Phil Knight
Born	(1938-02-24) February 24, 1938 (age 74) Portland, Oregon, U.S.
Residence	Hillsboro, Oregon
Alma mater	University of Oregon Stanford University
Occupation	Co-founder and chairman of Nike, Inc.
Net worth	US$14.4 billion (2012)[1]
Spouse	Penelope "Penny" Parks
Children	Matthew Knight Travis Knight Christina Knight
Parents	William W. Knight Lota Hatfield Knight
Website
Nike Corporation

Philip Hampson "Phil" Knight (born February 24, 1938) is an American business magnate. A native of Oregon, he is the co-founder and chairman of Nike, Inc., and previously served as the chief executive officer of Nike. By 2011, Knight's stake in Nike gave him an estimated net worth of US$14.4 billion, making him the 47th richest person in the world and the 19th richest American.^[1][2]

A graduate of the University of Oregon and Stanford Graduate School of Business, he has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the schools; Knight gave the largest donation in history at the time to Stanford's business school in 2006. A native Oregonian, he ran track under coach Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon, with whom he would co-found Nike.

Early years[link]

Phil Knight is the son of "a lawyer turned newspaper publisher", William W. Knight, and his wife Lota (Hatfield) Knight.^[3][4] Growing up in the Portland neighborhood of Eastmoreland, he attended Cleveland High School in Portland. According to one source, "When his father refused to give him a summer job at his newspaper [the Oregon Journal], believing that his son should find work on his own, Buck went to the rival Oregonian, where he worked the night shift tabulating sports scores and every morning ran home the full seven miles."^[5]

Knight continued his education at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he was a member of Phi Gamma Delta ("FIJI") fraternity, was a sports reporter for the Oregon Daily Emerald,^[6] and earned a business administration degree in 1959.^[3] As a middle-distance runner at the school, his personal best was 4:10 mile,^[7] winning varsity letters for track in 1957, 1958, and 1959.

Budding entrepreneur[link]

Immediately after graduating from Oregon, Knight enlisted in the Army and served one year on active duty and seven years in the Army Reserve.^[3] After the year of active duty, he enrolled at Stanford Graduate School of Business.^[3] In Frank Shallenberger's Small Business class, Knight developed a love affair with something besides sports — he discovered he was an entrepreneur. Knight recalls in a Stanford Magazine article:^[3] "That class was an 'aha!' moment ... Shallenberger defined the type of person who was an entrepreneur--and I realized he was talking to me. I remember after saying to myself: 'This is really what I would like to do.' " In this class, Knight needed to create a business plan. His paper, "Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?," essentially was the premise to his foray into selling running shoes. He graduated with a master's degree in business administration from the school in 1962.^[3]

Knight set out on a trip around the world after graduation, during which he made a stop in Kobe, Japan, in November 1962. It was there he discovered the Tiger-brand running shoes, manufactured in Kobe by the Onitsuka Co. So impressed with the quality and low cost, Knight made a cold call on Mr. Onitsuka, who agreed to meet with him. By the end of the meeting, Knight had secured Tiger distribution rights for the western United States.^{[citation needed]}

The first Tiger samples would take more than a year to be shipped to Knight, during which time he found a job as an accountant in Portland. When Knight finally received the shoe samples, he mailed two pairs to Bill Bowerman in Eugene hoping to gain a sale and an influential endorsement. To Knight's surprise, Bowerman not only ordered the Tiger shoes but also offered to become a partner with Knight and would provide some design ideas for better running shoes. The two men shook hands on a partnership on January 25, 1964, the birth date of Blue Ribbon Sports, forerunner to Nike.^[8]

Early career and family[link]

Before Blue Ribbon Sports, later Nike, took off, Knight was first a Certified Public Accountant with Price Waterhouse, and then Coopers & Lybrand; and an assistant professor of business administration at Portland State University.^[9] While at Portland State, he met his future wife, Penelope "Penny" Parks; they were married on September 13, 1968.^[10]

Nike's origin[link]

Knight's first sales were made out of a now legendary green Plymouth Valiant automobile at track meets across the Pacific Northwest. By 1969, these early sales allowed Knight to leave his accountant job and work full time for Blue Ribbon Sports.

