Josh Peter

USA TODAY Sports

Phil Knight remembers drinking adult beverages with Mike Bellotti, then head coach of the University of Oregon football team, at a scheduled victory party that felt more like a wake.

Colorado had just buried the Ducks 38-6 in the 1996 Cotton Bowl, and Knight, the founder and chairman of Nike who ran track for Oregon in the late 1950s, had a question for Bellotti.

"What do you need to get the program to the next level?" he asked.

An indoor practice facility, Bellotti replied.

So Knight kicked in almost $10 million to build a facility that protected the Ducks from the elements in rainy Eugene.

"It's kind of grown from there," Knight told USA TODAY Sports in an exclusive interview, adding that he grew intrigued with the notion of helping the program in 1995 after Oregon reached the Rose Bowl for the first time since 1958. "I wasn't really looking at a national championship. I thought we had a chance and could return to the Rose Bowl over a reasonable period of time instead of taking a while."

On Thursday, Oregon will play in the Rose Bowl for the third time in six years, this time against Florida State in the semifinals of the inaugural College Football Playoff. Even before kickoff, two things have been well established:

The Ducks, whose 105-25 record over the past decade is the fourth-best in college football, have evolved into a national power;

Knight, with apologies to T. Boone Pickens at Oklahoma State, has become the most impactful booster in college sports.

Bellotti, who for more than a decade worked under former Oregon athletic director Bill Moos, remembers a moment with his former boss.

"I once told Bill Moos, 'This program can live on without you and I, but it can't live on without Phil,'" Bellotti said. "He could put up when others would say shut up."

Knight has declined to discuss how much he has donated to the athletic department, but it's more than $300 million, according to a person familiar with the donations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose the information.

The money has been critical to build facilities for the following estimated price tags: $70 million for a football performance facility, $60 million toward the renovation of the football stadium, $60 million for an academic center and $100 million for a basketball arena. He also contributed about $10 million toward a lacrosse field and weight room and has given generously to the university at large.

Knight views the contributions less as donations than an investment. He has taken an active role in the construction of facilities and consulted with athletic department officials on other matters.

"I knew my way around sports and sport management a little bit and I wanted to be involved," said Knight, whose net worth is more than $20 billion according to Forbes. "They kept me very much involved, so I've had fingerprints and had the lead in what they were going to do with the money I was going to give them."

Instead of invoking Nike's famous slogan — Just Do It — Knight has borrowed a famous phrase from Al Davis, the late owner of the Oakland Raiders.

"Just win, baby," Bellotti said. "He said that to me. He's a fan first and foremost."

Now 76, Knight said he is feeling a greater sense of urgency about his objective: help Oregon win its first national championship in football. "While I can still see it," he said with a chuckle. "By the time I was 70, then we were starting to think about getting a national championship."

His checkbook is only one way he has improved the Ducks chances of doing it.

NEW LOOK, NEW DAY

Not long after speaking to Bellotti on New Year's Day in 1996, Knight called a meeting with four of his most trusted and valued executives. Tinker Hatfield, Nike's vice president for design and special projects, said he remembers it well.

"He simply said, 'I want you guys to come up with some ideas on how we can help the University of Oregon improve the ability to recruit better student-athletes for the football program,'" Hatfield recalled. "He asked us all to come back in a week with ideas."

Hatfield presented a bold vision: space-age uniforms that could help drive the rebranding of Oregon football.

"I'm not so sure (Knight) totally understood what I meant by brand building," Hatfield said. "But it was quite easy to understand completely changing the look of the University of Oregon's football team. And he gave me the go ahead."

At the 1998 Aloha Classic bowl game, Oregon unveiled its new look: dark green, bolder yellow, spiced with black. The aggressive new look conjured images of Star Wars and superheroes.

Hatfield had tinkered with the UO logo, too. They'd dropped the U and snazzed up the O. In addition to that, at the suggestion of Nike creative director Mike Doherty, the Ducks took the field behind a Harley Davidson and gave the Duck mascot a hint of snarl. Fans eventually embraced it all. Well, almost.

"You don't mess with the Duck," Doherty said. "I learned that quickly."

The Duck was restored, but the edgy uniforms kept coming every two to three years. The facilities Knight paid for looked similarly sleek.

