June 26, 2025 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, since its founding in 1972, Nike has employed nearly half a million people, but only four have outlasted Steve Bence. Bence was a University of Oregon track athlete, a teammate of the legendary Steve Prefontaine, and an early insider at Nike. He’s also the author of 1972: Pre, UO Track, Nike Shoes, and My Life with Them All. Today, he shares his remarkable story.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories up next. A
sports story, an innovation story, and so much more. Since
its start in nineteen seventy two, Nike has employed nearly
a half a million people. Only four have outlasted our
next storyteller. Steve Benz BNCE is Nike's program director in
(00:31):
Global Sourcing and Manufacturing. I was an All American runner
under legendary track coach at Oregon Bill Bauerman, who became
the co founder of Nike. Steve Benz is also the
author of nineteen seventy two pre Uo Track, Nike Shoes
and My Life with them All. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
HI, my name is Steve Bentz. I was born in Tennessee.
I started kindergarten in Japan, and I graduated from high
school in Spain. I went to the University of Oregon
to run track and later started with Nike. The way
I discovered running was during my junior year in high school.
I went out for football in seventh grade because all
(01:15):
my friends were going out for football, but at home
we never watched sports, so even though I was on
the football team, I really didn't know the rules or
the strategy. So I sat on the bench the whole
time and the winner. I went out for basketball and
sat the bench again, and when one of the games
was out of hand, the coach put me in and
four times I brought the basketball up court. Four times
(01:36):
I was called for traveling. I looked over at my
coach and he was just shaking his head. As luck
would have it, coach was also the track coach, so
we both knew from experience that I wasn't an athlete,
and he treated me that way. I still came out
every day and worked out with the track guys, but
when we had a track meet, on the bulletin board
was a posting of all the entries, and every time
(01:59):
I looked, my name was never on it. So I
missed all the track meets until the last one. It
was the district championships. I went and my name was
on the four hundred meters, a quarter mile, one lap
around the track, and I didn't know if somebody was
hurt or injured or what, but I was going to
take advantage of this opportunity. So the last track meet
that year, the district championships, I took second in the
(02:21):
four hundred meters and the coach came springing across the
field and gave me the biggest bear hug and looked
me in the eyes advance, you're a runner. In the
spring of nineteen seventy nine, I was a sophomore and
I had learned that my best race was a half mile.
So I won our district championships, which qualified me to
(02:42):
go to Los Angeles to run in the CIF Southern
Section quarterfinals, which were some of the best athletes not
only in our section but in the United States. So
I went to the quarterfinals not expecting much. Nobody was
expecting much out of me, and I qualified to move
on to the next round. So next week was semifinals.
I advanced again. I ran fast enough to get myself
(03:03):
into the finals, and I went and I took third place,
and I was on cloud nine right And then I
found out my dad was going to transfer to Torjone
Air Force Base near Madrid, Spain. I went to school
on base. It was called Madrid American High School, and
so I got to go to Germany where we ran
against all the schools in the European area, and the
(03:25):
big schools were in England and Germany. In the first
he was actually the semifinals I won and one fine,
which was a school record, and the first time I
ever broke two minutes and one of the coaches from
German school came over and talked to my coach because
he didn't know who I was. He said, where did
this guy come from? Right? And we talked a little bit,
(03:47):
and he has to see my shoes. And there were
these clunky boordy leather spikes that my mom bought for
me when I was a freshman, and there were size
eleven at the time, I wore about size eight. The
coach was saying, you broke two minutes in these shoes,
and so he disappeared for a while and came back
with a pair of shoes that pit me, probably one
of the other runners, and I tried them on and
(04:09):
just putting those shoes on made me feel faster. So
in the finals the next day, I ran three seconds faster.
So I was won fifty six, which broke the European record,
and I learned the importance of a good pair of
shoes in running. And so I had my final senior
year living in the barracks. But the most important thing
my senior year was trying to find a college in
(04:30):
the United States where I could go, and I'd written
to Ohio State, Kansas State, USC, and Oregon State. I
was accepted academically at all schools, but there was very
little interest in me running there. And perhaps the most
blunt letter I got was from the USC coach who said,
your time might be pretty good in Europe, but it's
(04:52):
a dime a dozen here in southern California. But I
found out one of our dorm counselors through the javelin
at Oregon said, have you considered Oregon? I pulled out
the letters and everything. I showed him everything I had
done to that point, and he go, why did you
pick Kansas State? And I said, that's where Jim Ryan
went to school. Jim Ryan was my hero. He was
a world record holder in the mile, and he goes
(05:14):
he didn't go to Kansas State. He went to Kansas
You got the wrong school, right then he asked me,
why did you write to Oregon State. I said, because
they're a good running school. He says, no, no, Oregon's a
good running school, not Oregon State. So I have picked
the wrong school. And he saw the letter I got
from USC, but he contacted coach Dollinger back in Eugene
and told him I was interested in going there. And
(05:37):
the answer I got was that that would be fine
because Bill Barman allowed walk ons. Anybody that wanted to
walk on and train with the team was fine. You know,
you never knew who's going to be good enough to run,
and they said, if you do really well, maybe you'll
get into a race or two, but there would be
no scholarship. That was fine with me because Bill Barman
he coached Oregon from nineteen forty eight to nineteen seventy two.
(05:59):
Bill wrote the book on jogging. He brought jogging first
to Eugene and had spread across Oregon, across the United States,
and then across the world. He's in the Hall of
Fame four times for a track coach and one time
as an inventor. He invented the modern day athletic shoot.
So I flew space available on military flight to Dover, Delaware,
(06:23):
and then I worked my way across the United States
and got to Eugene. I had two suitcases in my hand,
found a motel six close to the university, and Delager
had told me, when you get to Eugene, come see
me in my office. And so there were people there already,
so I didn't know if I should go in or not,
and Build signaled me in. And in his office was
Jim Ryan looking in a phone book for something. My
(06:46):
high school hero who I wrote my term paper for
was there. Sitting in a chair with was Steve Prefontein.
You know, the greatest American distance run of the United States.
When he died in nineteen seventy five. He held everymeric
record from the two thousand meters to the ten thousand meters.