Jeff Johnson, a friend of Knight, suggested calling the firm Nike, named after the Greek winged goddess of victory. Nike's logo, now considered one of the most powerful logos in the world more for its ubiquity than its aesthetic merits, was commissioned for a mere $35 from Carolyn Davidson in 1971.^[11] According to Nike's Web site, Knight stated: "I don't love it, but it will grow on me." In September 1983, Davidson was given an undisclosed amount of Nike stock for her contribution to the company's brand. On the Oprah TV program in April 2011, Knight claimed he gave her "A few hundred shares" when the company went public.

Labor issues[link]

Knight was named a "corporate crook" in Michael Moore's 1996 book Downsize This!. The book cited the harsh conditions in Indonesian sweatshops, where pregnant women and girls as young as age 14 sewed shoes for factories that the company contracted to make its products. Moore went to Knight in the hopes of convincing him to fix this problem. The interview can be seen in Moore's film The Big One . Of the nearly 20 CEOs whom Moore wished to interview for his movie, only Knight agreed to speak with Moore.

When questioned by Moore as to why no shoes were made in the United States, Knight responded that he was convinced Americans weren't interested in producing shoes. Moore responded with a challenge. If Moore could find 500 residents from his hometown of Flint, Michigan, who were willing to work in a Nike factory, would Nike then create a factory there. Knight accepted the challenge by saying he would seriously consider it. However, when Moore provided video evidence showing residents of Flint enthusiastically promising to work for a Nike factory, Knight backed down saying he would never seriously consider opening a factory there. Knight informed Moore that Nike does not own any of the factories that make its products. Knight told Moore if he were willing to invest in and build a factory in the U.S. that could match the price of footwear made overseas, Nike would consider buying shoes from Phil Knight.

In 1998, Knight pledged to impose more stringent standards for the factories that Nike engages to manufacture its goods, including minimum age standards, factory monitoring, and greater external access to Nike's practices.^{[citation needed]}

Philanthropy[link]

In 2000, Knight was inducted into the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame for his Special Contribution to Sports in Oregon.^[12] He is believed to have contributed approximately $230 million to the University of Oregon, the majority of which was for athletics.^[13] On August 18, 2007, Knight announced that he and his wife, Penny, would be donating an additional $100 million to the University of Oregon Athletics Legacy Fund.^[14] This donation is reportedly the largest in the University's history.

His significant contributions have granted him influence and access atypical of an athletic booster. In addition to having the best seats in the stadium for all University of Oregon athletic events, he has his own locker in the football team's locker room. An athletic building is named for him, the library for his mother, the law school for his father, and the basketball teams' home, Matthew Knight Arena, is named for his late son, who died in a SCUBA diving accident.

However, Knight's contributions to the Athletic Department at the University of Oregon have also led to controversy.^[15]

Public outcry surrounding Nike's labor practices precipitated protests in 2000, led by a group of students calling themselves the Human Rights Alliance. Protests included a ten-day tent-city occupation on the lawns in front of Johnson Hall, the main administration building, demanding that the university join the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) which was founded by United Students Against Sweatshops.^[16]

University President Dave Frohnmayer signed a one-year contract with the WRC. Knight's reaction was to withdraw a previous US$30 million commitment toward the Autzen Stadium expansion project and to offer no further donations to the university.^[17][18] Nike had endorsed the industry-supported Fair Labor Association, instead.^[19] In a public statement, Knight criticized the WRC for having unrealistic provisions and called it misguided, while praising the FLA for being "balanced" in its approach.^[20] The students disagreed, saying the FLA has conflicting interests, but President Frohnmayer sided with Knight's assertion that the WRC was providing unbalanced representation.^[21][22]

In October 2000, citing a legal opinion from the university's counsel, President Frohnmayer released a statement saying that the university could not pay its membership dues to the WRC since the WRC was neither an incorporated entity nor had tax-exempt status, and to do so would be a violation of state law. The Oregon University System on February 16, 2001, enacted a mandate that all institutions within the system choose business partners from a politically neutral standpoint, barring all universities in Oregon from membership in the WRC and FLA.^[23] Following the dissolved relationship between the university and the WRC, Phil Knight reinstated the donation and increased the amount to over $50 million dollars.^[24]

Also controversial was Knight's successful lobbying to have his friend and a former insurance salesman, Pat Kilkenny, named as Athletic Director at the university.^[25] Kilkenny, another wealthy athletic booster, had neither a college degree nor any prior experience in athletics administration. Kilkenny attended but did not graduate from the university, leaving the school several credit hours short of completion. He had been the chairman and chief executive officer of the San Diego-based Arrowhead General Insurance Agency and grew his business into a nationwide organization with written premiums of nearly US$1 billion when he sold the company in 2006.^[26] ESPN's Outside the Lines spotlighted Knight and his donation-backed influence on the university's athletics in an April 6, 2008, episode.

