Phil Knight

Phil Knight grew up in Portland, Oregon. At the University of Oregon he ran the mile under the coach Bill Bowerman. After a year in the Army he went to Stanford Business School, where he wrote a paper on whether Japanese running shoes could beat German ones in the American market.

In 1962 he flew to Kobe and talked his way into the rights to sell Tiger shoes in the western United States. In 1964 he and Bowerman founded Blue Ribbon Sports, selling shoes from the trunk of his car while Knight worked as an accountant. The company became Nike in 1971 and went public in 1980. Knight ran it as chief executive for most of the next three decades and stepped down as chairman in 2016.

Shoe Dog (2016) covers the years from 1962 to Nike's public offering. It shows a company that was close to failure for most of that time: short of cash, in a fight with its Japanese supplier, and kept alive by a small team of odd, loyal people. Knight now gives large sums to Oregon and Stanford, and he owns the animation studio Laika.