O’Neal says he’s starting to develop business interests that have nothing to do with basketball: He told me he’d bought a couple of car washes and strip malls, and had just signed a deal for some Burger King franchises. “Basketball is cool, but we can’t do it forever. After basketball, Dave Bing is my guy,” he said. “Those players who are smart enough save their money, so that after you stop playing you can keep it going—that is what I plan on doing, like the Kennedy money.” I asked O’Neal whether he saw himself as Joe Kennedy, a patriarch establishing a dynasty. “No, I’m the one who passed away in a plane crash—what’s his name?” he said. “The good-looking one. That’s who I am: good-looking, educated.”
On those few evenings and afternoons when O’Neal is not playing basketball or filming a commercial or visiting the children’s ward of a hospital or otherwise engaging in the various duties of an NBA superstar, he is often in a classroom, studying penal-code law. O’Neal has always been fascinated by the police—both Mike Parris, his business manager, and Jerome Crawford, who serves as his bodyguard, are retired police officers—and some years ago O’Neal decided that he wanted to train as a cop himself, with the intention of pursuing a law enforcement career after he leaves basketball, along with developing his business interests. He is already an honorary deputy for the Orange County sheriff’s office in Orlando, where he once surprised an international group of SWAT team officers who were performing a practice exercise of freeing a hostage from a bus by playing the hostage.
In Los Angeles, he is training to become an auxiliary member of the Port of Los Angeles Police, and he drives around with a senior officer, learning about how the law works. O’Neal frequently practices his law enforcement techniques on his teammates and the Lakers’ staff: Mark Madsen, a six-foot-nine-inch, 236-pound twenty-six-year-old, who has become a close friend of O’Neal’s since joining the Lakers, last season, told me, “He will come up to me and put me in all these police grips. He’ll say, ‘Which wrist did you have surgery on?’ and then he’ll do it on the other wrist. If I put up any sort of fight, I’m on the ground, quick.”
O’Neal hasn’t arrested anyone yet, but he does horse around by threatening to make citizen’s arrests on Lakers employees, and regularly orders members of the team’s support staff to stand against the wall with their legs spread. It’s unlikely that he will ever be a beat cop, since what he really wants to do is be a chief of police or run for sheriff, either in Louisiana or in Orlando: “Sheriff is an elective position, and I don’t just want to be a figurehead. And I don’t want to win because I’m Shaq, but because I have the knowledge and understand what is going on.” O’Neal generally avoids politics (though he recently went to a Nation of Islam meeting to hear Louis Farrakhan speak, and says that he is a friend of the Farrakhan family). He says that he wouldn’t run for sheriff on either a Republican or a Democratic ticket, but as an Independent, “like Ross Perot.” He told me, “Of course, I am not going to stop crime, make it zero percent, but I would try.”
When O’Neal returns to Orlando this summer, with or without a third championship ring, there will be plenty to do. He may undergo surgery on his foot, which would put him out of action for six to eight weeks. “Without any surgery, nothing is going to change,” Robert Mohr, the podiatrist, says. “For ordinary motion, you need about sixty degrees of pain-free movement in your toe. For jumping or running, you need close to ninety degrees. He has maybe twenty or thirty degrees. You imagine a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound body coming down on that joint.”
Fortunately, if O’Neal is recovering from surgery he will have the solace of various home improvements that are under way in Orlando, where his house measures thirty-six thousand square feet, and faces four hundred yards of waterfront. He has already added an eight-thousand-square-foot gym and a regulation-size basketball court, and contractors have started on the other side of the house, adding a new swimming pool and another nine thousand square feet of living space, including seven new bedrooms (O’Neal already has a master bedroom with a circular bed measuring twenty feet across), a recreation room, a cigar room, a movie theater, and a private dance club with a state-of-the-art DJ booth.
Injuries permitting, O’Neal will also be able to engage in one of his favorite activities—going on the Skycoaster, an amusement park ride in Orlando, which combines the sensations of hang gliding, bungee jumping, and skydiving. Riders are strapped into harnesses and hoisted to the top of a hundred-foot tower, where they pull a release cord that puts them into a pendulum swing, above an expanse that is the size of a football field, at about sixty miles an hour. The sensation is as close to flying as anyone who is not Superman or Michael Jordan is likely to experience, and O’Neal is fanatical about it.
