Del Hayes, one of the earliest employees of Blue Ribbon Sports and a Nike director for many years, passed away at the age of 82 earlier this month. Phil Knight met Hayes when he worked at Price Waterhouse after studying to become an accountant, and he was apparently in awe of Hayes' way with numbers. “He looked at numbers the way the poet looks at clouds, the way the geologist looks at rocks. He could draw from them rhapsodic song, demotic truths,” Knight wrote in Shoe Dog, his memoir. “Day after day I watched Hayes do something I'd never thought possible: He made accounting an art.” A few years after he left to run Blue Ribbon Sports, Knight called Hayes to guide the young company through financially precarious years. The accountant joined the group of hard-drinking and sometimes flamboyant employees who transformed Blue Ribbon Sports from an importer of Asics footwear to a publicly traded company with the mighty Nike brand. “Six foot two, three hundred pounds, most of it stuffed sausage-like into an exceedingly inexpensive polyester suit, Hayes possessed great talent, great wit, great passion – and great appetites,” Knight wrote. “Nothing gave him more pleasure than laying waste to a hoagie and a bottle of vodka, unless it was doing both while studying a spreadsheet.” In a statement released by Nike, Knight said: “He was my friend for 54 years, and my heart is heavy.”

Topics