Transcript
Introduction
Bowerman seemed to have been through some mythic struggle. He spit when someone called him coach. Just call me Bill, he said, but if you 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, "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. That's all training is. Stress, recover, improve. You would think any damn fool could do it, but you won't."
"You work too hard and you rest too little and you get hurt. You yield to the temptations of a liberal education and burn your candle at both ends and then you get mono. Every Angelic lying face I see here is poised to screw up, to overtrain, to fall in love, to flunk out." "We have no hard and fast training rules. The vicissitudes of life usually teach an intelligent person what he can handle. It does help to have someone wise in the ways of candles to steady you as you grope toward the light. That would be me. But I regret to inform you," he added, his tone not the least regretful, "you cannot just tell somebody what's good for him. He won't listen. He will not listen. First…first, you have to get his attention." Bowerman did not have a central organizing principle. He had this, a central organizing parable. "Farmer can't get his mule to plow," he said. "Can't even get him to eat or drink." Finally, he calls in a mule skinner.
Guy comes out, doesn't even look at the mule. Goes in the barn, get a two-by-four and hits the mule as hard as he can between the ears. The mule goes to his knees. The mule skinner hits him again between the eyes. The farmer drags him off. "That's supposed to get him to plow?" "That's supposed to get him to drink?" "I can see you don't know a damn thing about mules," said the skinner. "First, you have to get their attention." In the hush that followed, Bowerman's grin was not far from fiendish. This was his allegory, his rationale, his fair warning. He was our mule skinner, and all he would do to us constituted the two-by-four he would use to crack open our mulish skulls, so the lessons might be inserted. Leaving that first meeting, I felt only baffled disquiet. Even men who had trained under him for years were edgy. "Bowerman," one of them said, "is ruled by a need to unsettle, to disturb. The man lives to get you."
That was an excerpt from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Bowerman: The Story of Oregon's Legendary Coach and Nike's Co-founder. And it was written by Kenny Moore. Okay. So before jumping into the book, I want to tell you how I came, like why I selected this book to cover this week. I was actually rereading through my highlights from Phil Knight, the founder -- co-founder of Nike, his book Shoe Dog. I covered it, I think, back on my Founders #10. And I forgot -- I have read the book, I think, two to three years ago. And as I was reading through my notes, I forgot how important Bowerman was to Phil Knight and to the founding of Nike and how much Phil Knight admired him.