"It all keeps spinning to speed and being modern and futuristic and looking forward," Hatfield said. "That is all part of a branding exercise."

The substance and style have helped attract better players, said retired Oregon defensive coordinator Nick Aliotti, who served in that capacity from 1999 to 2013.

"It was the uniforms at first, the helmets and the uniforms that caught their attention," he said. "Initially, it helped us get visits from kids that were four-star and five-star (recruits).

"Way back when we were a second-class citizen, coaches would say, 'Don't even look at these guys because they're not for you. They're not SC and Alabama. Now when we show up, we have the strongest hand. On the West Coast, we carry the largest trump card."

As if inspired by the design, Oregon's offense looked increasingly innovative. When Chip Kelly took over as head coach in 2009, the Ducks went from fast pace to warp speed while sporting the space-age uniforms and reached the 2011 BCS national championship game.

The Ducks came within a whisker of fulfilling Knight's vision, falling to Auburn 21-19. But the Ducks had arrived.

"The whole thing, wow, it did work," Hatfield said. "It's amazing."

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT?

Not everybody is celebrating.

Ellen Staurowsky, a professor of sports management at Drexel University and recognized expert on college sports, expresses concern about Knight's dual roles: philanthropist realizing tax benefits from his contributions and corporate baron whose company is indirectly benefiting from those contributions.

Oregon's thriving football program has given Nike a platform to launch its football products — uniforms, helmets and cleats.

"I think it's probably one of the more complicated questions in trying to put what he's done in perspective," Staurowsky said. "If you look at higher education in total, there have always been philanthropists who have had tremendous impact over the entire higher education landscape.

"What makes it more complicated for me in terms of the question about Phil Knight is what appears to be a lack of boundaries between corporate interest and philanthropic interest."

During the 2001 season, Staurowsky asserts, Nike influenced Oregon's decision to pay for a billboard in Times Square featuring Oregon quarterback Joey Harrington as part of a Heisman Trophy campaign.

"The whole PR effort was done in conjunction with launching Nike's venture into football uniforms," she said. "I think the merging of boundaries between corporate interests, interest in the college sports industry and the interests of individual philanthropists, it's become much more difficult to tease out those interests that are disparate and apart.

"I think they're all intertwined in a way that some people may argue may not be particularly healthy."

The relationship between Knight and Oregon has included friction, too.

In 2000, then-university president Dave Frohnmayer aligned with the Worker Rights Consortium, a group of universities that had pressured Nike and other companies on fair labor practice issues. Frohnmayer later apologized publicly and profusely to Knight.

In 2004, Knight withdrew his financial support of the track program in protest of the coach. Moos initially resisted firing the coach but later said Knight was right to call for a change.

"Since then it's full steam ahead behind the relationship between Oregon and Phil Knight," said Rudy Chapa, a former Nike executive on the university's board of trustees. "I know how important Nike is to him, but he is as big a Ducks fan as anybody.

"When you get in a discussion about Oregon football, it's almost like a guy that's totally plugged into what the coaches are scheming."

In fact, the team's offensive and defensive coordinators have routinely met with Knight for two of three hours before the season to give him an overview of the team and its strategies. Knight has worn coach's headsets from his double suite at Autzen Stadium during games. He stands on the field during warmups, mingles with the players in the locker room and on National Signing Day has pulled signed letters-of-intent off the coaches' fax machine.

"It just comes from a place of passion, passion and excellence," current head coach Mark Helfrich said. "That's what that guy is all about. He loves to study passion and excellence, observe excellence, and certainly is well qualified."

Knight's VIP status conjures up memories of something he told his executives when he called the meeting in 1996.

"He said, 'You know, it's coming to be my time in the front row,' " Doherty recalls.

School officials insist Knight does not meddle, and Knight said the school has welcomed his presence and input.

"If they don't, they hide it well," he said.

He and Hatfield stood amid the bedlam at the Pac-12 Football Championship game after Oregon beat Arizona 51-13 and clinched a spot in the College Football Playoff.

"I just leaned over to him and I said, 'You know what I'm most happy for?'" Hatfield recalls. "'You. You must be so proud. You initiated this. None of this happens without you.'

"He just smiled."

Contributing: David Leon Moore in Los Angeles