‘94 Winter Olympic Games / Lillehammer : ‘Hair-Trigger Grin’ Gets Put to Work

One guy named Moe. Tommy Moe, American, is sitting by himself, elbow on a desk, chin cupped in his palm, daydreaming, drifting off into space, scratching his Fu Manchu, four days before his downhill run. He is thinking about Bill Johnson, about another place, another race, another American. He is thinking about Wild Bill’s wild ride down the slope of an Alp, about what it must have been like, 10 years before, descending that snowy stairway from heaven.

“Let’s see. Yeah. Where was I then?” Tommy Moe asks himself.

Away he goes, on a ski lift in his mind, transporting himself backward in time, searching his memory.

A smile suddenly gleams like a sunbeam on a snowcap. One often does. The official USA ski team guide describes Tommy Moe as having “a hair-trigger grin.”

He says, “Guess I must’ve been in Alaska. I was, like, 13 or 14 years old, so, you know, I don’t know how far I could have wandered off.”

Palmer, Alaska, population 2,666 and several moose, is the Moe family’s home base. Has been for years. Pa Moe (Tom Sr.) runs a river-rafting business near Mt. Alyeska for what he calls “day-trippers.” Step-Mom Moe (Tyra) began her weekend in Palmer, north of Anchorage on the way to Fairbanks. She and her husband day-tripped by airplane and automobile Saturday and came huffing and puffing to the zenith of a Norwegian mountain range Sunday morning, just in time to see Tommy ski.

And oh, what they saw.

They saw him hurtle downward at speeds as high as 80 m.p.h., hugging every turn, bumping and grinding over snow and rock. They saw him descend the 2,746 feet of Kvitfjell in a low tuck, then glide to a stop within sight of the frosted Glomma riverbank. They saw him squint into a perfect sun, flip up his goggles, check out his time and thrust his arms skyward triumphantly.

Tommy Moe, king of the hill.

That hair-trigger face of his, clean-shaven now, fired off another grin. Look who was here. What a place for a family reunion. Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Moe made his home here in Norway in the 19th Century before emigrating to the New World. Great Uncle Olvar, 82, still lives in Oslo, as do a dozen other Nordic kin. What a place for this to happen.

Even in his daydreams, he couldn’t quite picture it.

“Wouldn’t it be unbelievable, me winning?” Tommy asks, four days before the race.

Sure would be.

“Maybe I will,” he says.

Tommy Moe, American, on top of the world. He has had total northern exposure. He knows every inch of our 49th state. He mountain-bikes. He kayaks. He camps out. He fishes. He and his older brother, Mike Moe, go free-skiing. Together they recently built a house, with the name, Downhill Circle, etched into the driveway post.

Tommy can clown around about having been an adolescent stranded in Alaska, but fact is, when he was 14, he already was winning medals in junior events, mushing along like a malamute, making tracks.

Mike never sensed how much faster his brother could go.

Their father said here Sunday, “Mike’s back home, probably tearing the house down right now.”

On Feb. 17, 1970, slightly more than 24 years to the day before he would become America’s favorite and most famous Alaskan, Tommy Moe was born in Montana, up near the glorious peaks of Missoula. He grew up and hung out in the hillsides near Whitefish. When his ancestors left Europe and headed for lower ground, they didn’t want to go too low. They settled in Montana, not long after it achieved statehood. This is where Tommy Moe started out.

Then he moved north to Alaska and that’s when his gold rush really began.

At 4, he already could ski. Once up in Alaska, though, Tommy Moe got familiar with Mt. Alyeska the way children closer to sea level got to know hockey rinks or soccer fields. Tommy took sixth place in the U.S. junior championships a couple of days before another dear-diary birthday, his sweet 16th. Later that same year, he also won the Western J-II downhill, the super-G, the grand slalom. A silver in the slalom, too. Tommy Moe was junior skiing’s hottest property.

And then, in Tommy’s teens, skiing in America became hotter than ever before. At Sarajevo in 1984, after years and years of European rule, oh, how the Americans had flabbergasted everybody. As others crashed all over the Mt. Bjelasnica slalom course--only 47 of 101 starters completed two runs--Phil Mahre paired his silver medal from Lake Placid with a gold. His twin brother, Steve, got the silver. And then both twins broke down crying on American TV, when Donna de Varona broke the news to Phil that his wife had given birth to a son.

That wasn’t a bad way to end an Olympics. But combined with what happened at the beginning of those Olympics, skiing’s popularity in American rose like never before.

Bill Johnson had won the downhill.

“Remember what he said before the race?” Tommy Moe asks, on this dreamy day in Norway 10 years later.

Yes, someone says, but Tommy repeats it anyway.

“He said, ‘Everybody else is racing for second place.’ ”

Tommy Moe knows this story the way other kids know stories about Babe Ruth supposedly pointing to a baseball fence, or Joe Namath guaranteeing a football game. He knows that Bill Johnson went on to say, “I don’t even know why everyone else is here,” not unlike the way another Johnson, a football coach from Dallas, would crow 10 years later that his team would have no problem with a team from San Francisco. How even though no American had ever won an Olympic downhill gold medal, the totally cool Wild Bill stood in front of everybody and said, “They should just hand it to me now.”

One of Tommy Moe’s all-time favorite tales.

“So why didn’t you do that?” the person he is chatting with inquires, once a crowded room has cleared out.

Tommy Moe gives him the eye and says, “You know, I thought about it. I really did.”

Then that grin again.

“Wouldn’t that have been cool?” he asks.

Sure would have.