Pretty Good for a Girl

by Tina Basich

  Junior prom photo with Randy, 1987.

  At seventeen years old, I didn’t really understand how the whole Dating Thing worked. My first kiss was with Troy Hatler, a surfer boy who I’d met on a trip to Santa Cruz and had kissed only one other time. But for the next year, I didn’t kiss anyone else because we’d kissed, which I naively thought meant he was my boyfriend. No one can ever say that I’m not faithful. I’m ridiculously so.

  The first official boyfriend I had wasn’t the nicest guy. I’m not mentioning any more names, but I made the typical mistake of not knowing any better and thinking that he was going to be perfect for me and be my Happily Ever After guy, so I did everything for him. Even forgetting myself and what it was that I wanted (though I wasn’t always sure myself). I always thought of him and tried to think about what he was thinking. He was the jealous type, and so I’d lie about going to concerts or movies with friends to avoid confrontations with him when he’d get pissed that I was “having a good time without him.” I was too scared to stand up for myself and tell him he was wrong to treat me that way, and ended up in the relationship much longer than I should have been. He ended up breaking it off just when I was going to break up with him, I swear.

  Maybe it’s from my parents and the fact that they were first loves and things worked out that I think relationships are always the Forever After kind. This wouldn’t be the first time I reacted this way. But this first dating experience did lead to my listening to many breakup songs like “Open Your Heart” by Madonna, and massive amounts of energy poured into writing love letters and poems.

  Love letters were a big deal in high school among my girlfriends, and my best friend Angie Dominguez and I would sit for hours trying to think of words that rhymed with “heart.” Like, “You broke my heart, from the start, but you weren’t a part…” We were really bad at poetry, and they were cheesy, but at the time it meant everything to us. I think it was cathartic, too, because after pouring so much energy into these love letters and poems, I somehow felt so much stronger and couldn’t believe how long I’d been with such a loser in the first place.

  Being the oldest in high school didn’t necessarily mean I was the most popular by any means. I got a little more popular only because I was the first to get my driver’s license. I did odd jobs helping my dad paint houses, and I managed to save up and buy my first car, a 1971 Volkswagen square-back. My friends and I instantly decorated it with skateboarding stickers. I felt so cool driving it to school my first day of sophomore year. I had a car-pool route every morning to pick up my three best friends, Angie, Heather, and April. The fact that we didn’t have to take the bus to school anymore was a huge step into the cool crowd, even though we weren’t cheerleaders. We started to get invited to the cool parties on the weekends, maybe because we had a car. It was hard to really know. This car was also the one we used to head up to the hills the first time we went snowboarding.

  Sappy love poems from high school.

  I loved that car, but a year after I got it, I left it running on our steep driveway with the emergency brake on and ran into the house to get my backpack. I heard a huge crash. My car not only side-swiped my dad’s new truck, it also took out the garbage cans and ran into my neighbor’s house. It was totaled, I was devastated, and insurance didn’t cover it because I wasn’t in the car. Like that would have been a good thing.

  Since I had a driver’s license, that also meant I was the designated driver for all the high school parties. My friends started getting into drinking beer on the weekends and since I was always the driver, I never drank. There was definite pressure to drink because it seemed like everyone else did, but for the most part, I didn’t want to get into trouble and disappoint my parents. The first time I tried drinking was graduation night, and I got drunk on one beer—or I thought I was drunk—got sick, and threw up in the bathroom.

  In high school, I was the kind of kid who was scared to death of speaking in front of the class. It was my worst fear. I’d rather do anything else than get up in front of everyone and give a speech. For my oral report in English, I ended up bringing in my sewing machine to class to demonstrate how to make a pair of surf shorts and, subconsciously, to take eyes off of me and divert attention to the sewing machine. With a nervous, shaky voice, I taught the class step-by-step how to make these drawstring shorts. It ended up being the beginning of a company I started with my friend Mark Horner called Jammers. The next summer we sewed surf trunks on my mom’s sewing machine and made up this whole marketing plan, and of course I designed the business logo. We’d go to Santa Cruz and go skimboarding and camping at Brighton Beach Campground, calling them our “business trips” to sell our surf shorts.

