How a Small Mistake Cost an NBA Hall-of-Famer More Than $11B

The history of Nike began when Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight met in the ’50s. But an NBA Hall of Famer turned down the chance to be a part of it.

And that choice cost him billions…

“I was very aware of shoes when I was running track,” Knight told Stanford Magazine in 2008. “The American shoes were offshoots of tire companies. Shoes cost $5, and you would come back from a five-mile run with your feet bleeding. Then the German companies came in with $30 shoes, which were more comfortable.

But Bowerman still wasn’t satisfied. He believed that shaving an ounce off a pair of shoes for a guy running a mile could make a big difference.

So Bowerman began making shoes himself, and since I wasn’t the best guy on the team, I was the logical one to test the shoes.”

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Knight graduated from the University of Oregon in 1959 with a degree in journalism. He joined the Army and served a year in active duty before enrolling in the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

In Frank Shallenberger’s class on small business, the former middle-distance runner realized he had a passion for entrepreneurship.

“That class was an ‘aha!’ moment. Shallenberger defined the type of person who was an entrepreneur — and I realized he was talking to me,” Knight told Stanford Magazine.

“I remember after saying to myself: ‘This is really what I would like to do.'” He wrote a paper titled “Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?”

After earning his master’s degree in 1962, Knight visited Kobe, Japan, where Onitsuka Tiger running shoes were manufactured.

In a meeting with founder Kihachiro Onitsuka, Knight gained the distribution rights of the company’s relatively inexpensive high-quality running shoes in the western United States.

But he wouldn’t receive his first samples of the shoes stateside for more than a year.