National Football Foundation

From a track coach's waffle iron to the most famous company in sports, the story of Nike is interwoven through the lives of Bill Bowerman and his former athlete-turned- entrepreneur, Phil Knight. 

It was during his time as a graduate student at Stanford that Knight took a class called "Small Business Management" and became intrigued with the idea of starting his own shoe company. He wrote a paper for the class suggesting that low priced, high quality exports from Japan could replace German manufacturers as the dominant athletic shoe supplier to the United States. Following graduation, Knight traveled to Japan and contacted the Onitsuka Company, the manufacturer of Tiger shoes. He convinced the company to give him a distribution deal and exclusive rights in the western United States that eventually led him to call on an old friend and his former track coach at the University of Oregon, Bill Bowerman. 

In a partnership that began in 1964 with investment of $500 each in a start-up company called Blue Ribbon Sports (BRS), Knight began selling shoes out of his car at track events across the west. Realizing the success of the company hinged on a brand that conveyed speed and motion, the duo enlisted a graphic design student who ultimately came up with the famous "Swoosh." With a new logo and a football cleat they purchased from a company in Mexico, BRS launched a new brand called Nike after the Greek goddess of victory, selling the newly branded 'Nike' cleats for the first time in 1971. 

For the 1972 Olympic Track and Field Trials in Oregon, the company created running shoes based on a prototype Bowerman had designed using his wife's waffle maker during his time as Oregon's head track coach. Bowerman also designed a shoe specifically for artificial turf, called the Astro-Grabber, which was worn by NFL players including Bob Newland and Dan Fouts. The success of the Waffle Trainer and Astro Grabber prompted the company to sign an agreement in 1977 with aerospace engineer Frank Rudy, who led a design team to invent the "Nike Air" technology that was first utilized in the "Tailwind" running shoe in 1978. Only two years later, the company went public and began trading on the NASDAQ at $22 a share.

In 1984, the company banked its future on an NBA rookie named Michael Jordan in an effort to align the brand with the greatest athletes in the world. The strategy worked, and today Nike has sponsorship deals with most the world's most recognizable athletes including Jordan, NFL and MLB star Bo Jackson, Tiger Woods and former Oklahoma standout and current Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson. The "Just Do It" campaign, launched in 1988, has become one of the world's most iconic marketing campaigns, and is still used today. 

Presently, Nike is the world's leading supplier of athletic shoes and apparel with annual revenue in excess of $19.5 billion. Nike has invested more than $1 billion in colleges and universities through sports marketing, brand marketing, advertising and licensing royalties. The last 10 BCS champions wore the Nike brand and 70 percent of the teams that qualified for bowls were Nike-sponsored programs.