There's been a book written about him, the documentary and
two different movies. And in the doorway was Phil Knight,
(07:11):
Phil Knight, who with Bill Barman, co founded Nike in
nineteen sixty four. I had my camera with me, so
I took a picture in the office, which I have
in my book. And so I was just like in
awe of the people I've met. And I shook hands
with him and said, should I even wash my hands
after this? But the guy in the doorway, that Phil Knight,
(07:34):
I'll tell you a minute. He was probably the most
important person in that room because he's the one that
co founded Nike and would later change my life. I
walked out of that office, thinking wow, what I had
just seen, But at the same time was am I
an over my head? Can I rise up to this level?
I was a walk on who was rejected by all
(07:55):
the other universities that I had written to. Two weeks later,
Barman had the freshman in the stands. It was a
freshman meeting and I looked around when I got there
and there was about fifty people in the stands, all
wanting to run track. And I asked someone if who's
on scholarship, and he said, there's only three people on scholarship,
(08:17):
and it turned out to be Mark five. There was
Russ Francis who threw the javelin, and the third person
was Tinker Hatfield who some people might recognize that name.
He's the world famous designer that designs Nike shoes for
us now. But Bill Barman came out and he said, statistically,
based on all the years that he coached, only three
(08:38):
of us of the fifty would actually make it to
our senior year. Everybody else would drop out of school,
quit and he would be proven right. It was two
of those guys. It turned out to be me as well.
It was the only three that made it our senior years.
He also told us you can only do two things well,
and he says one of them has to be a student.
(08:59):
You have to be a good student, because if you
plunk out, everything else doesn't matter. But he said the
second thing, based on what he observed, was you could
either be a good athlete or you could be he said,
a good lover. You can't do both. And he said
you're just going to have to pick. And I remember
looking around and a few heads were looking down, like,
e is that true? You know? And he said something profound.
(09:21):
He said, if you can find meaning and what it
takes to stay on this track team, you'll probably find
meaning in another absurd pastime life, you know. And that
was in the movie Without Limits. If you've seen that and.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
You're listening to Steve Ben's tell one heck of a story,
imagine being a young kid, a college freshman, in the
same room with Phil Knight and Pre and Jim Ryan
and Bauerman. Well, I think most of us would just
cry or leave when we come back more of this
remarkable story me Pre and the birth of Nike. Here
(09:55):
on our American story, and we continue here on our
American stories. And we've been listening to Steve Bnce and
the book he's written nineteen seventy two pre Uo Track,
(10:19):
Nike Shoes and My Life with them All. Let's continue
with Bence and his story.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Nike was born on May first of nineteen seventy two.
I didn't know it when I was at the University
of Oregon running. I was on the track team, and
I was kind of oblivious to everything going on around me.
But I gradually started to learn that the Tiger shoes
that I was wearing was actually Blue Riven Sports shoes
and Blue Riven Sports was a handshake deal between Bill Bowerman,
(10:54):
the coach and Phil Knight, the athlete. In nineteen sixty four.
Barrierman was a coach, but he was also experimented. He
always loved problem solving and so he's always trying to
come up with stuff to make athletes better. And it
could be anything like he worked on track surfaces and
of course shoes and even apparel, and so people would
(11:17):
be wearing handmade shoes that he did. But he didn't
have a really a good business sense. Phil had that
business sense. He was an athlete, he was a runner.
He was coached by Barronman and so the two got
together to create a new company. At the first it
was Blue Ribbon Sports, and Phil had written a paper
in college at Stanford University. Just like cameras were very
(11:42):
good cameras were coming out of Germany and they were expensive,
but they were able to get good cameras out of
Japan at a much cheaper price. And at the time,
all the shoes were the good shoes. The competitive shoes
were made in Germany. It was Adidas in Puma, and
Phil speculated that you could make just as good shoes
in Japan at a much cheaper price, and so they
(12:04):
paired up and they went to Japan to find somebody
to make the shoes. Bottom were designed by Bill Barman,
and so they were able to mass produce good shoes
for kids in high school at an affordable price, and
that was the Tiger's shoe. But Phil picked May one,
nineteen seventy two. It's a birthday of Nike. The Nike
(12:25):
brand was starting to evolve, but that was the day
the letter he received from Japan on Nitska Tiger that
they would no longer allow him to sell Tiger shoes
in the United States. And so when most of the
company at the time heard that news. They thought, this
is the worst day of our life. We're all out
of jobs. But Phil said, no, this is the best
(12:45):
day of our life. You know, we can create our
own brand and control our own destiny. So that's when
the Nike brand was born again. I was a little
bit oblivless to the business part of it. I was
just running. But Barrenman twice had me wear test shoes,
and the first time, you know, I wore a pair
of his test shoes. You know, he came in the
(13:06):
locker room and said, hey, Bence, you wear size and nine.
Don't you go? Yeah? And he goes, try these out.
So I was going out for a six small run,
and about two miles into it, my achilles was really
sore and my calf. I said, just my luck. When
I'm supposed to be testing these shoes, I get hurt, right.
So I went back to the trainer and explained what
was going on. He said, let me see those shoes,
(13:26):
and he looked at him and environment flipped the bottoms.
Instead of the padding under the heel, he put it
under the forefoot. So every time I took a step,
I was putting his train on my Achilles, and the
trainer was saying, you can't be a guinea pig for him.
Your career and track is just a little bit too important.
So why don't you take these shoes back to Bill
and tell them you can't test anymore. And I didn't
(13:47):
want to do that first, but I waited for a
week and I felt confident and I went into the
office and I said, here's the shoes and he said
what do you think And I said, well, I got
hurt wearing them, and he goes, well, what happened? And
I said, we'll send my Achilles and caf area and goes, ah,
that's great. That's what I thought would happen. And that
was it. And I was thinking, like, what, he's either
mad scientists, you know, or he's testing me out, or
(14:10):
maybe he's just hazing a freshman. I didn't know what
it was. But anyway, I didn't want to deal with
any of that anymore, so I didn't do that. But
that was my lesson in he was motivated to try
to find the best things to make athletes better, and
he wasn't afraid to fail. You know a lot of
company cultures, you know, failure is not good. You know
(14:30):
there's backstabbing and politics that goes into it. But Tom
Clark at Nike at one point had a poster in
his office that said, the company that makes the most
mistakes wins. You know, problems are good. The story about
the waflf iron and Bill Barrman making souls in his
kitchen is partially true, but there's a lot of truth
(14:52):
to the fact that he was constantly looking for ways
to improve performance for athletes and wait take weight out.
