Arthur Golden told just a few people how far Phil Knight had gone to teach Dave Frohnmayer a lesson, and those few people kept the secret mostly to themselves. Nathan Tublitz was among them.
“Those of us who heard about it thought it was outright extortion,” Tublitz said. “But we kept our mouths shut because we felt terrible for Dave Frohnmayer and understood what he was going through. It was like there was a loaded gun pointed at his child’s head.”
When Knight returned to the fold at the University of Oregon, he was welcomed as a returning hero, not a villain. There was, however, a strange, almost superstitious lack of fanfare; the strings were now visible for all to see, even if Knight and Frohnmayer were the only ones who knew exactly how the puppet show worked.
The spring semester passed quietly, but by summer break it was clear that the old lines of communication between Nike executives and university administrators were crackling back to life. In early August of 2001, the school displayed renewed financial confidence as it broke ground on the expansion of Autzen Stadium, which had been stalled for a year after Knight withdrew his promised contribution of $30 million. Then, in September, the Nike CEO announced publicly what Frohnmayer had known for months: his commitments to the University of Oregon, financial and otherwise, had been renewed.
Knight’s money quickly breathed new life into the stadium expansion, which had become saddled with ballooning costs necessary to make up for lost time and finish the job before the 2002 college football season. Instead of a projected $80-million price tag, the expansion would cost $89 million, plus unforeseen extras, like $1.3 million worth of brand-new artificial turf that had to be replaced after it proved to be too slick in the rain. Instead of the original $30-million pledge, Knight would pay nearly twice that sum toward the stadium expansion, while the remaining $29 million was funded by issuing state bonds that came with hefty interest payments. What wasn’t covered by state bonds or Knight’s money were the various operating costs—like the $2 million that Oregon’s athletic department siphoned from the school’s general fund each year—that got passed on to students whose tuition dollars replenished the fund whether they liked athletics or not. While the University of Oregon’s top administrators scrambled to cobble together $90 million to improve the school’s football stadium, its faculty was earning less than their contemporaries at each of the sixty-one universities in its cohort of similarly prestigious public research institutions.
“Coughing up ninety million dollars to build luxury skyboxes when you can’t pay faculty is a form of insanity,” said Jim Earl, who had become one of Knight’s most vocal critics on campus.
It was not the first time the faculty was at loggerheads over Autzen Stadium, which owed both its conception and its construction to treachery and retribution within the school’s administrative ranks. A decade and a half before its 1967 unveiling, the Ducks were playing up to three home games per season at Portland’s Multnomah Stadium, after all but two other teams in the Pac-10 conference said they would no longer play at Hayward Field, which suffered from crumbling facilities and a seating capacity of just 21,000. So, without consulting university president Arthur S. Fleming, Oregon’s athletics director, Leo Harris, began his own private campaign to raise funds for a dedicated football stadium. For fifteen years, Harris solicited donations and hid the money in secret accounts located throughout the state of Oregon, convinced that Fleming, who opposed the building of a football stadium, would spend the money on other university programs if he ever found it. By the time Harris resigned over his differences with Fleming, in 1966, he’d squirreled away $1 million in donations, all but obligating the university to go forward with construction of the stadium that year, lest it enrage Harris’s legion of financial backers. President Fleming raised an additional $1 million by selling twenty-five-year leases on two thousand covered seats, which went for $500 each. Only $500,000 was raised privately, half of which came from Portland timber baron Thomas J. Autzen, whose gift gave Fleming a chance to get back at Harris.
“Fleming said Autzen had committed to the donation we needed to complete the financing, then he dropped the bomb on us,” said assistant athletic director Norv Ritchey. “He said it was going to be named after Tom Autzen. We were speechless—everybody thought it was going to be Leo Harris stadium.”
In the decades after its 1967 completion, Autzen had undergone only minor upgrades, like the installation of AstroTurf in 1969, and the addition of 381 club seats and 12 luxury seats in 1989. The $90-million makeover that began in August 2001 sparked both great hope for the football program’s future and great anxiety over the school’s priorities. There was a growing mistrust, throughout the nation, of the motives behind universities that had ostensibly sought to use college athletics as a tool for recruiting students and attracting donors in order to support its academic and research programs. Nathan Tublitz, another Knight critic among Oregon faculty, called the exponential growth of college football programs “a time bomb,” built on an unsustainable model, which, he added, was “spiraling out of control financially and morally.”
