THE X FACTOR : Skysurfer Joe Jennings Has Gone to the Extreme, and Lost a Friend and Partner Along the Way, but He Still Yearns for the Rush

When Joe Jennings jumps out of an airplane 13,000 feet above Rhode Island next week, he will turn on his camera and focus on his new partner, Patrick de Gayardon, who will be plummeting toward earth at 120 mph with his feet strapped to a board, performing a fast-paced routine for nearly a minute before deploying his parachute.

But with Jennings in spirit, he hopes, will be another popular skydiver, his former partner and best friend, Rob Harris.

“I’m not sure how it’s going to come out, but just with the vibes that I’m feeling it’s like, hey, this is for my buddy, you know?” Jennings said the other day, between training jumps with de Gayardon for ESPN’s X Games June 24-30 in Rhode Island. “If he’s around in some form or another I hope he’s with me.”

Jennings and de Gayardon will be competing in the skysurfing event, one of the more visual and definitely one of the more way-out

“extreme” sports, in that it involves a surfer and cameraman. Teams are judged on both the execution of the surfer’s routines and how well they are presented by the cameraman.

And although he has nothing against de Gayardon, Jennings wishes more than anything that he could be watching Harris through his viewfinder.

The flamboyant Manhattan Beach disc jockey jumped for the last time three days before his 29th birthday last December, performing a stunt for a soft drink commercial over British Columbia.

TV viewers can witness part of the stunt--Harris is the one wearing the tuxedo on the Mountain Dew commercial spoof of a James Bond movie.

What they won’t see, however, is the jump’s fatal ending.

Harris couldn’t overcome problems with his gear and crash-landed onto a snowy field as Jennings, who was filming the commercial, watched in horror while floating safely toward earth.

Harris started with three parachutes. As part of the stunt, he was to open one chute, or canopy, and cut it loose, leaving him with a main chute and a reserve. No big deal, everyone thought.

But he had problems immediately after deploying the first chute. It could be, Jennings said, that Harris pulled the wrong handle, releasing the main instead of the canopy, which might have caused an entanglement.

In any case, he said, there was some tangling and by the time Harris got everything cleared away and opened the reserve chute it was a second too late.

“I’m not 100% sure what happened,” said Jennings, 35, his voice cracking as he spoke of the tragedy. “All I knew was that he was having a problem clearing [the first chute], and when he finally did clear it, it created more lines and junk on his back that normally aren’t there, so when he finally did pull his reserve, it didn’t come out properly, and he pretty much had to work it out of there.

“And he managed to work it out but it was, you know, just above the ground really . . . just . . . like a fraction of a second too late.”

Jennings, his chute already deployed, was helpless. He knew Harris was dead and landed softly next to his body moments later.

The accident, which Jennings insists was a fluke, sent shock waves through the skydiving world. Harris was one of those people everyone liked. Nearly 2,000 attended his funeral at American Martyrs Church in Manhattan Beach. Some of Harris’ ashes were sent around the world to be spread by his skydiving peers.

But nobody outside of Harris’ immediate family--his parents and brother--was as devastated as Jennings.

He and Harris had trained almost daily for three years and dominated the young sport, winning the World Championships two years in a row, and taking first place in last year’s inaugural ESPN Extreme Games.

“They were so far ahead of everybody else; they were untouchable,” said Troy Hartman, 24, a skysurfer teamed with camera-flyer Vic Pappadato.

“They just clicked. They were sponsored before anybody else. They were jumping like 150 times a month, really just going for it. They had everything going . . . they were just way ahead of their time.”

They would have been strong favorites to win this year’s X Games. They had a certain chemistry others couldn’t match, Harris with his acrobatics and Jennings with his camera work.

They were inseparable.

“He saw Rob more than he saw me,” said Jennings’ wife, Lisa.

Immediately after the accident Jennings swore he would never compete again. He lost his drive.

“I took a couple of months off and pretty much did nothing,” he said. “I just got really involved with his family and with the whole process of dealing with losing him and everything.”

But Jennings’ mourning eventually ran its course. Owner of a Redondo Beach video production company, he decided to get on with his life, to grab his camera and take to the sky again. Harris wouldn’t have wanted him moping around.

Jennings contracted for a variety of commercial projects, and did so with vigor. Then something else happened: The competitive fire began to burn again.

He got together with de Gayardon, a Frenchman credited with introducing skysurfing to the United States in 1990 via a stunt performed during a sports-shoe commercial, and teamed up for the X Games, a made-for-TV extravaganza featuring other such outrageous activities as aggressive in-line skating, skateboarding, bicycle stunt riding, bungee jumping and street luge.

