Jonah Peretti made his first piece of viral content four years before cofounding the Huffington Post, and five years before he launched BuzzFeed, a Web site that would make him among the richest and most powerful figures in the media world. It began one day in January of 2001, when he visited Nike’s Web site while trying to put off work on his Master’s thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab.
“They had just launched NikeiD, which was a service where you could customize your shoes and put a word on the side of the shoes,” Peretti recalled. “I customized a pair of shoes with the word ‘sweatshop,’ cause I thought, oh, is Nike going to send me a pair of shoes that says ‘sweatshop’ under the swoosh?”
Instead of sending him shoes, Nike sent Peretti an email saying his order was canceled. He sent the following email in reply:
From: “Jonah H. Peretti” peretti@media.mit.edu
To: “Personalize, NIKE iD” nikeid_personalize@nike.com
Subject: RE: Your NIKE iD order o16468000
Greetings,
My order was canceled but my personal NIKE iD does not violate any of the criteria outlined in your message. The Personal iD on my custom ZOOM XC USA running shoes was the word “sweatshop.”
Sweatshop is not: 1) another’s [sic] party’s trademark, 2) the name of an athlete, 3) blank, or 4) profanity.
I choose the iD because I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes. Could you please ship them to me immediately.
Thanks and Happy New Year, Jonah Peretti
The email chain continued, with Nike arguing that Peretti’s order contained “inappropriate slang,” which he countered by pointing out that Webster’s Dictionary did not categorize “sweatshop” as a slang term. In his final email, Peretti relented, saying he would order the shoes with a different iD if Nike would fulfill “one small request,” writing:
“Could you please send me a color snapshot of the ten-year-old Vietnamese girl who makes my shoes?”
Peretti posted the entire email chain to the Web site shey.net, and it spread quickly across the Internet before being picked up by newspapers like the Guardian. He was then surprised to be asked to appear on The Today Show with Katie Couric, where he sparred with a Nike executive as though he were an expert on labor issues or global manufacturing. Peretti has called the NikeiD stunt the genesis of his fascination with how things go viral on the Web, but the reason behind his post’s success is clear: for years, Nike’s overseas factories had been subject to increasingly critical media coverage, and more recently activists on college campuses around the country had been organizing to bring the company’s alleged abuse of its labor force into closer focus. Peretti had simply found a clever way of using the Internet to capitalize on the momentum of work that activists and journalists had been doing for years.
At the time of Peretti’s stunt, Nike’s manufacturing operations consisted of more than 500 different shoe and apparel factories around the globe, all operating as independent contractors, with Nike technicians on-site to act as advisors. Knight had been exploiting Asia’s cheap labor market from Nike’s very inception—it was, in fact, one of the company’s founding principles, laid out in his assignment at Stanford Graduate School of Business. But things had been different when Nike was a start-up partnering with a Japanese firm to take advantage of the country’s cheap labor market as it rose from the ravages of war, during the 1960s and 1970s; decades later, it was a mature company seeking out the poorest nations, with the weakest labor laws, in order to maximize already stunning profits. By 1982, Nike was importing 70 percent of its shoes from South Korea, 16 percent from Taiwan, and another 7 percent from Thailand, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. The 7 percent of Nike’s shoe production that had been based in a secret New England factory was soon moved offshore as well.
Nike was pioneering in its use of offshore manufacturing, which proved to be immensely profitable for the company: a single factory like the one run by South Korea’s Samyang Tongsang could produce up to 4 million pairs of Nike shoes each year, for lower wages than Knight could legally pay workers in the United States, and without any big investments in construction, raw materials, or training of a labor force. Contractors also proved useful when Knight sought to distance his brand from the problems that arise when manufacturing in countries with weak or absent laws to ensure worker safety.
Knight had many such problems to distance himself from. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, underage workers toiled in the company’s plants in Indonesia; at factories in China, workers claimed that they were coerced into putting in excessive overtime in order to meet Nike’s demanding production schedule; and in Vietnamese factories, workers faced dangerous conditions. As Nike spent many tens of millions of dollars on marketing to associate its shoes with luxury and performance, news reports told the American public that they were cheaply made by laborers dwelling in poverty.
