Bill Bowerman

Bill Bowerman was an American track and field coach and the co-founder of Nike, Inc., whose tinkering with shoe design reshaped distance running. Born William Jay Bowerman in Portland, Oregon, in 1911 and raised in Fossil and Medford, he served as an officer in the 10th Mountain Division during World War II before returning to the University of Oregon as head track coach in 1948.

Over twenty-four seasons in Eugene he produced thirty-three Olympians, including Steve Prefontaine, and won four NCAA team titles. He coached the United States team at the 1972 Munich Olympics. His methods favored hard-easy training cycles, individualized mileage, and obsessive attention to footwear; he routinely tore apart shoes and rebuilt them on his garage workbench.

In 1964 he partnered with former runner Phil Knight to form Blue Ribbon Sports, distributing Onitsuka Tiger shoes from the Pacific Northwest. The company rebranded as Nike in 1971 and built its first proprietary outsole when Bowerman poured urethane into his wife Barbara's waffle iron, producing the Waffle Trainer that launched in 1974.

He also helped popularize jogging as a public health practice through his 1966 pamphlet and 1967 book Jogging, written with cardiologist Waldo Harris. He died at his home in Fossil in 1999 at age eighty-eight, by which time Nike had become the largest athletic footwear company in the world.

The name Bill is an English diminutive of William, from the Germanic Wilhelm meaning resolute protector through the elements wil and helm. The short form became standard in working-class American usage during the early twentieth century, attached to figures who combined plainspoken manner with technical precision. He embodied that blue-collar tone in everything he built.