Bill Bowerman
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Bill Bowerman
Bill Bowerman, born Feburary 19th, 1911 in Fossil, Oregon, died on 24th December 1999
Bowerman graduated from Medford (Oregon) High School, where he played for the state champion football team. When he enrolled at the University of Oregon in 1929, he played football and basketball. He later joined the university's track team, running the 440-yard dash for track coaching legend Bill Hayward.
After he graduated with a business administration degree from the University of Oregon in 1934, Bowerman coached track at various locations around the state of Oregon.
During a trip to New Zealand in 1962, Bowerman became an advocate for jogging after he took part in a jogging club organized by his friend and coaching colleague Arthur Lydiard. Bowerman returned to the USA and wrote a small book entitled "Jogging," which helped ignite the fitness phenomenon in the USA.
In 1964, he entered into a handshake agreement with Phil Knight, who had been a miler under Bowerman in the 1950s, to start an athletic footwear distribution company called Blue Ribbon Sports, later known as Nike, Inc.. Knight managed the business end of the partnership, while Bowerman experimented with improvements in athletic footwear design.
Bowerman is credited with creating the first lightweight outsole shoe from some latex, leather, glue and his wife’s waffle iron. He and Knight each put up $500 and made and sold 330 pairs of the shoes. From those early successes Nike was born and both Bowerman and Knight became larger than life.
Bowerman's design ideas led to the creation of the Cortez training shoe in 1968, which quickly became a top-seller and remains one of Nike's most iconic footwear designs. Bowerman's design inspiration also led to the introduction of the so-called "Moon Shoe" in 1972, so named because the waffle tread was said to resemble the footprints left by astronauts on the moon. Further refinement resulted in the Waffle Trainer in 1974, which helped fuel the explosive growth of Blue Ribbon Sports/Nike.
Bowerman's obsession with shaving weight off his athletes' running shoes was legendary. He believed that custom-made shoes would weigh less on the feet of his runners and cut down on blisters, as well as reduce the overall drag on their energy for every ounce he could remove from the shoe.
In June 1999, Bowerman stepped down as a member of the Nike Board of Directors, a post he held since 1968. In honor of his contributions to the sport of running and to the development of this company, Nike established the Bowerman Foundation. Nike is contributed a $1 million matching-funds program to the foundation, which renovated youth track-and-field facilities around the world through 2005. Along with this track restoration project, Nike saluted Bowerman and his unique spirit with a line of high-performance track-and-field footwear - the Bowerman Series. [1]
Today, the headquarters for Nike is located on Bowerman Drive in homage of the company's co-founder.
Six months after his retirement in 1999, Bill Bowerman died in his sleep on Christmas Eve in his home in Fossil, Oregon. He was 88 years old.