Just outside of Jakarta, Indonesia, a slum the size of a small city grew up around the 50 buildings it took to house 22,500 workers making Nikes on behalf of Taiwan’s Pou Chen Corporation, the largest manufacturer of shoes in the world. In the August 1992 issue of Harper’s, union activist Jeff Ballinger documented wages as low as $0.14 per hour for a factory worker named Sadisah, despite Indonesia’s minimum wage of $1.24. An annotated pay stub published with the report showed that it would take a worker like Sadisah 44,492 years to earn the equivalent of Michael Jordan’s endorsement contract. Abuses these workers suffered at the hands of management often went unpunished thanks to rampant corruption and bribery among the country’s 700 labor inspectors, who prosecuted as few as 7 reports of abuse in a year when 7,000 such reports were filed.
Nike’s general manager in Jakarta maintained that neither the company nor its executives should be held responsible for poor labor conditions in the factories they contracted. “I don’t know that I need to know [about what’s going on in the factories],” he said.
Later that year, Knight took action—not by raising wages or instituting rules against child labor, but by tasking Dusty Kidd, a member of Nike’s public relations department, to draft a series of new regulations for its contractors to follow. It was highly unusual for a corporation to use its public relations department to craft policy, rather than to spin policy, so there was little surprise when Kidd’s efforts failed. Several months later, a group of Indonesian factory workers making shoes for Nike told CBS News that they were being paid just $0.19 an hour. Then, in 1996, Knight’s public relations nightmare approached its crescendo after Life magazine published a photograph of a twelve-year-old boy stitching a Nike soccer ball in Pakistan, prompting daytime talk show host Kathie Lee Gifford to call on Michael Jordan himself to investigate the issue.
Near the end of 1996, an editorial in BusinessWeek called on American corporations to do more to prevent the exploitation of its overseas labor force, suggesting that even Wall Street was beginning to turn a corner on the issue.
“They have protested, disingenuously, that conditions at factories run by subcontractors are beyond their control,” Mark L. Clifford wrote in BusinessWeek. “Such attitudes won’t wash anymore. As the industry gropes for solutions, Nike will be a key company to watch.”
Those who did watch saw things go from bad to worse in the months that followed.
The shoes that Nguyen Thi Thu Phuong died making were designed at Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. The plans for the shoes were then relayed by satellite to a computer-aided manufacturing desk in Taiwan, where prototypes were developed and tested. Once the shoe’s blueprints were approved, they were sent by fax to the factory where Phuong worked, in Bien Hoa, northeast of Ho Chi Minh City. There the shoe’s three main parts—the outsole, the midsole, and the upper—were produced individually, then assembled in a labor-intensive process that was difficult to automate, and therefore relied on manual labor.
It was a summer day in 1997 and Phuong was making midsoles, carefully trimming away the excess synthetic material overflowing from molds that had just come out of an oven. Nearby, a coworker’s sewing machine suddenly broke down, spraying metal parts across the factory floor. A piece of shrapnel pierced Phuong’s heart, killing her instantly. She was twenty-three.
Nike’s response to the young woman’s death was to boldly claim: “We don’t make shoes.”
Knight and his team of self-proclaimed “shoe dogs,” whose origin story was tied to making prototype soles in Bill Bowerman’s waffle iron, now claimed they were little more than the designers and marketers of shoes made by other companies.
The backlash against Nike amplified just as the company was expanding its retail operations by opening its upscale Niketown retail outlets around the country. Picketers and news cameras showed up at store openings, including one in San Francisco, where NFL wide receiver Jerry Rice was assailed with questions about sweatshops and child labor. This was a major problem for Knight, who planned to open three more Niketown shops in 1998; they weren’t just retail outlets, but brand-awareness generators that helped increase Nike’s sales at other retailers, like Foot Locker. And key Niketown locations, like the one in London, would help give the company the foothold it needed as it sought to make inroads into the European soccer market.
Michael Jordan faced his own tough questions about Nike sweatshops during a press conference, but even worse things were in store for Knight, who learned that documentary filmmaker Michael Moore was set to release a new film, The Big One, focused on Nike’s misadventures in offshore manufacturing.
Wall Street took notice, and throughout 1997 it was not uncommon to find stock analyst reports filled with summaries of the latest news reports on the condition of Nike’s factories throughout Asia, and the extent to which the company and its shareholders were exposed. For the first time in years, analysts began downgrading Nike’s stock and lowering its expectations for the company’s outlook.
