Shoe Dog: Young Readers Edition

INTRODUCTION

Letter to My Grandchildren

Dear Jordan, Logan, Ridley, Willow, Anthony, Dylan, Nicholas, Reade, Henry, Riley, and Merrick,

When I was in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Or, more precisely, I wanted to do something different every week—journalist, businessman, lawyer, sports announcer, teacher . . .

And it didn’t get a lot better through college and graduate school. I tried to get a good education—I knew that would be a help—but it worried me to have to make real life choices.

I now realize I was lucky. The decision-making process is an enjoyable part of the journey. There was, for me, not a clear path, but one that worked out pretty well, and it has occurred to me that sharing this journey with you might be helpful.

I can remember, for the most of you, the moment of your birth—when all the world lay before you. And with that a challenge for all your older relatives: how to prepare you, how to educate you, how to discipline you, how to smile with you.

But in the normal course, and all too soon, there comes a day when we will go into your room, now turned cold, and there is only an empty bed with no impression from a human body. Our work done, you will have gone to a grown-up world of college or work or life with someone else.

If any of the experiences or lessons learned on your grandfather’s journey are helpful . . . well, then it will have all been worthwhile.

My own house was somewhat different than the one in which you grew up. In my house my sons Matt and Travis, the fathers of six of you, grew up with a third brother—one they could not see or touch but whose presence was constant.

And they always knew that other brother was there.

It became important to me that you know that member of the family. Oh, there has been plenty written about him, but I wanted you to see him through my eyes—his birth, his teenage struggles, his growth into that time when he, too, could leave home.

I have shown him here with all his youthful imperfections, but through it all I hope you accept him as a member of the family.

With lots of love,

Papa

Dawn

I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my shorts and sweatshirt, and laced up my green running shoes. Then slipped quietly out the back door.

I stretched my legs, my hamstrings, my lower back, and groaned as I took the first few balky steps down the cool road, into the fog. Why is it always so hard to get started?

There were no cars, no people, no signs of life. I was all alone, the world to myself—though the trees seemed oddly aware of me. Then again, this was Oregon. The trees always seemed to know. The trees always had your back.

What a beautiful place to be from, I thought, gazing around. Calm, green, tranquil—I was proud to call Oregon my home, proud to call little Portland my place of birth. But I felt a stab of regret, too. Though beautiful, Oregon struck some people as the kind of place where nothing big had ever happened, or was ever likely to. If we Oregonians were famous for anything, it was an old, old trail we’d had to blaze to get here. Since then, things had been pretty tame.

The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest men I ever knew, spoke of that trail often. It’s our birthright, he’d growl. Our character, our fate—our DNA. The cowards never started, he’d tell me, and the weak died along the way—that leaves us.

Us. Some rare strain of pioneer spirit was discovered along that trail, my teacher believed, some outsize sense of possibility mixed with a diminished capacity for pessimism—and it was our job as Oregonians to keep that strain alive.

I’d nod, showing him all due respect. I loved the guy. But walking away I’d sometimes think: Jeez, it’s just a dirt road.

That foggy morning I’d recently blazed my own trail—back home, after seven long years away. It was strange being home again. Stranger still was living again with my parents and twin sisters, sleeping in my childhood bed. Late at night I’d lie on my back, staring at my college textbooks, my high school trophies and blue ribbons, thinking: This is me? Still?

I moved quicker down the road. My breath formed rounded, frosty puffs, swirling into the fog. I savored that first physical awakening, that brilliant moment before the mind is fully clear, when the limbs and joints first begin to loosen and the material body starts to melt away. Solid to liquid.

Faster, I told myself. Faster.

On paper, I thought, I’m an adult. Graduated from a good college—University of Oregon. Earned a master’s from a top business school—Stanford. Survived a yearlong hitch in the U.S. Army—Fort Lewis and Fort Eustis. My résumé said I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a twenty-four-year-old man in full. . . . So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid?

Like the same shy, pale, rail-thin kid I’d always been.

Maybe because I still hadn’t experienced anything of life. Least of all its many temptations and excitements. I hadn’t broken a rule. The 1960s were just under way, the age of rebellion, and I was the only person in America who hadn’t yet rebelled. I couldn’t think of one time I’d done the unexpected.

