“No.”
“No?”
“No!”
That was the totality of the conversation and — if I’d been any older than seven, or if the adult in the room had been anyone other than my Dad — I’d surely have dropped an F-bomb.
My form teacher had told us we needed a calculator, so Dad dutifully came home the next evening with a brand new one. Nothing fancy, not like those scientific calculators that can calculate cos, sin and tan or tell you random facts about the universe. Just the basics: addition, subtraction and the ability to spell out “BOOBIES” if you knew how to multiply to 5318008 and turn the thing upside down.
But there was a problem: this was a Sharp calculator and we were a JVC family. Even now, I resent having to explain the issue, but Sharp was the front-of-shirt sponsor for Manchester United while JVC adorned The Arsenal. This, therefore, was no longer a means of counting, but a matter of conscience.
And I couldn’t believe that my Dad — of all people — the man who bore 50% responsibility for my existence and twice as much again for my footballing sympathies, could betray me and our boys in red in such a glib manner.
By the mid-1990s, the Japanese asset bubble had well and truly burst. Still, long before China became the one-stop manufacturing shop for practically everything except the most advanced semiconductor chips, Japanese electronics were how you consumed the Premiership.
I’ll be honest, this intro has gotten away from me and any decent editor would have sent me back to my desk with no track changes or compunction. But it’s Friday, it’s been a heavy week, and I’ve just finished Shoe Dog, the memoir by Nike co-founder, Phil Knight.
The book roughly spans the years 1962 — when a 24-year-old Knight borrowed a small amount of money from his father to start a company importing running shoes from Japan — to 1980, when what became Nike went public. I’ll be honest, it didn’t move me as much as it clearly has others.
I found the early, living by the seat-of-the-pants days as well as the minutiae of Japanese business practices and manufacturing processes fascinating. But as the pages turned, the will-they-won’t-they of the exact timing of Nike’s initial public offering wasn’t transmitting as much peril as Knight clearly felt. Like a stand-up comic who earnestly believes being of average height contains sufficient trauma to serve as the emotional heart of an hour-long show.1
And then, right at the end, Knight almost casually starts talking about his eldest son. And even though you don’t, you know exactly what’s coming. Matthew died in a scuba diving accident at the age of 34. And suddenly Nike, let alone my grumbles about a book I came to only mildly enjoy, felt like the least important thing in the world.