Books like Just Do It

The most powerful force in sports is not a football or baseball team. It is a shoe company. Nike is radically changing the way sports, business, and popular culture interact. Donald Katz is an award-winning author with a genius for getting inside places other journalists can't, and for writing nonfiction with the sweep and drama of a great novel. In his acclaimed bestseller, The Big Store, Katz gained unprecedented access to Sears, America's retail giant of the past. Now, in Just Do It, Katz has penetrated the company of the future, a dream machine that seeks nothing less than to define culture through the power of sports. The protagonist of Just Do It is Phil Knight, a reclusive billionaire who started a two-man operation importing Japanese running shoes and built it into a $4 billion company. Irreverent, unpredictable, and leery of the sports establishment, Knight has created the most muscular jock culture in business, a place where employees routinely take two hours at lunch to work out and then strategize late into the night in their holy war against competitors Reebok and Adidas. Outsiders think Nike is a cult. Insiders believe they are furthering the company's mission: to improve the performance of serious athletes. Not everyone can be a Nike guy. It requires a certain attitude. For example: Michael Jordan refusing to wear Reebok at the 1992 Olympics, or Charles Barkley joking about becoming a porn star. Katz shows how Nike created the spectacular imagery and marketing campaigns that made Jordan, Barkley, and Bo Jackson international icons. He also documents Nike's increasingly influential role in the management of its high-priced talent, taking us inside lucrative endorsementdeals involving Jim Courier, Andre Agassi, Deion Sanders, Alonzo Mourning, and Pete Sampras, as well as behind-closed-doors negotiations with the NBA and the NCAA as it considers a controversial plan for a collegiate Super Bowl brokered by Nike and superagent Michael Ovitz. Nike is