Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single person on the entire planet who isn’t familiar with the global athletic apparel juggernaut Nike. And most of us probably know that Nike was the brainchild of a former college professor turned entrepreneur named Phil Knight. But I’d bet that many of us forgot that Phil actually had a co-founder on his way to fame and fortune. That co-founder was Phil’s former University of Oregon running coach, Bill Bowerman. Bowerman’s life story is truly amazing. After all, how many humble state college track coaches inadvertently end up creating one of the most valuable and recognized brands in the world? And how much money did that earn for Bill?
William Jay Bowerman was born on February 11, 1911, in Portland, Oregon. His father, Jay Bowerman, was a former State Senator and interim Governor of Oregon. After his parents divorced in 1913 due to a scandalous affair, the family moved to his mother’s hometown of Fossil, Oregon. Bowerman attended elementary school in Medford, Oregon, and Seattle. He returned to Medford for high school, where he was a member of the band, a football player, and a competitor on the Oregon State Champion track and field team during his junior and senior years.
“If you have a body, you are an athlete.” – Bill Bowerman.
“The real purpose of running isn’t to win a race; it’s to test the limits of the human heart.“ – Bill Bowerman.
In 1929, Bowerman enrolled at the University of Oregon to study journalism and play basketball and football. In his final two years of college, he joined the track and field team as a quarter-miler. After college, he spent 14 years as a teacher, journalist, and part-time high school football and track coach. He began his coaching in Portland and then became the head football and track and field coach at Medford. He continued to coach at the high school level until 1948, only taking a break from that while he served in the Army during World War II.
Track Men of Oregon
In 1948, the University of Oregon hired him to coach the Ducks’ track and field and cross-country teams. Bowerman spent 24 years in that position at the U of O. Over that time, his “Track Men of Oregon” won 24 NCAA individual titles, four NCAA team titles (1962, 1964, 1965, and 1970), and posted 16 top-10 NCAA finishes. His teams featured 31 Olympians, 38 conference champions, 51 All-Americans, 16 sub-4 minute milers, as well as athletes who achieved 13 world records and 23 American records. During his 24 years as coach at the University of Oregon, his team had a winning season every season but one.
Everything you need is already inside.“ – Bill Bowerman.
Olympic Coach
For the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, Bowerman created a training program for athletes to adjust to the high altitudes at the Olympic venues. The success of this program led to Bowerman being named the head coach for the 1972 Munich Olympic track and field events. In this capacity, Bowerman coached members of teams from the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Norway. At the 1972 Olympics, Bowerman also played a pivotal role in the safety of several athletes. Israeli Olympic racewalker Shaul Ladnay escaped the PLO terrorists during the Munich Massacre, alerted the German police, and then woke up Bowerman, who called the U.S. Marines to come in and protect Jewish American Olympians, including legendary swimmer Mark Spitz.
Bill Bowerman(left), Dyrol Burleson(center), and George Larson(right)(Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
He Brought Jogging To The U.S.
Bowerman is also largely credited with creating the running boom that has flourished in the U.S. since the 1970s. It was during a 1962 trip to New Zealand that Bowerman was introduced to jogging as a means for older people to stay fit. Everywhere he looked, men and women were running through the streets. He brought the concept back to the U.S., and he himself began running again. Each week, he ran farther and farther, and despite his experience in the sport, found himself like so many others who take up running—amazed he was able to run so far simply by doing it regularly. He was 50 years old.
He began writing articles and books about jogging and started a running club in Eugene for adult athletes. A new crop of older athletic people took up running as a result, leading to the creation of the masters athlete division in road races. Bowerman was a man with a vision. He wasn’t just a coach of students–he inspired and coached people of all ages. Bowerman coached a ton of athletes in his 24 years at Oregon, but his most famous were Steve Prefontaine and Phil Knight.
Phil Knight
Bowerman met Knight in 1957 when he was a runner under his tutelage at Oregon. In 1964, Bowerman invested $500 in a handshake deal with Phil to create a running shoe company. Officially, Bowerman and Knight co-founded “Blue Ribbon Sports” on January 25, 1964. The company earned $8,000 in its first year selling a re-branded shoe made in Japan. In 1965, the company’s sales had reached $20,000. In 1966, Blue Ribbon Sports opened its first retail store, located at 3107 Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, so its employees no longer needed to sell inventory from the back of their cars. By 1969, sales were $800,000.
Via Fabio Sola Penna/Flickr
Nike
Blue Ribbon Sports officially changed its name to Nike, Inc. on May 30, 1971.
Bowerman became Nike’s first Director of Research and Development. He designed the Nike Cortez in 1968, a shoe that remains popular decades later. He created several other designs for the company, but his most famous experiment involved pouring rubber into his wife’s waffle iron in the early 1970s. That kitchen mishap produced a lightweight sole with improved traction — an innovation that helped define Nike’s future.
As a coach, Bowerman had always been obsessed with footwear. He believed lighter shoes translated directly into faster times and fewer injuries. By his own calculations, shaving a single ounce from a runner’s shoe meant eliminating roughly 55 pounds of lift over the course of a mile. He also pushed for customized fits to reduce blisters and conserve energy. At the time, these ideas were groundbreaking.
The waffle-iron experiment led to the Nike “Moon Shoe” in 1972, so named because the tread resembled the footprints astronauts left on the lunar surface. Two years later, the next-generation “Waffle Trainer” hit the market and ignited Nike’s explosive growth. By 1979, Nike controlled half of the U.S. running shoe market, with annual sales climbing into the hundreds of millions. The company soon expanded into apparel — shorts, running pants, shirts — and began signing superstar athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.
But Bowerman paid a personal price for his hands-on innovation. Years of working in a cramped, poorly ventilated workshop with toxic glues and solvents caused permanent nerve damage in his legs. By the mid-1970s, the man who had once introduced America to jogging could no longer run at all — not even in the revolutionary shoes he had given the world.
Show Me The Money!
So how much money did Bill Bowerman actually earn from Nike’s success? The answer is staggering. His original $500 handshake investment in 1964 ballooned into a stake equal to roughly 27.8 million shares after various restructurings leading up to the company’s IPO. On the day Nike went public in December 1980, those shares were worth about $9 million. That’s the same as roughly $35 million today.
And that was just the beginning. Nike’s rocket ride through the 1980s and 1990s sent Bowerman’s fortune soaring right along with it. By the time he passed away on Christmas Eve in 1999, at age 88, his shares were valued at an estimated $390 million. In today’s money, that’s the equivalent of roughly half a billion dollars. A small-town track coach had quietly become one of Oregon’s richest men.
Now here’s the kicker: if Bowerman had never sold a single share, and were alive today (he’d be 114 by the way), today his original $500 stake would be worth in the neighborhood of $2 billion at Nike’s current share price. Two billion dollars, born out of a waffle iron, a running obsession, and a $500 gamble. That kind of return is the stuff of legend — the financial version of breaking the four-minute mile.
Meanwhile, his business partner Phil Knight went on to become one of the wealthiest men on Earth, with a net worth in the tens of billions. Knight and his family trusts collectively control roughly one-fifth of Nike’s outstanding shares, giving him a net worth of roughly $33 billion.
Bowerman himself never flaunted his wealth. He lived modestly compared to Knight, and when he died he left behind not just his Nike fortune, but also a legacy defined by innovation, coaching excellence, and cultural impact. He was survived by his wife Barbara and their three sons — Jon, Jay, and Tom — who each went on to lead lives of their own, often far removed from the glare of Nike’s global empire.
Just do it, indeed.
