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Outside Magazine November 2002

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The Cool Sellout (Cont.)


	The indestructible Lelly Clark (Ben Watts)

DURING OPEN WEEK IN MARCH, Danny Kass is conspicuously absent from the Stratton bars, his usual stomping grounds. "I don't really have an ID," he explains when I finally get him on the phone two months later. Of the four medalists, he has been the hardest to nail down. No rider straddles the divide between the underground and the mainstream with as much craftiness as this 20-year-old Jersey kid with the black mop of hair. When asked by a buddy with a video camera at Salt Lake what he was going to do after winning the silver medal, Kass responded, "Dude, I am gonna smoke the fattest..." Then, spotting a Newsweek reporter, he said to his friend: "Dude, nice try! You almost got me, man! Drugs are bad!"

Kass's credibility is rooted in ability. In the 2000-2001 season, at age 18, the Gnu-sponsored rider won the X Games, the U.S. Open, and three of four USSA Grand Prix events. At the Olympics, where the judging system weighed amplitude more than rotational prowess, Powers won because, in addition to doing some tough tricks, he pulled off what was instantly recognized as the highest flight in halfpipe history—17 to 18 feet of big air. (Riders can go even bigger off a tall quarterpipe, because they have several hundred yards to pick up speed.) Kass, who grew up skateboarding and only started snowboarding at 12, took the other route. He pulled off a Cab 1080 with a Melon Grab (three full rotations midflight, front hand grabbing the heel edge of the board) and landed with enough speed to throw a 900 off the opposite wall—hands down the trickiest sequence that day. The final results had some core riders grousing, because they view Powers as a "pipe robot," the antithesis of Kass.



	(Ben Watts)

"It's rare to find style like that in snowboarders these days," says veteran Shaun Palmer, 34, who stormed the circuit with a punk attitude a decade ago. "I mean, people rip—they go 12 feet high—but they don't look like Danny when they're doing it." Then he clarifies: "Danny's style is style."

The other reason that adolescent rippers admire Kass has to do with the mystique of Grenade Gloves, the company owned by Danny and his 24-year-old brother, Matt, who both now live in Mammoth Lakes, California. Grenade's following has almost nothing to do with handwear, and everything to do with the commercial knavery employed by the Kasses and their posse of guerrilla marketeers.

When Grenade logos first cropped up around Mammoth in fall 2000, nobody knew if the company was real. Matt had made the design, a friend hit on the idea of using stencils and spray paint, and the crew started tagging. But there was no product yet. Then, in February 2001, at the Grand Prix in Mammoth, an NBC cameraman was tagged, and a certain giddiness infected the circuit. Kids with no firm affiliation to Grenade bought their own paint and entered the game to see how far they could spread the virus. When the gloves finally did hit shops in November 2001, all 6,500 pairs sold. To date, Grenade has sold roughly 15,000 pairs at $40 to $80 a pop; combined with T-shirts, sweatshirts, and hats, that amounts to just under $1 million in sales in 2002.

"You have to be careful," says Burton image maker Daviad Schriber. "We have the job of making it cooler, but bigger is lamer in snowboarding."

"We're not like your average new company that gets millions of dollars thrown in for advertising," explains Danny. "We just started spray-painting everything and everybody, instead of buying $20,000 ads in Maxim. We'd spray-paint big posters of Patrick Swayze and use them as signs. It was just cooler, you know? Nothing else gets marketed like that."

Grenade exudes cool in a way that even Burton can't replicate—though it's not above trying. This fall, Burton introduced a board called the Dominant, which has a plain white deck and comes with stencils so you can paint your own design.

"Personally, I think Grenade has helped revitalize the sport of snowboarding," says Carter Olcott, 27, Burton's North American team assistant. "They are so not the corporate way that snowboarding has maybe become over the past five years. Once the big money started coming in, [riders] started getting a lot more focused and not going out one or two nights before the contests. One of the coolest things about the Grenade crew is that they went out and partied harder than anyone, and still came in and won. It made me go, 'Shit, man.' That shows that you're an amazing athlete. You don't necessarily need to drink Gatorade 24 hours a day."

The suggestion that snowboarders don't survive on sports drinks alone has caused Kass some consternation. Several weeks after the Olympics, he returned to his hometown of Vernon, New Jersey, for a small contest and a break from the media attention. Journalists dispatched to the scene needed quotes from the silver medalist, but he made himself unavailable. One reporter from Sports Illustrated, Yi-Wyn Yen, pressed for an interview; Kass said no. But the matter did not end there.



	(Ben Watts)

"She just kept badgering me," says Kass. "I was wondering what I could get her to do, so I tried to get her to buy me a keg. I figured she wouldn't be able to write the article at all—it'd be dicey. Then she went and got all this beer with my friend, and wrote in the article how, like, we went and got all the beer."

The March 18 article dubbed Kass "snowboarding's most notorious bad boy" but failed to disclose that it was the reporter who purchased the "nine cases of Bud Light, four cases of Corona, and two cases of Coors Light" for the underage snowboarder. ("We are aware of the situation and it has been handled internally," said S.I. spokesman Rick McCabe. "It is contrary to our standards for securing interviews and developing relationships with sources.")

"It was kind of a prank," Kass tells me. "I thought it would be humorous for a Sports Illustrated person to purchase a bunch of minors alcohol to do an interview with them. But I mean, they loved it, you know? They just made us sound even worse."

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