So he did that the first I understood. The first
time he used the waff liron. He put some rubber
or whatever in there and he closed it and when
it's stuck, you know, just kept the upper head and
throw that thing out. So he had a couple steps
(15:12):
before he actually figured out how to do it. But
the waff lion was intriguing to him and he was
trying to get that. But if you think about what
a waffle looks like, there are indentations, and if you
look at the outsole, it's the mirror of that. It
goes the other direction. But it was the concept that
he had, and then he worked locally with rubber makers
and he was able to experiment with that until he
(15:33):
got it right, but then they just got sheets of
rubber with the waffle outsold that they made and they'd
just die cut it to go into the bottom of
the shoes. There's four of us that we went to
talk to Tom Barman, Bill's son, who lives in Eugene,
in the house where Barman used to live. And we
told Tom first question. We said, when he got up
in the morning, what was it like for him to innovate?
(15:55):
And Tom said, Bill wouldn't even know what the word
innovation means. He was a problem solver, he said. If
he didn't have a problem to solve, you know, he
wouldn't know what to do with himself in innovation. The
word innovation's overused these days, and even our innovation group
product Innovation at Nike, they took the word innovation out
of their title because it doesn't mean anything anymore. Track
(16:18):
seasons started and there were nine people listed in the
newspaper that could run eight hundred meters or the half
mile back then, and out of the nine half milers
with their personal best times in there, out of the nine,
I was number nine, So I was at the ninth
person on the team going into the track season and
where I'd been promised maybe I could run a few
(16:40):
races if I was good enough. I ended up winning
my first seven races there, and the seniors and juniors
and sophomores weren't all that excited about it, and I
went to the Pack eight Championships. It was the Pack eight,
not the Pac twelve back then. I ended up taking
second place at the Pack eight Championships, and they made
note of where the USC guy was the first USC guy.
(17:02):
I looked behind me and he was in fourth place.
In nineteen seventy four, I was a junior, and pre
Fontaine by then was a good friend and teammate of mine,
but he was competing on his own now. The previous
year he was still a University or Oregon student, having
a scholarship, and he was on the USA national team,
which paid for all of his transportation, room and board
(17:24):
and so forth as he competed around Europe for the
United States. And he said they also gave him four
dollars a day for spending money. But what he found
out when he was running over there after one of
their races that he won, one of the competitors suggested
that they pick up their prize money and go out
and have a few beers. And Priest was like, what
prize money? Right? All the money that came in for
(17:47):
US athletes went to the AAU, the federation that athletes
that he had to compete against in Europe were getting
prize money from the meets and their governing bodies were
supporting them financially. And so he was pissed and he said,
why should I care about the AAU. They don't care
about me. So in nineteen seventy four he decided he
(18:08):
was going to go to Europe, not compete in any
AAU meets and get his prize money. But he talked
some of us to join them, including me, And I
was kind of excited, you know, like I didn't know
if I can continue my track season after my junior season,
but I wanted to go to Europe and compete and
see how I do. So I accepted that.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
And you're listening to Steve Benz tell the story of
in essence, the founding of Nike, and it's a heck
of a story about running in sports and commerce and
in the end, this thing that well, let's face it, Bauerman,
as we already learned, didn't like the word innovation, and
most innovators don't because they're just trying to solve a problem.
(18:50):
And indeed it was a problem right in front of
them that had to do with his coaching and with winning.
And then that's what he really wanted to do, have
an advantage over everyone, and net benefit was he created
this remarkable sneaker company. When we come back, more of
the story of me pre and the birth of Nike,
and we're listening to author Steve Bentz here on our
(19:13):
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(19:41):
the story of Nike and how it came to be,
and so much more about the running world in the
nineteen seventies in its infancy that would spawn what we
now know as the modern world of track and field,
and so much more, including marathons, which before the seventies
were barely anything anyth one knew about. In nineteen seventy four,
(20:02):
running phenom Steve pre Prefontaine decided to take a stand
against the Amateur Athletic Union the AAU, which demanded that
athletes who wished to remain amateur for the Olympics not
be paid for appearances in track meets, even though they
drew large crowds that generated millions of dollars. At this time,
the AAU was taking away the amateur status of athletes
(20:24):
who were endorsed in any way. Because pre was accepting
free gear from Nike, he was subjected to the aau's
rulings and he found himself living on food stamps. He
spoke very publicly against the AAU and asked his friend
and Oregon track teammate Steve Bentz to join him in
Europe to race in defiance against the AAU. Here again
(20:48):
is Steve Bentz.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
We started in Finland. Prefontaine had to help us get
into a meet. In the first three track meets, I
won and I got my prize money, which was twenty
seven dollars at each meet, so you know, I had
three times twenty seven dollars for my first three races,
so it wasn't much, but it was illegal, for it's
against the rules of NCAA and THEAU. Now that the
(21:13):
European competitors picked up their prize money, but we weren't
supposed to do that. So I was being rebellious because
of Pre. He was talking us in to do that
and we were supporting him. Probably he thought they're safety
in numbers. And in nineteen seventy eight, this is after
Prefontaine died, Congress passed a law that changed the whole
thing and abolished the AAU and allowed athletes to start
(21:34):
being able to win money, which changed the whole sport
and in a way vindicated us in my opinion. The
next story I'll tell is on May twenty ninth, nineteen
seventy five, And anybody that knows Prefontain history knows that
(21:55):
he died on May thirtieth, nineteen seventy five. So this
is the Thursday. There was a track meet that evening
and Pre had invited the finish national team to come
to Oregon to compete. But the last race of this
tour was going to be at Hayward Field and it
was going to be that evening May twenty ninth. But
(22:16):
Pre came into our apartment with Mark and I. We
left the door unlocked and he just felt at home,
so he always come in and out, and he insisted
that we go over to his house and played spades,
played cards because he was so hyper, you know, because
he had to have a good meet that evening to
be able to recover some of the money and he
had promised that he was going to try to break
the American record in the five thousand meters to get
(22:36):
as many people in the stands as possible. That pre
ran his race, and then afterwards we went back to
our dorms shower and pre had graduated, so he went
to be with the Finns at a party. Went to
bed that night. I had a final exam the next day,
so I knew I had to get up and study.