If I tended to dwell on all the things I wasn’t, the reason was simple. Those were the things I knew best. I’d have found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or might become. Like all my friends, I wanted to be successful. Unlike my friends I didn’t know what that meant. Money? Maybe. Family? House? Sure, if I was lucky. These were the goals I was taught to aspire to, and part of me did aspire to them, instinctively. But deep down I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all . . . different.

I wanted to leave a mark on the world.

I wanted to win.

No, that’s not right. I simply didn’t want to lose.

And then it happened. As my young heart began to thump, as my pink lungs expanded like the wings of a bird, as the trees turned to greenish blurs, I saw it all before me, exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play.

Yes, I thought, that’s it. That’s the word. The secret of happiness, I’d always suspected, lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life.

At different times I’d fantasized about becoming a great novelist, a great journalist, a great statesman. But the ultimate dream was always to be a great athlete. Sadly, fate had made me good, not great. At twenty-four I was finally resigned to that fact. I’d run track at Oregon, and I’d distinguished myself, lettering three of four years. But that was that, the end. Now, as I began to clip off one brisk six-minute mile after another, as the rising sun set fire to the lowest needles of the pines, I asked myself: What if there were a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing?

The world was so overrun, the daily grind was so exhausting and often unjust—maybe the only answer, I thought, was to find some prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy, that seemed fun, that seemed a good fit, and chase it with an athlete’s single-minded dedication and purpose. Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines, and I didn’t want that. More than anything, that was the thing I did not want.

Which led, as always, to my Crazy Idea. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I need to take one more look at my Crazy Idea. Maybe my Crazy Idea just might . . . work?

Maybe.

No, no, I thought, running faster, faster, running as if I were chasing someone and being chased all at the same time. It will work. By God, I’ll make it work. No maybes about it.

I was suddenly smiling. Almost laughing. Drenched in sweat, moving as gracefully and effortlessly as I ever had, I saw my Crazy Idea shining up ahead, and it didn’t look all that crazy. It didn’t even look like an idea. It looked like a place. It looked like a person, or some life force that existed long before I did, separate from me, but also part of me. Waiting for me, but also hiding from me. That might sound a little high-flown, a little crazy. But that’s how I felt back then.

Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe my memory is enlarging this eureka moment, or condensing many eureka moments into one. Or maybe, if there was such a moment, it was nothing more than runner’s high. I don’t know. I can’t say. So much about those days, and the months and years into which they slowly sorted themselves, has vanished, like those rounded, frosty puffs of breath.

What remains, however, is this one comforting certainty, this one anchoring truth that will never go away. At twenty-four I did have a Crazy Idea, and somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst, and fears about the future, and doubts about myself, as all young men and women in their midtwenties are, I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long processional of crazy ideas. The things I loved most—books, sports, democracy, free enterprise—started as crazy ideas.

For that matter, few ideas are as crazy as my favorite thing, running. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s risky. The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s not just that there’s no finish line; it’s that you define the finish line. Whatever pleasures or gains you derive from the act of running, you must find them within. It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself. Every runner knows this. You run and run, mile after mile, and you never quite know why. You tell yourself that you’re running toward some goal, chasing some rush, but really you run because the alternative, stopping, scares you to death.

So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy . . . just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where there is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.

That’s the precocious, prescient, urgent advice I managed to give myself, out of the blue, and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it’s the best advice—maybe the only advice—any of us should ever give.

Part One

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.

—LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass

1962

When I broached the subject with my father, when I worked up the nerve to speak to him about my Crazy Idea, I made sure it was in the early evening. That was always the best time with Dad. He was relaxed then, well fed, stretched out in his vinyl recliner in the TV nook. I can still tilt back my head and close my eyes and hear the sound of the audience laughing, the tinny theme songs of his favorite shows, Wagon Train and Rawhide.

His all-time favorite was The Red Buttons Show from the 1950s. Every episode began with Red singing: Ho ho, hee hee . . . strange things are happening.

I set a straight-backed chair beside him and gave a wan smile and waited for the next commercial. I’d rehearsed my spiel, in my head, over and over, especially the opening. Sooo, Dad, you remember that Crazy Idea I had at Stanford . . . ?

It was one of my final classes, a seminar on entrepreneurship. I’d written a research paper about shoes, and the paper had evolved from a run-of-the-mill assignment to an all-out obsession. Being a runner, I knew something about running shoes. Being a business buff, I knew that Japanese cameras had made deep cuts into the camera market, which had once been dominated by Germans. Thus, I argued in my paper that Japanese running shoes might do the same thing. The idea interested me, then inspired me, then captivated me. It seemed so obvious, so simple, so potentially huge.