When Knight at last looked outside his company for help, he turned to a firm called GoodWorks International, owned by Andrew Young, a former mayor of Atlanta who had also been the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He hired GoodWorks to evaluate Nike’s operations in 1997, and Young himself went to Asia to meet with some of Nike’s suppliers and contractors there. When Young issued his report on Nike’s use of overseas labor, it was hard to imagine that Dusty Kidd and the rest of Nike’s public relations staff could have done more to polish what was clearly a rotten apple. Knight was so pleased with Young’s conclusions that he took out full-page newspaper advertisements highlighting them.
“It is my sincere belief that Nike is doing a good job,” one advertisement in The New York Times read. “But Nike can and should do better.”
Knight was also pleased with another aspect of Young’s evaluation: while third-party monitoring of Nike’s overseas factories was a good idea, it should be left to a company like his own firm, GoodWorks, Young felt, and not to global labor and human rights organizations. The benefits of this approach for Nike were evident from the amount of control the company was able to exert over the Young report, which completely ignored the key issue of wages for factory workers. Young had also relied entirely on Nike interpreters during his ten days of interviews with the workers making Nike shoes at factories in Asia.
The widely criticized Andrew Young report was further undermined in November 1997, when a disgruntled Nike employee leaked some highlights from a series of formal audits Nike had commissioned Ernst & Young to prepare. The accounting firm had, in fact, been auditing Nike factories in Indonesia since 1994, but Knight had managed to keep these less-forgiving assessments quiet up until the November 1997 leak of an Ernst & Young report recommending improvements to a factory just northeast of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. The factory where Nguyen Thi Thu Phuong died making Nike shoes, Ernst & Young found, did not have safety equipment or training for its workers, who were forced to work more hours than allowed by law, making them more likely to become injured or killed on the job. For months, Nike had known exactly which measures needed to be taken to prevent others from dying like Phuong had; but instead of focusing on solutions for the problems Ernst & Young had found at its factories in Asia, Nike instead promoted the much rosier portrait that Andrew Young had painted in his report, which was conducted the same summer that Phuong died—a picture of a company doing its best and coming up a little short, as even the best athletes sometimes do. A story rather than a solution, or, as Jordan might say, a “dream” to be sold, rather than a problem to be fixed.
On the afternoon of April 4, 2000, six University of Oregon students locked arms and blocked the entrance to Johnson Hall, a stately one-hundred-year-old building that housed the offices of the school’s top administrators. A heaving mass of protesters came with them, swarming the six stone columns framing the entrance to the redbrick façade, which sits on 295 immaculately kept acres of campus, bordered by the Willamette River and stippled with some 3,000 trees. From the window of his fifth-floor office, Dave Frohnmayer could see the message his students had written to him, spelled out on the sidewalk in bright pink chalk: “TAKE A HIKE NIKE,” with the company’s signature swoosh logo standing in for its name.
It was the University of Oregon’s first major student sit-in since the anti-war demonstrations that began in 1969 and carried on into the following year, when four members of a self-described student women’s militia hurled buckets of fresh animal blood on army recruiters while chanting slogans of protest against the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Oregon’s campus protests against the war in Vietnam intensified just as Frohnmayer arrived at the university as a law professor and legal counsel to then-president Robert D. Clark. In many ways, Clark had had it easier than Frohnmayer. Had he sided with protesters and kicked recruiters off his campus, he’d only have angered the U.S. Army. Frohnmayer, on the other hand, had to worry about angering Phil Knight.
In the three decades since Frohnmayer had moved to Eugene, the college by the river had grown to become Eugene’s largest employer, with 10,000 Oregonians depending on the school for their livelihood. And in the handful of years since Knight had begun paying for new buildings on campus, he’d become more than just an important booster for Oregon athletics; he was the school’s most important benefactor, which made him, in a sense, the town’s most important benefactor. On campus, not everyone was comfortable with the influence Knight seemed to have, or the school’s renewed focus on athletics over academics.
These developments coincided with a moment in which student activism was regaining its voice, particularly when it came to labor and human rights issues. And Nike—which was facing intensifying calls for independent monitoring at its overseas factories—had a target on its back. It was a major problem for Knight’s company, which was losing ground to Adidas and couldn’t afford to give up its position as the shoe and apparel supplier to America’s top universities.