  Skimboarding in Santa Cruz.

  Boys at the GoSkate curb, 1987.

  When I was sixteen, I discovered snowboarding. Thank God. For me, finding something that I was good at was really important, especially at this age. It gave me something new to focus on and it was exactly what I was made for. Even though I’d been involved in team sports my whole life and learned a lot from them, snowboarding was new and exciting. I loved that. It was completely unpredictable. I really found my confidence through it and so did my brother. It helped him overcome his insecurities of what he was going through with his epilepsy. Snowboarding was our ticket out of that anxious, insecure pit of being teenagers and helped us discover our talents, which we embraced as if our survival depended on it. Snowboarding really became our show.

  My first day of snowboarding, Soda Springs, California, 1985.

  CHAPTER 4

  FIRST DAYS

  My family was not a snow-family. We lived in the suburbs of Sacramento, so the only connection we had to the mountains was through occasional weekend getaways where we’d build a snowman or go sledding. The two times our family went skiing, we did the typical family ski package thing that included ski rentals, a one-hour lesson, and a sack lunch. We learned to ski and got to the snowplowing stage, which was fun, but it just didn’t click. Snowboarding, though, was a lot like skateboarding on snow, which was what my brother and I were all about. Obviously we liked to try new things, and it was the perfect extension of our adventures from childhood. It was uncommon and cool and it sucked us in more for what it represented than for the sport, because at the time it wasn’t considered a sport.

  I was the only snowboarder at my school, but I got my best friend Heather Mills into it right away. She was the only other girl in my high school who was content with going to GoSkate and watching the boys skateboard on a Friday night. I started to meet all the local pro skaters there and we had the hookup for free stickers and T-shirts. We gave skateboarding a try every once in a while, just to be a part of it, and had our ollies down fairly easily, but that was about as far as our talents in skateboarding went. For some reason, I never felt pressure to get better on my skateboard. In snowboarding, I had such a drive to represent for the girls that I couldn’t imagine not snowboarding. I guess it was a timing thing. I never saw another girl skateboarding when I was young and didn’t realize the significant impression it could make.

  I had no intention of being really good at skateboarding. The attraction was to the scene it created. Skateboarders were individuals. I felt like I was a part of something that wasn’t really popular, but more like a subculture for the misfit underdogs. At the time it might have just been a difference in a wild hair color, but soon it would mean so much more. By having a skateboard, you were making a statement. But actually skateboarding is very hard to do, and it hurts painfully falling on concrete or wood, which is one reason why I have the utmost respect for skateboarders as athletes.

  My friends and I were into the full Sac skate scene. We all had our mandatory skateboards and our Vans tennis shoes. My first deck was a Steve Olson Santa Cruz pro model that I picked out because it was checkered and matched my black and white checkered Vans, like the ones in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I carefully picked out black and red wheels to coordinate with the Independ
ent Built to Grind sticker on my board, and tricked it out with rails and a noseguard. It was so cool I almost didn’t want to skateboard on it because it was a showpiece and really quite beautiful.

  It didn’t matter that we lived in the suburbs of Sacramento rather than downtown with its city skate scene. Most of the time, the best curbs to skate on are at your typical Bank of America, until you get kicked out. And in the burbs, we found places to build ramps. My dad helped us build one in our backyard. We put skate stickers on everything, including the ramps, and we each had our own tag sign, which we’d graffiti to mark our turf. It wasn’t a gang thing, it was more that we were proud of what we were doing, and I’d have to say our tags were pretty creative.

  We’d drive to skate contests all over northern California. Skaters like John Lucero, Natas Kaupas, Steve Caballero, and Tony Hawk were the top pros at the time and they were our heroes. I respected these guys for what they could do on a skateboard. The tricks they pulled off seemed untouchable to me.

