44 pages • 1 hour read
Phil KnightShoe Dog: Young Readers Edition
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Do What You Know and Love
The overarching theme running throughout Shoe Dog is the concept of having a career that you love. Knight first mentions this concept in the book’s Prologue, as he describes what is going through his mind while he is out for a morning run. He had just returned home, to his parents’ house, after years of being away at college, graduate school, the army and is wondering what he should do with his life. He writes that suddenly he saw it all before him, “exactly what [he] wanted [his] life to be. Play” (4). Knight admits that at times he had fantasized about a career as a novelist or a journalist, but his ultimate dream was always to be a great athlete. He had been a three-year letterman as a member of the University of Oregon track team, but his athletic career was now over. While continuing his run, he wonders “if there [is] a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing?” (4).
For Knight, the work as play concept is not only about being able to avoid the “so exhausting and often unjust” daily grind that others are forced to endure but also about following some “prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy” (5). When Knight first starts selling Tigers, after meeting with Onitsuka and being given distribution rights in the western US, he is amazed at his success because he had been unable to sell encyclopedias while in Hawaii and had been only slightly better at selling mutual funds. He wonders why selling shoes is so different for him and comes to realize that with shoes, he is not actually selling. He believes in running and “believe[s] that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and [he] believe[s] these shoes [are] better to run in” (68-69).
The fact that Knight is selling a product that he believes in was clearly part of the reason for his early success. Another aspect crucial to that success is that he has expertise in the product. Not only is Knight a former collegiate distance runner at one of the most tradition-rich programs in the nation, but he was also coached there by Bill Bowerman, a track-and-field legend. Almost as soon as Knight forms Blue Ribbon, Bowerman asks to become his partner. In Chapter 4, Knight discusses a conversation he had with Delbert Hayes, the most experienced fellow accountant at Price Waterhouse. Hayes explains to him how risky his new business is because of the poor economy and because he has a cash balance of zero, but he also explains that having a legend like Bowerman for a partner “[is] one asset for which it [is] impossible to assign a number” (107). Bowerman’s expertise in shoes and running, coupled with Knight’s passion and enthusiasm for what he is doing, are the driving forces behind the company’s success.
Personal Growth as Professional Growth
Another primary theme running throughout Shoe Dog is growth. As a concept, growth plays a part of Knight’s narrative in two major ways: the growth of his company, first as Blue Ribbon and later as Nike, and his own personal growth as a person. In Chapter 1, Knight discusses the birth of his company, which comes about spontaneously during his first meeting with Onitsuka. When asked what company he is representing, Knight can only come up with Blue Ribbon because he is thinking about his awards at his parents’ house. His company with one employee doubles its workforce a year later when Knight hires his sister to do secretarial work and adds another employee in early 1965 when he hires Jeff Johnson as a salesman. Blue Ribbon’s workforce increases again in 1967 when Knight opens an East Coast store, sending Johnson east and hiring John Bork, a high school track coach, to replace him on the West Coast. Knight then hires two former Oregon runners, Geoff Hollister and Bob Woodell, upon the request of Bowerman.
While Blue Ribbon, and later Nike, continue to grow by leaps and bounds over the next several years, it is the nucleus of Knight, Johnson, Bork, Hollister, and Woodell, with their shared love of running, that establishes the culture of the company. As with any business, however, growth is typically measured in profits as much as size. During his first year, Knight posts $8,000 in sales and expects to double that in his second year but is warned by his banker that he is growing too fast (97-98). Unable to grasp how a 100% increase in sales is bad, Knight responds that “life is growth…business is growth. You grow or you die,” but the banker still holds that “growth off your balance sheet is dangerous” (98). Undeterred by the warnings of growing too fast, Knight continues placing larger and larger orders with Onitsuka, and Blue Ribbon continues to regularly double its sales totals. By 1966, Blue Ribbon posts $44,000 in sales, and by 1968, it posts $150,000.
The personal growth that Knight experiences throughout the narrative is rapid as well. In the Prologue, Knight wonders why he still feels like a kid after being away from home for six years and graduating from Oregon, earning a master’s degree from Stanford, and serving a year in the US Army (3). He concludes that the reason is because he has not yet “experienced anything of life” (3). Knight begins to change that when he sets off on an around-the-world trip in 1962, during most of which he travels alone. He then sets about following his dream of selling shoes, which he successfully does using his parents’ house as his headquarters. Knight eventually moves himself and his business to a rented apartment, and when he outgrows that, he rents an office space across town. Knight marries Penny in September of 1968, and roughly a year later, she gives birth to their son, Matthew.
Competition in Business
The theme of competition in business arises at many points throughout Shoe Dog. After Knight makes a deal with Onitsuka to distribute Tigers in the western United States, he first faces business competition from someone, like himself, who is selling Onitsuka’s shoes. In the summer of 1965, Knight receives a letter from a wrestling coach in New York who demands that he stop selling Tigers because he is Onitsuka’s exclusive American distributor. Knight writes Onitsuka asking for a clarification, but when he gets no response, he decides that he needs to fly back to Japan to speak with them. Before his meeting takes place, he thinks back to his athletic career, arguing that “people reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, is the art of forgetting, and now I reminded myself of that fact” (76).
Ultimately, Knight wins his standoff with the East Coast distributor and is told that the western states are his territory. Less than two years later, however, Johnson and Knight get word that the wrestling coach in New York is selling Tigers again, and this time “he’d even placed a national ad in an issue of Track and Field” (123). They decide that Knight must return to Japan once again to “kill this East Coast Cowboy once and for all” (126). Upon arriving, the new export manager for Onitsuka, Mr. Kitami, tells him that they want a more established firm with offices on the East Coast to be its distributor. In response, Knight claims that Blue Ribbon does have an East Coast office and is then given a three-year contract and exclusive distribution rights in the United States. He then hurries home and begins scrambling to set up an East Coast office before his next shipment arrives.
The fact that Knight lies about already having an East Coast office demonstrates not only how important distribution rights are to him but also how competition in business can sometimes lead to dishonesty. Another example of this comes from Chapter 8, when Bowerman returns from the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City and describes “the scandalous behavior of Puma and Adidas throughout the Games” (175). According to Knight,
the world’s two biggest athletic shoe companies—run by two German brothers who despised each other—had chased each other like Keystone Kops around the Olympic Village, jockeying for athletes. Huge sums of cash, often stuffed in running shoes or manilla envelopes, were passed around (175).
He explains that he and Bowerman were not necessarily offended by their behavior, but rather “they felt left out” (175). The implication here is that even though paying Olympic athletes to use certain brands of clothing or equipment was illegal prior to 1972, Knight would have done so had his company had the money.
