Phil Knight

133
Phil Knight bigraphy, stories - American businessman

Phil Knight : biography

24 February 1938 –

Philip Hampson "Phil" Knight (born February 24, 1938) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. 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.

A graduate of the University of Oregon and Stanford Graduate School of Business, he has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to both 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.

Nike’s origin

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. 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.

Philanthropy

In 2000, Knight was inducted into the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame for his Special Contribution to Sports in Oregon. He is believed to have contributed approximately $230 million to the University of Oregon, the majority of which was for athletics. 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.

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.

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.

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. Nike had endorsed the industry-supported Fair Labor Association, instead. 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. The students disagreed, saying the FLA has conflicting interests, but President Frohnmayer sided with Knight’s assertion that the WRC was providing unbalanced representation.

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. Following the dissolved relationship between the university and the WRC, Phil Knight reinstated the donation and increased the amount to over $50 million dollars.