And at six o'clock in the morning, the phone rang
(22:57):
and it was a friend who had graduated the previous year, said,
I just heard on the radio that Prefonte died. And
I was like, no, he could. You know, we were
just with him all day yesterday. He was just here
last night, you know that kind of thing. So I
called the radio station and they said it was true
that he was in a single car accident and that
(23:18):
he was dead. And I just remember taking my books
and going over to the student union because I had
to study, and I remember there was music in the
background playing, and I remember it was wishing you were here. Yeah,
(23:43):
had hit me see me again, And I thought about
what inspired me most about him, and it was reflecting
back to the Europe and defining the AAU. And even
(24:07):
in that track meet the night before, he was defined
the AAU by putting that on. He wasn't allowed to
put on a meat, but they backed off the last minute.
But just his rebellious spirit, you know, and his fight
for justice. I wanted to be that. I wanted to
live that, and so that became a part of who
(24:28):
I was or who I am. And Phil Knight later said,
if Nike could have the personality of any human being,
the personality he'd want is that of Steve Prefontaine. There's
a place called Prieze Rock in Eugene, which is where
Prefontaine died, where his car flipped and it killed him.
(24:50):
And people will go to Prieze Rock to honor them,
and they leave stuff. They leave shoes, they leave clothing
and all those kinds of things. He was twenty four
years old when he died. It was nineteen seventy five,
and people still go to the rock and kids are
still inspired by him. And when I've been up there
sometimes I've talked to people. For example, one time I
(25:12):
talked to a husband wife who were coaching in the
Midwest somewhere, and I said what is it about Pre
that your athletes love which inspires them the most? And
she said, it's because he's so blue collar. He works
so hard, he was so competitive. The kids just believe
that they do the same thing. You know, if they
(25:33):
work hard and do what they have to do, that
they can excel as well. And you know, it's not
his accomplishments that people admire him for, although he had
every American record from two thousand meters up to ten
thousand meters, it's not the accomplishments that the people talk about.
It's how he lived his life and how he competed.
And many times runners runners will just sit in the
(25:56):
back until the last half lap and then kick in
and win the race. Pre wanted to go out and
be in front. Every race that he ran he called
a performance, and he was doing it for the people
in the stands. And he would say, if you run
in the back and just kick at the last two
hundred meters, that's chicken. He just did not believe that
that was the right way to run a race. The
(26:16):
only way to really run races in the front, flat
out as hard as you can go and run as
fast as you can every time. But also one of
the things that coach Dellinger Bill Dellinger, who was the
assistant coach for the Runners at the University of Oregon,
he said, the one thing he noticed about pri is
he never missed a workout, He never missed a race.
He was there all the time and pre confided, you know,
(26:38):
there were times that he wasn't feeling good, but he
wouldn't tell anybody. He would go out there and run anyway.
So it's just that honorable, competitive, hard working ethic, I
think is what young people today look up to now.
When I started with Nike, to me, it was just
a bunch of runners getting together and moving into the
(27:01):
next part of our life. And I was trying to
figure out what was I going to do. I was
teaching and coaching, and maybe I could have done that
for my whole life, but I was looking for that
job that inspired me, that kind of was meaningful to me,
purposeful to me, and I didn't know Nike was going
to be it. But when the company started, when BRS
(27:22):
started importing Tiger's shoes from Japan, Phil placed his first
order to Japan for three hundred pair of shoes. So
that was nineteen sixty four Tiger's shoes and then you know,
maybe I don't know where we got up to about
a million pair. I'm really only talking about footwear because
that's what I have my experience, and we usually talking perage.
And when I told my to back up, when I
(27:44):
told my mother I was working for Nike, and she
asked me what's Nike? And I told her about Bill
Barrman and Phil Knight and we're making shoes for runners
and stuff. She says, you went to college. I'm gonna
tell my friends that you're shoe salesman or whatever you know,
And she says, why don't you work for a company
that makes something that a lot of people will buy? Right,
That's the way she was thinking back then. That's the
(28:04):
way we were all thinking. You know, it was a
small market, but because of jogging in particular runners and
average every day people started getting running shoes to run
in because now we were starting to jogging. It just
wasn't for elite runners, and people were wearing them to
knock around and walk around in because they were comfortable
in lightweight. So we didn't start wanting to change the world.
(28:25):
We were just trying to improve performance for runners. But
the thing was taking off. So when people find out
that it was a group of runners that started this
company and that's the culture that we have, it makes sense.
You know, no one can imagine a bunch of football
players getting together and doing this, or basketball players or whatever,
but a bunch of runners we pulled it off, and
(28:45):
so the culture that we have as a company comes
from that. I'm now settled down in the Virginal Oregon.
I've lived in my house for over thirty years. I
adopted a girl in Taiwan when we were there. We
adopted a girl in Korea when we were there. I
had a Sunday the United States. We moved back to Korea.
My youngest was born in Korea, and they've all grown
(29:05):
up here in this house. Now. I have four grandchildren,
you know, ages zero, two, four, and six. They're over
here all the time, you know, talking. So there's a
big group, my four kids and those four grandchildren. And
looking back on a career that has been incredibly rewarding
and being a part you know, I never claimed to
be a full knight or you know, anything major. I mean,
(29:26):
I was just a guy getting the job done, a
math nerd that was excited about being a part of running,
still about a part of the running culture. And when
you have an opportunity to do something bigger than yourself
and genuinely enjoy working with people, it's a pretty rewarding experience.
And that's where I am right now in my life.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
And a terrific job on the storytelling in production by
Greg Hangler and a special thanks to Steve Bentz, author
of nineteen seventy two pre uo track Nike Shoes and
My Life with Them All. Go to a bookstore and
buy this book or wherever you get your books online.
