#418 Phil Knight: Founder of Nike

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I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my clothes, and laced up my shoes. Then I slipped quietly out the back door. There were no cars, no people, no signs of life. I was all alone, the world to myself. What a beautiful place to be from, I thought. I was proud to call Oregon my home, but I felt a stab of regret too. Oregon struck some people as the kind of place where nothing big had ever happened. If we Oregonians were famous for anything, it was an old, old trail that we had to blaze to get here. The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest men I ever knew, spoke of that trail often. "It's our birthright," he'd growl, "Our character, our fate, our DNA. The cowards never started, and the weak died along the way. That leaves us." Phil Knight is quoting his co-founder of Nike, Bill Bowerman. Some rare strain of pioneer spirit was discovered along the trail, my teacher believed. Some outsized sense of possibility mixed with a diminished capacity for pessimism, and it was our job to keep that strain alive. That foggy morning, that momentous morning in nineteen sixty-two, I'd recently blazed my own trail back home after seven long years away. It was strange being home again, strange being lashed again by the daily rains. Stranger still was living again with my parents, sleeping in my childhood bed. Late at night, I'd lay on my back staring at my college textbooks, my high school trophies, and blue ribbons,