De Gayardon has an impressive resume: He has logged more than 8,300 jumps, has made 50 base jumps and 1,500 skysurfing jumps.

He has been in dozens of films and commercials and has performed so many dangerous stunts that some feel he’s fortunate to still be alive. “Inside Edition,” “A Current Affair” and, naturally, MTV have profiled the colorful parachutist.

But chemistry is chemistry. De Gayardon is not Rob Harris and skysurfing, although it may look easy, requires two individuals working in perfect harmony. The cameraman has to stay with the surfer and know exactly how fast he’s falling and what he’s going to do. Keeping the surfer in frame is no simple task.

The surfers, using graphite-foam boards about 60 inches long, perform grueling 50-second routines while falling from 13,000 feet at 120 mph. They use their arms to control their spin rate.

“We spin with so much force at times that I’ve blown the blood vessels out in my eyes,” Hartman said, assuring that it is no big deal. “That’s one of the injuries I run into quite a bit. It feels like a release in pressure. It doesn’t hurt, but boy, it’s like your whole eye is solid solid, dark red. It is gnarly.

“Also, the force pushes the blood to the extremities if you’re outside the axis of your spin, because the spins can get up to about 4 G’s. It’s hard-core. If any part of your body is way outside of the axis like your hand . . . You try to keep your arms outside long enough to get the spin cooking but not so long to burn your hands up, so it’s kind of like a compromise. I mean it can hurt. Oh God, especially when it’s cold up there. . . . Oh, I’ve really burned my hands up. All the blood just fills your blood vessels and it just expands your skin to the point where it just hurts.”

Otherwise, Hartman added, skysurfing--not the stunts some skydivers perform--is a relatively safe endeavor, as is parachuting in general. (The U.S. Parachute Assn. reported that in 1995 there were 26 deaths--about one per 84,000 jumps.)

Said Pete McKeeman, tour director for Skysportif International, which organizes freestyle and skysurfing events: “We’re perceived as being radical and extreme, but you’re probably safer jumping out of a plane than you are driving to the drop zone.”

Jennings said he considered the sport to be safe and didn’t want Harris’ death to put a black mark on it.

He added that he and de Gayardon were dedicating their performance to the memory of Harris, to Harris’ family and to the hundreds of friends Harris made over the years.

“It takes time to build up a chemistry, but Patrick has a pretty deep well of knowledge in terms of being able to fly, and I do too, because I’ve done so much camera with skysurfing,” Jennings said. “We’ve actually built up something that we’re really happy with. It’s looking pretty darned good. I would say at the very least the other teams are going to be sweating bullets--I’m not holding anything back. I want to win it for Rob.”

Struggling a bit with his emotions, Jennings then tried to put all the circumstances involving Harris’ death in perspective.

“At least Rob went doing what he liked,” he said. “Even the guy in the airplane will tell you that when he was exiting on that jump--I was too busy worrying about my camera to even see--but he had a big old grin on his face when he was heading out the door. I mean, he was having a good time.”

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Southland Competitors in the X Games

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Event Name City Aggressive In-line Skating Scott Bently Venice Jess Dyrenforth Laguna Beach Arlo Eisenberg Venice Chris Hines San Clemente Chris Garrett Seal Beach B. Hardin Venice Brooke Howard-Smith Venice Judy Eilmes Chino Tash Hodgeson Los Angeles Dana Giordano Venice Brian Konoske Los Alamitos Roadhouse Spizer Cypress TJ Webber Venice Mike Opalek Venice Bicycle Stunt John Parker Santa Ana Shawn Butler Santa Ana Brian Foster Huntington Beach James Levan Huntington Beach Todd Lyons Huntington Beach Mike Ocoboc Santa Ana Mike Escamilla Whittier Keith Treanor Santa Ana Mike Griffin Santa Ana Bungee Jumping Ron Jones El Segundo Dan Watson El Segundo Downhill In-line Skating Gary Gandee Venice Extreme Adventure Race Andrea Spitzer Los Angeles Cathy Sassin-Smith Santa Monica Skateboarding Neal Hendrix Costa Mesa Rune Glifberg Huntington Beach Chris Gentry Costa Mesa Willy Santos Huntington Beach Eric Koston Torrance Ed Templeton Huntington Beach Lance Mountain Alhambra Geoff Rowley Huntington Beach Brian Patch Huntington Beach Skysurfing Joe Jennings Redondo Beach Street Luge Marcus Rietma San Dimas

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