Nike’s war to maintain its grip on America’s college campuses began in earnest late in 1997, when students at the University of North Carolina protested the company’s $7.2-million endorsement deal with the school. In early 1998, the movement gained a powerful voice in Jim Keady, an assistant soccer coach at St. John’s University, who decided to publicly quit his job rather than wear the Nike gear his school’s contract demanded.
“I don’t want to be a billboard for a company that would do these things,” Keady said of Nike’s overseas labor practices.
In 1999, the pressure on Nike intensified after student activists took over buildings at Duke, Georgetown, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin, and staged sit-ins at many other schools. Just before Christmas in 2000, student carolers strode through the halls of Harvard University’s administrative buildings singing “Away in a Sweatshop.” It was becoming more than just an image problem for Nike. When a factory worker was fired by one of Nike’s contractors in Honduras, student activists organized such effective protests that the company was forced to rehire the woman.
Nike’s university shoe and apparel contracts became the common battleground shared by activists concerned over issues ranging from sweatshop labor and China trade policy to college athletics, which increasingly took precedence over academic excellence at schools around the country. And it wasn’t just contracts with athletic departments that were under fire. Nike was facing significant backlash over the branded apparel it had so successfully marketed to ordinary university students through its College Colors program.
“It really is quite sick,” said Tom Wheatley, a student and organizer at the University of Wisconsin. “Fourteen-year-old girls are working one-hundred-hour weeks and earning poverty-level wages to make my college T-shirts. That’s unconscionable.”
At a growing number of campuses around the country, organizations like United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and the Movement for Democracy and Education collaborated with the National Labor Committee and the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC). The student-led WRC proved to be especially effective at recruiting universities to the cause, first by protesting and then by lobbying students, faculty, and university presidents to sign its pledge censuring corporations using sweatshop labor to produce athletic apparel and shoes. By April 2000, the months-old organization had already gained the backing of 45 different universities around the country, which frustrated and angered Knight because joining the WRC meant publicly criticizing Nike for failing to allow, among other things, surprise inspections at the overseas factories where its shoes were made. Knight, meanwhile, was trying to pressure Nike’s partner schools into ignoring the WRC, steering them toward the relatively toothless Fair Labor Association (FLA), which had executives from various apparel companies sitting on its board.
The campus wars came to a head in April of 2000, when Knight abruptly ended negotiations to renew his company’s sports equipment contract with the University of Michigan—a deal that would have been worth as much as $26 million, making it the largest of its kind up until that point. Michigan’s administrators and athletics department stood firm, issuing an unusually pointed statement aimed at Nike’s retaliatory tactics.
“Nike has chosen to strike out at universities committed to finding appropriate ways to safeguard and respect human rights,” the school said.
Sarah Jacobson made her way through the crowd as Eugene police officers handcuffed the six students who had blocked the entrance to Johnson Hall, the student body vice president and president-elect among them. When Frohnmayer finally left the building, Jacobson, a senior and anti-sweatshop activist, blocked the path police had cleared for him.
“We’ve got the votes we need in the faculty senate and we’ve got the support of all these students and more,” she said to him. “You might as well sign on to the WRC right now.”
Frohnmayer had done his best to delay the issue, but by March of 2000, there was no longer any question about what the campus community wanted: a referendum sponsored by the student government yielded a majority vote in support of WRC membership, followed by an affirmative vote from a committee made up of students, faculty, alumni, and administrators. The faculty senate vote was coming, and early indications were that Jacobson was right about where the votes would fall.
A number of faculty members, like biology professor Nathan Tublitz, had actively pressed for the school’s membership in the WRC, and they had the support of more moderate professors. Jim Earl, who led the faculty senate, saw it as a “standard protest issue.”
“The idea of academics even thinking twice about upsetting a corporation that gave the school money frankly didn’t occur to us,” he said.
It had occurred to Frohnmayer, who was left with nothing but bad options. As much as he wanted to side firmly with Knight, the situation on campus had deteriorated to the point where he couldn’t even leave his office without having student protestors arrested. The day after his encounter with Jacobson, who police had to remove from his path, Frohnmayer faced more protestors. Six of them were arrested and charged with trespassing, but more showed up the following morning, ready to do it all over again. The local media breathlessly covered the showdown, and national activists descended on Eugene in solidarity, including Bobby Seale, a cofounder of the Black Panthers. Frohnmayer left town on business, and when he returned, the activists were waiting for him.