In 2006, Phil Knight donated $105 million to the Stanford Graduate School of Business.^[27] He also provided monetary support to his high school alma mater, Cleveland High School, for its new track, football field, and gymnasium.

In October 2008, Phil and Penny Knight pledged $100 million to the OHSU Cancer Institute, the largest gift in the history of Oregon Health & Science University, renamed Oregon Health Sciences University in 1981. In recognition, the university renamed the organization the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute.^[28]

Later years[link]

When Knight resigned as the company's CEO November 18, 2004, and retained the position of chairman of the board,^[29][30] he was replaced by William Perez, former CEO of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc. Perez was in turn replaced by Mark Parker in 2006.^[31]

In 2002, Knight purchased Will Vinton (Animation) Studios, where son Travis worked as an animator, and changed the name to LAIKA. Travis was named to the Laika board of directors later that year and became CEO of LAIKA in March 2009, replacing Nike former-employee Dale Wahl.^[32] Laika released its first feature film Coraline (in stop motion) in February 2009.

In 2009-2010, Knight was the largest single contributor to the campaign to defeat Oregon Ballot Measures 66 and 67, which, once passed, increased income tax on some corporations and on high-income individuals.^[33]

On February 24, 2012, Knight was announced as a 2012 inductee of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a contributor. The Hall recognized him as the driving force behind Nike's huge financial support for the sport and its players. Knight will be formally inducted on September 7.^[34]

On May 18, 2012, Knight contributed $65,000 to a higher education PAC formed by Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle.^[35][36] According to Boyle, the PAC will help facilitate an increase in autonomy at the schools in the Oregon University System.^[37]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Deford, Frank. 1993. "Running Man," Vanity Fair, August 1993, 56(8), pp. 52-72
• Knight, Phil. 2009. "When Things Don't Go Right: What Nike Learned In China," Playboy, February 2009, 56(2), pp. 26, 111
• Strasser, J.B., and Laurie Becklund. 1993. Swoosh: The Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There. HarperBusiness. ISBN 0-88730-622-5

External links[link]

• Origin of the Swoosh
• "Knight to Leave Nike Top Job" - Wikinews
• Forbes profile, page on Phil Knight
• Nike founder is Ducks' spiritual godfather - "The Seattle Times", 31-Oct-2006, by Bud Withers
• "Movers & Shakers: Entrepreneurs who rocked our world." - Entrepreneur, May 2007
• USA Today story on Knight and facial coding

v t e Nike, Inc. Corporate directors John G. Connors  · Jill Ker Conway  · Tim Cook  · Ralph D. DeNunzio  · Alan B. Graf  · Douglas G. Houser  · Phil Knight  · John C. Lechleiter  · Mark Parker  · Johnathan A. Rodgers  · Orin C. Smith  · John Thompson  · Phyllis M. Wise  · Keith White Assets and products Air Jordan  · Air Melo Line  · Cole Haan  · Converse  · Exeter Brands Group  · Hurley  · Nike Air Max  · Nike Considered  · Nike CTR360 Maestri  · Nike Flywire  · Nike Free  · Nike Golf  · Nike Pro  · Nike Mercurial Vapor  · Nike Shox  · Nike SB  · Swoosh  · Air Force 1  · Team Starter  · Nike Tiempo  · Nike Total 90  · Umbro  · Nike Multi-Turf Miscellaneous Nike Sports Research Lab  · Nike ONE  · Spark Suit Annual revenue: $19.2 billion USD (2.9% FY 2009)  · Employees: 26,500  · Stock symbol: NYSE: NKE · Website: nike.com

Michael Moore
Moore in New York to promote his memoir Here Comes Trouble, September 2011
Born	Michael Francis Moore (1954-04-23) April 23, 1954 (age 58) Flint, Michigan, United States[1]
Alma mater	University of Michigan–Flint
Occupation	Actor, director, screenwriter, producer
Years active	1972–present[2]
Religion	Roman Catholic[3]
Spouse	Kathleen Glynn (1991–present)
Website
michaelmoore.com

Michael Francis Moore (born April 23, 1954) is an American filmmaker, author, social critic and activist.^[4] He is the director and producer of Fahrenheit 9/11, which is the highest-grossing documentary of all time.^[5] His films Bowling for Columbine and Sicko also place in the top ten highest-grossing documentaries.^[5] In September 2008, he released his first free movie on the Internet, Slacker Uprising, which documented his personal quest to encourage more Americans to vote in presidential elections.^[6] He has also written and starred in the TV shows TV Nation and The Awful Truth.

