Phil Knight Partying, Growing With Stanford Coeds
The one creepy old dude in your undergrad creative writing course? Maybe it's Nike founder Phil Knight, who's secretly been attending classes at Stanford, learning to bare his soul through fiction. Knight isn't enrolled at Stanford, but $105 million donations have a way of opening doors.
Interviews conducted by the Wall Street Journal with classmates suggest that Knight, like John McCain and a million other aging "successful" dudes, has an adolescent Hemingway crush. He's working on a novel that will probably be about a misunderstood, hard-charging corporate exec fighting for what he believes in against weak-willed naysayers and child-loving labor activists.
Also, he's on Facebook! "He appears in a photo posted there," according to the Wall Street Journal, his arms around two undergraduates, with a third student holding what appears to be a drained margarita." Someone want to send that in?
Ironically, Knight's financial gifts to the school are going to develop the "Knight Management Center" at Stanford's business school, where each year hundreds of fresh-faced future CEOs will be subject to the burning resentment and scorn of Knight's English student peers.
Stanford Mystery: Who's the Old Guy In the White Nikes? [WSJ]