Phil Knight, the founder all the way through. We love
(30:10):
founders here on this show, the story of Nike, here
on our American Stories,
And we continue with our American stories up next. A
sports story, an innovation story, and so much more. Since
its start in nineteen seventy two, Nike has employed nearly
a half a million people. Only four have outlasted our
next storyteller. Steve Benz BNCE is Nike's program director in
(00:31):
Global Sourcing and Manufacturing. I was an All American runner
under legendary track coach at Oregon Bill Bauerman, who became
the co founder of Nike. Steve Benz is also the
author of nineteen seventy two pre Uo Track, Nike Shoes
and My Life with them All. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
HI, my name is Steve Bentz. I was born in Tennessee.
I started kindergarten in Japan, and I graduated from high
school in Spain. I went to the University of Oregon
to run track and later started with Nike. The way
I discovered running was during my junior year in high school.
I went out for football in seventh grade because all
(01:15):
my friends were going out for football, but at home
we never watched sports, so even though I was on
the football team, I really didn't know the rules or
the strategy. So I sat on the bench the whole
time and the winner. I went out for basketball and
sat the bench again, and when one of the games
was out of hand, the coach put me in and
four times I brought the basketball up court. Four times
(01:36):
I was called for traveling. I looked over at my
coach and he was just shaking his head. As luck
would have it, coach was also the track coach, so
we both knew from experience that I wasn't an athlete,
and he treated me that way. I still came out
every day and worked out with the track guys, but
when we had a track meet, on the bulletin board
was a posting of all the entries, and every time
(01:59):
I looked, my name was never on it. So I
missed all the track meets until the last one. It
was the district championships. I went and my name was
on the four hundred meters, a quarter mile, one lap
around the track, and I didn't know if somebody was
hurt or injured or what, but I was going to
take advantage of this opportunity. So the last track meet
that year, the district championships, I took second in the
(02:21):
four hundred meters and the coach came springing across the
field and gave me the biggest bear hug and looked
me in the eyes advance, you're a runner. In the
spring of nineteen seventy nine, I was a sophomore and
I had learned that my best race was a half mile.
So I won our district championships, which qualified me to
(02:42):
go to Los Angeles to run in the CIF Southern
Section quarterfinals, which were some of the best athletes not
only in our section but in the United States. So
I went to the quarterfinals not expecting much. Nobody was
expecting much out of me, and I qualified to move
on to the next round. So next week was semifinals.
I advanced again. I ran fast enough to get myself
(03:03):
into the finals, and I went and I took third place,
and I was on cloud nine right And then I
found out my dad was going to transfer to Torjone
Air Force Base near Madrid, Spain. I went to school
on base. It was called Madrid American High School, and
so I got to go to Germany where we ran
against all the schools in the European area, and the
(03:25):
big schools were in England and Germany. In the first
he was actually the semifinals I won and one fine,
which was a school record, and the first time I
ever broke two minutes and one of the coaches from
German school came over and talked to my coach because
he didn't know who I was. He said, where did
this guy come from? Right? And we talked a little bit,
(03:47):
and he has to see my shoes. And there were
these clunky boordy leather spikes that my mom bought for
me when I was a freshman, and there were size
eleven at the time, I wore about size eight. The
coach was saying, you broke two minutes in these shoes,
and so he disappeared for a while and came back
with a pair of shoes that pit me, probably one
of the other runners, and I tried them on and
(04:09):
just putting those shoes on made me feel faster. So
in the finals the next day, I ran three seconds faster.
So I was won fifty six, which broke the European record,
and I learned the importance of a good pair of
shoes in running. And so I had my final senior
year living in the barracks. But the most important thing
my senior year was trying to find a college in
(04:30):
the United States where I could go, and I'd written
to Ohio State, Kansas State, USC, and Oregon State. I
was accepted academically at all schools, but there was very
little interest in me running there. And perhaps the most
blunt letter I got was from the USC coach who said,
your time might be pretty good in Europe, but it's
(04:52):
a dime a dozen here in southern California. But I
found out one of our dorm counselors through the javelin
at Oregon said, have you considered Oregon? I pulled out
the letters and everything. I showed him everything I had
done to that point, and he go, why did you
pick Kansas State? And I said, that's where Jim Ryan
went to school. Jim Ryan was my hero. He was
a world record holder in the mile, and he goes
(05:14):
he didn't go to Kansas State. He went to Kansas
You got the wrong school, right then he asked me,
why did you write to Oregon State. I said, because
they're a good running school. He says, no, no, Oregon's a
good running school, not Oregon State. So I have picked
the wrong school. And he saw the letter I got
from USC, but he contacted coach Dollinger back in Eugene
and told him I was interested in going there. And
(05:37):
the answer I got was that that would be fine
because Bill Barman allowed walk ons. Anybody that wanted to
walk on and train with the team was fine. You know,
you never knew who's going to be good enough to run,
and they said, if you do really well, maybe you'll
get into a race or two, but there would be
no scholarship. That was fine with me because Bill Barman
he coached Oregon from nineteen forty eight to nineteen seventy two.
(05:59):
Bill wrote the book on jogging. He brought jogging first
to Eugene and had spread across Oregon, across the United States,
and then across the world. He's in the Hall of
Fame four times for a track coach and one time
as an inventor. He invented the modern day athletic shoot.
So I flew space available on military flight to Dover, Delaware,
(06:23):
and then I worked my way across the United States
and got to Eugene. I had two suitcases in my hand,
found a motel six close to the university, and Delager
had told me, when you get to Eugene, come see
me in my office. And so there were people there already,
so I didn't know if I should go in or not,
and Build signaled me in. And in his office was
Jim Ryan looking in a phone book for something. My
(06:46):
high school hero who I wrote my term paper for
was there. Sitting in a chair with was Steve Prefontein.
You know, the greatest American distance run of the United States.
When he died in nineteen seventy five. He held everymeric
record from the two thousand meters to the ten thousand meters.
