Buried Near the Carport
Bill Bowerman ruined his wife's wedding-gift waffle iron chasing a shoe sole in 1971. Fifty-five years and one sneaker empire later, that money just built an actual college of engineering.
On Wednesday, Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife Penny committed $1 billion to the University of Oregon — the largest gift ever made to a public university — to stand up the Knight College of Engineering. Knight called it the kind of opportunity “our great American universities... have historically provided.” The school is already home to the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, built on two earlier $500 million gifts from the same couple, in 2016 and 2021.
The university's own engineering credentials go back a lot further than this gift, but Nike's don't. In 1971, Oregon's track coach Bill Bowerman was trying to solve a real problem: a new urethane track installed on campus was shredding his runners' feet, and nothing on the market gripped it without adding weight. One morning he was watching his wife Barbara make waffles on a Bersted Model 251 iron, a wedding gift from 1936, and noticed the grid. He poured liquid urethane straight into it. The iron fused shut for good.
The ruined iron's tread pattern went under Oregon's cross-country team that November, then got hand-cobbled into a dozen or so pairs for the 1972 Olympic Trials in Eugene, nicknamed the Moon Shoe for the tracks it left in dirt. Nobody kept many. One surviving pair, unworn, sold at Sotheby's in 2019 for $437,500 — at the time, the most anyone had paid for a sneaker.
Knight knew Bowerman before any of that, as the coach's walk-on miler at Oregon in the late '50s, best time 4:15. His 1962 Stanford paper on importing Japanese running shoes became Blue Ribbon Sports with Bowerman in 1964, renamed Nike in 1971 — the same year as the waffle iron. Nike brought the Moon Shoe itself back this spring, a faithful remake at $105, currently in stock at nike.com.
The iron didn't get a plaque. Bowerman pitched it into a rubbish pit near the family carport in Coburg, and it sat buried until his son Tom turned it up decades later renovating the property. It lives in the Department of Nike Archives now, a few miles from where the billion dollars is headed.