STORM AND CALM

IN HIS MEMOIR, THE FOUNDER OF REEBOK LOOKS BACK ON THE EMPIRE HE BUILT… AND LEFT BEHIND

- ANJULY MATHAI

For 31 years, Joe Foster’s life ran parallel to the shoe company that he built. Until his shoes outpaced him. “It had become a big company that was being run by numbers,” he tells THE WEEK. “And I was just taking it light—getting picked up in limousines, meeting nice people, having nice meals…. By that time, the challenge was gone. The journey, for me, was at an end.”

It all began in 1942 when seven-year-old Joe won a Webster’s dictionary at an athletics event in Bolton, his hometown in northwest England. The dictionary was to come in handy 18 years later, after he and his brother, Jeff, started a shoe company called Mercury, only to realise that the name had already been taken by Lotus and Delta, a division of the British Shoe Corporation. They were advised to “choose a made-up name, something nobody else would have thought of”. A disillusioned Joe flipped through the dictionary, his finger trailing random names in it. Mamushi? Mamzer? Redwood? No, no and no. Until he came to Reebok: “A light coloured antelope”. Perfect. It was short, catchy and easy to pronounce. It suggested light, but fast and agile.