by Tina Basich
Talk about pressure. At first I was so intimidated, mainly because of her slick gear. Riding in a Domino’s pizza box was not exactly as glamorous as her ergonomic, tricked-out body pads. But whenever someone says something that challenges me, or makes me feel like a punk skater from Sac in the middle of a football party, something inside rises up and I start burning. I thought, “I’m going to go fast and show you what I got.” I had only competed against Lori a few times before and had never been fast enough to beat her. But on this day, we were going head-to-head for first and second place, Racer vs. the Halfpipe Rider.
It was a close race because I lucked out. She fell in our first run and that gave me a 1.5-second advantage. On our second run all I had to do was stay within 1.5 seconds behind her. I went fast and my Domino’s box completely ripped off my arm, but I knew I had won as I passed through the finish line right after her. It was a big moment for me. I received the overall award, plus my two first places in slalom and halfpipe at the contest. I now had three more trophies to add to my shelf. My walls were covered with snowboard posters and banners from my sponsors. I had stickers on my windows and door, and each of my medals carefully hung above my desk.
Snowboarding at this point was a big part of my entire family’s lives. I think my competitions and efforts to do well and getting to know other snowboarders inspired Michael also. We watched each other compete and talked about new tricks and had some of the same friends. For him, snowboarding was a huge help with his confidence, something he was good at, a way to express himself. He was back in school after three years of home school and wanted to be with his other classmates. He had overcome epilepsy and wasn’t having seizures and was motivated to learn and catch up with his reading and writing so he could send in his résumé and get his own sponsors.
For myself, competing in all disciplines against America’s best female snowboarders prepared me for the next step of competitive snowboarding. With my list of podium standings, I was qualified to compete in the newly developed World Cup tour, which traveled through Europe and Japan. My accomplishments also lead to more contracts with sponsors. I was getting paid more as an athlete to snowboard, which meant I had to perform and do well on the World Cup circuit against the world’s best. The more we got together to compete, the higher the bar was raised. We were pulling tricks that seemed highly unlikely in the beginning years—among guys or girls. One thing’s for sure, skiers were no longer saying we weren’t athletes. It even started a whole new movement in skiing and new “freestyle skiers” were starting to copy our moves.
Shannon, Michele Taggart, and me at the Op Pro Contest.
Copyright © Jon Foster
Traveling with all of our team gear.
Copyright © Mark Gallup
CHAPTER 8
WORLD TRAVELER
In 1992, with the support of my sponsors Kemper, Airwalk, Smith, and OP, I traveled to Europe for my first World Cup series contest. My travel plans were set up by our team manager at Kemper Snowboards. The distributors in each country offered to help us with transportation and lodging arrangements, but even with all that taken care of, I was in culture shock from everything I saw. It was nice to be traveling with my team, which included my brother, but this was my first trip overseas and everything was overwhelming, including the snow and the mountains.
In Europe the mountains are huge and the resorts do not always mark all the natural hazards and boundaries. You could ride off a cliff or go the wrong way into a valley where you’d have to hike out because there is no lift access to that area. It was nothing like Donner Ski Ranch or Breckenridge in Colorado. Not to mention the fact that I had never traveled by train before and with the language barrier, it was hard enough to get from the airport to the hotel with two huge duffel bags and a snowboard bag of gear that would never fit well in the trains, let alone get from the hotel to the mountain and try to find the halfpipe on the mountain in time for practice. I was quick to learn the ways of Europe because I had no other choice. There were more and more sponsored riders, so we had a good-sized-group of Americans competing in the World Cup together, but for some American snowboarders, it really knocked their confidence because things were just so different. For me, it was definitely hard to stay confident, but I didn’t mind the new cultures and I liked talking with people with different accents and hearing the things they had to say. I’d learned very early on, from the Option Institute and my parents and Michael, about not being judgmental, so I think it was easier for me to be open to different kinds of people. I liked talking to foreigners (although we were the foreigners). I liked their accents and how musical French and Italian sounded, and I liked how they used their hands so much. I could even pick up on a few words from my years taking German and Spanish at Waldorf, which was helpful.
But in European competitions, I had the feeling that the judges were biased to their riders. The competition was tough and the European girls were good, but we were also really good. European riders were mostly known for their racing backgrounds, not freestyle. Americans were the freestyle experts—we invented halfpipe riding—and there was this national pride thing going on with us. We had to make sure we owned what we had invented. My bag of tricks was expanding to frontside 540s and handplants, but European girls were pushing the level of tricks in the pipe, too, and on new equipment I’d never seen before. They had snowboard brands like Crazy Banana and Checkered Pig. Their snowboard outfits were very fashionable with more patterns and flowers or checkering. Plus, they seemed smarter because they could often speak three languages and already had stories of traveling the world, or at least Europe, which seemed like another world to me. So at the top of the pipe, it was like this group from other countries and then the Americans. They could talk to each other and could communicate among different countries. We couldn’t understand them unless they spoke English to us. We were the outsiders. And it was sometimes so disappointing because I’d travel so far and perform my best and not even make my usual top five spots. That took some getting used to.
Snowboarding in August at Valle Nevado, Chile, 1994.
Copyright © John L. Kelly
On one trip to the World Cup in Ishgal, Austria, professional snowboarder and best friend Shannon Dunn and I arrived five days early to adjust to the time change and get prepared for the contest. We were determined to get into the top three and we thought putting in the extra effort was going to make the difference. We had our tricks that we wanted to pull off listed on a piece of paper like a checklist. We practiced every day. We thought we were ready, but on the day of the contest we both fell on our first qualifying runs. We didn’t even get as far as the finals. Out of thirty girls competing, Shannon finished second to last and I ended up absolutely last. It really sucks reading your name at the bottom of a list, posted on a big white board for the entire European snowboarding community to read. I didn’t dare tell people we’d come early or mention our so-called preparations. We walked back to our hotel with our boards under our arms, trying not to listen to other riders—the winners—talking in foreign languages, and we were instantly overcome with a feeling of being homesick. We wanted to get out of there, back to the States, where we always did our best on our home turf. At the hotel, we funneled into the four-person elevator with about ten other competitors. The doors closed and someone mentioned that there were too many people in there. Some obnoxious Euro guy started jumping up and down, yelling something in French, to scare everyone and the elevator suddenly dropped about 10 feet. The lights flickered out and we ended up crammed in there in the dark for two hours while the extremely angry Austrian hotel maintenance men tried to get the doors open. Finally, they got them open and we crawled out between two floors.
When the hotel management saw how many of us were in there, they started yelling at us in German and wouldn’t give us our passports back when we tried to check out. Instead, they made us pay $1,400 for the repair. The Euro guys took off—we didn’t know most of them—and Shannon and I were stu
ck with the bill. The responsible girls. We finally coughed it up because we thought at this point we would never get home. I was hoping Kemper would accept the bill as an expense on my report, but they weren’t buying it at all. We were so pissed at those guys. But for some reason, experiences like that just fueled the fire and we kept at it, going back to Europe to compete and gain the respect from the girls on the World Cup—many of whom later became my close friends.
Competing in Japan on the World Cup tour, however, was a different story, mainly because it seemed like we were respected right off the bat. Snowboarding was a new sport in Japan, and the level of riding there was overpowered by U.S. and European riders. There was at least one stop on the World Cup tour in Japan every winter and I always looked forward to those trips because they were such a unique experience. Japan was a new world in a different way than Europe. For one thing, traveling on our own was not even an option because you can’t even try to read the signs at the train station, let alone on the mountain, because the alphabet is different characters and everything reads right to left. It always freaked me out to see all of these kids reading comics, starting with what seemed like the last page and flipping forward. And when I got the “cover” shot of a Japanese snowboard magazine, it seemed like it was on the back, not the front. It was very cool, but obviously weird for a girl from Sac.
An indoor ski resort in Japan, 1996.
The Japanese distributor of our snowboard sponsor took us around from the start of the trip until the end. Thankfully we had a guided tour. I used to think that American cities had a lot of vending machines and automated high-tech systems, but everything is automated in Japan. You can buy a 40-ounce beer out of a vending machine on any street corner. There’s even an indoor ski resort! When I first saw it, from the outside it looked like a high-rise building lying on its side and held up by scaffolding. What a crazy experience to ride a ski lift up an indoor mountain and snowboard under huge lights rather than the sky. It was like a big ice chest and set up like a roller rink: Rent your skis and head on in for your three-hour session.
Although it took a few trips before I understood the true experience of Japan, I always loved the oddball things that would happen to me there, like the time during a promotional appearance when this guy asked Shannon and me to sign his car and another couple wanted us to sign their rice cooker. We also saw a Mercedes parked in front of a skyscraper in downtown Tokyo with a brand-new snowboard attached permanently to the ski rack—a total fashion statement.
Snowboards were selling like hotcakes, so the Japanese distributors were generous and paid for our trips for promotions and snowboarding contests. The Japanese market was strong and boards were selling for around $850 (the same boards sold in the U.S. for $400). We couldn’t believe it. After one shop appearance a distributor took Shannon and me shopping and we noticed that we were being followed. Two Japanese schoolgirls would hide behind vending machines as we came out of stores and just stare at us. This happened all afternoon until finally our distributor went up to them to see what they wanted. He brought the girls over to us and I said in my broken Japanese, “Nice to meet you.” The taller girl burst into tears. My distributor taught me how to say “It’s OK” (dishobu). They were completely flipping out because they were fans of ours. I couldn’t believe it. I had a true fan! We talked with them for ten minutes with our distributor translating and I gave the tall girl my address. A year later, I received a letter from her saying she was starting to learn to read and write in English so she could send me a letter. Two years later on a trip to Japan for the World Cup, I saw her again. This time she had a laminated picture of me around her neck. That’s so extreme, but that’s how Japan is—anything can happen and when it does, it goes Richter.
I don’t eat fish, so on my first trip to Japan I thought that eating would be impossible. Everyone I had talked to who had been to Japan said “I hope you like fish,” so I had visions of nothing but raw fish and I packed about twenty Cup-a-Soups in my duffel bag, thinking I could always find hot water to add to make soup. This was how I was going to survive. Funny that in Japan, Cup-a-Soups are sold in every corner market. I looked at the labels of the Cup-a-Soups that I’d brought from Sacramento and they were all imported from Japan! I was clueless. No matter what anyone tells you, in Japan there are so many different kinds of interesting food and I ended up finding many that I liked. My favorite was the Korean BBQ (alright, so it’s Korean…) where you cook everything yourself on a grill built into the table, which guaranteed me that I wasn’t going to eat anything raw.
I’ve been to Japan about fifteen times now and I’m still learning to say things correctly in their language. I would try to learn one word on each trip, making lists of translated words in my journal. The culture and people are amazing and they take to new things immediately. Snowboarding was one of their passions and from the beginning, they were eager to learn more about the American snowboarding style. It was almost an obsession for them. Within a few years on World Cup, the Japanese riders were stepping up in competitions and creating their own heroes, like my friend Tomoko Yamakoshi, who is now one of Japan’s top pros and one of the top coaches at Girlfriends Camp in Japan. Snowboarding in Japan exploded as a sport and was considered very cool. Meanwhile, their pros gained recognition on the World Cup scene in only a few years. Now, top ten contenders on the circuit always include riders from Japan.
I was becoming a world traveler and when winter was over in North America, our sponsors would send us south of the equator for photo shoots, to Chile, New Zealand, and Australia, where it was winter.
Loving the backcountry in Utah.
Copyright © Kevin Zacher
On a trip with my Kemper team in Australia, I ended up the envy of all the guys, not because of my riding skills but because of who I ended up riding with. This was a new mountain and I was having a hard time keeping up with the guys on the team, like Steve Graham and Dave Dowd, so I went and rode by myself. There was a guy in the liftline who was also snowboarding by himself. He was all bundled up in goggles and a coat with his collar turned up, wearing a hat pulled way down because it was snowing pretty heavily. We started riding together, which is really no big deal, because we were on the same runs and we kept running into each other in the liftline. I rode a few more runs with him and then decided to take a break for lunch and he split. I headed into the lodge to meet up with the guys from my team and they said, “Hey, someone said that Adam from the Beastie Boys is here snowboarding. He has green hair.”
After lunch, I went back out to my runs and my buddy that I’d ridden with in the morning was there so I ended up riding with him for the rest of the day. I invited him to come hang out with my friends for drinks after the lifts closed. He came in with me and my friends all said hi. Then he took off his goggles and hat and we just stared. He had green hair.
Adam Yauch became a great friend and ended up being my roommate in Utah for a couple of seasons. He would even come out in between recording albums to get in some powder turns. He had the same passion for snowboarding that we did. He rode with us at Snowbird and whenever his band played in the area, he would hook us up with like fifty passes for all the Utah snowboarder locals. Then, we’d all go riding the next day.
It was a group effort, riding in new places and figuring things out like getting to competitions and actually competing. It’s funny when the only words you can understand over the loudspeaker in exotic locations are the names of snowboard tricks being announced. This was pre-Olympics. There were no coaches telling us what to do or driving us around to and from the mountain or checking us into airports and hotels. Being on the road takes you away from your home and family, so my teammates became my support group, and my circle of closest friends were often the girls I’d compete against around the world. Unlike the days when I was the only girl, I liked the fact that I could meet up with women on the competition circuit. It was comforting to talk about things like having a snowboarder boyfriend versus not having
a snowboarder boyfriend (which was never really clear). We’d talk about the latest tricks we were trying and the differences in our equipment. We’d talk about competing during a day of having insanely debilitating cramps. I clearly remember the sense of kinship I felt in the starting area of a pipe competition in Austria when I casually mentioned to Shannon how I’d been popping Midol all day and hoped I could pull it together. The girl from Sweden behind me said, “Me too.”
Sometimes we’d rally a group of girls together and just go ride in the trees far away from any halfpipe. We’d push each other at our own paces and stop and take group pictures at the top of the mountain for my journal. Other girls had journals, too, and would draw or write about their lives like I did. Some of these girls were so creative—artists and poets writing about their adventures in different countries. It’s comforting to have that group of girls on the road, traveling with you to competitions or meeting up at events and sharing tips, like never wear an underwire bra (crashes cause boob bruises). We also turned to each other for support in dealing with injuries or jet lag. Someone was always carrying the Advil or Arnica in her coat, and we often had the worst shin splints from riding the halfpipe five days a week. The big joke was Who’s got the Tiger Balm this trip? This was my world and these were my best friends.