  We had a colorful mix of friends. It was more than just the green-dyed or the red punk rock bracelet and studded belts, the guys had the attitude. I bought into it, standing up for who I was with a “Skateboarding is not a crime” sticker on my car. While I liked the feeling of being different, I wasn’t about to get a Rebel Without a Cause tattoo and thrash about like I hated the world, because I was a skater who liked the world. However, every party or skate contest we went to, there was always the worry and possibility that the guys in our group would end up getting into a fight because we were the punks. Skateboarders love to be skateboarders, and the second some jock, the “real” athlete, cuts them down, telling them they’re losers, they’re eager to stand up for themselves at any cost. I found myself the getaway driver a couple of times. Like this one time when the guys got into a fight at a house party in downtown Sac. The fight broke out because a jock called us punks, of course, and the living room immediately turned into chaos—furniture overturned, guys throwing punches, guys on the floor wrestling. Then glass started breaking. I didn’t know if it was a window or a drinking glass, because in typical fashion, I was already running for the car. Heather was with me and a few of the other skaters hopped in for the fast getaway. The way it worked was that if anyone got separated, we always congregated back at GoSkate. The guys wouldn’t get seriously injured because they’d bail before it got too bad. They could deal with getting roughed up and even a broken nose or bruised fist, but the threshold of pain that was never to be crossed was getting too hurt to skateboard. That would just be dumb.

  Heather and I appear in the school paper, the Del Campo Roar , 1986

  When I first heard about snowboarding, I was attracted to it right away because it was a perfect crossover from skateboarding. My mom came home one day after seeing a snowboard in a ski shop and said, “You guys have to try it, it’s like skateboarding on snow.” She knew my brother and I would love it.

  We rented the one remaining snowboard from the local ski shop in Sacramento and headed up to Soda Springs ski resort. They wouldn’t allow us on the chairlifts, so we hiked right alongside the “ski” run. I was wearing my Guess cords, Moon boots, an oversized thrift store sweater, and still rockin’ too much gold eyeshadow. The snow conditions were icy, but we didn’t care. It was still softer than the concrete we were used to falling on. My brother and I took turns hiking up with the snowboard. We’d strap it on and try to make turns. We fell almost every time and my feet would slip out of my Moon boots and my board would go flying down the hill. I’d be sitting there in the snow in wet cords and my socks. My mom would bring the board back up to me with my Moon boots still stuck in the bindings. We got so many looks from the skiers on the lifts. I knew that they were thinking “What are they doing here?” but like I cared. If anything, I thrived on that attention. Doing something different always intrigued me. I’d lived in a teepee, gone to an art school, and was a skateboard punker. This was nothing.

  We had a blast that day. It was nothing like our skiing experiences. There was something special about snowboarding and we fell in love with it right away. It was different from anything we had tried before, but had that same feeling as skateboarding. We were hooked, and my brother and I both bought our first boards the very next day with our Christmas money from our grandpa.

  My first snowboard was a Burton Elite 140. I thought it was the greatest thing in the whole world and carried it out of the ski shop with the biggest smile on my face.

  It was one of the first snowboard designs and had two fins on the tail like a surfboard for turning. It had tall, red highbacks (the plastic bindings behind our heels) on the bindings that we customized with foam and duct tape for better forward lean and quicker response on our turns. I carefully stickered it up the second I got it home. The first sticker I put on it was “Skateboarding is not a crime.” My skateboarder attitude had to be represented, now, as a snowboarder.

  Heather and me at Donner Ski Ranch, 1987.

  By the end of the 1985–86 winter season, we started riding at Donner Ski Ranch in Tahoe because it was the only resort that welcomed snowboarding. Norman Sayler, the manager of Donner Ski Ranch, was so supportive of all of us and just wanted us to have a good time. He saw that this was something new and made kids extremely passionate about getting outdoors and being active. We got season passes for under $150, which allowed us to go up as often as we could all winter. I’d go up with my brother and my friend Heather every weekend, rain or shine. My parents were so supportive and helped out with gas money.