The University of Oregon, Frohnmayer claimed, had no intention of plunging its athletics department into “an arms race that’s not sustainable except for the five or six more successful, richest institutions.” In reality, the school was not only engaged in such an arms race, but leading it. Evidence of this could be found as close as Autzen Stadium and as far away as Manhattan, where the school had spent $250,000 on a massive 80-by-100-foot billboard to promote Oregon’s star quarterback, Joey Harrington, as a candidate for the 2001 Heisman Trophy. Then there was Oregon Ducks head coach Mike Bellotti, who led the team to a record ten victories in 2000, earning him a $750,000 salary with escalator clauses that made it possible for him to bring in $1 million per season. Just as Nike had become the national face of concerns over sweatshop labor, Oregon’s football program suddenly became the focus of those concerned that academics had become secondary to athletics at a number of American universities.
“It frustrated me,” Coach Bellotti said. “This perception that we sold out to something.”
Tublitz was cautiously optimistic that the athletic department would make good on its promise to become financially self-sufficient by 2004, but many of his colleagues held the more pessimistic view that Oregon’s football program, which had been a punch line only a decade earlier, had grown into a juggernaut that would consume more resources, not fewer, as it grew. As these concerns over out-of-control spending became more urgent, Frohnmayer summoned increasingly grandiose defenses to quell faculty protests.
“We don’t want to become a pseudo-professional team,” he said.
Pseudo-professional was, however, an apt description for what Oregon football was becoming: ticket revenues increased by $2 million annually after Autzen’s expansion and face-lift; conference payouts for the right to broadcast Oregon football and basketball games brought in another $10 million each year; and with Knight’s return came a cavalcade of Nike marketing executives, designers, and branding specialists who descended on the University of Oregon campus to discuss new deals, projects, and partnerships.
The key partnership remained, as ever, between Frohnmayer and Knight, who quietly finalized a deal one year in the making, recorded in the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund’s 2001 tax filings as an “unusual grant” of $2 million, which, filings state, came from the same individual who donated $2 million to the organization in 1999—a donor who, conspicuously, had not offered a donation in 2000. And that donor, according to Lynn Frohnmayer, had been Phil Knight.
There was nothing remarkable about Nike’s early football uniforms for Oregon. They looked much like the old ones, aside from Nike’s signature swoosh. Feeling they could do better, Knight asked the company’s creative director, Todd Van Horne, to work with designer Rick Bakas on a new brand identity for the Ducks.
It was radical, at the time, to think of a public university in terms of its brand identity. For centuries, universities had been defined by mottos that clearly spelled out the school’s academic or civic mission. Cornell University’s motto was a quote from Ezra Cornell, who said, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” The nation’s original agricultural college, Michigan State University, has an appropriately straightforward motto: “Advancing knowledge. Transforming lives.” The University of Oregon’s motto was taken from a Latin text by the poet Virgil, which roughly translates to: “The mind moves the mass.” Implicit in each of these mottos, and many others, was a sense of the university’s purpose and its responsibility to better the individual, benefit the public, and enlighten mankind. A brand identity, on the other hand, expresses only some vague sense of the product that is being sold—in this case, that product was the University of Oregon, a brand built in Nike’s image.
After Bakas joined Nike in 1995, he was tasked with creating a new brand identity for the Denver Broncos, who subsequently showcased his work on the advertising world’s biggest stage by winning back-to-back Super Bowl championships in 1998 and 1999. Knight had been impressed with the work. In 1999, the Nike CEO gave Bakas the assignment of creating a new image for the Ducks, which he hoped would “raise Oregon’s status as a national title contender by attracting better players, better coaches, and grow the Oregon fan base.”
Bakas was spending a lot of time at the University of Oregon’s campus, where he had studied architecture in the 1980s. He was sensitive to what he felt was the school’s legacy—Bowerman, Pre, and the Oregon Duck, a mascot based, with Walt Disney’s permission, on Donald Duck. The key branding problem for Bakas and Van Horne was that Ducks, unlike Broncos, are not particularly tough.
This assignment presented another peculiar challenge of designing an “O” logo that managed to look sporty and modern without infringing on any trademarks owned by Oakley sunglasses. Bakas spent hours at his drafting table, sketching different “O” logos, many of which ended up looking like some alien weapon from a bad science fiction movie. Finally, during one of many visits to Eugene, he looked down on Hayward Field from the tallest bleachers and noticed how closely its oblong shape resembled the letter “O.”
