his morning class, another five in his afternoon Little Eskimo Club.
My agent found me this gig when I got out of recovery. It was becoming clear to him that I wasn’t ever going to return to the circuit, stomp powder again, make real money. He said a lodge in Utah wanted me to teach classes.
“No fucking way I’m doing bunny slopes.”
“All right, then let me ask you a question: When’s the comeback?”
“Soon,” I said.
“Uh-huh. You’ve been saying that for four years.”
“I was learning to walk for the first three of them.”
“Ronnie, you need to take this job. I can’t line up any more interviews if you don’t ski. People are forgetting about you.”
I didn’t take the job, and that summer my agent dumped me. I coasted on savings and posted updates on my Third Eye feed—mostly me lifting weights, going to physical therapy—but my followers were dwindling. I watched my feed drop below a million. Then I started bartending at Red Lobster, serving old biddies who had no clue who I was, and it depressed me enough to call the lodge and agree to work a season.
Rick, the mountain manager, wanted me to give extreme lessons. He figured he’d cash in while I was still alive in people’s memory. Extreme ski with Ronnie Hawks: Big Snow Gold Medalist and Xtreme Games Champion. I agreed, and though Third Eye’s focus fades as quickly as the next viral video, it worked. Old fans logged on to my feed and actually came to the mountain to learn tricks from me.
It wasn’t an extreme class. No cliffs, no 540 tail grabs or Lincoln loops, nothing that could break a neck or put someone in the hospital. What we had was a groomed slope with a couple packed jumps where I taught aging millennials how to do a daffy, a spread eagle, a backscratcher for the most advanced. We had a rail and a half-pipe, and I demonstrated combo grinds, watching as one after the other busted their asses. Every now and then I’d get a kid who wanted me to teach him a switched cork or backflip, and I’d put my glove beneath my chin, out of camera range, and point at my eyes. “Sorry, man, not allowed,” I’d say, which was my way of letting him know that if it wasn’t for the contacts, I’d have done it. The lodge made us keep them in so skiers could beam into any lift operator’s eyes and see the unbroken lines of snow or follow ski patrol to find out where the powder runs were. That’s a joke now—our streams are basically a bad version of the nature channel. You can watch empty ski lift after empty ski lift if that’s what gets you off, maybe see a single coyote make its way through the mush.
I made good tips and usually got free drinks. Everyone wanted to know about the accident, what it felt like to drop off that cliff, go tumbling halfway down a rock face, how I could ever bring myself to put on skis again. If they were fans, I’d drag the story out for as many rounds as I needed to get plastered.
“It hurt like hell,” I’d tell whoever was buying. It sucked. But your bones healed and you got over it, because you don’t give in to fear—not in life and not in extreme powder. “Give in to fear and you might as well give up on living,” I’d say, just like I had in all the post-crash interviews. People wanted to hear that my crash was a metaphor for their lives: overcome the odds; don’t give up no matter how hard you fall. It was symbolic to them, and they’d go back to their office jobs imagining they were applying my philosophy when they were turned down for a promotion. What they didn’t want to hear was how my bones screamed at night so bad I had to smoke enough weed to get a busload stoned to fall asleep; how maybe I’d put on skis and do a rail slide, but there was no way I’d ever go off a cliff again; how my career officially ended when I fucked up that jump, and all that was left for me was a stupid extreme class, a couple last retrospectives, and free drinks at Jerry’s Lodge.
When people still
My agent found me this gig when I got out of recovery. It was becoming clear to him that I wasn’t ever going to return to the circuit, stomp powder again, make real money. He said a lodge in Utah wanted me to teach classes.
“No fucking way I’m doing bunny slopes.”
“All right, then let me ask you a question: When’s the comeback?”
“Soon,” I said.
“Uh-huh. You’ve been saying that for four years.”
“I was learning to walk for the first three of them.”
“Ronnie, you need to take this job. I can’t line up any more interviews if you don’t ski. People are forgetting about you.”
I didn’t take the job, and that summer my agent dumped me. I coasted on savings and posted updates on my Third Eye feed—mostly me lifting weights, going to physical therapy—but my followers were dwindling. I watched my feed drop below a million. Then I started bartending at Red Lobster, serving old biddies who had no clue who I was, and it depressed me enough to call the lodge and agree to work a season.
Rick, the mountain manager, wanted me to give extreme lessons. He figured he’d cash in while I was still alive in people’s memory. Extreme ski with Ronnie Hawks: Big Snow Gold Medalist and Xtreme Games Champion. I agreed, and though Third Eye’s focus fades as quickly as the next viral video, it worked. Old fans logged on to my feed and actually came to the mountain to learn tricks from me.
It wasn’t an extreme class. No cliffs, no 540 tail grabs or Lincoln loops, nothing that could break a neck or put someone in the hospital. What we had was a groomed slope with a couple packed jumps where I taught aging millennials how to do a daffy, a spread eagle, a backscratcher for the most advanced. We had a rail and a half-pipe, and I demonstrated combo grinds, watching as one after the other busted their asses. Every now and then I’d get a kid who wanted me to teach him a switched cork or backflip, and I’d put my glove beneath my chin, out of camera range, and point at my eyes. “Sorry, man, not allowed,” I’d say, which was my way of letting him know that if it wasn’t for the contacts, I’d have done it. The lodge made us keep them in so skiers could beam into any lift operator’s eyes and see the unbroken lines of snow or follow ski patrol to find out where the powder runs were. That’s a joke now—our streams are basically a bad version of the nature channel. You can watch empty ski lift after empty ski lift if that’s what gets you off, maybe see a single coyote make its way through the mush.
I made good tips and usually got free drinks. Everyone wanted to know about the accident, what it felt like to drop off that cliff, go tumbling halfway down a rock face, how I could ever bring myself to put on skis again. If they were fans, I’d drag the story out for as many rounds as I needed to get plastered.
“It hurt like hell,” I’d tell whoever was buying. It sucked. But your bones healed and you got over it, because you don’t give in to fear—not in life and not in extreme powder. “Give in to fear and you might as well give up on living,” I’d say, just like I had in all the post-crash interviews. People wanted to hear that my crash was a metaphor for their lives: overcome the odds; don’t give up no matter how hard you fall. It was symbolic to them, and they’d go back to their office jobs imagining they were applying my philosophy when they were turned down for a promotion. What they didn’t want to hear was how my bones screamed at night so bad I had to smoke enough weed to get a busload stoned to fall asleep; how maybe I’d put on skis and do a rail slide, but there was no way I’d ever go off a cliff again; how my career officially ended when I fucked up that jump, and all that was left for me was a stupid extreme class, a couple last retrospectives, and free drinks at Jerry’s Lodge.
When people still
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