Gaining a Peak Success : Skier Street Cools Her Temper, Has a Shot at the Gold

“Baby Girl” wasn’t breathing in the crucial moments after her birth on April 3, 1971. She was baby blue.

Later, this would glibly be recounted as her first temper tantrum, but the matter then was deadly serious. The nearest doctor from the family home in Triumph, Ida., was 12 miles away in Sun Valley. With no time to spare, Roland Wayne (Stubby) Street pressed his mouth against his daughter’s and blew into her lungs.

The baby’s chest swelled and soon she turned a healthy pink. Street describes this as the moment she “kicked in and fired up.”

Stubby then flipped her over, held her feet with one hand and swatted her behind with the other. The girl didn’t so much as yelp. Instead, the story goes, she looked up and smiled.

“I swear to God she was laughing at me that day,” her mother, Dee, recalls.

No one could have imagined that nearly 23 years later, Picabo Street would be a contender for an Olympic medal in downhill skiing.

But everyone knew the Street girl was a spitfire right out of the gate. In her short but eventful life, she has bemused and bedeviled those closest to her--family, friends and, to be sure, U.S. Ski Team coaches.

In the summer of 1990, Street was kicked off the U.S team briefly for disciplinary reasons. But no one stays mad at Picabo for long. In between tantrums--some of her best have been in ski-race finish areas--Street is a mile-a-minute, straight-shooting talker and skier of some repute.

After years of work at U.S. Ski Team charm school, the pieces finally came together last year as Street earned a silver medal in the combined at the World Alpine Ski Championships in Morioka, Japan.

But nothing would come easy for the girl named Picabo.

Some girls grew up singing. Picabo--pronounced “Peek-a-boo” --grew up swinging.

Street’s parents, hippies who ran off to Idaho together in July of 1967, decided to let their children name themselves. Two years before “Baby Girl” was born, “Baby Boy” entered the world. He would be known as “Baby Boy” or “Baba” for five years until another Big Brother--the federal government--came calling.

In 1974, when the Streets applied for documents before a planned trip to Mexico, the government demanded that the parents give proper names to the children.

So, Baby Boy became Roland Wayne III. But no one has ever called him Roland; it’s Baba, Bubbers, Bubs or Bobs.

Baby Girl? She became Picabo.

On the trailer trek to Triumph years before, the Streets had passed through a dot on the map called Picabo, Ida., and the name stuck in their heads.

Dee says picabo is the Nez Perce Indian word meaning “shining waters.”

It is a strange name, but this is a different girl.

There would be, as you might expect, the requisite playground fights at Hemingway Elementary School nearby Ketchum, named for the author who once lived there.

Picabo heard it all.

“Peek-a-boo, I see you!” was standard fare, she recalls. Or, “What’s your brother’s name? Hide and Go Seek?”

But she never backed down. Her parents told her she could change her name at any time, but she refused.

“I started coming up with stuff like, ‘Well, at least my name’s not Jim, like everyone else in the world,’ ” she says. “It started to sink in that it was pretty cool my name isn’t like that. I kind of enjoyed it. It made me stand away and out from the rest.”

Family and friends have always called her “Peek” for short.

Those brave enough to pick a fight with her usually got their chance.

In fifth grade, while she was chasing a girl around campus after an altercation, Picabo slipped on a patch of ice and chipped her front tooth on a curb.

“You could’ve opened a beer can with that tooth,” her mother still says proudly.

The Streets had a barter deal with the local dentist, though, and their daughter got the tooth capped. “We built him a fireplace and he fixed our teeth,” Dee Street says.

Triumph had been a thriving mining community until the North Star Mine closed in 1953. But by the time the Streets hit town, there wasn’t much town at all. Of the eight kids who ruled Triumph, population 13 or so at the time, Picabo was the only female.

Yet, in the neighborhood, she was always just one of the boys.

“Once, I got hit in the forehead and knocked out with a baseball,” Picabo recalls, “and they just said, ‘Ah, c’mon,’ and kicked me around and got me back up. So I just had to hack it and be tough. I think that’s what made me as tough as I was, growing up in that atmosphere and having the name that I did.”

At 4, Picabo demanded a chance to ride her brother’s bike, which had no training wheels, seat or brakes. Tired of her pestering, Baba put Picabo on board and pushed her down the street. She didn’t stop until she bounced off a fence.

At neighborhood birthday parties, Picabo would sometimes pull out the boxing gloves and “whip the crap out of everybody,” her mother remembers.

Discipline was a problem. The prospect of a spanking usually drew a hearty laugh from Picabo, so her parents had to get creative.

“Unpredictable,” is how her mother puts it.

The one thing Picabo couldn’t do was sit still. So, for punishment, Stubby would make Picabo place her nose on a designated spot on the wall barely high enough to make her crane her neck.

She would be ordered not to move for minutes at a time. It was very effective.

This sort of punishment pained the Streets, who had fled the establishment and its rules and regulations.

INCENSE AND PEPPERMINTS

Dee Meyer met Stubby Street in Reno in 1966. Meyer was attending college, while Street was a gourmet chef and the son of a Nevada banker.

Stubby’s childhood was strictly regimented, one reason he later joined the Marines, but he apparently had no desire to live a white-collar life in the shadow of his family.

So, on July 4, 1967, Street hitched a trailer to his Dodge van and took off with Dee. For two months, they rented a trailer space and camped in Grass Valley, where the couple made extra money by painting fences.

Stubby grew out his beard. Dee wanted a head with hair. Long, beautiful hair. Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen.

Eight years later, Dee’s mane extended below her knees. You could braid it and jump rope. Dee played guitar and sang folk anthems. She still gives lessons. She once performed at a peace march in Reno and claims she can sing Joan Baez, “backward, blindfolded and with my hands tied.”

