Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

ads in running magazines and what did I think? He wrote to inform me that he’d placed those ads in running magazines and the response was good. He wrote to ask why I hadn’t answered any of his previous letters. He wrote to plead for encouragement. He wrote to complain that I hadn’t responded to his previous plea for encouragement.
    I’d always considered myself a conscientious correspondent. (I’d sent countless letters and postcards home during my trip around the world. I’d written faithfully to Sarah.) And I always meant to answer Johnson’s letters. But before I got around to it there was always another one, waiting. Something about the sheer volume of his correspondence stopped me. Something about his neediness made me not want to encourage him. Many nights I’d sit down at the black Royal typewriter in my basement workshop, curl a piece of paper into the roller, and type, “Dear Jeff.” Then I’d draw a blank. I wouldn’t know where to begin, which of his fifty questions to start with, so I’d get up, attend to other things, and the next day there’d be yet another letter from Johnson. Or two. Soon I’d be three letters behind, suffering from crippling writer’s block.
    I asked Jeanne to deal with the Johnson File. Fine, she said.
    Within a month she thrust the file at me, exasperated. “You’re not paying me enough,” she said.
    AT SOME POINT I stopped reading Johnson’s letters all the way to the bottom. But from skimming them I learned that he was selling Tigers part-time and on weekends, that he’d decided to keep his day job as a social worker for Los Angeles County. I still couldn’t fathom it. Johnson just didn’t strike me as a people person. In fact he’d always seemed somewhat misanthropic. It was one of the things I’d liked about him.
    In April 1965 he wrote to say he’d quit his day job. He’d always hated it, he said, but the last straw had been a distressed woman in the San Fernando Valley. He’d been scheduled to check on her, because she’d threatened to kill herself, but he’d phoned her first to ask “if she really was going to kill herself that day.” If so, he didn’t want to waste the time and gas money driving all the way out to the valley. The woman, and Johnson’s superiors, took a dim view of his approach. They deemed it a sign that Johnson didn’t care. Johnson deemed it the same way. He didn’t care, and in that moment, Johnson wrote me, he understood himself, and his destiny. Social work wasn’t it. He wasn’t put here on this earth to fix people’s problems. He preferred to focus on their feet.
    In his heart of hearts Johnson believed that runners are God’s chosen, that running, done right, in the correct spirit and with the proper form, is a mystical exercise, no less than meditation or prayer, and thus he felt called to help runners reach their nirvana. I’d been around runners much of my life, but this kind of dewy romanticism was something I’d never encountered. Not even the Yahweh of running, Bowerman, was as pious about the sport as Blue Ribbon’s Part-time Employee Number Two.
    In fact, in 1965, running wasn’t even a sport. It wasn’t popular, it wasn’t unpopular—it just was. To go out for a three-mile run was something weirdos did, presumably to burn off manic energy. Running for pleasure, running for exercise, running for endorphins, running to live better and longer—these things were unheard of.
    People often went out of their way to mock runners. Drivers would slow down and honk their horns. “Get a horse!” they’d yell, throwing a beer or soda at the runner’s head. Johnson had been drenched by many a Pepsi. He wanted to change all this. He wanted to help all the oppressed runners of the world, to bring them into the light, enfold them in a community. So maybe he