“It’s like a roller coaster, and it is dangerous—if that cord breaks, you can die,” O’Neal told me. “It’s scary. It feels like you’re actually flying. It’s like you are falling from the top of a building, and someone grabs you and says, ‘OK, I ain’t going to let you die.’ And then they swing you—whoosh. I go on it all the time.” One evening, he flew for two hours, in his own, customized harness; and when other would-be Sky-coasters asked for his autograph he offered instead to take them on a ride with him. So all evening astonished patrons stood in line to fly with Shaq, waiting for their chance to swoop through the air, the kind of thing that happens in dreams.
2002
PART THREE
PERSONAL BEST
“There’s your problem.”
“I think you just missed something. The ball went up
in the air and somebody caught it and the crowd’s yelling like mad.”
DANGEROUS GAME
NICK PAUMGARTEN
In the ski-bum brain, the chance to ski with a magus like Andrew McLean is the equivalent of an invitation for a night on the town with Don Juan. The allure is great, but there’s always a possibility that the excursion will not end well. McLean is a ski mountaineer; he climbs mountains and then skis down them. He is especially fond of skiing chutes—steep, narrow flumes of snow that plunge like elevator shafts through otherwise impassable terrain. Last fall, before he and I met, he’d sent me a copy of The Chuting Gallery, his self-published guide to the chutes in his home range, the Wasatch Mountains, which are just east of Salt Lake City. He had inscribed it: “I’m looking forward to skiing with you this winter. If you die skiing one of these, I promise it will be renamed in your honor!” I can’t say that the prospect hadn’t crossed my mind.
McLean has a bit of a history. One of the runs described in The Chuting Gallery is named Roman’s, after McLean’s friend Roman Latta, who, on an outing with him there in 1993, set off an avalanche in which he was buried and killed. Latta was the first of four men who have died while climbing or skiing with McLean. The most famous was Alex Lowe, who was considered by many to be the best mountaineer in the world; Lowe disappeared in a giant avalanche on Shishapangma, in Tibet, in 1999, when he and McLean and others were attempting to become the first Americans to ski a peak higher than eight thousand meters. In all, McLean has lost more than a dozen friends to the mountains—“lost to the mountains” being a locution favored by alpinists, as though skiing or climbing were a sacrificial rite, instead of a voluntary act.
My family has a bit of history, too. My father’s father, Harald, was a devoted alpinist, as well as a ski racer and jumper who competed for Austria in the 1928 and 1932 Winter Olympics. After the 1932 Games, in Lake Placid, he stayed in America. He briefly held a job at a bank in New York (the story goes that on his lunch breaks he’d head out to Central Park, remove his suit, hang it on a tree, and go running in his underwear) before deciding that the office life was not for him. He moved to New England to teach skiing, which is how he met my grandmother, a Philadelphia society girl who was among the early wave of modish flatlanders to take up the sport under the tutelage of the Austrians. In the summers, my grandfather went on expeditions to the Fairweather Range, in Alaska. He lived in Philadelphia during th
e war, but afterward he began spending his winters in St. Anton, in Austria, in order to ski. He was killed in an avalanche there in 1952, when my father, the youngest of five children, was six. Twenty years later, one of my father’s sisters died in an avalanche while skiing. She had two children, ages seven and three. Since then, there have been a few other incidents. My father was nearly killed in an avalanche while I was skiing with him, and between us we have witnessed a fair number of slides. There was also a disturbing encounter with a crevasse—a snow bridge gave way, and I fell in. I hung by my arms over a void until two guides pulled me out.
Friends and relatives treat this high incidence of snow trouble as evidence of a family curse, or plain idiocy. The weight of these opinions is such that every time I head out on a trip that involves the kind of skiing that can lead to trouble—glaciers, powder fields, steeps—a certain premonitory queasiness sneaks up on me. The anxiety that comes of tempting fate, especially in pursuit of such an indulgence, helps generate dreams of death by suffocation or falling. But in daylight disquiet gives way to delight, and I find myself doing things that may or may not be dangerous, half aware that at any second my situation, as well as that of my wife and children, could dramatically change. It’s a fraught kind of bliss.
