by Tina Basich
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travel tips
People who don’t travel a lot may not realize how gross it is to sleep in hotel sheets for days in a row and eat at restaurants and use public phones all the time. Cell phones take care of the latter these days, but here are some travel tips I’ve learned from being on the road as a professional snowboarder.
I travel with a little set of chopsticks, so if I’m uncomfortable eating from not-so-clean silverware in not-so-clean restaurants, I bust out my little chopsticks. I actually got my chopsticks at the Tokyo Disneyland, and they have this little case and a Mickey Mouse on them, but whatever. You can get chopsticks these days pretty easily. So, whenever I travel and start getting grossed out, I bust out the chopsticks.
Whenever I order a drink I always ask for a straw, which is usually clean and fresh, instead of sipping on the lipstick prints from some old lady who drank from that glass before you.
When you’re flying in an airplane and you get up from your seat, don’t grab the seat in front of you. There’s nothing worse than trying to sleep and someone’s jarring your seat to get up, so be courteous of other people.
I always bring my own pillowcase to put over the pillow in a hotel room. Or if you don’t have one, you can use a T-shirt so that you have your cheeks against your own nice fabric.
When staying at hotels, always check the bed before you hop into it. Take off the bedspread and put it into the closet because hotels don’t wash those. They’re a dry-clean-only item, and I’ll bet the hotels only clean them once a year if we are lucky. I saw the HBO special that showed what’s actually on those bedspreads and it ain’t pretty. So for me they go right into the closet first thing. I just sit on the sheets—at least they wash those.
I always bring my essential oil kit with me. In hotels in Japan and Vegas, for example, the windows don’t open, so you can get claustrophobic with totally recycled air constantly being pumped in. I bring cotton balls and dab a little lavender on one and stick it in the air-conditioning vent. It filters into the air and you don’t feel like you’re stuck breathing the same air. This is also a good tip for people who have to travel a lot in traffic—you can put the cotton ball in your car vent and the exhaust fumes won’t bother you as much. I also bring lemon and peppermint oil for restaurant water because it’s usually tap water and tastes horrible. Add a few drops of peppermint and you have flavored water that tastes pretty good.
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Copyright © Tina Basich
CHAPTER 9
BOARDING FOR BREAST CANCER
Shannon Dunn and I traveled together a lot, competing at the same events. We were both doing well in our competitions around the world and riding progressively on our boards, but we were also ready to make our mark in the industry in other ways. Our sponsors knew that we were highlights of their snowboard teams, and in 1994 we were the first girls to release signature pro model snowboards. She had the Shannon Dunn board by Sims and I had the Tina Basich board by Kemper. We were able to help design the boards to our specifications and design our own art for the graphics. It was the perfect opportunity to tie in my art with my snowboarding career. I remember finding a list of goals that I had made a few years earlier that listed “My own pro model snowboard” with a “ha-ha!” next to it. At the time I thought it was a long shot because only guys had pro model snowboards. I was proving myself wrong and that became a big deal in so many ways. Professional and Olympic women skiers were shocked. It turned the heads of corporate sports manufacturers like Nike and Trek. Other than basketball shoes and tennis rackets, not many other manufacturers had professional female-endorsed sporting equipment.
The snowboarding industry completely embraced our efforts, and to our surprise, even guys were riding our boards. It really shook up the industry and sparked a new wave of female athlete–endorsed equipment.
While my first pro model was in 1994 with Kemper, my first hand-painted board graphics were in 1995 when I moved to Sims. Shannon called me and said she was leaving Sims for Burton so there was a spot open on the Sims snowboard team. Kemper was struggling to stay in business at the time, so I called Sims and they flew me up to Canada right away to the main office. I had a big meeting, which is where I first met Gaylene Nagel, who was the marketing and team director. Sims said, “OK, we want you on our team, and we’re going to give you a pro model snowboard, and we need your graphics by tomorrow.” The meeting went just like that. I was so stoked for this new opportunity. Sims was a big company and I wanted to make this deal work.
I had my paint set with me and I went back to my hotel room and painted all night, then FedExed my graphics to the Sims factory in Europe the next day. I’d painted a watercolor of a butterfly fairy. From that point on, I’ve always been able to have my artwork on my pro models with Sims snowboards, which is one of the reasons why it was such an accomplishment for me—not only to finally have my own signature board, but to have my art under my feet throughout the winter.
But clothing was still a problem area. I always wore guys’ snowboarding outfits because there was no other choice and nothing ever fit. I’d have to roll up the sleeves and the pants and wear a belt to hold them up. This was the “baggy pants big stance” era, meaning oversized jackets and pants were in style, but we were wearing guys’ oversized gear that was twice as big. My pants would get stuck in my bindings and sometimes I’d do a trick in the pipe only to have my coat ride up and blind my view for the landing. Oversized was only cool to a point. We were pro riders and needed clothing that fit, and the monster clothing was getting in the way. Plus, the demand for women-specific equipment and apparel was increasing because more girls and women were getting into snowboarding. New girls would not be into the dark browns, blacks and big, oversized jackets and pants. Honestly, we looked so far from being feminine.
