equal time Phil Mushnick Adding up sports’ swings and misses — including Nike’s plummeting stock By Phil Mushnick Published Sep. 26, 2026, 2:22 p.m. ET An American multinational sport clothing brand Nike store is seen in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Thursday, April 24, 2025. SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Before 2-plus-2 became a matter of opinion, I preferred single-digit numbers as stand-alone numbers. Last week provided witness to several numbered news items of sports business note.
1) Nike stock is in a sustained free fall. While its money and influence — one and the same — remains the lifeblood of ask-no-questions sports and athletes around the world, Nike has met the inevitable reality that in the history of business — outside of drug dealing, gambling and prostitution — there has never been an earnings graph with a line that points straight up.
And suddenly the smugness that allowed Nike and its paid celebrity shills to pitch $200 sneakers — made for pennies by sweat shop wage slaves in Third World factories — to the poorest, most vulnerable kids and embrace social activists, emboldened by ignorance and fad-driven anti-Americanism, is gone with a swoosh.
