ON A STEAMY JUNE afternoon in Louisville, the Dew Action Sports Tour sprawls across the Kentucky Fair & Expo Center. The production includes the Freedom Hall arena, site of the pipe competitions, and the 33,500-seat Papa John's Cardinal Stadium, next door, where the turf is buried under tons of dirt borrowed from the county fair. The dirt has been sculpted into impossibly high jumps for the freestyle motocross (FMX) events. There's a stage for bands and sponsor tents touting Oxy acne medicine and Right Guard antiperspirant—a roll call of solutions to teenage insecurities.

"Huge names in this second heat!" screams the announcer at the BMX venue inside Freedom Hall. It's an obstacle course of ramps, rails, and drops, in which riders are given two minutes to show off their best tricks. Handlebars spin, pedals whip, hands come off bars, and, in some cases, the whole bike is spun and flipped.

The big names include Astephen's clients Mirra and Ryan Nyquist, 26, a Greenville, North Carolina, rider, whom ESPN designated as the world's best action-sports athlete in 2004. Nyquist comes out fast and big but crashes twice while trying to nail an aerial maneuver. Mirra gets the biggest cheers when he rides out to Metallica—only to crash, too. Astephen, running late because of flight delays, has missed everything.

Mirra's score, an 84.5 out of 100, puts him in tenth place, with a shot to sneak into the next day's finals. But then Scotty Cranmer, a 16-year-old from Jackson, New Jersey, rockets down the ramp to the cheeky accompaniment of Britney Spears's "Toxic" and reels off an audacious front flip over the top of a ramp. Mirra's out.

A collaboration between NBC Sports and Clear Channel Communications, backed by a multiyear deal with Mountain Dew, the tour was created to produce a points series much like NASCAR's Nextel Cup. The idea is to have a full-fledged season in which tension mounts, rivalries develop, and young eyeballs are lured to the TV week after week.

"The pro tour for action sports" is the way NBC's 400-plus promos, shotgunned across the network from the Today show to Joey, billed the concept. It's a big gamble for the network, but even the gray-suited execs know that the popularity of nontraditional events is encroaching fast on classic fare like baseball and hockey. Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports & Olympics, has said he first realized this in 1998, after watching his kids ignore the summerlong home-run derby between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire to practice skateboarding instead.

The tricky part is keeping the tour alive. The landscape is littered with the ghosts of events that have failed to find traction, including the NBC-televised Gravity Games, which was sold to OLN in 2004 after some stars stopped participating. The lone exception is the original showcase event, ESPN's twice-a-year X Games, which launched in 1999.

But even if the tour is a bust, TV and its advertisers aren't giving up. Listen to John Galloway, vice president of sports and media at Mountain Dew. "Ultimately, we need to sell soda," he says, "and what's impressive is that action sports have really helped us do that." The strong attraction, he believes, comes from the fact that "these sports are about a lifestyle, not winning."

Still, you've got to have a winner to flack a lifestyle. And back at the BMX venue, Astephen, who's just appeared, is feeling frustrated on that score. He had two flights canceled en route from the West Coast, only to arrive and find that his two biggest stars have been bounced from competition in the first hour.

"Man, what a day!" he says to no one in particular. "When was the last time both Dave and Ryan rode like that?" Then he brightens up. "Remember what I told you about having the next Mirra?" he asks me. "Cranmer's ours, too."

Astephen grew up in a lower-middle-class family that moved between various blue-collar suburbs in Boston, the oldest of five kids raised by a divorced mother. When he was ten, he got hooked on skiing after his mom took him to a small hill outside the city. In 1988, he finished high school and boarded a bus to Vail, Colorado, with $150 to his name. Within a year he'd converted to snowboarding and partnered up with his new friend, Jimmy DeLong, another convert to snowboarding whom he met while working as a liftie, to open the Other Side, the first snowboard shop in Beaver Creek.

The shop boomed, but Astephen's mind started wandering. "Way back when I was a kid, I wanted to be a real NBA/NFL-type agent," he says. "When I got to Colorado, I started reading contract-law books and came to understand how to negotiate."

In 1994, Astephen, burned out on the retail grind, walked away from the shop and headed to San Diego to become one of Lamar Snowboards' marketing managers. A year later, when Astephen heard that Reebok had suddenly canceled a contract with one of Lamar's riders, Kevin Jones, he spoke up.

"Nobody was looking out for snowboarders," says Astephen. "Kevin had a two-year contract worth like 80 grand, and they said they were gonna pay him ten grand to walk away. I was like ‘No, no, no. That ain't right.' In the end, I got Kevin nearly the whole sum."

When Jones told other pros that his buddy Steve had convinced Reebok to make good, they started asking him for help, and Astephen realized he was staring at the germ of a viable business. But this was 1995—no bank was going to loan money to a board-sports agent. Astephen needed an investor. For three years, he worked out of his garage and then a tiny office in Solana Beach until he got publishing scion Austin Hearst, an avid snowboarder, to put up just under $100,000.

The Familie, with Jones as its first client, was born, and a sports market that hadn't had agents before suddenly did. "When I heard about him trying to be an agent, I thought, That's a weird idea," says Ken Block, cofounder of DC Shoes, which makes roughly $150 million a year selling skateboard shoes and snowboard boots. But Astephen's idea came with a downside, according to Block. "He weakened the close relationship we had with athletes."

"There are a lot of companies out there who hate me," Astephen says, smiling. "Guys who were making 12 grand a year in 1997 went to 300 grand pretty quick."

If all of this makes it sound like Astephen is the only game in town, well, in summer sports, he more or less is. But if his roster has a shortcoming, it's in snowboarding. He may still represent Tara Dakides, winner of eight

X Games medals, and 15 other pros, including Todd Richards, who'll cover Olympic snowboarding in Turin this month for NBC, but Astephen has let many male stars slip away—in part because he wasn't the only agent chasing snowboarders in the late nineties.

Around the time Astephen was first arranging deals, Portland, Maine–based contract lawyer Peter Carlisle started representing East Coast snowboarders. His first client, in 1998, was Ross Powers, an 18-year-old from South Londonderry, Vermont, who went on to win a gold medal in the halfpipe competition at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake. By the time Carlisle sold his agency to Octagon, in 2001, his roster included Kelly Clark, now 22, the 2002 women's-halfpipe gold medalist, and Danny Kass, now 23, who finished second to Powers in Salt Lake. Today, Carlisle is managing director of Olympic and action sports at Octagon, with a client sheet that includes street skater Paul Rodriguez and the golden boy of the 2004 Athens Olympics, swimmer Michael Phelps.

For his part, Astephen is brashly unconcerned about the competition. "The reality is I've never lost an athlete I wanted," he says. When asked about parting ways in 2002 with 20-year-old Shaun White, a freckle-faced redhead from Carlsbad, California, who is a force in both skateboarding and snowboarding, Astephen claims it was due to "personality differences," not to poaching from another agency. (White is now with IMG's fledgling action-sports division.)

"Listen," Astephen says, "as long as I love my clients like I do, they have no reason to leave."