Shannon and I were lucky that Lisa Hudson, who worked at Swag snowboard clothing, also saw there was a need for change and came to encourage us to get more involved in designing our own line of women’s snowboard clothing. She was the driving force in the outerwear business to get manufacturers and designers to accept and understand the need for functional, feminine girls’ apparel. I was all over it. Like designing my Jammers surf trunks and my prom dress, this was a chance to take it way further and for real. Lisa set up the funding with investors and I dove into learning the process of design and production. We’d have “design meetings” where I’d show Lisa and Shannon my colored line drawings of outfits. I really wanted to make this happen and so did Shannon. This wasn’t just me and my buddies using my mom’s sewing machine anymore, this was about sourcing waterproof fabrics, choosing color swatches, and testing designs for movement and freedom.
In 1994, we launched a women’s line from Swag called Prom, which was the second women’s clothing line out there for girl snowboarders. We were ready to look like girls and Lisa helped make it happen, allowing us the freedom to design clothes with slimmer cuts, pastel colors, and butterfly logos. We were as girly aswe wanted to be and rocked it with confidence. Our Prom ads were completely revolutionary for snowboarding: We wore prom dresses to show that we weren’t afraid to be feminine. Our apparel line was a crossover from snowboarding to our lifestyle and it really represented who we were becoming: grown professional female snowboarders.
My board is sold in Japan for 850 USD.
It made an impression on the snowboarding industry—a women’s movement, we would later call it. It was the push in women’s apparel that helped start more manufacturers to design women-specific products.
Over the years, Shannon and I had so much fun making up the names for the different lines of clothing we were involved with: Prom, Tuesday, Blush, Madison, Bliss…the list went on and on. Our best source of names came from lipstick colors. We would go to the mall and pretend to be shopping for makeup at the Mac counter and memorize all the color names. Our ideas for clothing designs mostly came from vintage clothing and thrift store finds and the functions that we needed on t
he mountain. For example, our favorite piece was a retro coat with sports stripes down the sleeve and an embroidered butterfly on the chest, but it was made of Gore-Tex waterproof fabric.
Back then, as women, we not only had to push our way into the industry side of things, we also had to make sure we were represented in all competitions and getting equal prize money. We were at the top of our sport, but we still knew what it was like to be a female athlete in a male-dominated industry. There were way more guy pros than female pros. If we didn’t push it, then everything might be lost for new girl riders out on the mountain, and snowboarding for girls might end up like so many other sports in terms of competitions with no women’s divisions, no prize money, no place to even test one another’s abilities. So we pushed hard to make sure we represented in every aspect.
At the Air & Style Big Air contest in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1994 there still wasn’t even a women’s division, even though the event had been around for three years. My brother was entered in the contest and Shannon and I were out there at the practice session checking out the jump because we thought we might be able to do it. The officials came right over to us and said in broken English, “No girls allowed.” Oh, sure. Now we were really going to do it. We went back to the car and grabbed our snowboards and started hiking up to the jump. We talked the officials into allowing us three practice jumps and then judging if we were “unsafe.” I felt like I was at Boreal trying out for my blue badge. Even though we both crashed hard on our first jump and I knew I’d be paying for it the next day with a stiff neck, there was no way that I wasn’t going to do it. By the third try, we passed their test and that night, under the spotlights of the event stadium, in our pink Prom snowboard outfits and hair in pigtails, we jumped the 60-foot gap jump in front of 15,000 people. The announcer kept saying over the loudspeaker, “Those crazy American girls! Those crazy American girls!” But the only thing “crazy” would have been if we had let the opportunity slip by. We weren’t able to be “judged” officially because there was only a guys division, so we were the “exhibitionists”—the warm-up clowns for that night’s circus. But magazine articles later reported that we’d gone bigger than some of the guys that night and probably would have placed in the top ten. It was perfect.
Designs for my pro model snowboards.
Around this time, I distinctly remember feeling the change in how I was viewed as a female athlete. People around the world were noticing my talents, and for the first time I started hearing the compliment “You’re pretty good,” not just “You’re pretty good for a girl.” Maybe it was because I’d been consistently placing well in the halfpipe, or because I had just made a strong statement by jumping a huge big-air jump in Europe, which nobody expected any girl to do. Or, it could have come from newfound respect for crashing so seriously (I definitely had my share of yard sales, losing my goggles, gloves, and hat) after trying to land a cliff and coming back for more. No matter what the exact source was, hearing that and believing that I was pretty good kick-started my drive to be even better, maybe even better than some of the guys. It was happening and I could feel it inside. I was making my mark.
So were other women athletes. Suddenly more companies were launching women-specific equipment and adding women’s apparel to their lineup. In the media, magazines were giving girls more coverage. In 1994, I got my first cover (on the back) of the Japanese magazine Snow Style with a feature article titled “No Need to Look Like a Guy Anymore.” It was my first printed global exposure. In surfing a year later, four-time World Champion Lisa Anderson was on the cover of Surfer magazine with a tagline that read “Lisa Anderson Surfs Better Than You.” Skateboarder Cara-Beth Burnside was getting feature articles written about her in Skateboarding magazine and was the first female to grace the cover of Thrasher, a totally core, guy-oriented street skateboard magazine.
