Bowerman felt his original mission of making an honest shoe had been eroded by a new ideology, which he summed up in two words: “Make money.” Nike, he griped in a letter to a colleague, was “distributing a lot of crap.” Even to one of Nike’s founding partners, it seemed, the words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.”
