Outside Online - Terje Haakonsen

Outside magazine, February 1999

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Adjustment in Midflight (cont.)

Haakonsen first tried snowboarding at age 13, when a neighbor loaned him a swallowtail board. Though he was already an experienced skier, he immediately felt the sweet expansiveness inherent in snowboarding, the greater use of terrain, the sweeping carves, the wider array of tricks. He took to it quickly and easily, maneuvering the backcountry, developing his powerful turns, and later going big off natural moguls. Soon Einar Lofthus, another Telemark snowboarder and already a touring pro, escorted Haakonsen into the world of big air, where Legend Haakonsen, with his sense of balance and soccer player's athleticism, was born.

In 1990, at the age of 15, Haakonsen placed fifth in the world championships. Two years later he was the world champion. Even today, he has no special training regimen, just surfing, snowboarding, soccer, and skateboarding. And the occasional yoga session to help him stay limber. "That was a fun time," Haakonsen says of this period before his status preceded him into every half-pipe he dropped into. "I was the youngest guy on the tour. I was always learning new tricks, figuring out ways to get better. When I'm having fun snowboarding, it's like meditation. I'm not thinking about anything but what I'm doing right now. No past, no future."

It is easy to lose sight in this too-wearied, too-calculating professional athlete of the playful, exuberant kid who transformed his sport. But remember him at 18, or watch his videos: He was quiet, full of confidence. He was good, but a lot of guys were good. What set Haakonsen apart, besides the plain fact that he could go two or three

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times as big as anyone else out of the pipe, was the way he could also tackle big mountains and backcountry, could just look at a frightful line and with no hesitation or fear be the first to take it—in the clannish world of snowboarding, that's what earns respect. "He was this kid who was afraid of nothing," says Jake Burton.

Now Haakonsen works at snowboarding, reading Transworld Snowboarding like a show-biz player parsing Variety, gleaning workplace gossip and valuable intelligence from the columns: who's where, doing what, and for whom. Sponsorships. Contests. Tricks. This is his business more than his sport, one that has rewarded him exceedingly well; between sponsors, endorsements, and prizes, his annual income is close to a million dollars. "I do have to look at it as a business," Haakonsen says of deciding what to endorse, where to compete, which publications to appear in. "I have to protect myself. Do what's right for me. A lot of people work for me—I don't know how many, a tax lawyer, agents, team managers, marketing people, so many people. And they all bring me different projects—this jump competition, some magazine. And if it's a good enough concept or it's worth it to me financially, I do it. I guess I'm a sellout, that's how it is."

So yes, Haakonsen's been getting rich and acquiring fame and all the while losing what he values most about snowboarding: the spontaneity, the risk-taking. Standing in his kitchen, amidst rose-pink walls, boiling a pot of herbal tea and emptying chocolates into a bowl, he's the picture of the kroner-rich life. This apartment on Kirkeveien Street—barren walls, top-of-the-line Bang & Olufsen stereo, gear overflowing from walk-in closets—is an anonymous bachelor's pad. You get the feeling he could walk out of this life in two minutes flat. But this is the pricey part of town, and owning a home here, and bidding on a luxurious penthouse across Frogner Park, and renting the oceanfront place in Laguna Beach, California, and spending the off-season months in Brazil, all these are the perquisites of fabulous athletic success, of a well-maintained business. And Haakonsen feels frozen by them.

"People get stuck and all they do the whole year is pipe, and that's too bad for them," he complains. "They do the same routine over and over, get the moves down. It becomes like this really precise, synchronized movement, like they're little ballerinas or something. It's no longer this spontaneous sport, like when you're a kid screwing around."

He shakes his head; he's been describing his own boarding, of course. "Everything around [snowboarding] now is, like, work. It's too complicated. It's changed the feeling. Before, my motivation was always to get a lot of different tricks, different terrain. Like my motivation when I was young, not so long ago, was based more on what tricks could I do, how big I could go, how easy I could make it look, the style. But for the last few years my motivation changed. I got more routine, especially on the pipe. I was still trying to go big, but I wasn't trying new tricks. I was, like, not taking chances. I was, you know, stuck."

Look back once more: thinking about that stretch when Haakonsen was doing time in Mililani, when he found himself trapped by some antiforce, some inertia, in the midst of a town he couldn't stand, with no idea of what he was doing there. Back then he searched for a way out but couldn't find one. There was nowhere to go, no World Cup to ride, no half-pipe to snowboard, no soccer game to join, and he was just there, planted, and it was hot and sticky and he had nothing to do but sleep late with his girlfriend, visit the strip mall for frappuccinos, and wait for the urge to get out of there.

When he did finally get out of there, he left his girlfriend with a child, Matthew, now 15 months old. Haakonsen and the mother never married, but they share the parenting, Matthew spending several months with his father in Norway or on the road, then returning to his mother in Hawaii.

Matthew, a chubby ball of flesh with curly brown hair and goopy baby lips, recently left Haakonsen's sleek loft in Oslo after spending the month with his father near Salvador, Brazil. Haakonsen can still see him, though, as if he were paddling in the late-afternoon Brazilian surf, Matthew a brown dot on the white sand. While Haakonsen was bobbing in the swell, he felt like maybe this was the point of it all—that idle period, his half-throttle efforts in the pipe, the concentration on his bottom line. Maybe this little boy on the beach, grasping handfuls of sand, not knowing a snowboard from Adam, maybe that was the point.

And all this other stuff was, like, just business.

"I feel different now," Haakonsen says about snowboarding, but really talking about his whole life. "I don't care about just winning contests, doing what I know will win. I feel like going back to more tricks, going back to taking chances. I feel like trying more new things, taking a different line through life. I want to get that feeling again, of being a kid in the backyard, of making a jump, of doing this because this is exactly what I want to be doing."

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