There's been a book written about him, the documentary and
two different movies. And in the doorway was Phil Knight,
(07:11):
Phil Knight, who with Bill Barman, co founded Nike in
nineteen sixty four. I had my camera with me, so
I took a picture in the office, which I have
in my book. And so I was just like in
awe of the people I've met. And I shook hands
with him and said, should I even wash my hands
after this? But the guy in the doorway, that Phil Knight,
(07:34):
I'll tell you a minute. He was probably the most
important person in that room because he's the one that
co founded Nike and would later change my life. I
walked out of that office, thinking wow, what I had
just seen, But at the same time was am I
an over my head? Can I rise up to this level?
I was a walk on who was rejected by all
(07:55):
the other universities that I had written to. Two weeks later,
Barman had the freshman in the stands. It was a
freshman meeting and I looked around when I got there
and there was about fifty people in the stands, all
wanting to run track. And I asked someone if who's
on scholarship, and he said, there's only three people on scholarship,
(08:17):
and it turned out to be Mark five. There was
Russ Francis who threw the javelin, and the third person
was Tinker Hatfield who some people might recognize that name.
He's the world famous designer that designs Nike shoes for
us now. But Bill Barman came out and he said, statistically,
based on all the years that he coached, only three
(08:38):
of us of the fifty would actually make it to
our senior year. Everybody else would drop out of school,
quit and he would be proven right. It was two
of those guys. It turned out to be me as well.
It was the only three that made it our senior years.
He also told us you can only do two things well,
and he says one of them has to be a student.
(08:59):
You have to be a good student, because if you
plunk out, everything else doesn't matter. But he said the
second thing, based on what he observed, was you could
either be a good athlete or you could be he said,
a good lover. You can't do both. And he said
you're just going to have to pick. And I remember
looking around and a few heads were looking down, like,
e is that true? You know? And he said something profound.
(09:21):
He said, if you can find meaning and what it
takes to stay on this track team, you'll probably find
meaning in another absurd pastime life, you know. And that
was in the movie Without Limits. If you've seen that and.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
You're listening to Steve Ben's tell one heck of a story,
imagine being a young kid, a college freshman, in the
same room with Phil Knight and Pre and Jim Ryan
and Bauerman. Well, I think most of us would just
cry or leave when we come back more of this
remarkable story me Pre and the birth of Nike. Here
(09:55):
on our American story, and we continue here on our
American stories. And we've been listening to Steve Bnce and
the book he's written nineteen seventy two pre Uo Track,
(10:19):
Nike Shoes and My Life with them All. Let's continue
with Bence and his story.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Nike was born on May first of nineteen seventy two.
I didn't know it when I was at the University
of Oregon running. I was on the track team, and
I was kind of oblivious to everything going on around me.
But I gradually started to learn that the Tiger shoes
that I was wearing was actually Blue Riven Sports shoes
and Blue Riven Sports was a handshake deal between Bill Bowerman,
(10:54):
the coach and Phil Knight, the athlete. In nineteen sixty four.
Barrierman was a coach, but he was also experimented. He
always loved problem solving and so he's always trying to
come up with stuff to make athletes better. And it
could be anything like he worked on track surfaces and
of course shoes and even apparel, and so people would
(11:17):
be wearing handmade shoes that he did. But he didn't
have a really a good business sense. Phil had that
business sense. He was an athlete, he was a runner.
He was coached by Barronman and so the two got
together to create a new company. At the first it
was Blue Ribbon Sports, and Phil had written a paper
in college at Stanford University. Just like cameras were very
(11:42):
good cameras were coming out of Germany and they were expensive,
but they were able to get good cameras out of
Japan at a much cheaper price. And at the time,
all the shoes were the good shoes. The competitive shoes
were made in Germany. It was Adidas in Puma, and
Phil speculated that you could make just as good shoes
in Japan at a much cheaper price, and so they
(12:04):
paired up and they went to Japan to find somebody
to make the shoes. Bottom were designed by Bill Barman,
and so they were able to mass produce good shoes
for kids in high school at an affordable price, and
that was the Tiger's shoe. But Phil picked May one,
nineteen seventy two. It's a birthday of Nike. The Nike
(12:25):
brand was starting to evolve, but that was the day
the letter he received from Japan on Nitska Tiger that
they would no longer allow him to sell Tiger shoes
in the United States. And so when most of the
company at the time heard that news. They thought, this
is the worst day of our life. We're all out
of jobs. But Phil said, no, this is the best
(12:45):
day of our life. You know, we can create our
own brand and control our own destiny. So that's when
the Nike brand was born again. I was a little
bit oblivless to the business part of it. I was
just running. But Barrenman twice had me wear test shoes,
and the first time, you know, I wore a pair
of his test shoes. You know, he came in the
(13:06):
locker room and said, hey, Bence, you wear size and nine.
Don't you go? Yeah? And he goes, try these out.
So I was going out for a six small run,
and about two miles into it, my achilles was really
sore and my calf. I said, just my luck. When
I'm supposed to be testing these shoes, I get hurt, right.
So I went back to the trainer and explained what
was going on. He said, let me see those shoes,
(13:26):
and he looked at him and environment flipped the bottoms.
Instead of the padding under the heel, he put it
under the forefoot. So every time I took a step,
I was putting his train on my Achilles, and the
trainer was saying, you can't be a guinea pig for him.
Your career and track is just a little bit too important.
So why don't you take these shoes back to Bill
and tell them you can't test anymore. And I didn't
(13:47):
want to do that first, but I waited for a
week and I felt confident and I went into the
office and I said, here's the shoes and he said
what do you think And I said, well, I got
hurt wearing them, and he goes, well, what happened? And
I said, we'll send my Achilles and caf area and goes, ah,
that's great. That's what I thought would happen. And that
was it. And I was thinking, like, what, he's either
mad scientists, you know, or he's testing me out, or
(14:10):
maybe he's just hazing a freshman. I didn't know what
it was. But anyway, I didn't want to deal with
any of that anymore, so I didn't do that. But
that was my lesson in he was motivated to try
to find the best things to make athletes better, and
he wasn't afraid to fail. You know a lot of
company cultures, you know, failure is not good. You know
(14:30):
there's backstabbing and politics that goes into it. But Tom
Clark at Nike at one point had a poster in
his office that said, the company that makes the most
mistakes wins. You know, problems are good. The story about
the waflf iron and Bill Barrman making souls in his
kitchen is partially true, but there's a lot of truth
(14:52):
to the fact that he was constantly looking for ways
to improve performance for athletes and wait take weight out.