  The first time we ran into a few other snowboarders on the hill, we instantly became friends. Back in the day, if you saw someone else with a snowboard, you’d go talk to them and ask about their board, where they got it, what kind of bindings they were using, and when they started. There was always an exchange of advice or tips, like taking out the middle fin from your board to make it easier to maneuver, or using foam inside your Sorrel boots for better ankle support. This was before snowboards had metal edges like skis and snowboard boots didn’t even exist. I bought my first Sorrel “snowboarding boots” at the grocery store in Tahoe. I wasn’t going to use them for what they were made for, like shoveling snow off the driveway. Our outfits head-to-toe were a mix-match of our Dickies skateboard brand jackets and grocery-store-bought ski glasses. There were no such thing as snowboarding clothes back then. And every time we’d get on a lift with skiers, they’d ask, “What’s that?” We’d get so sick of having to explain a snowboard every run and what it was all about that we’d try to ride together so we wouldn’t have to answer questions on each lift ride.

  Snowboarding was springing up in pockets around the country in 1985, like Tahoe Donner where I started in California and Stratton Mountain in Vermont. Tom Sims, an innovator of skateboarding, was making his mark with his own Sims snowboard brand on the West Coast, while Jake Burton Carpenter, a skier, was heading up the East Coast scene with his Burton snowboards. The seed for these snowboarding pioneers came from Sherman Poppens’s “Snurfer,” an oversized plastic sled that you stood on sideways like a skateboard, balancing, with a rope attached to the tip. In 1967, when Snurfers were first manufactured, they were considered more of a toy and sold at grocery stores. Like hula hoops and pet rocks, Snurfers faded out.

  Skiers considered snowboards a toy, too, like a fad that would probably go away quickly. But snowboarding would prove to be much more than that because we were passionate about what we were doing, although even we couldn’t have imagined the impression it would eventually make on sports history.

  No matter where we lived, we were a group of people who didn’t necessarily consider ourselves athletes, we just liked to snowboard. Snowboarding wasn’t even considered a sport. Like the football players who railed on skateboarders because we weren’t “real” athletes, snowboarders weren’t considered real “snow users” by most resorts and skiers. I don’t even think snowboarding was considered a legitimate hobby. We were always misfits—those skateboarders,
those graffiti artists. But we didn’t care. We were all in it for the love of snowboarding and the adventure that came with it, like making up new tricks and techniques. Snowboarding wasn’t something that we did once in a while. If we could, we’d do it all the time. It was a part of our culture—spray painting and stickering up our boards, riding, and tweaking our equipment with files and screwdrivers and duct tape. Lots of duct tape. We’d joke about getting sponsored by duct tape because we used it so much to “customize” our bindings. We’d tape foam to our highbacks to create a more forward angle and duct tape our Sorrel boots all around our ankles for more support. Having duct tape on hand was as important as having a screwdriver, which we needed to constantly retighten the screws of our bindings to our boards. Every snowboarder knew the value of duct tape. In fact, the first-place trophy at the now legendary Mt. Baker Banked Slalom was a gold-plated roll of duct tape. It still is.

  Even though we didn’t have positive feedback from the everyday crowd at the “ski” resorts (we were always looked down upon as punk kids who got in the way and cut people off, making their experience worse), we were going to ride anyway. When I started riding at Boreal, another Tahoe ski resort, you’d have to get a green circle badge or beginner certificate on a card to ride the chairlifts. If you wanted to ride on the more advanced lifts, you had to have an instructor take a run with you and approve that you were capable of snowboarding safely and give you a blue triangle badge. The goal was to work your way up to a black diamond badge, which was the hardest run. Skiers didn’t have to take this test to see if they were “safe”—only snowboarders. But most ski resorts didn’t allow snowboarding until the mid-’90s. To this day, there are still a few stubborn resorts that remain closed to snowboarders, which is fine with me. Let all the skiers who can’t handle us go there.