He's not the most empathetic of bosses but appears to have secured the loyalty of his core management team, all men who've been with him from the start and are known in frat-boy parlance as 'the Buttfaces'. Knight emerges as an obsessive, driven individual who's not above descending to dubious business tactics when necessary - falsely telling Onitsuka at their first meeting that he represented an existing company, and stealing documents from an opponent's briefcase. The rest, as they say, is history – and an interesting, unconventional history it is. Knight stores the shoes in his parents' basement and sells them out of the boot of his Valiant. A good athlete at university, Knight goes into partnership with his former track coach, Bill Bowerman, each putting up $500.

Aged 24, Knight heads to Japan, where he cold-calls shoe manufacturer Onitsuka and does his first deal, buying 12 pairs of runners for $50. The story of an MBA graduate with a crazy idea of importing running shoes from Japan reads like a parable. His rollicking story on the history of Nike, from its creation in 1962 until it went public in 1980, is a cracking read.Īccording to Forbes magazine, Knight, a native of Oregon in the US, is worth about $US25.1 billion ($35 billion), having created 'the most valuable sports brand in the world'. That makes the Nike founder a shoe dog extraordinaire.

In this memoir Phil Knight tells us that shoe dogs are people who devote themselves to footwear with an all-consuming mania.

Knight shoe