Jeff Johnson

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from May 1997.)

LIFE AFTER NIKE. They met as students at Stanford University in the 1960s. Both sold Tiger running shoes, first from their car trunks and later from small offices.

I bought my first Tigers from one of them, Jeff Johnson, and met the other, then known by his nickname of Buck, a few years later when he came to the Runner’s World office to introduce his new brand of shoes. He later dropped the old nickname (but lived up to it by making big bucks) and is now known as Phil Knight.

Jeff is responsible for naming the company. The word came to him in a dream: Nike. The business thrived, of course. Knight is now the most powerful business leader in sports, and Jeff Johnson is long departed from Nike.       

Jeff took very early retirement in 1983, when in his early 40s. He didn’t have to wonder what he’d do with the rest of his life. He would do more of what he already did for fun: shoot photos for magazines, fish at his lakeside home in New Hampshire and coach runners.

“I entered coaching in 1969, by accident actually,” he recalls. “I was coerced into taking over a Boston women’s club, the Liberty AC. I couldn’t say no to a bunch of talented, dedicated young women.”

Jeff later coached at two high schools in New Hampshire. Former athletes of his occasionally call to tell him “the good directions their lives have taken and how they credit track and cross-country with giving them the tools for success.

“More than once I had graduating seniors tell me that they learned more in cross-country than they learned in school. Not true literally, of course, but what they meant was that they learned things in running that school didn’t teach them.”

Jeff has now taken a leap to coaching out-of-college athletes. This has led him back to where he started as an athlete, to the Stanford area where he founded The Farm Team. Meanwhile his old classmate, Phil Knight, oversees an empire. Who’s to judge which of them is better off?

UPDATE. I knew Jeff Johnson, as a fellow runner, for almost a decade before there was a company called Nike. The Farm Team that he founded moved north and morphed into the Oregon Track Club Elite. Jeff is back in New Hampshire, enjoying his long retirement.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]