Brooks

"When the final script came in, the unbelievably controlling Brooks made me come to his office to read it while he sat staring at me from six feet away. He then refused to deal with anyone at the company other than me. As a result I learned so much from him about the craft of big-time moviemaking. He was also the cheapest producer/director I’ve ever known, tough as the old shoe leather his face resembled."

"The smile froze after a few days, when Johnny Austad joined the conference call for the Brooks management for the first time. Now the bureaucracy and paperwork were over, Austad demanded results. "And if you don't deliver as promised, I will come over and drink your blood," was the message. "I wanted to signal that we were Vikings," he smiles retrospectively. Austad's next move was to attack the management with an axe, move Brooks to Seattle, and hire one of Nike’s top people, Helen Rockey. The new boss was known as "the rocket" among friends because of her skiing skills. In record time, she had developed Nike’s sales of T-shirts from 60 million a year to almost a billion."

"Austad was invited over to Portland in the USA to see Nike up close, and became directly infuriated over the supplier's use of power. So instead of attending a presentation in a huge Nike store, Austad went to a competing sports store. There he wandered along the shoe shelves with an ulterior motive: It had to be possible to find another supplier that could be built up into a big brand in Norway. In the shelf, he found the answer: Brooks Shoe Factory. And a few phone calls later, he was on a plane to Brooks headquarters in Michigan. There was no end to the goodwill when Austad suggested that Gresvig should get the Scandinavian rights to the shoe brand. The news hit like a bomb at the confident Nike. They were used to getting their way, but they met granite. Who did Austad from little Norway think he was? For Brooks, Austad's interest must have seemed like a gift from heaven. While Nike and Reebok were billion-dollar successes, Brooks was the scabby boy in the class. Already in 1983, the company went bankrupt for the first time, and the current owner, Wolverine World Wide Inc, bought the brand at a bargain. For eleven years, they had tried in vain to make it a good business – without success. Wolverine was a shoe brand that had great success with the shoe brand Hush Puppies, but they quickly discovered that running shoes had as little to do with ordinary shoes as jogging suits with tuxedos."