A year and a half ago, I read a story in the magazine Skiing titled “11 Excuses for NOT Skiing with Andrew McLean.” One was “He’ll dust you.” Another was “Tragedy dogs him.” Perhaps with that in mind, I found myself, within minutes of meeting McLean, telling him about my family, under the guise of trying to persuade him to take it easy on me. (A more direct approach had failed. “Don’t know what you think you signed up for here, Nick. You’re with the wrong guy.”) He seemed to home in on the infatuation, rather than on its consequences. “Sounds like you’ve got skiing in the blood,” he said. But later, when I passed along the additional piece of information that my great-aunt—my grandfather’s sister—a world-champion racer and fervent mountain girl, had been crippled in the fifties by a runaway ski, he said, “Maybe I should be a little concerned about skiing with you.”
McLean’s approach to peril is to see humor in it. Certainly, close calls can be comic, and McLean can laugh, in the way of soldiers and crooks, over many of his near-misses. There was the time he cart-wheeled down five hundred vertical feet of cliffs, only to land upright on his skis, unaccountably alive and intact, or the time a boulder fell and pulverized itself on a ledge just above his head. Although there isn’t really anything funny about avalanches, his manner of survival, in a few of the half dozen or so that he has been caught in—clinging to the trunk of an aspen tree, high above the ground, or buried upside down, with his legs sticking straight out of the snow—can sound cartoonish. The only thing that spoils the Wile E. Coyote effect (he is forty-three years old, yet he has never so much as broken a bone while skiing) is that a number of his narrow escapes have coincided with the deaths of other people. This is something he doesn’t much like to discuss.
In The Chuting Gallery, McLean inventories the hazards of his favorite routes with a cheek that, in the solemn and superstitious realm of mountain chronicles, borders on blasphemy. In some quarters, it is considered an irresponsible book, as appropriate as a guide to robbing banks. The northeast couloir of a peak called the Pfeifferhorn, McLean writes, is “more fun than running with scissors, sticking paperclips into electrical sockets or taping firecrackers to a cat’s tail.” Of Hellgate Couloir, a run that involves rappelling down two cliffs, he writes, “Short, stout, steep and scary. What more could you ask for?”
The Chuting Gallery begins with a disclaimer, from McLean’s mother: “The fact that this is a ‘guidebook’ does not mean that you, the reader, should take it seriously. Obviously, no one in their right mind would ski this stuff—and you shouldn’t either.” By “this stuff,” she means terrain that is challenging enough to fit under the standard definition of extreme skiing, first codified by the American steep-skiing pioneer Chris Landry: “If you fall, you die.” McLean ascends quickly, sometimes with the aid of ropes, ice axes, and crampons. And he descends carefully. He is not a hot dog. What he’s after is an elusive blend of anxiety and exhilaration—a level of difficulty that requires physical and analytical prowess, as well as self-discipline and imagination. He also wants to be first. It’s the adventurer’s injunction: Do it before anyone else does, or at least do it differently. His calling takes him to such remote places as Antarctica and the Himalayas. He goes on two big expeditions a year. This month, McLean and three friends are going to Alaska for four weeks in an effort to become the first people ever to ski the Archangel Ridge of Mount Foraker, a sister peak of Mount McKinley. It is a gruesome and isolated route, eleven thousand vertical feet—dark, cold, high, scary. It has been climbed only twice before. What’s more, to reach Foraker the group will have to climb up and ski down another difficult peak, in order to avoid sixteen river crossings, not to mention bears.
There are, of course, many extreme skiers in the world, and many mountain climbers, and quite a few who combine the skills of both. The game has changed since my grandfather’s day. The vogue is to refer to them as “adventure athletes.” They star in films, have sponsorships, and market themselves aggressively, inspiring an ever-growing array of imitators who fan out into the hills and devour fresh terrain, like so many Scrubbing Bubbles. McLean, however, is a true shellback. He is as hungry for accomplishment as the rest, yet he has learned to balance the ragtag joys of wandering the mountains with the requirements of making a living at it. He’d be doing what he’s doing even if nobody was watching. In some respects, he is not an extreme athlete at all but just a lucid and devoted rambler, with high standards and a low pulse—a descendant as much of Kit Carson as of Harry Houdini.
On my first morning in Utah, I met McLean in a parking lot at the base of Little Cottonwood Canyon, which cuts east into the Wasatch, about a half hour south of Salt Lake City. Little Cottonwood is home to the Snowbird and Alta ski areas and the gateway to a vast array of backcountry terrain. It is known for having the best powder snow in the world.
McLean has the trim and sinewy build of a Sherpa (he is five feet ten and weighs 145 pounds) and a rubbery, slightly hunched posture, but his bright blue eyes, bobblehead proportions, and anachronistic helmet of light brown hair give him an impish appearance. In warmer months, he likes to ride a unicycle on mountain trails. There is relish in his smile; he likes to say, in jest, “It isn’t fun until someone gets hurt,” and he enjoys watching lesser men attempt to keep up with him. He once wrote, “There is nothing finer in life than enjoying a chilled tin of congealed octopus while listening to the moans and groans of fellow human beings…as they struggle on a slick 45-degree track.” The sado-stoicism is not bigheaded or bullying; it’s how he conveys to his partners his own particular blend of enthusiasm and forbearance. It is a more garrulous version of the ethic you come across in the classic mountaineering tales of Chris Bonnington, in which the climbers, many of them former British military men, invariably respond to serious trouble—storms, avalanches, broken bones—by brewing up a pot of tea.
McLean was accompanied by Polly Samuels, his fiancée; they were to be married in two months. Samuels, thirty-five years old and a lawyer in the Utah attorney general’s office, has red hair and an aspect of seriousness. She has become a formidable skier in her own right; last year, she was the North American women’s champion in randonee racing—long slogs up and down mountains in touring gear. (Among the men, McLean usually finishes in the top three or four.) McLean drove. As he navigated the winding road up the canyon, he craned his neck and pointed out some favorite chutes, which coursed through the cliffs on either side like waterfalls. They were avalanche paths, basically, but if you have a taste for such things you begin to view all terrain in terms of what is plausible and you imagine leaving tracks everywhere—on distant peaks or a neighbor’s snowy lawn—much as fishermen cannot regard a body of water without thinking of casting a line.
T
hat morning, we took it easy: We started at the Alta ski area, where in order to gain altitude we took a chairlift, and to warm up we did two intermediate runs on machine-groomed snow. McLean, an advocate of leg power, doesn’t often consent to such indignities. But after a couple of hours we ventured into more McLeanian terrain—Main Baldy Chute, a long, regal cataract that, being avalanche-prone, is rarely open. It happened also to be the site of his conversion to chuting, fourteen years earlier. The run required a half-hour hike and several dozen compact turns on old chalky snow, the joy deriving, in part, from the sensation of simultaneously resisting and submitting to gravity. McLean’s skiing style was tight and neat, but deliberately functional and in no obvious way vain. At the bottom, McLean called out, “Main Baldy—check!” as though he were planning to have me ski every chute in his book.
We went to the base of the mountain and retrieved more gear. We were using randonee equipment, which weighs less than standard alpine equipment and is designed for going uphill as well as down. For the ascent, the heel of the binding detaches from the ski, as with a cross-country or telemark ski, and you stick a climbing skin, which is a reusable adhesive strip with mohair or nylon on one side, to the base of each ski (people used to use real seal skins); the grain prevents you from sliding backward. To descend, you peel off the skins and lock down the heel. Each of us wore an avalanche beacon—a transceiver about the size of a Walkman, which sends out a signal in case of burial—and a pack that contained a probe and a shovel, for locating and digging out a buried companion.
We left Alta and hiked up a ridge for a half hour or so to a place called Wolverine Cirque, an amphitheater of chutes guarded by cornices. McLean dropped into one called the Scythe. He jumped up and down on a pillow of snow near the top, to see that it was stable, then hopped back and forth down the slope before skirting under an outcropping, in case the next skier, me, set off a slide. I did not. The snow was deep and a little windblown: not bad. After another pitch, the chute opened onto a bowl that looked like a place where you didn’t want to hang around. It was where Roman Latta, among others over the years, had been buried. We crossed a basin, skinned up for forty-five minutes, then skied down to Alta.
The Only Game in Town Page 33