Bill Bowerman's boys called him a genius. As an athletic coach, he was not just some guy with a whistle; they said he was a professor of competitive responses. I'm not sure Bill would have understood that if he'd heard it. The Bill Bowerman he knew was a good teacher at the University of Oregon—a more or less ordinary fellow who lived comfortably in the home he had built for himself and his wife, overlooking the Mackenzie River in Eugene.
Yet, in the life of this ordinary fellow, there was one most extraordinary day.
It was a peaceful Sunday morning in 1972. The sun was shining in through the kitchen window. Bill was up a little earlier than usual and decided to help his wife make breakfast. Here was the deal: Bill had a taste for waffles. He had always liked them, but this particular morning, for some reason, he craved them.
Now, here he is, sitting at the kitchen table, eating his waffles. Bill's wife would never forget that morning. The look of astonishment that suddenly came over her husband's face was startling.
"Was something wrong?" she asked.
But Bill did not answer. His eyes just seemed to get wider and wider, focused on the plate of waffles in front of him.
"Something was wrong, Bill?" his wife asked again.
But before she or he could say another word, her husband had bolted from his chair, yanked the electrical cord of the waffle iron out of the wall, snatched the still-warm appliance from the kitchen counter, and was heading out the door. The next thing Bill's wife heard was a clattering out in the garage, so she went out to look.
There, poised at the garage workbench, was Bill, and he was pouring some strange-looking substance onto her brand-new waffle iron—no, no, into the waffle iron. Then Bill plugged the appliance in once more, muttering something about the greatest idea ever.
The iron got hot, but guess what? Whatever Bill had poured into it had welded the thing shut.
I don't want to say that the episode shook the faith of Bill's wife, but it did shake the faith of Bill's wife. She has confided many times since that her faith was shaken that day. And I guess it should be further mentioned that, lo these many years later, somewhere in the landfill across the road from Bill Bowerman's house, there is that waffle iron. Someday, somebody's going to dig that thing up and look it over. They'll see that it appears its owner had tried to wreck it. But what the discoverer will probably do—or at least what he ought to do—is put it in a museum. He ought to put that old, now-rusted, stuck-together toaster in a special room for the little things from which big things grow.
For before Bill Bowerman threw out that waffle iron that day, he did manage to remove the solidified slab of urethane from its insides—urethane which he then glued to the soles of a pair of track shoes. Until that day, such a waffle pattern had been completely unheard of in the athletic shoe industry.
Of course, you know what became of Bill Bowerman's sole interest: an entire athletic shoe company called Nike. Only now, you know the rest of the story.
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