A Giant Awakens: 1990

At Seton Hall Preparatory School for Boys of Higher Learning and Education, every student wore a blue blazer with a patch, white shirt and tie. In the Spring of senior year, we were allowed (told?) to wear collared, blue, polo shirts instead of blazers so we could concentrate more and stand out more from the underclassmen. It got hot in those old buildings in West Orange, New Jersey, so that was fine with us. Sports, U2 and girls were a big deal at SHP. Hacky Sack, Descendents and Natas Kaupus were not.

On the hot days, we’d hang outside in the yard, within school grounds, laughing at jocks and nerds walking by, noticing the t shirts each type of student wore underneath the uniform. Concert t’s were banned, especially black ones. But there was one dude, Frank Marino, who wore Metallica shirts under his uniform every day. I never felt the need to make a statement with my underwear. I sometimes think that the lack of identity my high school friends and I chose to exude bothered the kids who worked hard to create their own presence, even in such a restricted environment. Our comfort with our lack of style confused them and made the insecure ones even more paranoid about their need to conform.

Our comfort stemmed from the fact that we participated in activities and listened to bands not because they were trendy and popular, but because we truly enjoyed them. Most of the things we loved so much were important to us because they offered freedom from the crap we endured at school and/ or home. On weekends during the winter of 1990, snowboarding was the only thing that mattered. When that stoke overflowed into the school week, it peaked on Friday afternoons. Some of my classmates seemed uncomfortable with the whole snowboarding thing, and that typically manifest itself in stupid comments and shady glances. I wonder if they remember those ignorant comments at Christmas time these days, buying new shred gear or Shaun White video games for their kids.

By 1990, Warren Miller had snowboarding in his sights. Snowboards were being manufactured for global consumption in factories using ski production technology. Skateboarders and surfers were beginning to ride all winter. Skiers and ski resorts however, were not that stoked, just yet. They were skeptical, typically snooty, but unusually inquisitive when they got you alone: “Is that fun? Could my kids learn?”. But on the outside, most people on skis were bitter at snowboarders for scraping the snow, ruining the bumps and crowding the trails. They’d change that tune in a few years and Warren Miller knew it, snowboarding refueled winter sports for the next 10 crucial years.

As a snowboarder in 1990, you knew you were part of something big, but you were having too much fun being different to admit that. It was as if the self-realization that you were on the edge of the fastest growing sport worldwide would kill the stoke instantly, better to just keep riding and acting stupid. The sport was exploding globally, it had been accepted at resorts, there were no more certification tests. They needed us to pay to ride, they were getting used to us paying to ride, even though they did not understand or enjoy our presence. In 1990, terrain parks and halfpipes were discussed and built at resorts. People were riding race boards, freestyle boards and all-around snowboards, with different types of boots and bindings. Pro riders were now idolized, emulated, and riding talent and good looks became a commodity. I was a zitty high school kid with a reverse mullet, riding a prototype Burton M13 race board with pink and yellow Koflach boots and vari-plate bindings. I had green woolies, a new Burton coat and an old, red ski cap. I sweated and turned as hard and fast as I could on that board, under the lifts at Magic.

Riding styles began to emerge: euro style, free-style, east coast hardcore, mid west attitude, colorado kids, utah powder, west coast badass, northwest big mountains. We started to hear about, read about, watch and admire riders from totally different backgrounds and regions. People like Damian Sanders, Peter Bauer, Shaun Palmer, Steve Graham and Mike Ranquet emerged to challenge the mainstream, American Burton army from the east. At the time, no one knew what style to embrace, so most riders just made up their own, it was open source. A lot of kids were riding equipment and clothing that were cobbled together from pieces of hand-me-downs and whatever freebies they could get through connections, so fashion style was not possible. But riding styles emerged, morphed, collapsed and were reborn all within the span of a season or two.

It was a wild time to be a snowboarder and riders like Joe Bogdanski embodied what it meant to be a freestyle snowboarder. No one knew where things were headed, and the field was wide open for riding progression and style to push the sport forward. The interesting thing was, although everyone on a snowboard believed their style and riding region was the raddest, no one stepped in and tried to tell anyone else where or how to ride and definitely not what to wear riding. I feel like it was this respect for the freedom of every other rider that helped snowboarding get past “fad” status so many in the skiing elite predicted. Snowboarders wore everything from army woolies and OR mitts to speed suits and day glo. At the time, respect for other snowboarders spanned across riding and fashion styles. Big air, fast turns, simple radness and a lack of attitude earned respect for snowboarders within the ranks in 1990. It was this freedom and lack of structure in snowboarding that threatened the alpine mainstream and made every skier on the hill despise snowboarders. Skiing was all about fashion, style, smoothness, history and families. Skiing was heavily influenced by the European style, alpine living and high tech equipment. Snowboarders were young, ugly, rude and American, and we were clearly having the most fun on the hill, for now.

If you owned a small snowboard company or planned to start one in 1990, you were in for a serious ride, if you could just hang on. Some did hold on, but not without feeling the wrath of riding on Burton’s coat-tails. Jake’s company drove the industry forward in a big way, although many product innovations and styles emerged outside of the Big B. Burton was saavy enough to drive innovation where they could and pick up on other’s trends in time to capitalize on them when they failed to stay ahead of the game. We blindly followed Burton, rode Burton and preached Burton while at the same time regarding other’s products as somehow inferior, usually because it was kinda jacked (Crazy Banana?). No one had the development money that Jake put into products. So almost everyone who tried something new, called it revolutionary, and failed the first time, including Burton. Many times the product development issues were especially visible in snowboard bindings, which makes sense because the world had been producing technology for everything else a snowboarder needed for years. Bindings were a new frontier technology-wise, and growing pains became so apparent that development has stagnated over the years, maybe because the riders are not asking for more. Baseless, slapratchets, forward lean adjusters, and step-ins are good examples of snowboard-specific binding technology that came and went with tough consequences and many sore feet. Snowboarders have stuck with what works and have been unwilling to try anything new, as a result, snowboard bindings look and function much the same now as they did in the early 90s, apart from graphic inlays and spit/ polish.

Snowboarding in 1990 was about validation, excitement and some wild-ass style, as well as some of the better antics never recorded for YouTube or grainy cell phone videos, but only for the prized memories and storytelling. Does anyone else tell stories any more? It was just the beginning of something gigantic, something that would change winter sports for ever, change the Olympics, change the economy, change the world of fashion, and change thousands of lives, including those of my family and friends. We didn’t care about any of that, we had no idea. All we knew was we wanted to ride as much as possible, with our friends, at mountains like Magic Mountain and Big Bromley, in conditions that ranged from decent to shitty. Once in a while, someone got really rad right in front of you, or you got to ride deep powder, and feel like Craig for a turn or two. It was those isolated memories that punctuated the everyday runs on standard ski trails in Vermont, and made you feel like the riders in the videos you watched time and again.

Over the next four years, some of those visions of insane riding were created by people even closer to me than I ever knew. The new crop of snowboard pros set the tone for the sport for the next generation of riders. From the mid-nineties onward, professional snowboarders ruled the sport, thanks to Jamie Lynn, Craig Kelly and Terje.