A pioneering magazine launched in 1995 called W.i.G. Magazine—for Women in General—was the first to showcase the lifestyles of women in action sports like snowboarding, surfing, and skateboarding. The editor and publisher was my friend Kathleen Gasperini and the art director was Dawn Kish, the first woman photographer to break into the boys’ club of snowboarding photography. They told the stories of what it was like to live the lifestyle of women in snowboarding and had stories, art, and photography from professional athletes and women in the industry. In one issue, Monica Steward, the cofounder of Bonfire snowboard clothing and best friend of professional rider Michele Taggart, who introduced us, wrote a story called “Both Feet on the Ground.” It shocked every one of us. While we were feeling invincible and so alive, Monica had a much bigger story to tell—of being twenty-six years old, a snowboarder, and having breast cancer.
In W.i.G. she wrote, “I received the news that we have all heard before, but hope never to hear in our own world. We have seen it on TV, in Cosmo, and heard about friends and close and distant relatives who have been diagnosed with breast cancer. We have been told about the monthly exams we are supposed to do to ourselves, but rarely do. At 26, I felt a lump in my breast. I went to the doctor, but he told me it was nothing. He told me what I wanted to hear. I did not pursue getting a mammogram. Why should I? A 26-year-old healthy woman does not get breast cancer. I didn’t think so anyway. But three years later, that lump turned out to be ‘something.’ It was cancer.”
Monica went on to talk about her mastectomy, recovering from being severely ill, and about how easy it is to drift into a doom state when you’re sick and dealing with moments of terror about your life. She talked about the energy it takes to keep positive in order to heal and acquiring inner strength no matter what’s thrown your way and having the strength to catch it in both hands, standing on both feet, with the capability to understand how to deal with it. And she challenged us all by asking, “Why do we need to have a near-death experience to thrust us into living life the way we’re supposed to? Every day I get out of bed, set my feet on the floor, and start the day. Have you ever done the same? Ever set your feet on the floor and thought to yourself how wonderful it is to have feet? Feet that have no pain and do exactly what you tell them? We never realize how good something is until it’s in pain…or gone.”
That story stopped me in my tracks. I thought breast cancer was something that our grandmothers were dealing with. Not us. And not a dear friend fighting for her life and having a mastectomy. There was a trade show coming up in a month and Kathleen, Dawn, Shannon, Lisa, and I planned on getting together with Monica to see what we could do. Her cancer was in remission and at the show, Monica told us how alienated she felt when she was so sick and being diagnosed so young. There was nowhere for her to turn. There were no support groups for people like her and her husband, John, and there was very little research about young women and breast cancer. But she didn’t let this get her down. She said she wanted to do something.
We decided to have a snowboarding event like a Lollapalooza on the snow with bands playing and professional snowboarders in a big-air and halfpipe competition. We thought if we could attract people with a fun atmosphere, we could also teach them about breast cancer, or at least make them aware, and maybe show them how to do a self breast exam. Maybe we could also raise a little money and give it to breast cancer research or counseling for young couples dealing with the disease.
Fall turned to winter as we planned our little event over the phone, figuring out the location, where to get a stage, how to sell tickets, and setting the date. We decided on having it at the end of the season, in April, when snowboarding competitions were over, as a last big fun event. Sierra-at-Tahoe resort in northern California stepped up and general manager John Rice said they’d donate ski lift ticket sales to our cause and that their mountain employees would volunteer to help. They said they’d get the word out about our event on local radio and TV stations in Tahoe. Monica and Lisa started calling snowboarding manufacturers to donate clothing, equipment, and gear for auctioning off at the event, and Kath-leen and Dawn put together artwork for b
anners, located stage equipment, volunteers, and contacted the press about the event. Monica decided to call our event Boarding for Breast Cancer, which we hoped would attract snowboarders. Michele Taggart, Shannon, Michael, and I called all our friends and told them that they had to come to our event and represent. No one questioned it. Of course they would come, even though our “prize money” for best snowboarder was donations such as mountain bikes, surfboards, and jackets.
In December, Monica called Kathleen and said she was sick again. The cancer was back inside and she might not be able to make it. We had no idea the extent of her illness. On January 8, 1996, at the age of twenty-nine, she died. It was only three months before our inaugural event.
We were silenced. At Monica’s memorial service, which was packed with friends from the snowboarding industry, they talked about Monica’s fund-raising event and everyone rallied around the cause. In memory of Monica, we decided to keep going and focused on making it happen. We were able to book bands like M.I.R.V., Tilt, Spent Idols, and Sick of It All to come play. Fifty manufacturers from the snowboarding industry donated product, and John Logic, a former DJ and the owner of a Seattle-based snowboard shop called the Snowboard Connection, volunteered to come down and run our auction. Between myself, Michael, Shannon, and Michele, we had 120 professional riders confirmed to come and throw down their best moves in the halfpipe and big air.