Tom Sumeragi, whose intervention in Nike’s chaotic early years played a pivotal role in the company’s financial survival and ascension, has died.

Sumeragi died last week. A wake was held this week in Japan.

“He was a giant,” Nike cofounder Phil Knight told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Sumeragi’s path crossed with Nike’s in 1971. At the time, Nike was still known as Blue Ribbon Sports. It was far from the blue-chip company it is today. It employed less than 50 people and had just crossed $1 million in annual revenue.

But while the company had explosive sales growth, it had trouble staying in the good graces of Portland’s banks because of heavy cash demands and Knight’s aggressive entrepreneurialism. Adding to the chaos, the company was in the middle of a falling out with Onitsuka Co., the Japanese company whose shoes it imported. The Nike line hadn’t yet launched.

In the middle of that storm, Sumeragi, who worked for the Japanese trading company Nissho Iwai, tossed the company a financial lifeline, starting with a line of credit and eventually offering a more sweeping backstop. Nissho Iwai would eventually expand its support to providing supply chain and logistics help around the time the Nike brand launched in 1972.

“Somehow, I had confidence in this particular company,” Sumeragi said in a 1982 story about him in a Nike employee publication. “Of course, we had no idea that it would grow as much as it has.”

“He will always be a legend,” said Bob Woodell, an early Nike executive who served as the company’s first chief operating officer and briefly as president. “He was a hero.”

Jeff Johnson, the first full-time employee in Nike’s history, recalled Sumeragi or Knight once joked that, “If not for Sumeragi, there would be no Nike.”

“The more I think about it, the more I realize that is probably more true than even Tom realized,” Johnson said.