‘Boarders Take Care of Business

Maybe the title of this column should be changed. Snowboarding is not skiing, and snowboarding and snowboarders are about all anyone is talking about these days.

If snowboarders are not yet dominating the slopes, they certainly are dominating the news. Little of which has been good, of course. . . .

* Snowboarding becomes a medal sport in this year’s Olympics, giving the world a chance to see what these people are all about. A gold-medal winner tests positive for marijuana and the world has seen enough. Some start referring to the halfpipe as the hashpipe.

* After the Olympics, two snowboarders stray from the boundaries of a local resort, one of them, a 14-year-old following the tracks of his uncle, gets lost and eventually dies.

* A week later, two others stray from the groomed slopes of another local ski area and are found the next day in good health. Family and friends are relieved, but there is a growing sentiment that these two, and future snowboarders who act as irresponsibly as they did, pay for their rescue.

* A 22-year-old pro snowboarder dies under the weight of an avalanche that buries him after he ventures into the back country after a heavy snow and without preparation; an amateur boarder suffers the same fate a week later in Colorado.

* Finally, there are the two international snowboarders still awaiting the outcome of a hearing in Nevada after being busted two weeks ago for possession of marijuana during a traffic stop.

All this, naturally, has given a sport that has been thrust into the spotlight a serious black eye.

Earlier this week, a Times reporter visited a local resort and interviewed several snowboarders--for a story in another section of the paper--who basically resented being stereotyped as rebellious, pot-heads with no respect for authority, merely because of the actions of a few.

Their points should be well-taken. Snowboarding has come a long way since Sherman Poppen invented the “Snurfer” in 1965 by bolting two skis together for his daughter.

Snowboarding is big business now. Snowboards are as high-tech as skis. And snowboarders, as a whole, are no longer a small minority of teenage rebels. Their ranks have swollen to nearly 5 million in the United States alone.

As Sean O’Brien of Transworld Snowboarding Business Magazine said, “If it wasn’t for snowboarding coming to the resorts, overall skier visitation numbers would be in the toilet.”

Indeed, snowboarding has been a blessing for ski areas as well as for big-name ski equipment and clothing manufacturers, who have jumped on the snowboarding bandwagon as a means of salvation.

Today’s average snowboarder is no longer a 15- to 19-year-old male, but a 20- to 25-year-old of either sex. Many are in their 30s and 40s, an indication that the sport is not only for the Generation-X crowd, it is converting longtime skiers.

“There are about 4 million snowboarders in the U.S. and about 28 million skiers,” said Greg Ralph, director of marketing for Bear Mountain in Big Bear. “But snowboarders probably make an average of about 10 trips a year, while skiers are doing about two. So, it doesn’t take long to see where the revenue is coming from.”

But the fact remains that snowboarding, as a sport, is still relatively young and snowboarders, as a whole, still have some growing up to do. Snowboarders and skiers are learning to get along, but their relationship remains an uneasy one.

“It’s not that skiers don’t accept them, a lot of them still don’t accept us,” said Mark Baker, 39, technical director of the ski school at Mountain High in Wrightwood.

Baker recalled an incident last weekend in which he got on a chairlift with three other instructors, and in the chair in front of them was a group of young boarders.

“They turned around, looked right at us and lit up a joint,” he said. “We were in uniforms and they didn’t even care. They looked at us like, ‘You can’t do anything to me.’ ”

If skiers are lighting up too, Baker said, at least they’re discreet about it.

Ralph acknowledged that there are snowboarders who still carry an attitude to the slopes and said snowboarders lack the “Alpine etiquette” long ingrained in skiers.

Part of that, Ralph said, probably stems from the fact that many snowboarders’ parents don’t snowboard. They are being introduced to the sport as youngsters by youngsters and have no adult supervision on the mountain.

Ralph, 41, who likes to snowboard, said many snowboarders also come from surfing backgrounds and hit the slopes with the same “my-wave mentality” they bring to the lineup.

“Surfers are not the friendliest people,” Ralph said. “I found this out while going to school at Pepperdine and trying to learn how to surf. They don’t welcome other surfers and they don’t encourage beginners, or people from the Valley.

“I remember my first time skiing at Snowbird [Utah], and making my first run. I fell all the way down the mountain, but every time I fell there was someone helping me out. That’s what I mean about the Alpine etiquette that skiers have. You don’t really see that with snowboarders.”

Ralph was quick to add, however, that this shouldn’t be construed as a blanket indictment against snowboarders. It is merely the result of one sport evolving along different lines than another. Surely, there are considerate snowboarders just as there are inconsiderate skiers.

I met a few riders for Ride Snowboards while on a recent media trip to Bear Mountain. They were pleasant company. Certainly none seemed the type that would choke a coach, break up a hotel room or charge a young fan for an autograph. They seemed proud merely to be part of the fastest-growing sport in the world.

One of them was Circe Wallace, 26, one of the top female boarders in North America. Wallace was an avid skateboarder as a grade-schooler in Eugene, Ore. She lived a “troubled childhood,” had a “blowout” with her mom at 14 and moved to Seattle to live with her dad.

She has been snowboarding since and is now one of the most outspoken members of the tight-knit community of pro snowboarders.

“The hardest thing for snowboarding in general [in the beginning] was the attitude we received from the skiers, the mountain manager and just the public in general,” she said. “We were yelled at from the chairlift, called knuckle-draggers and got this really bad image.

“I think a lot of it can be attributed to the fact that we weren’t rich kids with all the nice gear. We were skateboarders not used to this ‘mountain etiquette’ that had already been established in the ski community.”

Today, Wallace said, some things have changed and some haven’t.

“We are an Olympic event and a multimillion-dollar business, yet the general public is still not ready for us and, to tell you the truth, we aren’t ready for the general public,” she said.

“I was totally disgusted with the way we were perceived in the media during the Olympics and it’s obvious that we are still the rebels of the modern sports world.”