Moore criticizes globalization, large corporations, assault weapon ownership, U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton^[7] and George W. Bush, the Iraq War, the American health care system, and capitalism in his written and cinematic works.

Personal life[link]

Moore was born in Flint, Michigan,^[1] and raised in Davison, a suburb of Flint, by parents Veronica (née Wall), a secretary, and Frank Moore, an automotive assembly-line worker.^[8][9][10] At that time, the city of Flint was home to many General Motors factories, where his parents and grandfather worked. His uncle LaVerne was one of the founders of the United Automobile Workers labor union and participated in the Flint Sit-Down Strike.^[11]

Moore was brought up Catholic,^[12] attended parochial St. John's Elementary School for primary school and later attended St. Paul's Seminary in Saginaw, Michigan, for a year.^{[13][8][14][15][16]} He then attended Davison High School, where he was active in both drama and debate,^[17] graduating in 1972. As a member of the Boy Scouts of America, he achieved the rank of Eagle Scout.^[8] At the age of 18, he was elected to the Davison school board.^[18]

Since 1990, Moore has been married to producer Kathleen Glynn,^[19] with whom he has a stepdaughter named Natalie. Moore is a Catholic,^[3][20] but has said he disagrees with church teaching on subjects such as abortion^[21] and same-sex marriage.^[22]

Following the Columbine High School massacre, Moore acquired a life membership to the National Rifle Association (NRA). Moore said that he initially intended to become the NRA's president and dismantle it, but he soon dismissed the plan as too difficult.^[23][24] Observers such as Dave Kopel noted that there was no chance of that happening;^[25] authors David T. Hardy and Jason Clarke wrote about how Moore failed to discover that the NRA selects a president not by membership vote but by a vote of the board of directors.^[26]

In 2005 Time magazine named Moore one of the world's 100 most influential people.^[27] Also in 2005, Moore started the annual Traverse City Film Festival in Traverse City, Michigan.

Career[link]

After dropping out of the University of Michigan–Flint following his freshman year (where he wrote for the student newspaper The Michigan Times), Moore worked at the local Buick plant.^[28] At 22 he founded the alternative weekly magazine The Flint Voice, which soon changed its name to The Michigan Voice as it expanded to cover the entire state. In 1986, when Moore became the editor of Mother Jones, a liberal political magazine, he moved to California and The Michigan Voice was shut down.

Moore at the 66th Venice International Film Festival in 2009

After four months at Mother Jones, Moore was fired. Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard reported this was for refusing to print an article by Paul Berman that was critical of the Sandinista human rights record in Nicaragua.^[29] Moore refused to run the article, believing it to be inaccurate. "The article was flatly wrong and the worst kind of patronizing bullshit. You would scarcely know from it that the United States had been at war with Nicaragua for the last five years."^[30] Moore believes that Mother Jones fired him because of the publisher's refusal to allow him to cover a story on the GM plant closings in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. He responded by putting laid-off GM worker Ben Hamper (who was also writing for the same magazine at the time) on the magazine's cover, leading to his termination. Moore sued for wrongful dismissal, and settled out of court for $58,000, providing him with seed money for his first film, Roger & Me.^[31]

Directing/producing[link]

Roger & Me

Moore first became famous for his 1989 film, Roger & Me, a documentary about what happened to Flint, Michigan, after General Motors closed its factories and opened new ones in Mexico, where the workers were paid much less. Since then Moore has been known as a critic of the neoliberal view of globalization. "Roger" is Roger B. Smith, former CEO and president of General Motors. Harlan Jacobson, editor of Film Comment magazine, said that Moore muddled the chronology in Roger & Me to make it seem that events that took place before G.M.’s layoffs were a consequence of them. Critic Roger Ebert defended Moore's handling of the timeline as an artistic and stylistic choice that had less to do with his credibility as a filmmaker and more to do with the flexibility of film as a medium to express a satiric viewpoint.^[32]

Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint

(1992) is a short (23-minute) documentary film that was aired on PBS. It is based on the feature-length film Roger & Me (1989) by Michael Moore. The film's title refers to Rhonda Britton, a Flint, Michigan, resident featured in both the 1989 and 1992 films who sells rabbits as either pets or meat.^[33]

