
Phil Knight co-founded Nike in 1964 with his track coach Bill Bowerman after importing Japanese running shoes from Tiger and selling them from the trunk of his car at track meets — and built it into the world's most valuable sports brand worth over $30 billion. Born in Portland, Oregon in 1938, Knight earned an MBA from Stanford and wrote a paper proposing that quality Japanese athletic shoes could disrupt the German-dominated running shoe market. Nike's signing of Michael Jordan in 1984 and the creation of the Air Jordan line is the most successful athlete endorsement deal in business history, generating over $5 billion annually. Knight's memoir Shoe Dog is widely regarded as the best business autobiography ever written.
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