So he did that the first I understood. The first
time he used the waff liron. He put some rubber
or whatever in there and he closed it and when
it's stuck, you know, just kept the upper head and
throw that thing out. So he had a couple steps
(15:12):
before he actually figured out how to do it. But
the waff lion was intriguing to him and he was
trying to get that. But if you think about what
a waffle looks like, there are indentations, and if you
look at the outsole, it's the mirror of that. It
goes the other direction. But it was the concept that
he had, and then he worked locally with rubber makers
and he was able to experiment with that until he
(15:33):
got it right, but then they just got sheets of
rubber with the waffle outsold that they made and they'd
just die cut it to go into the bottom of
the shoes. There's four of us that we went to
talk to Tom Barman, Bill's son, who lives in Eugene,
in the house where Barman used to live. And we
told Tom first question. We said, when he got up
in the morning, what was it like for him to innovate?
(15:55):
And Tom said, Bill wouldn't even know what the word
innovation means. He was a problem solver, he said. If
he didn't have a problem to solve, you know, he
wouldn't know what to do with himself in innovation. The
word innovation's overused these days, and even our innovation group
product Innovation at Nike, they took the word innovation out
of their title because it doesn't mean anything anymore. Track
(16:18):
seasons started and there were nine people listed in the
newspaper that could run eight hundred meters or the half
mile back then, and out of the nine half milers
with their personal best times in there, out of the nine,
I was number nine, So I was at the ninth
person on the team going into the track season and
where I'd been promised maybe I could run a few
(16:40):
races if I was good enough. I ended up winning
my first seven races there, and the seniors and juniors
and sophomores weren't all that excited about it, and I
went to the Pack eight Championships. It was the Pack eight,
not the Pac twelve back then. I ended up taking
second place at the Pack eight Championships, and they made
note of where the USC guy was the first USC guy.
(17:02):
I looked behind me and he was in fourth place.
In nineteen seventy four, I was a junior, and pre
Fontaine by then was a good friend and teammate of mine,
but he was competing on his own now. The previous
year he was still a University or Oregon student, having
a scholarship, and he was on the USA national team,
which paid for all of his transportation, room and board
(17:24):
and so forth as he competed around Europe for the
United States. And he said they also gave him four
dollars a day for spending money. But what he found
out when he was running over there after one of
their races that he won, one of the competitors suggested
that they pick up their prize money and go out
and have a few beers. And Priest was like, what
prize money? Right? All the money that came in for
(17:47):
US athletes went to the AAU, the federation that athletes
that he had to compete against in Europe were getting
prize money from the meets and their governing bodies were
supporting them financially. And so he was pissed and he said,
why should I care about the AAU. They don't care
about me. So in nineteen seventy four he decided he
(18:08):
was going to go to Europe, not compete in any
AAU meets and get his prize money. But he talked
some of us to join them, including me, And I
was kind of excited, you know, like I didn't know
if I can continue my track season after my junior season,
but I wanted to go to Europe and compete and
see how I do. So I accepted that.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
And you're listening to Steve Benz tell the story of
in essence, the founding of Nike, and it's a heck
of a story about running in sports and commerce and
in the end, this thing that well, let's face it, Bauerman,
as we already learned, didn't like the word innovation, and
most innovators don't because they're just trying to solve a problem.
(18:50):
And indeed it was a problem right in front of
them that had to do with his coaching and with winning.
And then that's what he really wanted to do, have
an advantage over everyone, and net benefit was he created
this remarkable sneaker company. When we come back, more of
the story of me pre and the birth of Nike,
and we're listening to author Steve Bentz here on our
(19:13):
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(19:41):
the story of Nike and how it came to be,
and so much more about the running world in the
nineteen seventies in its infancy that would spawn what we
now know as the modern world of track and field,
and so much more, including marathons, which before the seventies
were barely anything anyth one knew about. In nineteen seventy four,
(20:02):
running phenom Steve pre Prefontaine decided to take a stand
against the Amateur Athletic Union the AAU, which demanded that
athletes who wished to remain amateur for the Olympics not
be paid for appearances in track meets, even though they
drew large crowds that generated millions of dollars. At this time,
the AAU was taking away the amateur status of athletes
(20:24):
who were endorsed in any way. Because pre was accepting
free gear from Nike, he was subjected to the aau's
rulings and he found himself living on food stamps. He
spoke very publicly against the AAU and asked his friend
and Oregon track teammate Steve Bentz to join him in
Europe to race in defiance against the AAU. Here again
(20:48):
is Steve Bentz.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
We started in Finland. Prefontaine had to help us get
into a meet. In the first three track meets, I
won and I got my prize money, which was twenty
seven dollars at each meet, so you know, I had
three times twenty seven dollars for my first three races,
so it wasn't much, but it was illegal, for it's
against the rules of NCAA and THEAU. Now that the
(21:13):
European competitors picked up their prize money, but we weren't
supposed to do that. So I was being rebellious because
of Pre. He was talking us in to do that
and we were supporting him. Probably he thought they're safety
in numbers. And in nineteen seventy eight, this is after
Prefontaine died, Congress passed a law that changed the whole
thing and abolished the AAU and allowed athletes to start
(21:34):
being able to win money, which changed the whole sport
and in a way vindicated us in my opinion. The
next story I'll tell is on May twenty ninth, nineteen
seventy five, And anybody that knows Prefontain history knows that
(21:55):
he died on May thirtieth, nineteen seventy five. So this
is the Thursday. There was a track meet that evening
and Pre had invited the finish national team to come
to Oregon to compete. But the last race of this
tour was going to be at Hayward Field and it
was going to be that evening May twenty ninth. But
(22:16):
Pre came into our apartment with Mark and I. We
left the door unlocked and he just felt at home,
so he always come in and out, and he insisted
that we go over to his house and played spades,
played cards because he was so hyper, you know, because
he had to have a good meet that evening to
be able to recover some of the money and he
had promised that he was going to try to break
the American record in the five thousand meters to get
(22:36):
as many people in the stands as possible. That pre
ran his race, and then afterwards we went back to
our dorms shower and pre had graduated, so he went
to be with the Finns at a party. Went to
bed that night. I had a final exam the next day,
so I knew I had to get up and study.