Canadian Bacon

In 1995, Moore released a satirical film, Canadian Bacon, which features a fictional US president (played by Alan Alda) engineering a fake war with Canada in order to boost his popularity. It is noted for containing a number of Canadian and American stereotypes, and for being Moore's only non-documentary film. The film is also one of the last featuring Canadian-born actor John Candy, and also features a number of cameos by other Canadian actors. In the film, several potential enemies for America's next great campaign are discussed by the president and his cabinet. (The scene was strongly influenced by the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove.) The President comments that declaring war on Canada was as ridiculous as declaring war on international terrorism. His military adviser, played by Rip Torn, quickly rebuffs this idea, saying that no one would care about "... a bunch of guys driving around blowing up rent-a-cars."

The Big One

In 1997, Moore directed The Big One, which documents the tour publicizing his book Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American, in which he criticizes mass layoffs despite record corporate profits. Among others, he targets Nike for outsourcing shoe production to Indonesia.

Bowling for Columbine

Moore's 2002 film, Bowling for Columbine, probes the culture of guns and violence in the United States, taking as a starting point the Columbine High School massacre of 1999. Bowling for Columbine won the Anniversary Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival^[34] and France's César Award as the Best Foreign Film. In the United States, it won the 2002 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. It also enjoyed great commercial and critical success for a film of its type and became, at the time, the highest-grossing mainstream-released documentary (a record now held by Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11).^[5] It was praised by some for illuminating a subject avoided by the mainstream media.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Fahrenheit 9/11 examines America in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, particularly the record of the Bush administration and alleged links between the families of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. Fahrenheit was awarded the Palme d'Or,^[35] the top honor at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival; it was the first documentary film to win the prize since 1956. Moore later announced that Fahrenheit 9/11 would not be in consideration for the 2005 Academy Award for Documentary Feature, but instead for the Academy Award for Best Picture. He stated he wanted the movie to be seen by a few million more people via a television broadcast prior to election day. According to Moore, "Academy rules forbid the airing of a documentary on television within nine months of its theatrical release", and since the November 2 election was fewer than nine months after the film's release, it would have been disqualified for the Documentary Oscar.^[36] However, Fahrenheit received no Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The title of the film alludes to the classic book Fahrenheit 451 about a future totalitarian state in which books are banned; according to the book, paper begins to burn at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. The pre-release subtitle of the film confirms the allusion: "The temperature at which freedom burns." At the box office, as of 2010 Fahrenheit 9/11 is the highest-grossing documentary of all time, taking in over US$200 million worldwide, including United States box office revenue of almost US$120 million.^[5] In February 2011, Moore sued producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein for US$2.7 million in unpaid profits from the film, claiming they used "Hollywood accounting tricks" to avoid paying him the money.^[37]

Michael Moore at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival receiving a standing ovation for Sicko

Sicko

Moore directed this film about the American health care system, focusing particularly on the managed-care and pharmaceutical industries. At least four major pharmaceutical companies — Pfizer, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, and GlaxoSmithKline — ordered their employees not to grant any interviews to Moore.^[38][39][40] According to Moore on a letter at his website, "roads that often surprise us and lead us to new ideas—and challenge us to reconsider the ones we began with have caused some minor delays." The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2007, receiving a lengthy standing ovation, and was released in the U.S. and Canada on June 29, 2007.^[41] The film was the subject of some controversy when it became known that Moore went to Cuba with chronically ill September 11th rescue workers to shoot parts of the film. The United States is looking into whether this violates the trade embargo. The film is currently ranked the fourth highest grossing documentary of all time^[5] and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.^[42]

Captain Mike Across America

Moore takes a look at the politics of college students in what he calls "Bush Administration America" with this film shot during Moore's 60-city college campus tour in the months leading up to the 2004 election.^[43][44] The film was later re-edited by Moore into Slacker Uprising.

Capitalism: A Love Story

On September 23, 2009, Moore released a new movie titled Capitalism: A Love Story, which looks at the late-2000s financial crisis and the U.S. economy during the transition between the incoming Obama Administration and the outgoing Bush Administration. Addressing a press conference at its release, Moore said, "Democracy is not a spectator sport, it's a participatory event. If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. So Obama will rise or fall based not so much on what he does but on what we do to support him."^[45]

Writing[link]