A member of the Oregon track team that accompanied the start of Phil Knight's business, James Gorman was among the U.S. industry pioneers who contributed to the rise of Nike as well as several other brands in the U.S. market. A sub-four minute miler at the University of Oregon, he was on the same team as Steve Prefontaine and coached by Bill Bowerman, Nike's co-founder. Gorman started working with Knight while he was training for the 1972 Olympic trials. He sold shoes from the back of a Volkswagen van, helped to press the first Nike tee-shirts and ended up spending 18 years at the company. Gorman then joined Rob Strasser and other former Nike executives to become a partner at Sports Inc, the company that formed Adidas USA. Among other assignments, he was CEO at Diadora in North America and president of Puma North America. More recently, Gorman was vice president of footwear manufacturing at Columbia Sportswear. He was inducted into the University of Oregon Athletic Hall of Fame in 2011. Gorman died on June 12 in Boston, aged 67, after a battle with scleroderma, an auto-immune disease. An obituary published in the Boston Globe indicates that a get-together is to be held in Gorman's memory in Portland later this summer.

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