“I took the shape of the track and the shape of Autzen Stadium’s footprint and punched the track shape out of the stadium shape,” Bakas said. “With that, the Oregon ‘O’ was born.”
Ten years later, the logo had become iconic enough that LeBron James used his hands to throw up an “O” while attending an Oregon game against USC.
In the years since Frohnmayer hired him to be the University of Oregon’s director of communications, Thomas Hager had rarely been surprised during the course of his workday. His job, after all, was to make sure that the media and the public knew what was going on at the state’s oldest liberal arts university, which made Hager and his small staff arguably the most informed people on campus. This made it especially shocking when they were corralled into a conference room one day and introduced to a team of Nike designers who had been working in secret on a new brand identity and logo for the Oregon Ducks.
“I was surprised about the unveiling of the new logo as a sort of fait accompli,” Hager said. “Supposedly I was in charge of external communications for the university and I had not been privy to any discussions about changing things.”
Hager had been excluded from the process for the same reason that virtually every other university employee found themselves out of the loop: Nike was now calling the shots on campus. The mingling of public and private labor became a growing problem in the late nineties, when Nike employees began consulting on various projects alongside university employees, who were ostensibly employees of the state. With its rebranding project, Nike established a new precedent, which was to compartmentalize some aspects of its partnership with the university to such an extent that faculty, staff, and student involvement were almost eliminated. Nike’s Gulfstream V corporate jet became a veritable fixture at the Eugene airport, while Nike “suits” became a regular presence on campus. When they showed up in your department, Hager said, you learned to stay out of their way. Whatever they came to do was subject to little or no scrutiny, since Nike is not subject to the same level of accountability as a public university; this lack of transparency, meanwhile, made it more difficult to discern which decisions were being made by Frohnmayer and which were being made by Knight.
For a decade or more, taxpayers had been disinvesting in state universities across America, and any number of top administrators had responded by adopting more businesslike management techniques to ensure that a liberal arts education was defined, increasingly, by fewer costs and greater dividends. But among America’s public universities, Oregon alone could claim to have been fashioned into a product, a brand to be marketed not by public stakeholders but by private interests.
The university’s deepening partnership with Nike also represented an abandonment of the independence that had characterized the school since its establishment in 1876, when the school’s founders dared to challenge Oregon’s parochial system of education by making it a secular institution. As land-grant colleges went, it was more public than most, brought to life not only by the Morrill Act but also by $30,000 worth of bonds issued by the county court and $20,000 in donations from Eugene locals, some of whom raised funds by selling their own land. Eugene’s religious groups also contributed to the effort to pay for the construction of the secular university, with funds raised through church suppers and “strawberry festivals.” Labor for the construction of the campus, which was still underway when the school’s first five students enrolled, was paid for in part through the sale of $6,000 worth of donated wheat, valued at $0.90 per bushel. What benefits the community reaped from these donations was clear enough from the first graduating class of 1878, which consisted of four local men and one local woman, who went on to be authors and historians, and judges in both the county court and the state supreme court.
When the Oregon and California Railroad connected Eugene to the rest of the West Coast near the end of the century, the town’s population grew, along with its sense of what was happening in the rest of America, thanks to the telegraph lines that came along with the railroad. One of the things the town learned was that public universities east of the Mississippi River, like Cornell and the University of Chicago, were growing their enrollment and distinguishing themselves as some of America’s premier liberal arts colleges. In the spirit of competition and industriousness that characterized the times, the University of Oregon hired an Easterner, Dr. C.H. Chapman, as its new president. Chapman, who was thirty-three, was the son of a farmer and had graduated from Johns Hopkins before arriving in Eugene, where he immediately began shaping the University of Oregon into the model of a liberal arts “industrial” college. He eliminated preparatory classes from the curriculum and added commercial and engineering courses, while broadening and liberalizing the courses already in place at the school. He also met with high school principals throughout the state in an effort to ensure that more Oregonians, regardless of their beginnings, had an opportunity to attend college. Oregon’s public universities, Chapman believed, should be more closely aligned with the rest of the state’s public education system, for the benefit of the state’s economy and its industries as much as for the individual. This model persisted for a century at the University of Oregon, with a periodic rebalancing of the tensions between Jonathan Baldwin Turner’s founding idea of an “industrial education,” focused on training the labor force, and the more utopian ideal of the liberal arts university as a place where young minds are prepared for unimagined challenges through broad exposure to the western canon of knowledge. By means of the former, the school offered Oregon’s “sons of toil” better lives through prosperity and social mobility, and by means of the latter it offered Oregon a better society through the democratization of privilege.
