By: Ellen McGirtSeptember 1, 2010

Photograph by Patrik Giardino

"It still has moon-dust on it."
Mark Parker sounds like a happy kid as he points to an astronaut manual from the Apollo mission inside his glass-topped desk at Nike's Beaverton, Oregon, headquarters. Over his shoulder, Keith Richards, at least the version of the Rolling Stones guitarist by German artist Sebastian Krüger, feigns a boozy disinterest. "And here," says Parker, swinging around in his chair, "is Jimi Hendrix's guitar."

It is astonishing to see this shoe designer turned CEO in his natural habitat, surrounded by artwork he has commissioned or collected, mixed in with bits of Nike history, such as the boots Michael Keaton wore in the 1989 hit Batman. Next to Keith Richards is a bas-relief by Missouri sculptor Kris Kuksi. Parker owns three of his pieces, one a blank-check commission. "He just said, 'Do something huge,' " says Kuksi, who met Parker at a gallery show in Philadelphia.

"Being a designer," says Parker, "a lot of the people I hang out with are creatives. I like the eccentricity, to be surprised." Whether artists or athletes, he says he's attracted to people who are "intense, maybe even obsessed." He regularly hosts dinners for about 25 artist friends to just talk and kick around ideas. One that emerged from a get-together at his friend Lance Armstrong's house was "Stages," a recent show of more than 20 commissioned artworks that he and Armstrong cocurated in Paris to benefit the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Another friend, artist Tom Sachs, delighted the crowd with "Lance's Tequila Bike for Girls," a modified Trek bike that dispensed tequila in scatologically named shot glasses. "Irreverence inspires me," smiles Parker, sounding decidedly un -- CEO -- like. And no, he doesn't check Nike's share price daily, fret about 10-Qs, or try to game the news cycle, no matter what messes his athletes get into. Obsessed people make messes. It goes with the territory.

Obsession comes naturally to Parker. As a champion teenage marathoner, he routinely modified his own running shoes in search of better performance. Now, the designs he once called his "delicate creations" are so deeply embedded in the success of the company that he's lost track of the number of patents he holds. One is for Visible Air technology, which he created as a side project; it helped catapult Nike out of the doldrums in the mid-'80s. John McEnroe, Kobe Bryant, Olympic athletes, and your high-school's cross-country star -- he's shod them all. Bryant, fresh from the Lakers' play-off victory and his MVP award in June, describes meeting Parker, then Nike copresident, in 2003 and watching him whip out his notebook to sketch while they talked. "I knew right from that that we were on the same page," Bryant says. "He's not doing things just for innovation's sake. He truly wants to optimize my performance."

Parker isn't an attention-seeking sort of CEO, so until now it has been