Phil gently prodded Travis to join him at Nike, but backed off when he saw it wasn’t going to happen. “It never got very far,” Phil says. “It was maybe one conversation.”
Travis, who grew up in Hillsboro, attended Jesuit High School near Beaverton and was a good student. In addition to drawing, he had a passion for music, and as a teenager he began to compose and perform his own rap songs. Improbably, when Travis was seventeen MCA Records offered him a record deal to cut an album to be produced by the Bomb Squad, the team behind the best-selling and influential Public Enemy records. It was unusual, to say the least, for an unknown teen rapper to land such a deal; the fact that this rapper was also a billionaire’s son probably didn’t hurt.
Under the name Chilly Tee, Travis released his first and only rap record, Get Off Mine, in 1993. It included a song called “Just Do It,” a streetwise interpretation of the Nike slogan that described a world never seen before (or since) on a rap record, and another called “Snap Ya Neck to This”:
See, they call me the Tee, in ’86 it was Trav
If you need to get in touch you can catch me on the ave
I got the Nike wears, head to toe with the trim
The BMW I drive is the color of my skin
I’m in it to win it, I got the skills and the status
You wanna know why? My pockets are the fattest
Not takin’ what’s given cause see, I didn’t fit in
Just gimme the mic and a rhythm, that’s how I’m livin’
The market for privileged white rappers singing about the less-than-mean streets of suburban Portland turned out to be predictably small—the record vanished, and Chilly Tee was put on ice for good. Travis recalls his brief career as a playa with some reluctance. “Nobody bought that record,” he says. “I liked making music, but I hated the performing part of it. I think there’s a reason most animators are hidden behind giant curtains. They’re not meant for the spotlight.”
After graduating from Portland State University, Travis interned with Vinton Studios; Will Vinton, a Claymation whiz who grew up in McMinnville, had founded the animation house in the mid-1970s. Travis found a home at Vinton and quickly distinguished himself as an adept artist. “Travis is a good animator,” says Vinton, who today runs a company called Freewill Entertainment that develops, produces, and directs animated productions for film and television. (He’s also worked on TV pilots at Fox Broadcasting and at MTV and a movie script at ABC. Currently he’s writing a movie adaptation of Jack Hightower, the graphic novel he created for Dark Horse Comics. He’s also a teacher at the Art Institute of Portland, where he conducts a class on claymation and stop-motion photography.) “[Travis] kind of found himself when he came to Vinton Studios. He started at the bottom and proved himself to be quite good.”
Pleased that Travis seemed to be thriving at Vinton, Phil Knight stepped in with a $5 million investment in 1998, which gave him 15 percent ownership of the company. Part of that original investment included an agreement that allowed him to assume control of the board of directors if the company began losing significant amounts of money. Four years later, Vinton was on the verge of bankruptcy. Phil put an additional $450,000 into the company and acted on the agreement to assume control in the event of heavy losses. Knight ousted Vinton from his own studio.
“We’ll get the first (box office) numbers on February 8. So keep me away from tall buildings that day.”- Phil Knight
Vinton was outraged. In a parting memo, he called Phil’s move “surreal” and “Machiavellian,” and he eventually sued Phil and Vinton Studios’ board of directors, saying he’d been forced out unfairly. (A judge dismissed the suit.) Phil, meanwhile, promoted Travis to a seat on the board even though his son, age twenty-nine, had never been a manager and had only four years’ experience as an animator.
To stamp his own brand on the studio, Phil considered more than a hundred names for the company before settling on Laika. (“Phil likes Ks,” one insider says.) Only later did Phil learn that Laika was the name of the Russian dog sent into orbit aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957, the first living mammal in space. As it turns out, Laika was also the first mammal to die in space—she died during the first hours of the mission, and her remains disintegrated, along with the rest of Sputnik 2, upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere. It’s a measure of Phil’s just-do-it style of decision-making that his studio was named after a dog that crashed and burned.
Phil and Travis were getting their new company off the ground when they received some tragic news. Phil and Penny Knight’s eldest son, Matthew, died of a heart attack at age thirty-four while scuba diving with colleagues in El Salvador. Matthew had been shooting a fundraising video for Christian Children of the World, a Portland nonprofit, and helping acquire two houses for orphanages. He suffered the heart attack while sixty-five feet underwater and died instantly. In December, four years after the accident, Knight and the University of Oregon announced that the university’s new $227 million basketball arena (built with a $100 million contribution from the Knights) would be named Matthew Knight Arena. Beyond honoring their son publicly, the Knights have said little, if anything, about the painful subject of his death.
Several months after the funeral, Phil stepped down as Nike CEO and became chairman of the board, a title he retains. He increased his philanthropic giving, donating not only the $100 million to University of Oregon athletics but also $105 million to Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and $100 million to the Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). OHSU is renaming its research center the Knight Cancer Institute; Stanford’s new business campus will be called the Knight Management Center.
Nearer to home, Matthew’s death has brought Phil and Travis closer than they’ve ever been. Father and son work together on a shared dream: building an animation studio that produces distinctive, high-quality feature films. Travis’s work on Coraline has given him a newfound appreciation for what his dad had to do to build an upstart athletic footwear business into the world’s largest shoe company. In the end, Travis may prove that we often become our parents, hard as we may try to avoid it. He remembers that when he was a boy his father was “always working”; now Travis finds himself spending long nights and weekends manipulating plastic puppets in a Hillsboro warehouse before going home to his wife and two young children.
“It’s sort of funny, watching Travis’s evolution,” Phil says with a sly smile. “He always felt that he would never let his work be as all-consuming as mine was when he was growing up. And I’m watching it slowly creep up on him.” He laughs. Travis, looking slightly annoyed, says, “Well, you have to find a balance. And that’s hard.” After considering the point, Phil says, “It’s very hard.”
With so much riding on the success of Coraline, Phil briefly considered putting the Nike brand behind the movie, but then decided against it. “We don’t see the tie-in,” he says. “Not on Coraline.” He shoots his son a guilty sideways look, as if to apologize for being so hardheaded. Travis’s expression doesn’t change. The old man isn’t telling him anything he hasn’t heard before.
Published: February 2009