A century after the age of industry prompted American universities to consider courting the labor force, the age of marketing convinced them to view higher education as a product to be packaged, commercialized, and sold. When Thomas Hager began his stint as the University of Oregon’s communications director, his first act was to rechristen his new department, which had been known for decades as the News Bureau before his predecessor changed it to the Office of Communications and Marketing in 1993. Hager was an alumnus of the school, where he earned his journalism degree before working for ten years as the editor of the university magazine. His approach to media relations reflected his journalism background, as well as his strong belief that a public institution ought to be a good and open steward of the public records it produced. But the marketing approach he’d tried to stamp out in the News Bureau soon took root elsewhere in the university.
“At some point the decision was made to let athletics have their own media people,” Hager said. “One or two of them at first, and more when the money started rolling in, all of them in the habit of handling their own requests their own way, with an emphasis on the marketing.”
Hager fought to bring the university’s office of communications back under one roof, but it went nowhere, leaving the school with parallel media relations operations beholden to different stakeholders. The athletics department’s public relations staff, with its emphasis on marketing and obfuscation, grew increasingly powerful as it aligned itself with marketing executives and public relations specialists from Nike. It was the school’s new logo and brand identity, however, that signaled a turning point for Hager.
“After that there was a different way of doing things,” he said.
There was tremendous pressure on the Oregon Ducks ahead of the 2001 college football season, and the weight of those expectations fell almost entirely on the broad shoulders of starting quarterback Joey Harrington. Those expectations began building in November of 1978, when Oregon football coach Len Casanova wrote a letter congratulating his 1967 quarterback, John Harrington, on the birth of his son Joey.
“Hoping to hear from you in about seventeen years,” he wrote to the two-week-old.
Harrington began his career with the Ducks as a freshman in 1999, but it was during his junior year that he distinguished himself as a starting quarterback with NFL potential, throwing 2,967 passing yards while leading his team to its best record ever, with ten wins and two losses. In the process, Harrington set himself up as one of the top contenders for the 2001 Heisman Trophy, awarded annually to college football’s best player. And with Knight’s money once again rolling in, Oregon was anxious to flex its financial muscles and show off its star quarterback with an ostentatious display that set Harrington up for a kind of stardom rarely known by college athletes.
“For the better part of six months I had over a million views a day,” Harrington said. “A ten-story billboard in New York City at the top of Penn Station, across from Madison Square Garden, has a way of attracting eyeballs.”
The billboard pictured Harrington alone, in full uniform, and it sold him as “Joey Heisman,” which transformed him into an overnight media sensation, prompting op-eds in The New York Times and hours of punditry on sports television and radio programs.
“Some people were thrilled that a player from a West Coast school not named USC was receiving this kind of national attention,” Harrington said. “Some people were furious that someone would have the audacity to promote themselves in a way that was so in-your-face and over the top—but most of all, people were just curious who I was and what I had done to deserve this larger-than-life attention.”
What Harrington had done was simple, if not easy: he’d won a lot of college football games—fourteen out of the sixteen he’d started by the time the 2001 season began—and he’d won many of them in spectacular fashion, racking up more than one-third of his college football victories with dramatic fourth-quarter comebacks. He’d also had the good fortune to be a winner at a time when winning really mattered for the University of Oregon. Harrington and his teammates were the first generation of Oregon football players to benefit from Knight’s largesse, especially when it came to improved facilities like the state-of-the-art training facility, the Moshofsky Center, which Knight had helped fund. They also benefitted from access to the latest Nike shoes, uniforms, and equipment, and they enjoyed the fringe benefits that came with playing football at a school increasingly reliant on athletic programs for funding: cheerleaders who were encouraged to “date” them; tutors who were paid to help them with homework; and enough professors, in enough departments, who were willing to help carry them academically so that they could focus their efforts on the field.