On April 7, the sit-in moved from the lawn to the hallway outside the president’s office, and the following morning Frohnmayer and two mediators met with Jacobson and seven other students. One of them was a senior named Melissa Unger, who had been involved in campus labor politics since her freshman year. She knew it was only a matter of time before Frohnmayer would be forced to sign on with the WRC, but she also knew the terms of that deal still left room for concessions to Nike—concessions that could cost the protestors everything they’d fought for if they were to underestimate Frohnmayer.
“We want you to sign on with the WRC for a term of five years,” Unger said.
Across the table from her, Frohnmayer just smiled. On April 12, he signed the WRC’s members document, making the University of Oregon “a fully committed member” in the “effort to take a socially responsible stand on sweatshops and child labor,” for a term of one year, rather than five.
Knight did not appreciate the lengths his friend of more than two decades had gone to in order to seek compromise. He was incensed by the fact that his alma mater had signed on to join the WRC rather than the industry-friendly FLA. He was livid that the school, which had been happy enough to accept tens of millions of dollars that had been generated by Nike’s labor practices, now had the gall to criticize them. And he would be damned if he was going to give them the $30 million he’d pledged for the renovation of Autzen Stadium.
In a statement sent to the media on April 24, Knight said the school had “inserted itself into the new global economy where I make my living. And inserted itself on the wrong side, fumbling a teachable moment.” He left no room for doubt about who he felt had quarterbacked that fumble: “Ask University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer one question,” Knight wrote. “Ask him if he will sign a pledge that all contractors and sub-contractors of the University of Oregon as well as University itself [sic] meet the WRC’s ‘living wage’ provision.”
Nike profits paid for a significant chunk of Frohnmayer’s salary, not to mention Knight’s enormous financial contributions to the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund. Knight was interested in results, not the efforts Frohnmayer had made. And the results were bad enough that on April 24, Knight publicly withdrew his outstanding $30 million donation to the University of Oregon. Privately, he resorted to even more brutal means of punishing Frohnmayer.
In the six months leading up to the WRC protests, Frohnmayer was recovering from a full cardiac arrest that might have killed him if his heart hadn’t stopped while he was surrounded by doctors at a meeting at the NIH, in Bethesda, Maryland. When he regained consciousness the next day, all he remembered was slipping away during his talk and waking up on a table surrounded by doctors in scrubs and green masks. The first thing he remembered thinking was that he couldn’t die until they’d found a cure for Amy.
It was a week before he was breathing on his own and some days after that before he could talk, hoarsely, and with difficulty. He underwent surgery to implant an electronic defibrillator to jump-start his heart in case he suffered another arrhythmia, and Lynn made him give up the coffee, scotch, and cheap cigars he loved so much. He also exercised more, walking two miles each day, but there was nothing he could do to avoid the stress of the WRC protests, the pressure from Knight, or the strain of fighting to save his daughter’s life.
In the days after Knight withdrew his $30 million gift, Frohnmayer and Knight talked personally and “soul-searchingly” about resolving the issue. The best that Frohnmayer could offer was his assurance that he would do his best to see that the university didn’t extend its agreement with the WRC beyond the one-year agreement he’d already signed. This seemed not to be good enough for Knight. The angry letters Frohnmayer received each day from the university’s more pro-business alums compounded the stress of these secret talks with Knight.
Some letters, like the one John S. McGowan wrote to Frohnmayer on April 28, 2000, were angry but fairly harmless, harsh words from small-time donors with no influence on campus or civic affairs. McGowan accused Frohnmayer of betraying and alienating the university’s largest benefactor, and defended Knight’s spiteful response, writing in his letter that “virtually any CEO placed in that position would respond the same way.” He also criticized the WRC, calling it “a front organization for organized labor” that had no place on a college campus where taxpayers and alumni should be calling the shots.
Other letter writers demanded to be taken more seriously. Jane Moshofsky and her husband Arthur had donated millions of dollars to the University of Oregon, and the school’s Moshofsky Center was named for Arthur’s brother Ed, and his wife Elaine. In her letter to Frohnmayer, Jane Moshofsky said the University of Oregon’s membership in the WRC “shouts ‘antibusiness!’” She also gave him a list of donations that she and her husband had “seriously discussed” before being put off by the school’s membership in the WRC—money for the Autzen Stadium expansion that Knight had withdrawn from, and for establishing “a scholarship fund for young people from small towns.” It was the school’s duty, she added, to “support all legitimate business in Oregon” and “promote the free enterprise system.”
