When Michigan first baseman Samantha Findlay blasted a three-run shot to left field, the Michigan softball team became the first team east of the Mississippi River to win a softball championship. Michigan Athletic Director Bill Martin spent most of that week in Oklahoma City with his wife - the two of them watching the Wolverines win game after game of the Women's College Softball World Series. To Martin, the Nike swooshes on the players' jerseys were probably insignificant - hardly noticeable after so many years. What he was focusing on was the ping of the aluminum bats and the roll of the ball across the dirt infield.

Kit Morris wasn't in Oklahoma, but he cared about the game almost as much. For that first week in June, Morris centered his life on the women of the Michigan softball team. Morris is an executive at Nike, and he is in charge of all of Nike's collegiate contracts - Michigan, Arizona, Texas and more.

Morris roots for Michigan regularly. The school is one of his company's longest-standing partners; plus, he's always sort of liked the Wolverines. He even makes it out to the occasional football game at the Big House.

That week, Morris spent a lot of his time with the channel stuck on ESPN. Because he lives and works in Beaverton, Ore., he went home early from work to watch the Wolverines take on UCLA. He spent the weekend with his wife at home watching softball. For Morris, and probably for some executive at Adida, the California college's big-time corporate sponsor, the game meant something.

In his office at Nike, Morris even keeps a picture of the 2001 national champion Michigan field hockey team that is autographed by all of the players and coaches.

It seems odd that big-time executives at multi-million dollar companies care so much about what happens in the Women's College Softball World Series, but these teams and games mean a lot to corporate America.

University lands on Planet Nike

Michigan was involved with Nike for many years before 1994, but it was that year that still defines the Michigan-Nike relationship. In Oct. 1994, the Michigan Athletic Department - led by then-Athletic Director Joe Roberson - signed the first school-wide contract. In the deal, Nike agreed to provide jerseys, shoes and equipment for all 25 Michigan athletic teams. It also agreed to pay Michigan a substantial sum of money.

Including royalties for Nike products bearing the Michigan name, the total came to about $7 million during the six-year contract, or more than $1 million per year. Michigan's current agreement, which was signed in January 2001 and runs through August 2008, will pay Michigan nearly $30 million for the opportunity to put the Nike swoosh on all Michigan apparel.

Roberson, who is now 70 years old and retired, insists that the money was the last consideration he made when negotiating the sponsorship deal - and it's true that the Michigan Athletic Department was already running a pretty strong surplus throughout the years with Roberson at the helm.

"The first thing I wanted to get was control," Roberson says. "I wanted to be able to have the say in what our coaches were getting, what they were giving away. The second thing I wanted to have was equalization - I wanted the whole department to have it. And the third thing I wanted was to maximize it. - We didn't need money, but if you're going to do that kind of thing, you might as well get as much as you can out of it."

Roberson, sitting at a small restaurant that is walking distance from his house in Bloomfield Hills discusses one of the more stressful periods of his eventful life. Standing up, his nearly 6-foot-6 frame gives him away as a former athlete - he played minor league baseball for five years out of high school before getting degrees in education and athletic administration. But sitting down, wearing a golf shirt with a country club emblem, khaki shorts, sneakers and white tube socks, his athletic frame is disguised as he discusses his former life as a Michigan athletic director.

"I took heat like you can't believe," Roberson recalls. "The number of times people told me that I had sold out - which was insane."

For the same reasons he did a dozen years ago, Roberson says he still believes that signing with Nike was the right call. At the time, many Michigan coaches had individual contracts with apparel companies. Even though Nike and the Michigan athletic department confirmed the coaches' contracts, neither would discuss how much they were worth.