Harrington studied business and enjoyed practicing classical piano on his great-grandmother’s restored 1911 Baldwin. When he had time for live concerts, he preferred the mellow, folksy sounds of James Taylor or the Dave Matthews Band—a far cry from the larger-than-life Joey Heisman image, which he bought into as a means of conquering his own nerves from August until January, when his teammates relied on him to be a fearless, faultless leader. In time, he won so many games, under such stressful conditions, that his false bravado turned into confidence real enough to cast a shadow longer than his billboard near Times Square. By the time the 2001 season got under way, some people were comparing Harrington to Tom Brady, noting how quickly the three-step passer moved in the pocket, and how agile he was at rolling out of the pocket when it collapsed; they remarked on his poise and how rarely he forced the ball into traffic. At six feet four inches and 215 pounds, he could gain ten pounds of bulk and remain just as quick on his feet after going professional, which he was sure to do if his senior year with the Ducks went as well as his junior year had.
The season began with a hard-won opener against Wisconsin, which seesawed dramatically right up until Harrington led a masterful drive late in the fourth quarter to claim a 31–28 victory over the Badgers, who had been one of two teams to beat the Ducks in the previous season. A week later, the Ducks steamrolled Utah 24–10, keeping the team scoreless in the second half. Then, on September 29, 2001, Oregon hosted the USC Trojans at Autzen Stadium, where both teams took to the field before the start for a moment of silence to honor the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks, which took place just a few days after the Ducks had played Utah. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan followed on October 2, 2001, and President George W. Bush’s War on Terror pushed campus protest movements in a new direction.
On the evening of January 11, 2001, two hundred state police officers surrounded a massive apparel factory on the outskirts of Puebla City, Mexico, not far from the slopes of an active volcano called Popocatépetl. The police were dressed in riot gear and armed with guns, shields, and clubs, and they arrived with leaders from a government-backed union that represented the factory’s 850 workers, who had been engaged in a general strike for three days. With the riot squad behind him, one of the union leaders entered the compound, where 300 of the striking workers had been occupying the factory. There were a number of grievances behind the strike, including low wages and abusive supervisors, but at its core the work stoppage was about the lack of confidence factory workers had in their government-backed union, which had sided with management often enough to make them wonder whether its allegiance was to them or the company. When the union leader arrived with the riot squad behind him, the workers knew that they’d been right to worry; and when he spoke, it was clear that they might have more to worry about than they’d ever imagined.
“Are you frightened yet?” he asked.
These troubles had been brewing for months at the factory, which was, in many ways, a monument to the glory and the ugliness of the new global economy: a sprawling compound of hangar-like buildings where Mexican workers sewed and knitted apparel for the American companies Nike and Reebok, under the supervision of the Korean manufacturing firm Kukdong International. Some of the workers said they were paid less than minimum wage, which meant they were bringing home under $25 for a 45-hour work week; those who were paid a legal wage didn’t make much more than that, and while most of the factory’s workers were women, Kukdong International did not offer its workers maternity pay. The company also failed to pay the workers a Christmas bonus that is required by law in Mexico, and that wasn’t the only law it was breaking: children between the ages of 13 and 15 were illegally working as many as 10 hours per day at the factory; workers were sickened by rancid meat served in the employee cafeteria; and factory managers had occasionally beaten employees with hammers or screwdrivers.
Near the end of 2000, these simmering resentments led five factory supervisors to organize a movement aimed at ousting their existing government-backed union in favor of one more willing to stand up to Kukdong International. Organized labor was not something the company wanted to find itself up against when it came time to meet a demanding production schedule from Reebok or Nike, which was at times responsible for 85 percent of the factory’s orders. Terrified over this prospect, Kukdong International decided to crush the nascent shadow union by firing the five supervisors who had organized the effort. But instead of frightening the workers, these firings emboldened them. The workers held their ground for as long as they could before the police began beating them, with help from their own union representatives. At least four of the strikers ended up in the hospital with concussions and internal bleeding, and two pregnant women suffered miscarriages. After nursing their wounds, the workers agreed to return to work as long as Kukdong International didn’t fire any of the factory’s workers in retaliation. The company signed a document agreeing to these terms, but soon broke it by firing 250 of the workers who had taken part in the strike. State police continued to play a role in Kukdong’s intimidation tactics by visiting the homes of the workers most deeply tied to the independent union, issuing several arrest warrants related to the general strike. Thirty police officers soon took up posts inside the factory, where they scrutinized workers for any sign of dissent or labor-organizing efforts.
