Nike

Nike pays top athletes in many different sports to use their products promote/advertise their technology and design.
Nike's first professional athlete endorser was Romanian tennis player Ilie Nastase, and the company's first track endorser was distance running legend Steve Prefontaine. Prefontaine was the prized pupil of the company's co-founder Bill Bowerman while he coached at the University of Oregon. Today, the Steve Prefontaine Building is named in his honor at Nike's corporate headquarters.

Besides Prefontaine, Nike has sponsored many other successful track & field athletes over the years such as Carl Lewis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Sebastian Coe. However, it was the signing of basketball player Michael Jordan in 1984, with his subsequent promotion of Nike over the course of his storied career with Spike Lee as Mars Blackman, that proved to be one of the biggest boosts to Nike's publicity and sales.

During the past 20 years especially, Nike has been one of the major clothing/footwear sponsors for leading players of tennis. Some of the more successful players currently or formerly sponsored by Nike include: Roger Federer, James Blake, Rafael Nadal, Maria Sharapova, Serene Williams, Marion Bartoli.

Nike also sponsors some of the leading clubs in the world, like the Brazil National Team, Portugal National Team, Netherlands National Team, Manchester United, FC Barcelona, Arsenal, Celtic, PSV Eindhoven and some more football clubs.

Nike also sponsors various minor events including Hoop It Up (high school basketball) and The Golden West Invitational (high school track and field). Nike uses web sites as a promotional tool to cover these events. Nike also has several websites for individual sports, including nikebasketball.com, nikefootball.com, and nikerunning.com.