The Streets were, well, far out.

“We weren’t stoned out all the time,” Dee says. “We weren’t on acid all the time. But we were kind of anti-establishment. We rebelled against the 8 to 5, working for someone else.”

While in Grass Valley, Stubby heard that there were jobs available at the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho. He was, by trade, a ski bum and gourmet cook.

It took about 10 minutes to hitch the trailer.

Idaho was everything they imagined. Where else could you rent a house for $50 a month from a landlord such as theirs, Ernie Haar, whom Dee suspected had been chased out of South Dakota because he said he had made contact with UFOs?

“I learned to cook on a wood stove,” Picabo recalls fondly. “We’d go up to the high country to camp and fish. We had horses. We ate really good food, rice and beans, powdered milk, just really healthy.”

The Streets ate every meal at home. Picabo says she watched TV only about five times as a child.

“I spent all my time with my family,” she says. “I never had a baby-sitter. My parents never left us . . . The best thing about my parents, they were really open-minded and they let us do a lot of things we wanted to do. They let us go out and experiment and were there to pick us up if we fell on our butt.”

THE AGE OF NEFARIOUS

Picabo Street and the Sun Valley ski resort were an accident and a ski champion waiting to happen.

Of course, there was no stopping her.

She started skiing at 5. She cried all the way up the chairlift the first time, thinking she would fall, but once she exited, Picabo made a bee-line to the bottom.

She called it survival of the fittest. “I just started chasing my brother and my dad around the mountain,” she says. “I had to keep up or get left behind. It was like, ‘If you can’t keep up, meet us at the car at 4.’ ”

Picabo kept up.

It soon became clear she was something special. Picabo joined the Sun Valley ski team.

“The day she left the Sun Valley ski team was the day we drove around the corner and she was lying on the snow at the finish line, kicking and screaming because she wasn’t beating everyone,” Dee Street says.

Picabo was 11.

It was Dee’s mission to keep her daughter from becoming “a brat and a prima donna.”

Unlike the majority of ski families, the Street’s didn’t have much money. Yet when Picabo was 13, the family moved to Salt Lake City so she could enter the prestigious Rowmark Ski Academy.

The experience was a disaster, and the Streets were back in Idaho within the year. For one, Picabo didn’t care much for schoolwork.

As she puts it, “I didn’t want to get honors and go to Stanford. I wanted to learn what I could and get out.”

Picabo’s ski career quickly took off. In 1988, she won the U.S. Junior downhill and super-G championships.

Pure talent brought her only that far. After suffering a knee injury in 1989, she came to dry-land training camp at Park City, Utah, in the summer of ’90 out of shape and out of sorts.

Paul Major, then the U.S. women’s coach, took one look at Street and sent her home with the admonition to get her act together.

Street: “They flat-out said, ‘Your attitude stinks and you need to go home and figure out whether you want to do this or not. So, I went home and wrote out the pros and cons of skiing or not skiing, and the pros outweighed the cons by a lot.”

Street returned, but it wasn’t an open-and-shut case.

“It never just turned around completely,” Major says. “I think it’s turned around now because she’s had some success. She understands it’s going to take a lot of work to stay up there.”

Major, who now has the dual role as women’s coach and Alpine director, and Street have had their share of run-ins. “There are 1,000 stories,” Major says. “Some of them you can’t repeat.”

Street says she has worked hard to control her temper but still has a problem with authority figures. “I think they realized they had to approach it a little bit differently with me, too,” she says. “They just couldn’t wag their finger at me any more. That’s not something I’m partial to at all.”

Street and the coaches tried to find some common ground.

Her temper was still an issue. Last year, desperate to retrieve a duffel bag buried beneath a mound of others in the team van, Street grabbed the straps of her bag, put both feet against the bumper and yanked the bag out while falling flat on her backside.

Major says she was lucky she didn’t break her back.

“I don’t have control over it,” she says of her emotions. “I used to let it fly a lot worse. I used to freak out whenever I didn’t ski as well as I wanted to. I didn’t care who was around watching. I’d just throw my stuff around, throw a little temper tantrum. I’ve learned you can’t do that. It’s very distasteful . . . So I go around the corner and do it. It’s not that I’ve stopped doing it, I just don’t do it in the public eye anymore.”

At least not as often.

“There was a girl on the team, and we were playing broom hockey, and she kept hitting me with her stick, and it (teed) me off and I wound up to punch her. I was about to punch her out, and I stopped myself and said, ‘Wow, you can’t do that.’ ”

With Street, control is a 12-step program. “I really like her because of her energy,” Major says. “I like her because she’s a genuine person. She’s extremely extroverted. She just loves to tell you what’s on her mind. There’s nothing contrived about her. She may not have all the social graces to go with it, but that’s fun. You’re really seeing a person.”

Street hopes to have it all working for her in the Winter Olympics starting Saturday. She wants to throw her best tantrum as she’s screaming down the mountain.

“I’ve got a lot of fire in me,” she says. “It’s good, but it’s taken me four or five years to channel it in the right direction. I’ve got to get it going, get it working for me, not against me.”

Her parents will be course-side when Street descends the Olympic downhill course at Kvitfjell on Feb. 19. Until she learned how to ski herself, Dee couldn’t bare to watch Picabo race. The reality of that danger hit home on Jan. 29 when Austria’s Ulrike Maier was killed in a downhill race at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

Picabo had completed her run and was leading the race when the accident occurred. Street ended up a respectable seventh. There was no celebration.

Back in Idaho, a flower-child-turned-mother grew more anxious.

“I’m somehow under the impression that it’s never going to get better,” Dee Street says of the worrying. “As a mother, I think I’m always going to go through this.”