A decade earlier, all of this might have gone unnoticed to the world beyond the shadow of Popocatépetl. Prior to the founding of the WRC in 1998, the movement to end sweatshop labor had advanced in fits and bursts, but with the new campus group came the structure and organization necessary to propel the cause forward. In less than three years, the group had spread from a handful of elite Eastern colleges, like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Wesleyan, to more than one hundred chapters at institutions ranging from the Ivy League to public universities like Western Michigan and Georgia State. Each new campus the group reached led to a renewed sense of purpose through protest, as well as a refreshed well of recruits to conduct fact-finding missions to the overseas factories where Nike shoes and apparel were made. When things began to fall apart at Kukdong International’s factory, the WRC sent a team of seven activists to Puebla City, where they interviewed more than forty workers who outlined their grievances with Kukdong International and with Nike. The resulting report that the WRC issued later that month proved troublesome for the Korean manufacturing company and for its biggest clients, Nike and Reebok. It was also an unwelcome surprise for administrators and athletic directors at eleven universities that were named in the report: Nike had hired Kukdong International to make licensed apparel for these schools, which included Georgetown, Purdue, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oregon.
Nike’s initial reaction was to downplay its relationship with Kukdong International, and to dismiss the WRC’s fact-finding methodology as an unfair attempt to politicize the company’s business dealings. Without conducting its own investigation, the industry-governed FLA suggested the issue might be resolved by allowing the factory workers to choose a new representative from the ranks of the same government-backed union that had already failed to support their interests—a suggestion Nike publicized while working behind the scenes with a Mexican lawyer who made his own recommendations about how the company should proceed. In the end, the attorney recommended some of the same solutions proposed in the WRC report, but Nike continued to ignore calls for action until the media coverage of campus protests prompted universities implicated in the scandal to publicly insist on some kind of compromise that might bring an end to the standoff. Facing intense pressure from the eleven universities named in the WRC report, Nike allowed delegates from the anti-sweatshop group to interview managers from the Kukdong factory and officials from the government-backed union—two groups that seemed to be following commands from Nike. This was a major concession that would have been unimaginable just months earlier, and it was important for a number of reasons. One was that it allowed members of the WRC fact-finding mission to speak with Kukdong employees who were not disgruntled, and who could dispassionately describe the factory’s working conditions from the perspective of middle managers who saw a bit of everything on a daily basis. It also gave them a chance to speak to less radical factory workers, who nonetheless supported their activist colleagues. And, perhaps most important, it showed that orders were coming from Nike, not from Kukdong or the government-backed union. Over the course of several months, the WRC group interviewed more than 150 workers and managers from the factory, which gave them enough ammunition to pressure Nike into allowing Kukdong’s workers to withdraw from the government-backed union in favor of one that was independent, with leaders elected by the workers themselves. It was an unprecedented victory for the factory workers, the labor rights group, and the broader anti-sweatshop movement, which was beginning to reach the public in ways that transcended growing membership and visibility.
“People are drawn in by the horror stories,” one WRC activist said at the time. “But then they start to see how the whole system works.”
In early September, Kukdong International formally recognized its workers’ independent union, gaining momentum for a movement that was preparing to tackle a broad range of corporate abuses. Later that month, police were expecting 50,000 activists from this movement to converge on Washington, D.C., in protest of meetings between the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Then, as with so many other things, the September 11 terrorist attacks altered the course of the anti-sweatshop movement. USAS, the group responsible for founding the WRC, said it was “neither the time nor the place to gather in opposition,” almost certainly unaware that their momentum would be nearly impossible to regain after the nation’s period of mourning.
In the months that followed, campus protests went from looking unseemly to unpatriotic as more and more Americans moved on from grief to anger. After the United States invaded Afghanistan and began moving closer toward war in Iraq, activists and student protesters became reenergized with a sense of urgency and purpose not seen since the Vietnam War. The anti-sweatshop movement, which had been the most successful campus protest campaign since college students raised their voices against apartheid in South Africa, proved to be a casualty of the protests against war in the Middle East—and, in many ways, a casualty of its own success. The shocking speed with which the anti-war protest movement came together was, in part, a result of the culture of dissent left behind by anti-sweatshop activists who had been organizing on college campuses for years, where they forged enduring leftist networks. By November of 2001, the anti-war movement had taken over at more than 400 college campuses around the country.
Those few students who remained committed to the deflated anti-sweatshop movement had been dealt a staggering blow by Frohnmayer, who had given other university administrators a playbook for resisting WRC membership when he maneuvered Oregon out of its agreement in early 2001. At the same time that the labor movement was weakening, Nike was strengthening its position after learning, through Frohnmayer’s capitulation to Knight, that it could effectively use financial pressure to bend university policies to the will of the company. Knight’s company had also learned a few other tricks during its tussles with anti-sweatshop and human rights groups. In May of 2001, Nike began working to improve its damaged reputation by changing its messaging on the issue of sweatshop labor. The company that had spent years defending itself with the claim that it didn’t make shoes, just designed and marketed them, portrayed itself very differently in a statement issued that month by its corporate and social responsibility manager, Harsh Saini.