And at six o'clock in the morning, the phone rang
(22:57):
and it was a friend who had graduated the previous year, said,
I just heard on the radio that Prefonte died. And
I was like, no, he could. You know, we were
just with him all day yesterday. He was just here
last night, you know that kind of thing. So I
called the radio station and they said it was true
that he was in a single car accident and that
(23:18):
he was dead. And I just remember taking my books
and going over to the student union because I had
to study, and I remember there was music in the
background playing, and I remember it was wishing you were here. Yeah,
(23:43):
had hit me see me again, And I thought about
what inspired me most about him, and it was reflecting
back to the Europe and defining the AAU. And even
(24:07):
in that track meet the night before, he was defined
the AAU by putting that on. He wasn't allowed to
put on a meat, but they backed off the last minute.
But just his rebellious spirit, you know, and his fight
for justice. I wanted to be that. I wanted to
live that, and so that became a part of who
(24:28):
I was or who I am. And Phil Knight later said,
if Nike could have the personality of any human being,
the personality he'd want is that of Steve Prefontaine. There's
a place called Prieze Rock in Eugene, which is where
Prefontaine died, where his car flipped and it killed him.
(24:50):
And people will go to Prieze Rock to honor them,
and they leave stuff. They leave shoes, they leave clothing
and all those kinds of things. He was twenty four
years old when he died. It was nineteen seventy five,
and people still go to the rock and kids are
still inspired by him. And when I've been up there
sometimes I've talked to people. For example, one time I
(25:12):
talked to a husband wife who were coaching in the
Midwest somewhere, and I said what is it about Pre
that your athletes love which inspires them the most? And
she said, it's because he's so blue collar. He works
so hard, he was so competitive. The kids just believe
that they do the same thing. You know, if they
(25:33):
work hard and do what they have to do, that
they can excel as well. And you know, it's not
his accomplishments that people admire him for, although he had
every American record from two thousand meters up to ten
thousand meters, it's not the accomplishments that the people talk about.
It's how he lived his life and how he competed.
And many times runners runners will just sit in the
(25:56):
back until the last half lap and then kick in
and win the race. Pre wanted to go out and
be in front. Every race that he ran he called
a performance, and he was doing it for the people
in the stands. And he would say, if you run
in the back and just kick at the last two
hundred meters, that's chicken. He just did not believe that
that was the right way to run a race. The
(26:16):
only way to really run races in the front, flat
out as hard as you can go and run as
fast as you can every time. But also one of
the things that coach Dellinger Bill Dellinger, who was the
assistant coach for the Runners at the University of Oregon,
he said, the one thing he noticed about pri is
he never missed a workout, He never missed a race.
He was there all the time and pre confided, you know,
(26:38):
there were times that he wasn't feeling good, but he
wouldn't tell anybody. He would go out there and run anyway.
So it's just that honorable, competitive, hard working ethic, I
think is what young people today look up to now.
When I started with Nike, to me, it was just
a bunch of runners getting together and moving into the
(27:01):
next part of our life. And I was trying to
figure out what was I going to do. I was
teaching and coaching, and maybe I could have done that
for my whole life, but I was looking for that
job that inspired me, that kind of was meaningful to me,
purposeful to me, and I didn't know Nike was going
to be it. But when the company started, when BRS
(27:22):
started importing Tiger's shoes from Japan, Phil placed his first
order to Japan for three hundred pair of shoes. So
that was nineteen sixty four Tiger's shoes and then you know,
maybe I don't know where we got up to about
a million pair. I'm really only talking about footwear because
that's what I have my experience, and we usually talking perage.
And when I told my to back up, when I
(27:44):
told my mother I was working for Nike, and she
asked me what's Nike? And I told her about Bill
Barrman and Phil Knight and we're making shoes for runners
and stuff. She says, you went to college. I'm gonna
tell my friends that you're shoe salesman or whatever you know,
And she says, why don't you work for a company
that makes something that a lot of people will buy? Right,
That's the way she was thinking back then. That's the
(28:04):
way we were all thinking. You know, it was a
small market, but because of jogging in particular runners and
average every day people started getting running shoes to run
in because now we were starting to jogging. It just
wasn't for elite runners, and people were wearing them to
knock around and walk around in because they were comfortable
in lightweight. So we didn't start wanting to change the world.
(28:25):
We were just trying to improve performance for runners. But
the thing was taking off. So when people find out
that it was a group of runners that started this
company and that's the culture that we have, it makes sense.
You know, no one can imagine a bunch of football
players getting together and doing this, or basketball players or whatever,
but a bunch of runners we pulled it off, and
(28:45):
so the culture that we have as a company comes
from that. I'm now settled down in the Virginal Oregon.
I've lived in my house for over thirty years. I
adopted a girl in Taiwan when we were there. We
adopted a girl in Korea when we were there. I
had a Sunday the United States. We moved back to Korea.
My youngest was born in Korea, and they've all grown
(29:05):
up here in this house. Now. I have four grandchildren,
you know, ages zero, two, four, and six. They're over
here all the time, you know, talking. So there's a
big group, my four kids and those four grandchildren. And
looking back on a career that has been incredibly rewarding
and being a part you know, I never claimed to
be a full knight or you know, anything major. I mean,
(29:26):
I was just a guy getting the job done, a
math nerd that was excited about being a part of running,
still about a part of the running culture. And when
you have an opportunity to do something bigger than yourself
and genuinely enjoy working with people, it's a pretty rewarding experience.
And that's where I am right now in my life.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
And a terrific job on the storytelling in production by
Greg Hangler and a special thanks to Steve Bentz, author
of nineteen seventy two pre uo track Nike Shoes and
My Life with Them All. Go to a bookstore and
buy this book or wherever you get your books online.
Phil Knight, the founder all the way through. We love
(30:10):
founders here on this show, the story of Nike, here
on our American Stories,
Host
Lee Habeeb
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