It was 1962. Phil Knight sat in his Stanford Business School classroom, working on what should have been just another forgettable term paper. The assignment was simple: write about a business idea.

But Knight's idea was anything but simple. It was, by his own admission, crazy.

"Can Japanese sports shoes do to German sports shoes what Japanese cameras did to German cameras?"

At the time, Adidas and Puma dominated the athletic shoe market with an iron grip. They were established, respected, untouchable. Knight's paper proposed that cheap, high-quality running shoes from Japan could dethrone these giants.

His professor gave him an A. The rest of the world would have given him much less.

Fresh out of Stanford, Knight didn't go to Wall Street or join a Fortune 500 company. Instead, he flew to Japan with no connections, no experience, and no real plan beyond his term paper. Walking into the offices of Onitsuka (now ASICS), he bluffed his way into a meeting and invented a company on the spot: Blue Ribbon Sports.

"How many employees do you have?" they asked.

"We're expanding rapidly," Knight lied. The company existed only in his imagination.

Incredibly, they gave him distribution rights for the western United States.

Knight returned to Oregon with a handshake deal and a problem: he needed money. His father, disappointed that his Stanford-educated son wanted to sell shoes, reluctantly loaned him $50.

From the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight became a one-man operation. He drove to track meets across the Pacific Northwest, selling Tiger running shoes to anyone who would listen. High school tracks. College meets. Local running clubs. If there were runners, Knight was there with his trunk open.

His first-year sales: $8,000.

He couldn't even afford to quit his day job as an accountant at Price Waterhouse. For five years, he worked full-time while building his shoe business on nights and weekends. The company's first "headquarters" was his parents' basement. When they finally could afford office space, it was above a bar with broken windows they couldn't afford to fix. Pigeon droppings fell through gaps in the ceiling onto their desks.

But Knight had a secret weapon: his old track coach, Bill Bowerman.

Bowerman wasn't just any coach - he was an obsessive tinkerer who spent nights ripping apart running shoes and rebuilding them to be lighter, faster, better. One Sunday morning in 1971, inspiration struck as he watched his wife making waffles.

"That's it!" he shouted, and ran to his workshop.

What happened next has become the stuff of legend. Bowerman poured liquid urethane into his wife's waffle iron, destroying the appliance but creating something revolutionary: a sole with waffle-like nubs that provided incredible traction while remaining lightweight.

It was Nike's first breakthrough innovation. They called it the Waffle Trainer.

By then, Knight had ended his relationship with Onitsuka and launched his own brand. The name came from an employee who dreamed of the Greek goddess of victory. The iconic swoosh logo cost $35, designed by a Portland State student who Knight thought charged too much.

By 1984, Nike was growing but still an underdog. Adidas ruled basketball. Converse had the legends. Nike was for runners, not ballers.

Then Knight made the kind of bet that either makes you a genius or a fool.

Michael Jordan was a talented rookie, but far from a sure thing. He preferred Adidas - they were his dream sponsor. But Adidas wasn't interested. Neither was Converse, who offered him $100,000 a year with no special products.

Knight saw something others didn't. He offered Jordan something unprecedented: $500,000 a year, Nike stock options, and his own signature shoe line. For a company doing $900 million in revenue, it was an insane gamble.

"Air Jordan" launched in 1985. The NBA immediately banned the shoes for violating uniform rules. Nike paid the fines and turned the ban into marketing gold: "Banned by the NBA" became their rallying cry.

First-year Air Jordan sales: $126 million. Today, Jordan Brand alone generates over $5 billion annually.

The mediocre miler from Oregon had just changed sports marketing forever.

Knight stepped down as Nike CEO in 2016, leaving behind a company valued at over $150 billion. The shy accountant who couldn't break 4 minutes in the mile had broken every rule in business instead.

When asked about his journey, Knight often returns to a lesson from his teacher about the Oregon Trail: "The cowards never started, and the weak died along the way. That leaves us."