MY NAME IS HAMPTON and I'm a snowboard dad.

Since that fateful day in Whistler, my wife, Anne, and I have sucked untold numbers of gas tanks dry driving untold thousands of miles every year to haul our young Jedi to regional and national snowboarding competitions. We've been everywhere from Maine's Sunday River to California's Mammoth Mountain, from Oregon's Mount Hood to New Mexico's Angel Fire. With McCall having qualified for five consecutive amateur national snowboarding championships, in multiple events, we've more or less built our vacations around snowboarding. Although he's not in the nation's top ten, he's consistently done well. At last year's nationals, at Tahoe Northstar, he placed 18th in slopestyle, and in previous years he's placed as high as 13th overall. Santa Fe, where we live, has a snow-starved mountain without a snowboarding coach or even a halfpipe, but over the years we've sought out some of the best freelance instruction we could find. At a skills clinic in Aspen a few years ago, through dumb luck, McCall wound up spending a whole day in the pipe with a promising (and, might I add, hot) twenty-something phenom named Gretchen Bleiler.

As a native flatlander from Tennessee, I never in a million years imagined I'd grow up to be this kind of father, spending so much time loitering on the mountain. On the morning of an event, as McCall pulls on his competitor's bib, I hear myself urging

We want to cheer on your little grommets, but we don't quite know what to say. "Go! Jump! Check it out!"

him to "style out your melons," "watch your speed checks," and by all means never "overrotate." During the competitions, I stand anxiously beside the scoreboard with butterflies in my stomach as I wait for McCall to take his run. I study the judges for clues to their proclivities. I watch the coaches from Steamboat and the Stratton Mountain School in their natty matching team jackets. I savor the different styles of these young riders, who all seem to come with names pitch-perfect for the X Games: Dash Kamp, Zac Fear, Blaze Kotsenburg, Zeppelin Zeerip. (Composer Burt Bacharach has a gifted snowboarding son McCall has ridden with who goes by the name of Sharky. He wears a floppy dorsal-fin getup over his helmet.) I enjoy the patter of the soul-patched announcer as he narrates the action from the Red Bull tent over strains of thrasher music. "Yo, dawg, check him out!" he says. "He keepin' it thug, he keepin' it real!"

And sometimes, à la Tonya Harding, I secretly dream of kneecapping my son's rivals.

We snowboard pops are a pathetic new breed. Though we do not yet have a support group, during my travels I have found solace commiserating with my cohorts through many dark hours. Our affliction is both real and surreal. Though many of us think we're cool, we're actually the epitome of squareness. We push for a greatness we don't quite understand, we root for a style and an energy that's not of our generation. We bankroll the growth of a youth culture that would never accept us as members. Some of us peroxide our hair and tattoo our arms and wear skate-shop clothes in a lame attempt to blend in with their world—forgetting, silly rabbit, that tricks are for kids. We want to cheer on our little grommets, but we don't quite know what to say. "Go! Jump! Cork it out!"

Although I've tried it a couple of times, let's face it, snowboarding didn't even exist when I was growing up. Only a few years ago, it was a renegade endeavor, an expression of pure freedom, an anti-sport. It strove in its own ruffian way to be the opposite of everything organized sports had become. But now, at its worst, snowboarding has turned to the Dark Side: lucrative sponsorships, asshole coaches, a thoroughly corporate-driven aesthetic, and pressure enough to give kids a bleeding ulcer.

And just like in Little League, there now can be found those familiar yelling, goading, make-you-cringe moms and dads, standing ever so obtrusively on the sidelines, pushing their kids, embarrassing their kids, making their kids cry. Moms and dads who soap up their minivan windows with annoying messages like SHRED 'EM, CODY! Live-through-their-offspring parents who nurse decidedly premature visions of Olympic glory and see snowboarding as their free ride to a college scholarship.

I've witnessed some soul-searing scenes out there on the circuit. In Colorado I once met a dad who, as a matter of policy, refused to attend an awards ceremony unless his son came in first—a silver or bronze wouldn't cut it for the Great Santini. At the 2005 nationals, at Copper Mountain, I overheard another father say, "Good God, Ty, we rehearsed this! You were s'posed to end with a big 540, and you come up with a piddly-shit method air?" And this from a despot in California to his son after a poor showing: "There's a little thing called talent—look into it."