You've Come a Long Way, Dude

On the eve of X Games IX, it seems time to face the truth: Extreme sports have gone mainstream

With tricks like his "dinner roll", Johnny Mosley has helped bring the appeal of freestyle skiing to a worldwide audience.  Al Bello/Getty Image

With the thought of making a grand entrance to a masquerade party in London in 1760, the inventor Joseph Merlin strapped onto his feet a pair of metal-wheeled boots and rolled into the festivities while playing a violin. Joe did not have a full grasp of how to control his new invention, however, and he crashed, Stooge-like, into an expensive mirror that covered the entire length of one wall, thereby making a bid to become Western Civilization's first extreme athlete.

In today's extreme world, of course, crashing through a plate of glass would be the object, preferably after skating onto the wing of a hovering airplane and executing a backward somersault or two. But let us give Merlin his props. Just as there had to be Julia Child before there was Emeril Lagasse, and Vin Scully before Dick Vitale, so did there have to be Joseph Merlin before there was Tony Hawk. The journey to extremity begins with one small step -- and perhaps a pratfall or two.

And so, as we prepare for the cacophonous symphony of earsplitting motorcycle engines, deafening heavy metal music and overheated, overhyping announcers that will accompany the ninth X Games, in Los Angeles from Aug. 14 to 17, we stop to consider how we got where we got.

And where is that exactly?

To be sure, the X Games are still Ex, as in Extreme. Though much of the appeal of auto racing is the imminent possibility that someone will be seriously hurt, that sport is loath to market its dangerous aspects. Not the X Games, which love to trumpet alarming news. Motocross rider "Mad" Mike Jones got only halfway around on a backflip! Clifford Adoptante, the Flyin' Hawaiian, broke his femur! That is the kind of crawl that appears in the corner of the event's website these days.

Yet in some strange way the X Games -- and extreme sports in general -- have moved away from the edge, which is invariably what happens when corporations elbow their way into the action and begin throwing around money. Extreme becomes mainstream. The big news at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, besides alleged vote fixing by figure skating judges, was the impact made in the snowboarding event by athletes once considered outsiders. Then, too, the X Games themselves carry a Roman numeral appellation, this one being X Games IX. Dude, can you really be extreme when you're wearing red, white and blue and naming your games like Super Bowls?

This absorption into the corporate culture -- some would say co-opting by the corporate culture -- is not unique to extreme sports, of course. Professional football seems a lot less extreme when played in a venue called M&T Bank Stadium or Network Associates Coliseum ... though a skateboarder trying to execute a 960 might reasonably argue that the NFL -- hell, even the XFL -- is not extreme at all. But the mainstream press, not to be confused with the extreme press, delightedly delivered its full arsenal of irony last year when it became known that the United Professional Skaters Association (a group of more than 70 elite skateboarders of all styles) had met with Gene Upshaw, the executive director of the National Football League Players Association, to look into the possibility of unionizing -- and when a bunch of skaters at X Games VIII in Philadelphia threatened to organize a boycott because ESPN had signed away their rights for an IMAX movie.

Extreme sports at their various genesis points were sometimes happy accidents, sometimes the children of invention, sometimes the offshoot of necessity, but they were not product for a television culture or a potential revenue stream for Red Bull. Ralph Samuelson, for example, didn't know what would happen when, in 1922, he strapped two eight-foot-by-nine-inch pine boards to his feet and took off behind a motorboat on a lake in Minnesota. He survived and became generally regarded as the father of waterskiing. Skis weren't exciting enough for a 17-year-old waterbug named A.G. Hancock 25 years later. During a family vacation in Winter Haven, Fla., he decided to ski without skis, instructing the boat to build up speed so he could glide barefoot across the surface of the water.

No camera crew accompanied two weekend warriors from Barstow, Calif. -- Michael Pelky, an accountant, and Brian Schubert, a truck driver -- when they parachuted off Yosemite's El Capitan one summer day in 1966. Swirling winds pushed them both back into the rock wall, but bruised and battered, they survived and helped launch the extreme sport of BASE jumping, in which parachutists leap from any of four fixed objects -- Buildings, Antenna Towers, Spans (usually a bridge) or Earth (a formation such as El Capitan). A Muskegon, Mich., man named Sherman Poppen was looking for an activity that would keep his young daughters occupied so his pregnant wife could get some me-time when he nailed two wooden skis together and called it a Snurfer. Thus was the snowboard born 37 years ago. Poppen said he shed a tear when three Americans swept the Olympic halfpipe in Salt Lake City.

An ulterior motive -- fame -- sometimes attended these pioneers. Bruce Brown made his name in the movie business with his film Endless Summer, which brought surfing to the masses. And the perilous Paris-to-Dakar Rally, celebrated for the dangers facing competitors along a 5,863-mile route, much of it through desert, was the brainchild of a publicist, a Frenchman named Thierry Sabine. But anyone who makes his living by typing on a keyboard should be slow with snide comments about those, past or present, who make their living on the edge. The fact that the cameras are rolling and the fat cats are shelling out money does not make it any easier for, say, Mike Metzger to land a ramp-to-dirt backflip on a motorcycle (as he did last July) or for any of those yet unsuccessful skateboarders to add 60 degrees to the first-ever backside 900, which Hawk landed three years ago at the X Games in San Francisco.

It does, however, make it more worth their while.

Issue date: August 4, 2003

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