The Cool Sellout (Cont.) | Outside Online

Outside Magazine November 2002

Page:

The Cool Sellout (Cont.)


	White light, white heat: A competitor surfs above the halfpipe (Ben Watts)

"YOU JUST PLAY EVERY DAY," says Norwegian Anne Molin Kongsgaard, laying out the life of a professional snowboarder over some fries in the Stratton cafeteria. The 25-year-old Burton rider switched from two planks to one in 1994 for the independence it affords—mainly, no coaches telling her what to do. Once they score sponsorships, most pros shelve school and hit the contest circuit sans chaperon. And most, like Kongsgaard, relish the lifestyle of riding, seeing the world on someone else's tab, and hanging out with a tight group of good-looking friends. Still, it takes stamina.

Take a look at Ross Powers. He arrives midday, straight off a red-eye from L.A. Last night he taped a segment of Weakest Link; today he's just hoping to get in a few runs. Wearing three days' stubble and bright yellow goggles, the champ wanders along a carnivalesque main street of sponsors' kiosks, the tail of his board dragging in the slush, as a huckster for Right Guard Xtreme bellows into a too-loud speaker, "Who's the most EXTREME here!?"

"It seems like every other night I wake up in a different place these days," Powers mumbles, looking at his feet. He hasn't ridden in weeks. "Sometimes I kinda forget where I am, and then I realize what I'm there for and it brings the memory back."

"I don't want to sell out, you know, and I don't think I will," says Kelly Clark. "But I don't even know what the real definition of it is."

Powers, who is 23, grew up eight miles away, in South Londonderry, and the Open is his homecoming. People around here are proud of him, and they all seem to know his story: that his father left when he was five, and that he and his younger brother, Trevor, were raised in a two-room apartment by their mom, Nancy, who still works at the Bromley Mountain Ski Resort cafeteria. Ross started racing in 1988, when he was nine, nursing used equipment and winning like mad. Burton took note and started outfitting him the next year. By 1993 he'd made enough of a name for himself to get into the tony Stratton Mountain School ski academy on a partial scholarship, washing windows in the summer to offset his share of the balance. (Tuition is currently $17,300 for day students.) The year after he graduated, he took the bronze medal in the halfpipe at Nagano.

"If it wasn't for my mom and a lot of other people," he tells me matter-of-factly, "I wouldn't be where I am today."

That place is somewhere over the million-dollar rainbow, according to his agent, Peter Carlisle, who, as director of the action sports division of the management firm Octagon, also manages Kelly Clark, the 19-year-old from Vermont who rides for Burton. Powers was doing just fine with Burton and Polo RLX as his sponsors, but since the Olympics he's added Stratton Mountain and Malibu Boats (he's into wakeboarding) to his portfolio. "My guess—and it's an educated guess—is that he's the best-compensated snowboarder out there," says Carlisle.



	Kass meets his public. (Ben Watts)

How Powers goes about making his money is a delicate matter. Selling out is a heavy subject in snowboarding—credibility means everything. Humble as his beginnings were, Powers has to be vigilant about the pitfalls of success. "There's some stuff you just can't do because it would make you look stupid," he says. Like? "They wanted Danny and J. J. and me to go and rock out with 'N Sync while they were at the Olympics. We didn't do that. It would probably hurt our image more than help us."

The new Olympians are acutely aware of the fine line they must walk. "Before the Olympics I would pick up on people saying little things about selling out," says Clark. "But now that I did well, everyone's like, 'Oh, no, it's totally cool!' Which is, like, maybe a little bit annoying to me? I don't want to sell out, you know, and I don't think I will. But I don't even know what the real definition of it is. I guess what it comes down to is how you're going to feel having that sticker on your board."

The sticker that Powers, Kass, and Thomas will be sporting this season is large and reads Nestea cool. Coca-Cola aired a commercial for its new tea last spring showcasing the three Olympians and a snowman using only the word dude to express various sentiments. It bombed in snowboard circles. "Let me see if I can be diplomatic about this," says Schriber, Burton's former image maker, who resembles an ornery, bespectacled Alfred E. Neuman. "What I would hope for is that when somebody wants to use snowboarding to sell their product, they contribute rather than detract."

That's a tall order. Dudespeak aside, snowboarders judge coolness in widely varying degrees, so for a major corporation to use the medalists' credibility without simultaneously eroding it would be lucky. Fortunately for sponsors, the medalists all have different images, which broadens their potential demographic appeal. Powers is the Horatio Alger, Kass is the Willy Wonka, Thomas is the Hunk, and Clark is the Role Model (she did 40 public appearances in the ten days following her victory). "It's like a perfect Venn diagram," says Schriber, referring to the kind of graph that employs overlapping circles to illustrate logical relationships. "It's almost too lucky that three totally different guys got medals. They have three different followings in the sport. All three of them now have to give the Olympics themselves some credit."

Thomas has no problem with that, especially given that he didn't expect to be in this position. He posted good but not stellar results until last January, when he finally mastered the Cab 900 and the Switch McTwist, taking first and third at Grand Prix events at his home mountain in Breckenridge, Colorado. Then he won the X Games. "It's been cool—you get a lot of stuff for free," says Thomas, who is six feet tall, with a tan to match his medal, and still lives at home with his parents. "You go into the local deli and they're like, 'Here you go!' Tom Petty came to Red Rocks, and I just called my friends over at the radio station in Denver and they hooked me up." As for the Nestea commercial? "If you go out, people will tease you and shit," he says. "The only people who really harsh you are just, like, haters—they're just jealous or whatever. I don't even sweat that, man."

Whether the Nestea deal is a first step toward Team Sweep being perceived as sellouts remains to be seen. Kass, for one, entertained other options. According to Bob Klein, his primary agent, he turned down Pepsi's Mountain Dew, a brand that's gone after generations X and Y with TV commercials and its sponsorship of the X Games, to sign with Coke's Nestea Cool.

"When I laid it out to Danny," says Klein, 38, a Northern Californian who used to be Shaun Palmer's agent, "I said, 'Here's Mountain Dew and here's Coke. Mountain Dew's paying about a third more. What do you think?' He was like, 'Well, I'm going to do the Coke deal.' I couldn't believe it, because I'm thinking Mountain Dew is a no-brainer, the image is already there. Shit, Nestea Cool? C'mon man, there is no image, right? I was like, 'Why?' He said, 'Because I don't want to Do the Dew—dude.' That's all he said. And that's all it took for me to understand what he was saying. And that, my friend, is what the kids of snowboarding understand."

Page: