Pretty Good for a Girl

by Tina Basich

  We would do anything we had to in order to get on the mountain and go snowboard. We could always rally a group of riders to carpool up to the mountain. We would use paper clips to attach our lift tickets so that we could drop them from the lift to our friends waiting below. They’d catch them and use the same lift tickets to get up the hill so everyone would make it to the halfpipe to practice. If a competition was out of town, we could fit at least seven to ten people in one hotel room. Driving up to the mountain, I always had an eager feeling in my stomach and couldn’t get to the halfpipe soon enough. I’d have my winter socks already on, most of my clothes and my boots ready to lace up so I wouldn’t waste any time in the parking lot. I didn’t want to miss a thing. Anything could happen. Someone could be pulling off a completely new trick.

  By 1987, I was good enough to enter the newly formed World Championships in Breckenridge, Colorado. I was seventeen and this was my first trip away from home. I was so nervous. Heather traveled with me. This was bigtime—an out-of-state snowboarding competition. My parents bought my ticket and I had a little bit of money saved up from birthdays and side jobs that I used for spending money and for food. We had some connections with other snowboarders from Tahoe who were going out for the contest, so we had floor space for lodging. GoSkate paid my entry fee as part of their “sponsorship” for me as their shop athlete at a world championship, so I wore their GoSkate T-shirt to represent.

  I’d been riding and training hard for this contest, sometimes even skipping school Fridays to go ride. As long as I kept up with my grades and my homework, my parents were cool with me taking an extra day to ride, especially when I told them I was practicing for a world championship. But it was really different than what other kids in school were doing, like going to basketball games and having the school bus take the team to their game, then home afterward. There wasn’t a busload of snow-boarders coming with me, singing rallies, or taking me home that night if I lost the game. It was just Heather.

  Waiting for the results to come in.

  This was my first big contest to test my own skills against other professional women who were mostly teenagers like I was. Girls like Susie Riggins, Jean Higgins, Kelly Jo Legas, and Amy Howitt were part of the lineup, and none of us knew what to expect.

  When we arrived, we immediately went to the resort to sign in and get our competition bibs, then check out the pipe. I looked around the lodge at all of the snowboarders signing up. There were so many of us. Up until this point, it seemed like our little Tahoe scene was all that existed, but it was so much bigger now. It’s a different feeling knowing that there are other snowboarder girls “out there somewhere” versus actually being with them, checking in to get your competition bibs so you can compete against them.

  Early days at the California Series contest with the girls.

  Plus, the halfpipe seemed huge. It was so much bigger than the one I was used to at Donner Ski Ranch that I fell during practice just trying to drop into it. This did not help with my already shaky confidence. My stomach had that nervous feeling like before a gymnastics meet. All of the other girls were ripping, it seemed, and I felt like I wasn’t snowboarding my best at all. Amy Howitt was doing airs an entire foot out of the pipe, and until this point, I’d never been truly impressed by another girl snowboarder. I wanted to do airs like she did on my snowboard. Some of the other girls had new tricks and I checked them out and tried to remember them so I could practice their moves when I got home. In my competition run, I did a two-handed backside method and a frontside indy air, which was all I had in my bag of tricks, so I just repeated them all the way down the pipe. There was no way I could try my ally-oop in a pipe this big. But I ended up placing sixth in the halfpipe, and thought, “Does this mean I’m sixth in the world?” Possibly.

  I was so excited!

  During the same contest, the guys were pushing the levels of the sport with huge airs out of the pipe. Craig Kelly was the favorite in the guys division with his smooth frontside slob airs. Shaun Palmer was catching the most air with big backside rocket airs about five feet out of the pipe. They were superhuman to me. I couldn’t imagine that girls would reach that level of riding. Still, we were definitely pushing it in our own right and we had a good showing for the women’s division.

  Toward the end of our trip, Heather and I were approached by a film director to snowboard in a commercial for Wrigley’s spearmint gum. I called home and told my mom that some guy from Hollywood wanted to put us on TV and he would pay for our hotel if we could stay with him for another two days. I’m sure it sounded fishy the way I blurted it all out, and she told me it “probably wasn’t a good idea” and that “it was time to come home.”

  Even without the commercial to our credit, we were all starting to get sponsored with snowboards, boots, and clothing, and things were changing fast. We were surprised by all of the attention we were getting. Luckily, as snowboarders, the group of people who started in this sport were so creative and aggressive but not necessarily the kind of people who looked for attention. Like other snowboarders, I’d go back to school and most people didn’t know where I’d been or care that I’d just placed sixth in the world. The big news on Monday was that Del Campo had won the football game.

  I appear in the newspaper as part of “the latest trend.”

  Copyright © Bud Fawcett

  Sometimes after riding so hard in the halfpipe all weekend, I could feel the pain and stiffness set in. It wasn’t unusual on Monday mornings to wake up for school and not be able to lift my head up off the pillow because of whiplash from the latest crash. It would take so much effort to lean forward, put my feet on the ground, and make my way to the shower. I don’t think cheerleaders ever felt this way. I doubt they went to the chiropractor later in life as much as I did either. Once I turned pro and could afford it, my chiropractor became a new friend, putting my back in line every other month. He would compare the extent of my condition to that of car crash victims because often I was worse off than his car patients. He’d say, “Well, Tina, don’t worry, this time it’s only a small car crash—a Beetle alignment.” The Ford truck crashes practically took me out completely.

  At the World Championships in Breckenridge, Colorado, 1987.

  Even with a bad case of whiplash or stiff leg muscles and bruised shins, I got ready every morning because I really liked public school and wanted to do well. At Waldorf, they didn’t have a grading system; the teacher would give us feedback and comments at the end of each month on a one-on-one basis about the quality and artwork and completed answers in our lesson books. In public school, I was graded A through F, which was new to me. And I have to say, I liked it. It was competitive and I could see exactly where I stood. I was almost a straight-A student, but teachers thought I did weird things. In public school, my assignments would be on Xeroxed copies, plain, black and white. No calligraphy, no expectations of applied color, we just had to do the assignment. So, for example, in biology, I would color in the black-and-white Xeroxed frogs that we had to describe on our assignment paper. I’d shade in the frog’s skin in various shades of green, lighten the underbelly, make the heart a deep-red rose with layers and layers to show potential palpitation. I don’t know why I would do this. It just seemed like I should because the frog was blank and boring. Sometimes the teachers would hold it up in front of the class and say, “Look at the extra effort Tina put into her assignment. Not exactly what we were thinking of for extra credit, but…” My classmates would look at me and were like, “Why did you color in the frog?”

  Nobody thought I was weird in snowboarding. We were all different and making up our existence as we went along. For women snowboarders, we were not only the weird new athletes, but girls, so we needed to push each other in a supportive and positive way for our sport to grow, but more important, so that we could all feel like we belonged. It would have been crazy not to support the other girls. Some of these women, like Barrett Christy, Shannon Dunn, Morgan LaFonte, Michele Taggart,
Bonnie Zellers, Amy Howitt, and Jean Higgins, made their marks in the sport, and they were always pushing the limits of what people thought women could do. They were even better than most of my homeboys at Donner. I looked up to them and they gave me the inspiration to push myself to new levels and go beyond what most people thought possible. By being together, and competing and being supportive of each other and excited about what we were doing, we didn’t fade out, and instead paved the way during those early contests to make a permanent place for women in snowboarding competition.

  To keep up with our demands and improved riding abilities, snowboarding equipment was also changing rapidly. Duct tape was less necessary and the days of not having highbacks on bindings or having metal fins on boards were gone. We now had boards with highbacks built in for better forward lean when trying to turn, wraparound metal edges, and kicked up tails for riding backward. Snowboard companies were coming out with new versions of equipment every single season. We were constantly testing prototype models. And suddenly, snowboard companies were a part of the ski industry trade show. They now had a place where they could display snowboard products and write orders with skateboard shops and newly formed snowboard shops.

  First published photo in a snowboard magazine, I.S.M.,1988.

  Copyright © John Bing

  The new designs in snowboards enabled riders to advance quickly. Tricks that used to take us a whole season to learn were all in a day’s worth of practice. Suddenly, pros were popping up on the scene after only riding for a year. Snowboarding was evolving faster than anyone could have imagined and was catching on so quickly that new contests and professional snowboard teams were being formed all over. What’s so strange is how schools were blind to this new form of “team.” I sometimes envied the soccer and softball teams because they were all together and would wear their jerseys to school on big game days. Everyone knew who the quarterback was, everyone knew the halfback and goalie in soccer. No one knew what a halfpipe freestyler snowboarder was. I was the snowboarder girl, so sometimes I’d wear my GoSkate shirt just to give our sport some props.

  In my senior year, even though part of me wanted to go with the flow and follow my friends to the universities, I knew I would end up taking a different path. I already was. I started to think about art colleges and put together my art résumé and a portfolio with my drawings and paintings and some designs I’d made from Jammers surf shorts. I went on many interviews to different kinds of schools for art, fashion design, and graphic design and showed them my portfolio, hoping they saw talent in my work. But I also had my snowboard life.

  By my second trip back to the World Championships in Breckenridge in 1988, I had met even more professional snowboarders and people in the new snowboarding industry. George Pappas, who was a top pro, was starting a snowboard company with David Kemper and thought that I might be the only girl able to make it onto their snowboard team. I typed up my snowboarding résumé, which included my contest results, where I’d trained in the summer, and how I would be a professional representative of their company, and sent it in right away. The thought of being on a snowboarding team was the ultimate. This would mean more than just free stuff. It would mean getting expenses paid and the opportunity to get photos in ads in the new snowboarding magazines. It was a brand-new opportunity and I could hardly wait for their response. I checked the mail every day for two weeks.

  My first snowboard résumé.

  Finally, I got a phone call from George Pappas. He said I’d made it onto the team. It was 1988 and I was just graduating from high school. There was a big decision to be made: accept an art scholarship I’d gotten to study graphic design at Santa Cruz College, or take up Mr. Pappas with my Kemper snowboard contract, which offered me $250 a month for six months and a small expense budget for travel. I asked my parents what I should do, and many of my friends’ parents couldn’t believe it when they said to follow my heart.

  Of course, I chose snowboarding.

  The King of the Hill starting gate, Valdez, Alaska.

  Copyright © John L. Kelly

  CHAPTER 6

  TEAM RIDER

  My intention was to take a year off before college and see where my snowboarding adventures would take me. My competition schedule got much heavier and I ended up getting more sponsors to help with my travel money. Being sponsored meant that I was under contract to wear only my sponsors’ clothing and gear and that I represented them whenever I was snowboarding. My obligations were to compete in snowboarding competitions and be in photo shoots for media exposure in the new snowboarding magazines. I was getting a free ride to travel the world and snowboard. I wasn’t giving this up for anything. I was an athlete—a professional snowboarder.

  I was also the only girl on my team, but no one seemed to notice really, and I traveled and did everything they did. I felt like I had to because I knew if girls could see me snowboarding, maybe they’d want to give it a try, too. It’s frustrating growing up and hearing people say things like, “Oh, girls aren’t interested in that. They don’t care about video games, they don’t care about car racing, they don’t care about riding motocross.” It’s such an old-school attitude, because we do care. And with our generation, if we see another girl out there doing it, especially if it’s considered a guy thing, we want to try, too. Maybe the reason more girls don’t play football is because there aren’t many girl football teams? Not because we don’t care. I had to ride and do well in competitions and be in photo shoots not just for myself, but so girls would see this sport and it wouldn’t fade for them or take a backseat to guys.

  On one of my first major photo shoots with my Kemper team in 1990, I rode the powder in Utah, which would eventually change my riding forever. We went to Snowbird ski resort for the shoot and it snowed a foot every night with light, fluffy powder, and the conditions were unbelievable. But we weren’t used to the elevation at 11,000 feet above sea level. Our photographer was a smoker and actually passed out in the tram from the altitude. We let the ski patrol deal with him because as the saying goes, “There are no friends on powder days.” Fresh powder runs just cannot wait and must be ridden as soon as possible.

  None of us were used to the altitude or the big-mountain riding and vast terrain that was waiting for us. For four days, I rode with my teammates, Dana Nicholson, Matty Goodman, Brett Johnson, JD Platt, Andy Hetzel, and David Dowd, following these guys down runs that were steeper than I was used to. It was all I could do to keep up, but hell if I wasn’t going to try. I rode harder and even started to jump cliffs because I had to get the girl shot for the team and besides, the powder provided perfectly soft landings. Our experience was so amazing that the whole team vowed to move to Utah for the next winter season.

  So, the following year, when I turned twenty-one, I moved out of the house for the first time. I was definitely ready to be on my own, but when I was packing my car, Utah suddenly seemed so far away. I’d have to pay my own bills. Having my own kitchen would be a real test of my cooking abilities. I was so close to my family and was used to having them to come home to after contests. There would always be someone to tell about my latest adventure and my bed and my stuff were all there for me. Now when I came home, who would be there?

  Well, there was Andy Hetzel, who was on the team and was now my boyfriend. I thought he was a cool guy and an excellent rider. We moved with the rest of the team to Utah, but decided to get our own place away from the guys. Thank God because before winter even started, two of the other guys on the team who had also moved to Utah trashed their place with TV dinners piled up in the closet and holes in every wall from wrestling or doing whatever young guys on their own for the first time getting drunk every night do.

  With a $5,000 budget from Kemper Snowboards, we had a pretty good setup, but I wanted to make sure I was a professional athlete, so I bought bookkeeping journals to keep track of my expenses and receipts so I could send in expense reports to Kemper and get reimbursed and show my responsibility as a representativ
e of their company. Not many girls were sponsored professional snowboarders and I wanted to do all I could to show I was up for the challenge—not just in my riding. Feeling grown-up about my own place, I also decorated our apartment, which was filled with thrift store furniture and snowboards lined up in the front room, with my paintings, snowboarding posters, and pictures out of magazines.

  Snowbird ski resort sponsored us with season passes, so we got to ride almost every day. My life in Utah was spent on that mountain because the powder snow was unlike anything I’d ever ridden before. We knew all of the secret runs and spots for jumping and we knew where to go to avoid the crowds on the weekends and still get fresh, untracked powder days after a snowstorm. Riding in Utah naturally turned me into what’s known as a big-mountain rider—people who ride fast on various kinds of natural terrain rather than manmade snowparks or halfpipes. The terrain pushed my abilities beyond pipe riding because these runs were seriously steep, the powder insanely deep, and this required a whole different style of riding that I was starting to love.

  Trying to keep up with Andy made me a better snowboarder, as did the other people I met on that mountain. There were so many great riders in Utah who were after the same thing: fresh, untracked powder runs in deep, light Utah snow. Snowbird resort had a following of snowboarders who were not all pros, just riders who snowboarded every single day of the winter. There were people from all over the country who had moved there to be ski lift operators for the season or wait tables in the resort restaurants at night just for the chance for a free ski pass and the ability to ride that mountain. There was a cult-like following of all kinds of people who rode religiously—Lori Gibbs, who became a top racer and big-mountain rider; Natalie Murphy, who went into designing for Quiksilver; Jane Mouser, who became a designer for Helly Hansen. They lived the lifestyle, too. But in my job, on my team, I was responsible for doing things like jumping cliffs for photo shoots.