White Gold Rush / The X Games star lives up to expectations in the halfpipe

The man who just won the unofficial title of coolest dude in the Winter Olympics still lives with his parents.

The new king of the men’s halfpipe, the rockin’est event at these Games, digs music that you’d hear on KLOS, doesn’t mind being filmed in the same shot as a cardboard cutout of Fabio and thinks the best part of his gold medal is, it boosts his chances with a quintessential good girl.

“I’m hoping Sasha Cohen dates gold medalists,” Shaun White said, slipping into an imaginary conversation with the figure skater. “ ‘Hey, babe. Oh, this? Oh, yeah, I just got it. How you doin’?’ ”

Now that the rest of the world can see what the X Games crowd already knew -- White is the capital-T Truth -- it’s time to reveal what the first impressions don’t give off. In a Mountain Dew sport, he’s vitamin-D milk.

Don’t be fooled by White’s profession or that huge outburst of red hair, the one that earned him the nickname “the Flying Tomato.” Even he admits, “I’ve gotta get a haircut.”

Truth is, he’s just as normal as any 19-year-old who owns three homes in California and two condos in Utah, needs two commas to tabulate his endorsement deals, travels around the world and wins just about every competition he enters can be.

“It’s an amazing year for me,” White said. “Honestly, I feel really grateful for everything.”

He paused to ask teammate Danny Kass, the silver medalist, “Do you want to go to Disneyland?”

“I was on the chairlift today with Andy Finch, one of our teammates,” White continued. “I was just like, ‘Can you believe this is kind of our job, this is what we do?’ ”

It’s just as unbelievable to think that snowboarding has taken over as the American event of the Winter Olympics. Sunday’s 1-2 punch combined with the Salt Lake City sweep of 2002 gives the U.S. five of the last six medals awarded in the halfpipe event and six of nine since the Olympics adopted the sport for the 1998 Games.

Many observers also thought American Mason Aguirre had the third-best run Sunday, but his score wasn’t good enough to displace Markuu Koski of Finland for the bronze medal.

So say goodbye to the Phil and Steve Mahre days. The roles have switched now: The top snowboarder is a conformist and the top skier is an anti-establishment rebel. And unlike the outspoken Bode Miller, White wins Olympic gold medals.

Even someone taking in his first live halfpipe competition (like me) can tell White’s just that much better than everyone else. He has that key component of greatness, the ability to make it look easy.

I’ll let Bud Keene, the U.S. halfpipe coach, explain it in better detail.

“Most riders drop into the pipe, they do their tricks, they land their tricks and just drift toward the next wall,” Keene said. “He skates that thing. He’s in control every second, whether he’s in the air, whether he’s on the wall, whether he’s in the flat bottom. Everything is happening exactly the way he wants it to happen. And that’s a quality that really shines through in his riding.”

To put it in snowboard-speak, “He’s just got backside 9s on lock,” Kass said. (Translation: He excels at spinning 2 1/2 times from the back side of the board.)

White’s the beta version of the new American sports hero. Snowboarding might have a counterculture image, but White couldn’t get enough of the red-white-and-blue. He performed his halfpipe runs with an American flag bandana across his face. After he’d surfed his way to victory on the second run with the gold medal assured, White waved a giant American flag like a matador enticing a bull, then draped Old Glory across his shoulders. If that weren’t enough, White grabbed a tiny flag and waved that too.

Kass then let us in on a secret: “I saw, he cried.”

“It was just tears,” White clarified. “It wasn’t crying. It wasn’t my fault. It was the family coming up and their eyes were beet red and they were just like, ‘uhwuhuh, uwuhuwuh.’ ”

You can tell family means everything to White. His parents, brother and sister came to Italy to cheer him on. He thought about them at the top of the hill, kept talking about them during his news conference. And how many teenagers do you know who refer to their fathers as “rad”?

White credited his dad for his taste in music, an old-school lean that led to two songs recorded before he was born -- AC/DC’s “Back in Black” and Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” -- booming through the speakers for his runs.

“My dad, he’s the rocker,” White said.

White and Kass (who looks like one of the tough kids in “The Simpsons” when he wears his knit hat) have a good connection too. Kind of a Ben Stiller-Owen Wilson thing. And for the record, that life-sized Fabio that joined Kass and White for a pipe-side TV interview came from Kass’ family.

“What a strange bunch,” White said. “Where would one find a Fabio cutout?”

Soon, people might start asking where they can find a Shaun White cutout. White still dreams of one day attending the Summer Olympics to compete in skateboarding, his first love.

If the sport were adopted and he won a gold medal, White and American Eddie Eagan (bobsled/boxing) would be the only people to win gold in both the Summer and Winter Olympics.

And the best part of all?

“Sasha would dig that.”

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande, and to read more, go to latimes.com/adandeblog.