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This article is about NIKE, one of the most popular sports shoe brand and also about one of its co-founder Mr.Bill Bowerman.
First let me tell about the meaning of NIKE , NIKE is a greek word Νίκη which means "Greek Goddesses of Victory " . The symbol of NIKE Swoosh is derived from the wings of Godess of Victory . "Blue Ribbon Sports " is NIKE now, it was founded by Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight in 1964.
The more interesting thing is about Mr. Bowerman.Mr. Bowerman was a biology teacher and was a football coach at Franklin High School in Portland. He was very passionate about coaching athletes hence he quit his teaching job and took the up a full time coaching job at University of Oregon. Bowerman because of his passion,efforts and dedication became one of most successful track coaches not only at the state level, national level but even at international level .
Check this ,he trained 31 Olympic athletes, 51 All-Americans, 12 American record-holders, 24 NCAA champions, and 16 sub-4 minute milers (running 1 mile within 4 minutes was completely ruled out by all physicians and medical theory at that time). During his 24 years as coach at the University of Oregon, the track and field team had a winning season every season but one, attained 4 NCCA titles, and finished in the top 10 in the nation 16 times. He is also the recipient of the Oxford Cup, Beta Theta Pi's greatest honor. [This paragraph is from wiki ]
His passion to coach should have been gratified with these achievements, but this guy wanted to go further to make athletes faster. He started to work on the shoes, he wanted to make the shoes lighter so that the athletes can run faster . He approached many guys/companies with his idea only to be turned down by most of them.This however did not discourage him, instead it made him to take a bold step, he started Blue Ribbon Sports(which is now Nike) along with Phil Knight and rest is history .
Today Tiger Woods one of the greatest golfers and richest athlete is one of the Brand ambassador for Nike :)
Passion , perseverance, positive thinking can create a lot of great things , so let us all try to pursue our passion and put our best efforts to reach our goal :)
I am very happy that I also own one of NIKE's products :)
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1 comment:
There's a very good anecdote about Bowerman.
Back then athletes either ran barefoot or used flat-soled shoes both of which caused medical problems due to excessive stress on the feet.
Bowerman tried for a long time to produce shoes with ribbed soles and experimented with this design quite a lot. His wife said in an interview that he would pour molten rubber in Pancake makers to produce such soles. Such pancake makers would become unusable about which she would be very sad :)
Today, each of those initial designs are worth millions..
Anyways, good luck for your blog and keep up the good work :)
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