flâneur

Founders: #153 Bill Bowerman (Nike)

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What I learned from reading Bowerman and the Men of Oregon: The Story of Oregon's Legendary Coach and Nike's Cofounder by Kenny Moore. ---- [0:01] Take a primitive organism, any weak, pitiful organism. Say a freshman. Make it lift, or jump or run. Let it rest. What happens? A little miracle. It gets a little better. It gets a little stronger or faster or more enduring. That's all training is. Stress. Recover. Improve. You would think any damn fool could do it, but you won't. [0:25] You work too hard and you rest too little and get hurt. [1:38] You cannot just tell somebody what’s good for him. He won’t listen. He will not listen. First, you have to get his attention. [4:14] From the book Shoe Dog. Phil Knight on Bowerman: I look back over the decades and see him toiling in his workshop, Mrs. Bowerman carefully helping, and I get goosebumps. He was Edison in Menlo Park, Da Vinci in Florence, Tesla in Wardenclyffe. Divinely inspired. I wonder if he knew, if he had any clue, that he was the Daedalus of sneakers, that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations. I wonder if he could conceive at that moment all t

[00:00:00] Bowerman seemed to have been through some mythic struggle. He spit when someone called him coach. Just call me Bill, he said. But few would, or could, at first. This accorded with why we were here. We were to be cultivated, refined. Bowerman was about to ask us to put aside the things of a child. Not by accident did he begin. [00:00:23] Men of Oregon, take a primitive organism, any weak, pitiful organism, say a freshman. Make it lift, or jump, or run. Let it rest. What happens? A little miracle. It gets a little better. It gets a little stronger, or faster, or more enduring.…

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