The hard-to-understand Nike Guy

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Understanding how Phil Knight' made Nike a household name is easy. Under-standing Phil Knight is not. For someone whose empire rests on visceral consumer reactions, Knight is remarkably self-con-tained.

Once dubbed the "most powerful man in sports" by the Sporting News, Knight presents himself as affable, albeit slight-ly stiff and a tad shy. He unobtrusively enters the Wimbledon conference room on the fourth floor of the John McEnroe Building on the Nike World Campus in Beaverton, Ore. (a good hour's jog from Portland), clears his throat, introduces himself and apologizes for being 10 minutes late. "Where should I sit?" he asks. Knight isn't wearing his ever-present Oak?ley sunglasses ( he's rarely photographed without them), which is a bonus, as his pale blue eyes open wide and sparkle when a topic engages him.

Like many of the 2,700 employees on the campus, Knight instinctively glances down at his visitor's shoes before taking a seat at the far end of the conference table, his back to the picture window that offers a view of the campus and the 10-acre lake anchoring it. I nervously appraise my black leather, conservative flats and kick myself for making such a boring choice for a meeting with the man who made footwear an art form. It's like picking up John DeLorean'0 in a Yugo".

Knight, 58, still has the lean, almost gaunt build of a runner. Known for his decidedly dressed-down and wrinkled wardrobe, he looks surprisingly natty. A black linen suit drapes loosely over his slender frame. His black, collarless shirt buttons up to his Adam's apple. With his trim beard, collar-length,wavy red-blond hair shrouding most of the gray, he suggests a record executive who looks and sounds remarkably like actor Donald Sutherland."

Knight has been portrayed as mysterious, inscrutable, eccentric, unpredictable, enigmatic, idiosyncratic, shy, aloof, reclusive, competitive and a genius. But the world may never know which adjective suits him best. Knight, who with his wife of 28 years, Penny, has two grown sons, shuns publicity and self-explication the way Howard Stern courts it.

"Genius" is the one attribute on the list that Knight questions. "Other than that, I'm all of those things — most of those adjectives are right some of the time," he says. That's as far as he'll go. When asked a potentially revealing question ("Have you deliberately cultivated an image for yourself, the way Nike has for its clients?" ) he toys with a can of Diet Pepsi or fiddles with the watch he took off at the start of the interview. He signals that a question is not to his liking by deftly shifting the focus to Nike, lapsing into corporate-speak or even abruptly cutting himself off in mid-sentence and waiting — in stony si-lence — for the next question.

Knight is not one for reflection. Time spent basking in the glow of success or recounting past triumphs is time wasted,just as a baseball player is only as good as his last at-bat, Knight figures Nike is only as good as its last quarterly report. Plato27 may have thought the unexamined life was not worth living, but what did he know? All he wore was a pair of sandals.

Occasionally, though, Knight does indulge himself. Late at night, he leans back in his office chair and gazes out the window. Lights reflect off the lake and illuminate the four miles of running trails that crisscross and surround the campus. "Sometimes I look out there and I get goose bumps," says Knight, almost dreamily. A small smile flits across his face, but he quickly checks it. His voice hardens.

"But you better not spend much time doing that, because every six months is a new lifetime, and you've got to worry about what's coming up to stay ahead of the curve, " he says. " If you want to spend time saying this is cool , you're going to get your ass kicked. "

Knight laughs uncomfortably and reaches for his watch as if embarrassed to have committed two personal transgressions: He reflected out loud , and he exposed a small corner of his heart. He straightens out of a slouch, steadies his gaze and, like a shortstop, waits to field the next question. The message is clear; introspection over. It's time once again to just do it.

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