America's Rubber Soul

By Richard Stengel

SWOOSH: THE STORY OF NIKE AND THE MEN WHO PLAYED THERE

by J.B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $24.95

Sneakers -- or what some people still call tennis shoes and most everyone now refers to as athletic shoes -- are an American icon. The sneaker is not so much an object as an idea, a symbol of values that America has always taken pride in: social and physical mobility, practicality, informality, even rebellion (such as when Woody Allen wore a pair of Converse high-tops to escort First Lady Betty Ford to the ballet in 1975). It has only been since the 1960s that sneakers have become the shoe of everyday life, the U.S. form of mass transportation. Worn by bums and billionaires, All-Stars and klutzes, the sneaker is a quintessentially democratic shoe, the rubber soul of America.

The secret of the success of the Nike corporation, which began to make its famous footwear in 1971 and grew from an unknown also-ran in the shoe business to the universally familiar $3 billion institution of today, is that it understood that sneakers embodied the values of the people who wore them. / Americans wanted a well-made, high-tech athletic shoe not because it was a necessity but because the consciousness of the country had changed. "Jogging," "getting in shape," "working out" were part of the new life-style (another '70s concept), and Nike gave customers a stylish shoe in which to pursue the good life every American believes is his due. Keds were passe; Converse was clunky; Adidas was too serious; but Nikes were fun and practical -- the perfect American combination.

The chairman and founder of Nike Inc. and the protagonist of Swoosh is Phil Knight, a former distance runner at the University of Oregon and a laconic accountant who thought it would be more enjoyable to sell shoes than balance checkbooks. He started out representing a Japanese running shoe called Tiger but realized he could create and hawk his own American shoe. Nike was named for the winged Greek goddess of victory and given the now familiar "Swoosh" logo (at the time, someone said it resembled an upside-down Puma insignia). At first Nike made shoes for serious runners, but as millions of Americans began to run seriously, it became a shoe not just for wiry steeplechasers but also for ladies wheeling shopping carts.

Swoosh, a readable if overlong history of Nike, follows the familiar trajectory of entrepreneurial success. A group of hell-raising, antiauthority types have a dream. (The Nike founders called their annual meetings Buttfaces, engaged in food fights and gleefully refused to give one another corporate titles.) The dream succeeds beyond their imaginings, and the small revolutionary company becomes a large and conservative one. Even now that Nike is a corporate giant, it still fosters the image of irreverent hipness with its striking advertising and superstar endorsers: the magical Michael Jordan, the bodacious Bo Jackson and those rebels with racquets, John McEnroe and Andre Agassi. The authors tell this tale with a mixture of gee-whiz cheerleading and nostalgic regret. (Strasser is the wife of an ex-Nike executive; Becklund is her sister and a writer at the Los Angeles Times.)

In the genre of business books, Swoosh is the Blues Brothers meet In Search of Excellence. What Swoosh does is chart the course of how a few men in Eugene, Ore., sensed a shift in the national zeitgeist and then created a company, an idea really, to complement that change. Like relay runners who deftly grasp the baton handed to them, Phil Knight and Nike caught the spirit of the times, and then ran with it.