The University of Oregon should teach that corporations are not evil, she argued, adding that Oregon businesses had every right to enrich their own enterprises through investment in the school. Students, she said, should work as apprentices at Oregon businesses, while representatives from the business world should be welcomed in classrooms to “edify the curriculum.” Frohnmayer, she wrote, had dealt “an unfair blow to Phil Knight and ‘Nike,’ a business started in Oregon by a U of O alumni,” provoking “irreversible consequences for our University of Oregon.”
She could not have possibly known how closely her wish list aligned with the immediate future at Oregon’s oldest and most prestigious public university.
When the Second World War began, in 1939, the self-help organization Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) had just one hundred members. Over the course of the following decade, its ranks swelled, partly because of men like Arthur Golden, who returned from battle with a drinking problem. He got sober in 1953, built a successful career in real estate, and raised a family in Utica, New York, before moving to Eugene upon retirement in 1980.
Golden’s experiences with AA left him deeply committed to helping others, and he spent his twilight years volunteering at Eugene public schools, where he enjoyed reading to young children. When he heard about the Frohnmayer family’s fight against FA, he volunteered to help out with the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund. He also became a trusted babysitter for the Frohnmayer kids, someone Lynn and Dave could count on when they needed an extra hand around the house. As the years passed, he became a close friend to the family and something of a caretaker for the girls, who he loved as if they were his own grandkids.
“Arthur was a wonderful, kind, honest man,” Lynn Frohnmayer recalled.
As a close member of the Frohnmayer family’s inner circle, and a regular presence in the household, Golden shared in the good times and the bad. In 2000, there were good and bad times in the Frohnmayer household. Amy Frohnmayer—Lynn and David’s last surviving child to inherit FA—was in the seventh grade during the spring of 2000, thirteen years old, with long blond hair and blue eyes. She could play Vivaldi on the violin and loved to run, like Knight had when he was her age. She exhibited no outward signs of the toxic blood cells coursing through her veins, allowing her parents to practice what Dave sometimes called “functional denial” about the reality of their situation. Unlike her sisters, she managed to reach her teen years without any serious health problems. But Lynn and Dave had already seen how quickly the end could come once the bruising and fainting spells begin. They knew a cure was the only way to make sure their daughter had a long, full life. And thanks to advances in gene therapy, they had reason to hope that a cure might be found in Amy’s lifetime.
The first attempt at gene therapy was made in September 1990, when doctors at the NIH treated a four-year-old Cleveland girl named Ashanthi DeSilva, whose immune system was crippled by a genetic disease called adenosine deaminase deficiency, or ADA. It worked well as an experiment in a petri dish, but DeSilva’s treatment led to only a partial correction of the defective gene. Repeated and refined over a period of two years, the girl’s genes were tricked into producing about a quarter of the normal amount of ADA. The problem was an inefficient delivery system for getting corrective genes into the nuclei of thousands or millions of defective cells. Eventually, with more funding for more researchers, scientists found better ways of delivering the corrective genes through viral carriers. The crucial advancements came when private companies began human trials for gene-therapy treatments aimed at diseases like melanoma and hemophilia.
These breakthroughs gave the Frohnmayers reason to believe that the disease etched into Amy’s genes, which was barely understood by doctors when she was born, might soon be something they could scrub from her DNA completely. Thanks to research made possible by the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund, the gene responsible for causing the disease had been identified. Now all they needed to do was raise the massive amounts of money researchers would need to proceed with human trials for genetic therapies aimed at curing FA.
Phil Knight’s money had brought that goal within reach. Each year, around Christmas time, the Nike billionaire added to the Frohnmayer family’s holiday cheer with a gift of $1 million to the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund; some years, he even gave $2 million. Things were different, however, in the final months of 2000. Even as Frohnmayer worked tirelessly to repair the damaged relationship between Nike and the University of Oregon, Knight made it clear that he would not be making his annual contribution to the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund. A dark, distressed mood fell over the Frohnmayer household, according to Golden, who was so shocked by Knight’s cruelty that he wrote a letter to a University of Oregon faculty member who had been openly critical of the school’s relationship with Nike. Early in 2001, over coffee, Golden unburdened himself: Dave was distressed, he said, and Lynn seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.