I’d spent weeks and weeks on that paper. I’d moved into the library, devoured everything I could find about importing and exporting, about starting a company. Finally, as required, I’d given a formal presentation of the paper to my classmates, who reacted with formal boredom. Not one asked a single question. They greeted my passion and intensity with labored sighs and vacant stares.

The professor thought my Crazy Idea had merit: He gave me an A. But that was that. At least, that was supposed to be that. I’d never really stopped thinking about that paper. Through the rest of my time at Stanford, through every morning run and right up to that moment in the TV nook, I’d pondered going to Japan, finding a shoe company, pitching them my Crazy Idea, in the hopes that they’d have a more enthusiastic reaction than my classmates, that they’d want to partner with a shy, pale, rail-thin kid from sleepy Oregon.

I’d also toyed with the notion of making an exotic detour on my way to and from Japan. How can I leave my mark on the world, I thought, unless I get out there first and see it? Before running a big race, you always want to walk the track. A backpacking trip around the globe might be just the thing. I wanted to visit the planet’s most beautiful and wondrous places.

And its most sacred. Of course I wanted to taste other foods, hear other languages, dive into other cultures, but what I really craved was connection with a capital C. I wanted to experience what the Chinese call Tao, the Greeks call Logos, the Hindus call Jñāna, the Buddhists call Dharma. What the Christians call Spirit. Before setting out on my own personal life voyage, I thought, let me first understand the greater voyage of humankind. Let me explore the grandest temples and churches and shrines, the holiest rivers and mountaintops. Let me feel the presence of . . . God?

Yes, I told myself, yes. For want of a better word, God.

But first, I’d need my father’s approval. More, I’d need his cash.

I’d already mentioned making a big trip, the previous year, and my father seemed open to it. But surely he’d forgotten. And surely I was pushing it, adding to the original proposal this Crazy Idea, this outrageous side trip—to Japan? To launch a company? Talk about boondoggles.

Surely he’d see this as a bridge too far.

And a bridge too darned expensive. I had some savings from the Army and from various part-time jobs over the last several summers. On top of which, I planned to sell my car, a cherry-black 1960 MG with racing tires and a twin cam. All of which amounted to fifteen hundred dollars, leaving me a grand short, I now told my father. He nodded, uh-huh, mmhmm, and flicked his eyes from the TV to me and back again, while I laid it all out.

Remember how we talked, Dad? How I said I want to see the world?

The Himalayas? The Pyramids?

The Dead Sea, Dad? The Dead Sea?

Well, ha-ha, I’m also thinking of stopping off in Japan, Dad. Remember my Crazy Idea? Japanese running shoes? Right? It could be huge, Dad. Huge.

I was laying it on thick, putting on the hard sell, extra hard, because I always hated selling and because this particular sell had zero chance. My father had just forked out hundreds of dollars to the University of Oregon, thousands more to Stanford. He was the publisher of the Oregon Journal, a solid job that paid for all the basic comforts, including our spacious white house on Claybourne Street, in Portland’s quietest suburb, Eastmoreland. But the man wasn’t made of money.

Also, this was 1962. The earth was bigger then. Though humans were beginning to orbit the planet in capsules, 90 percent of Americans still had never been on an airplane. The average man or woman had never ventured farther than one hundred miles from his or her own front door, so the mere mention of global travel by airplane would unnerve any father, and especially mine, whose predecessor at the paper had died in an air crash.

Setting aside money, setting aside safety concerns, the whole thing was just so impractical. I was aware that twenty-six of twenty-seven new companies failed, and my father was aware, too, and the idea of taking on such a colossal risk went against everything he stood for. In many ways my father was a conventional Episcopalian, a believer in Jesus Christ. But he also worshipped another secret deity—respectability. He liked being admired. He liked doing a vigorous backstroke each day in the mainstream. Going around the world on a lark, therefore, would simply make no sense to him. It wasn’t done. Certainly not by the respectable sons of respectable men. It was something other people’s kids did.

For these and a dozen other reasons I expected my father to greet my pitch in the TV nook with a furrowed brow and a quick put-down. Ha-ha, Crazy Idea. Fat chance, Buck. (My given name was Philip, but my father always called me Buck. In fact, he’d been calling me Buck since before I was born. My mother told me he’d been in the habit of patting her stomach and asking, "How’s little Buck