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It's the age old question: "What do you give to the man who's been everything?"

Only now we get to ask it of Phil Knight, the man who brought you Nike, in exchange for all the money you could push toward his cash register.

Knight is passing his stewardship of Le Swoosh on to some guy named William Perez, which seems odd when you consider that Knight owned all of sports for a good long while.

What's he going to be in retirement -- "the world's No. 1 sports fan"?

It's like the guy who owns the factory going on weekends with a folding chair, a barbecue grill and a bottle of Tractor Shed Red down to the factor he just sold so he can watch the loading dock bake in the sun.

Oh, he'll still be the company's chairman, which we can only assume means that he can always bump off the new guy if he doesn't like the next ad campaign (think Nicole Powell accosted by a cast member of "The Wire" wearing only a towel and sneakers).

But the central truth remains that most emperors do not simply retire to watch the world go by, not after having directed that world for so long. They are by nature active, acquisitive, and often downright cranky when someone crosses them. They do not go to the stadium wearing stuff they designed themselves, head to the loge seats and yell, "Hey Ref, You Suck!" in all the Romance languages.

And that is why the implausible "Phil Knight retires" story smells a bit like, well, an old sneaker.

Oh, maybe Phil means it when he says he's had enough of cornering the market once dominated by Converse and Keds. Maybe the sports shmata trade is starting to seem a little too hamster-wheel tedious to him. Maybe he really does want to slow down.

But then think about the "retirements" of Roger Clemens, and Evander Holyfield, and Deion Sanders, and loads of other athletes over the past 25 years, for whom retirement is largely just a way to skip training camp. Mostly, they play until nobody wants them to play any more.

And Phil Knight sure seems like the type not to know how to quit. Certainly not the way he fought when Nike was accused of using sweatshop labor, even by his beloved and fully decked-out University of Oregon.

Retirement? What's he take us for, rubes?

Well, maybe he does. He did, after all, turn the modest sneaker into a fashion accessory. He put springs in shoes, he put air in shoes, and for all we know he even put in a little drawer to hold coldcuts in shoes.

And then he branched out, beyond T-shirts, sweatsuits, sunglasses, watches and anything else he could reasonably slap the swoosh on.

And then he branched out again, signing every athlete, living, dead or just really sleepy, to endorse all the various forms of Nike whatnot, thereby making the mega-million-dollar endorsement a normal piece of modern-day athletic business.

Eventually, he was every bit the heavy hitter that the commissioners of sport think they are, every bit the heavy hitter that the presidents of network television think they are, every bit the hammer as the players wearing his stuff. When he coughed, the world took a Tylenol With Codeine.

This is not the sort of guy who retires, or kicks back, or takes it easy. He is certainly not the kind to settle for just watching like he was just another guy who likes sports. It's hard to imagine Phil Knight feeling at home in the Dawg Pound, or the Black Hole, or the terraces at Maracana.

You also don't see him jostling with other fans trying to get Adonal Foyle's autograph on his kid's forehead, or going to Champs to overpay for a Sue Bird jersey for his niece, or dividing up the season tickets with the other guys in the sales department ("No, no, YOU get the Clippers. I get the Lakers"), or calling in the local chat show ("Hi, this is Phil from Lake Oswego, and I think the Blazers should trade Joel Przybilla for Dwyane Wade and Shaquille O'Neal, or Steve Patterson is an idiot").

No, this isn't what Phil Knight does. He wouldn't be very convincing at it, and it wouldn't take long for him to realize, "Hey, I could buy Adonal Foyle," or, "Hey, I could buy the entire WNBA," or "Hey, I could buy all the tickets for every game," or "Hey, I could buy the radio station and make the hosts clean my pool."

And because of that, he can never know the fan's impotent rage, or how to scrimp for that one big sports outing for the family, or the value (such as it is) in phoning in a take.

God, the more you think of it, the more you realize that Phil Knight can NEVER be a fan. There's too much degradation involved.

So we expect to learn within a year that retirement didn't work for Phil, and that he is going back, and his first act back in the saddle is to buy the Olympics and have it all held on Nike's interplanetary headquarters in Beaverton, a healthy spit from the Borders on Walker Road.

It's not the same as being a fan, but then again, when you've had a chokehold on fans' wallets for this long, what's the fun in being a fan at all?

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com