Nike founder Phil Knight didn’t need a smartphone to capture LeBron James’ record-breaking moment

He was the white-haired man in the crowd – sitting there, hands in his lap, watching with his own eyes as LeBron James broke the NBA scoring record.

But Phil Knight is no bystander. He did not need a smart phone and the Instagram material because he, as much as anyone, is the individual who put together that piece of history. It will have amused him that he has gone viral as a bystander to it.

Knight co-founded and built the Nike Corporation and like those who are the best in business, he threw out a lot of ideas, some of them duds, along the way.

When he’d decided in 1972 that taking on Adidas was a business proposition – the German company’s training shoes were expensive and hard to come by in the US – he tried to come up with a lasting name and logo.

It took a long time to put Knight off his idea of ‘Dimension Six’ – because he could be very stubborn – and it was the company’s co-founder who came up with ‘Nike’ – the winged goddess of victory from Greek mythology.

Phil Knight (front centre) was one of the only people in the room watching the action with his own two eyes

Knight was sat with James’ sons Bryce and Bronny as their father made history against the Oklahoma Thunder

The 84-year-old founded and built the Nike Corporation in 1972 with the original name ‘Dimension Six’

Some tried to put Knight off the logo he’d come up with – or rather, that a local art student he’d met had come up with, after he’d asked her to work on designs, for a fee of $35 (£28). 

‘Looks like an upside down Puma stripe,’ the co-founder, Bob Woodell said. But Knight insisted on it. ‘I don’t love it. But I think it’ll grow on me,’ he said of what would become known across the planet as the Nike Swoosh.

And when they’d put all of that together, Knight decided they needed athlete endorsements – very fast – especially for the new basketball and tennis shoes they were trying to sell. 

He was advised to tie up with a 17-year-old kid called Jimmy Connors but instead went in with a slightly older Romanian called Ille Nastase, who had a terrible temper and had already acquired the nickname ‘Nasty.’

Cost had something to do with this. Knight agreed to pay Nastase a mere $3,000 a year. But it was a first step into a hugely successful marketing strategy that turned ‘bad boy’ athletes into counterculture heroes who sold shoes. 

Knight was joking when he later said that this was a sign of his far-sighted promotional judgement. He’s got humility. And he lives and breathes sport and its athletes. He asked that his picture be taken with him and Nastase at the time.

It took eight years for Nike to become the number one athletic shoe and it was certainly not always pretty, as the corporation decided that recruiting and even training the best athletes was the best way to overtake Adidas. 

In her 1991 book ‘Swoosh: the Unauthorised Story of Nike and the Men who Played There’, former senior executive Julie Strasser revealed that minutes from a 1979 Nike corporate retreat detailed how track and field stars at the company’s Athletics West training centre was developing steroids for athletes.

James celebrated the historic night with his family who quickly took to the court to be with him

James overtook Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time NBA scoring record and finished the night on 38,390

In large part, the cash and the image made athletes like LeBron James want to be on Knight’s team. Writer Brian Windhorst relates in his book, ‘LeBron, Inc.: The Making of a Billion-Dollar Athlete,’ why James always dreamed of working with Nike: ‘Some of it was superior branding. Some of it was ego: He wanted to wear the swoosh.’

But it was Knight’s personality, too. James signed a life-changing seven-year deal with the company in 2003, before he was drafted to an NBA team.

Two years later, he approached Knight at an event, said he’d been reading up on Nike and learned that it had been founded in 1972. He handed him a 1972 Rolex, which he’d asked a jeweller to source. It was engraved: ‘With thanks for taking a chance on me.’

Knight signed the new NBA all-time top scorer in 2003 before he was drafted into the NBA

Other Nike athletes seem to share the affection. Maria Sharapova tweeted the image of Knight watching James. ‘Phil Knight. No screen. No need. The only one taking in history.’

Footage has since emerged of Knight meeting James after the game in which the Los Angeles Laker player passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s long-standing record.

‘I’m so happy you were here,’ James told him in a video shared on social media.

‘I wouldn’t have missed it,’ Knight says.

And he most certainly did not.