“We were a bunch of shoe geeks who expanded so much without thinking of being socially responsible that we went from being a very big sexy brand name to suddenly becoming the poster boy for everything bad in manufacturing,” Saini said.
After the moment of silence had passed, and the somber mood along with it, Oregon’s game against the USC Trojans followed a script that had come to seem familiar since Harrington took over as starting quarterback for the Ducks: an early lead, a reversal of fortune, and a dramatic comeback to secure victory in the closing seconds of the game. In the final push, Harrington moved his team downfield in just forty seconds before throwing the touchdown pass that gave the Ducks their third win of the 2001 season. In the weeks that followed, Oregon took its dream season on the road, beating Utah State, Arizona, and California in away games that left them with an undefeated record as the season neared its halfway point. It was the first time since 1964 that the Ducks had held a 6–0 record, and with each thrilling victory came even greater hopes that Harrington’s talent might cover the $250,000 check Oregon had written for his Joey Heisman billboard.
On October 20, 2001, Knight’s two alma maters collided when Oregon hosted Stanford at Autzen Stadium, where the Ducks had won twenty-three consecutive home games—a streak longer than any other team in the nation could claim. In the spirit of magnanimity, Oregon allowed the Stanford marching band inside Autzen Stadium for the first time in eleven years, ending a ban that resulted from a 1990 halftime show when they’d poked fun at the standoff between Oregon’s loggers and its spotted owl, a newly protected species with a habitat large enough to send the state’s timber industry into a decline. Once the game started, the Cardinal proceeded to hurt Oregon’s feelings all over again. Stanford took the lead early before ceding three touchdowns to the Ducks, but neither team could pull far enough ahead to get comfortable as the game seesawed relentlessly. Halfway through the fourth quarter, the Ducks had failed to move the ball beyond the fifty-yard line, while the Cardinal chipped away at Oregon’s fourteen-point lead by blocking punts, intercepting passes, and capitalizing on every opportunity to score touchdowns. For only the third time since he became Oregon’s quarterback, Harrington lost a football game.
After years of ignoring or denying accusations that it had relied on sweatshop labor, Nike began marketing itself as a company trapped by its own humble beginnings, unaware of the immense power it had accrued. But one jogger from San Francisco wasn’t buying Nike’s denials or its new image, and he set out to make his case in the Supreme Court of California.
As a fifty-four-year-old former marathoner with a history of environmental activism stretching back to his days at Yale, Marc Kasky had learned to recognize an injustice that needed action. The solution, he decided, was a lawsuit against the company that had sold him many of the old running shoes he had piled in his closet. But it wasn’t really about the shoes.
In April of 1998, when Kasky filed his lawsuit in California Superior Court, he hadn’t bought a pair of Nike shoes since reading about the deplorable conditions of its factories in Indonesia, seven years earlier. And for years, this modest personal boycott was enough to give Kasky peace of mind. But the sweatshop scandals kept erupting, each time bringing new denials and a fresh spin from Knight’s company, which perversely sought to paint itself as a crusader for labor rights.
“Nike makes a very good product,” he said. “But we all need to be accountable for our words and actions. Nike has been representing itself as a model corporate citizen, and it was disappointing and discouraging when I began to suspect otherwise.”
Kasky’s lawsuit accused Nike of violating California’s state consumer laws by willfully misleading the public about the working conditions endured by hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indonesian factory workers who made the company’s shoes. California’s unfair competition law, which bans false claims and advertising, allowed Kasky to file the suit as a representative of the state’s public, alleging that the workers making Nike shoes throughout Asia were, in fact, subjected to physical punishment and sexual abuse, and that they were exposed to dangerous chemicals for prolonged periods of time, contrary to the company’s claims. As evidence of this, Kasky’s lawyers pointed to the leaked Ernst & Young audit, commissioned by Nike itself, which documented serious problems and recommended specific improvements that the company did not implement.
Nike’s lawyers persuaded a superior court judge to toss the lawsuit by claiming it would violate the corporation’s first amendment right to free speech, but the Supreme Court of California disagreed with the company’s novel argument.
