I'll leave the story. That is 153 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.