After his career at Oregon, Knight put his athletic career in the rearview mirror for now and pursued a career in business at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford. In a business class taught by a man named Frank Shallenberger, Knight constructed a paper, “Can Japanese Sports Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?”This paper was Knight’s “aha!” moment and he remembers saying to himself after he wrote this paper, “This is really what I’d like to do.”
Following his dream, Knight traveled to Japan to research more about Japanese made athletic shoes. Crossing paths with an Adidas knock-off shoe, Tiger, Knight had found his first shoes he would be selling. Very intrigued with the Japanese culture and the low cost and high quality of these shoes, Knight was very excited, to say the least, to start this companionship with Tiger. Beginning in 1964, he returned back to the states and began selling these running shoes at track meets around the Pacific Northwest from the trunk of his Plymouth Valient, trying to rival those of the “Goliath” of shoe companies: Adidas. Within five years, in 1969, Blue Ribbon Shoes had sold a million dollars worth of Japanese made shoes and in Knight’s mind, this was just the beginning.
Proving just that over the coming years, Philip Knight and his once small shoe company that he began from the back of his car made leaps and bounds that not even he saw coming. In 1971, Knight felt like it was time to retire Blue Ribbon and create a new company and logo that better fit his mega shoe industry. A man by the name of Jeff Johnson, a friend of Knight’s, came up with the name “Nike” which came from a Greek winged goddess of victory (Krentzman). Soon after, the fat check mark known as the “Nike Swoosh” was created as the official Nike logo. According to BBC News, a well respected news agency worldwide, the Nike Swoosh is one of the most powerful logos in the world. Among most college and professional sports teams, the Nike Swoosh is branded on the top athletes’ apparel throughout history, including: Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, Dion Sanders, Derek Jeter, Lebron James and thousands of others. ![Image](https://shoesclues.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/phil_knight1.jpg?w=310)
April 17, 2012
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