“When a business makes factual representations about its own products or its own operations, it must speak truthfully,” the court said.
Nike then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to take the case in January of 2003, but balked later that same year by deciding it had “improvidently granted” the scheduled hearing, which had been widely expected to produce a landmark ruling on the free speech rights of corporations. As a result, Nike was forced to return to California and defend itself in a court that had already denied its First Amendment argument. Faced with the strong possibility that a California judge would find that Nike had violated the state’s laws against false advertising when it claimed not to use sweatshop labor, Knight’s company chose to settle the case out of court. The settlement, which left intact the Supreme Court of California ruling that makes companies vulnerable to lawsuits over false advertising claims, cost Nike $1.5 million.
It was the kind of mixed result America’s anti-sweatshop activists were learning to live with: in court, Nike suffered a black eye and lost $1.5 million to the movement, but insisted on paying its settlement to the industry-friendly FLA, rather than support a truly independent factory monitoring organization like the WRC. It was not unlike the settlement that forced tobacco companies to air anti-smoking television commercials, but allowed them to have enough creative control to produce ads that one tobacco industry critic called “as invisible and unwatchable as they possibly can be.”
Victory was more clear in Mexico, where Kukdong International, and its clients Reebok and Nike, lost an eighteen-month battle with workers and signed a collective bargaining agreement resulting in the formation of Sitemex, one of the first independent unions in Mexico’s maquiladora sector. And in American universities, where the WRC had reignited the fires of organized student protest, the movement was stronger than ever before, but reorganizing away from labor issues and toward keeping America out of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Ducks spent the rest of the college football season exacting revenge on other teams for the stinging loss they’d suffered to Stanford: the Washington State University Cougars fell in a game that saw the Ducks gain 565 yards of total offense; Harrington threw six touchdown passes, matching his own record from the previous season, in a rout of Arizona State; and the UCLA Bruins, considered Oregon’s most capable challenger for the conference crown, lost by a single point in a nail-biter that earned Oregon its third conference title and burnished Harrington’s chances at winning the Heisman. In December, the Pac-10 Conference champions took a victory lap around the Oregon State Beavers at the annual Civil War match, and on New Year’s Day the number-two-ranked Ducks faced Colorado, ranked number three in the nation, at the Fiesta Bowl.
Harrington would rather have been playing in the Rose Bowl on January 1, 2002, but he didn’t treat the Fiesta Bowl like a consolation prize. It was, in fact, some of the best football he and his team had ever played. Throughout the year, Oregon’s offense had averaged thirty-four points per game, gaining the most yards per play while allowing the fewest sacks in their conference—strong numbers that the team handily surpassed while holding Colorado’s potent offense to just forty-nine rushing yards. Harrington, in the final game of his college football career, threw for 350 yards and four touchdowns in the 38–16 victory over the Buffaloes. He was passed over for the Heisman, but Harrington was nevertheless elated over his team’s performance throughout the season. He was picked third overall in the 2002 NFL draft.
“I was the kid that helped turn a local team into a national college football power,” said Harrington, who won twenty-seven of the thirty games he played with the Ducks.
Years later, NBA broadcaster Ahmad Rashād, who had played football at the University of Oregon in the 1970s, recalled Harrington’s Fiesta Bowl performance, and his brilliant tenure with the Ducks, as a key reason for the team’s ascension into the ranks of the perennial contenders in college football.
“For any kid in the country who wants to play for a big-time program, Oregon is a real option,” he said. “In the past, it hasn’t been.”
Beyond Harrington’s spectacular final season with the Ducks, Rashād offered two other reasons why the University of Oregon had become a college football powerhouse and a draw for the country’s best young athletes: the newly renovated Autzen Stadium and its state-of-the-art locker rooms, which had both come courtesy of Knight’s financial contributions to the program. These impressive facilities gave the Ducks an edge when it came to attracting the nation’s top high-school football prospects, which was important in the increasingly competitive world of college football recruiting. Nike had transformed the University of Oregon into its own brand, but the value of that brand depended on bringing the best athletes to Eugene year after year. Anything less would slow the trickle-down economics of the University of Nike: good players ensured more lucrative television contracts for the conference, more donations and licensing revenue for the university, and higher performance bonuses for the coach. In pursuit of the best players, Oregon’s athletic department sought to impress potential recruits by flying them to Eugene on one of Nike’s corporate jets, or having an attractive cheerleader show them around campus. Sometimes, they resorted to even more extreme methods.