Wayne Wong and his shades

When I was an adolescent, I was kinda into some of the things that my peers were into:  soccer (I saw Pele play his last game, and actually shook his hand at the end), skateboarding, basketball (terrible), baseball (even worse), etc.  However, what I was really into was skiing, and specifically the nascent sport of Freestyle Skiing.  Somehow Brother Paul got involved in a nearby trampoline center (ahead of its time!) and we ended up buying a really nice webbed, competition-type trampoline and putting it in our barn where we practiced tricks, both normally and even with skis on (brother Paul and I peeled the edges off) and on weekends he and I and mostly his pals roared around Mount Hood Meadows hucking off natural jumps and cliffs (the ski patrol would tear down built jumps and pull tickets; a far cry from today where resorts invest zillions in building big features for people to huck) and go bump skiing.  

Brother Paul was kind enough to let me tag along with his posse as long as I could keep up, but later I realized that his “permission” was as much for he and his pals’ entertainment value as for me, since I’d pretty much huck myself off anything they’d suggest, at any speed they’d suggest.  “Bring Little Paul; he’ll do anything we ask him to!”  

Paul – being 6 years older than me – was able to compete, and he and his buddies were driving around the Northwest going to events, and it drove me crazy that I was too young to enter.  In the meantime I was as obsessed as kids can get, paying close attention to the top folks in the sport and trying my best to emulate them doing such rad tricks as Spread Eagles, Twisters, Helicopters, Daffies (my favorite) and various combinations of those.   Again, ironically, the resorts were conservative enough at that time that any inverted aerials (flips) were very much banned and anyone caught going upside down on skis would get their pass pulled.  However, inverts were being done, and we got a sobering lesson when Paul screwed up a back flip, cratered upside down, and “broke his back” (compressed a disc), which at the time meant he spent a month in bed; a suboptimal way to spend the spring of his senior year of high school.  

So although I was chastened enough by watching Paul go through that injury and the long recovery, I was finally approaching the formal “Junior” freestyle age and I was pretty determined to have an impact there.  So I talked my parents into letting me go to the Toni Sailer summer ski camp.  Toni Sailer was an Austrian who was the first to win three Olympic golds, and did so in the only three available events in the same Olympics (he won the giant slalom by six seconds, which of course is an unheard-of gap today).  As such, the ski camp was mostly focused on racing, but – recognizing the potential for Freestyle – they had recently added that discipline as well, and to maintain the same level of integrity as their racing camp they didn’t mess around with coaching:  Toni Sailer hired Wayne Wong.  

Wayne Wong was a legend in Freestyle skiing.  I don’t know much about his youth other than he was born in Vancouver, BC,. and clearly he skied a lot.  As Freestyle got going, he became the sport’s signature guy due to not only his skills, but also his creativity in coming up with new moves, unique style, and – importantly – his famously-great personality.  In an era where some of the Freestylers were reveling in their image as the partying alternative to the racers and were kinda doods, Wayne seemed to be such a genuinely nice, normal guy that the crowds, other competitors, and judges all loved him.  He didn’t really huck huge doing the hardest tricks, he just did all of the disciplines – moguls, ballet, and aerials – with grace, style, and precision.  As an impressionable adolescent, I took notice of this, and of course adopted Wayne’s signature shades:  The I-ski aviators:

I of course, had to get them.  And they were good for backpacking too:

So when I wanted to go to a camp to hone my Freestyle skills, I went to where Wayne Wong was.  

Of course, the concept of meeting your heroes and being disappointed is pretty much a given.  However, when I met Wayne, this was very much not the case!  He was as nice, encouraging, thoughtful, and helpful as I’d hoped he be, and after a week with him not only was my bump skiing vastly improved, I was also throwing front and back flips under the watchful eye of Wayne and his pal, fellow coach, and Freestyle legend Floyd Wilkie. Back flips are actually fairly easy since the jumps pretty much launch you up and over backwards, but fronts are more challenging since you gotta kinda load up the skis on the ramp and use the skis’ spring-back to throw you forward, and I pretty much dove over the lip at lower speed onto my head many times ‘til they were satisfied that with more speed I’d come all the way around.  

Being that it was a summer camp, we were mostly skiing in the morning and the afternoons were filled with lots of trampoline stuff, diving into pools/lakes, and other teen stuff.  Weirdly, I got this pic of Wayne:

At the end of the week they had a bump contest, and I was the junior champ, which in my mind was the first step towards being a national junior champion mogul skier:

I was also able to meet a handful of the famed “Crazy Canucks” -the Canadian downhill racers who at the time were taking it to the Euros. While I wasn’t a racer, like every kid I loved ( still love) skiing fast and followed Downhill, and at the time those doods were the fastest, so it was an exciting meeting for me.

Despite the auspicious start – and a few good competitions as a junior in the Pacific Northwest that my mom was kind enough to drive me to, my dreams of mogul skiing and aerial fame and fortune didn’t pan out; I realized that sports that are judged are not worth doing due to the weird, subjective nature of judging, and drifted towards the very straightforward sport of running:  a start line, a finish line, and who can go the fastest between those two lines.  Of course the same can be said for ski racing, but having ‘wasted” my youth in bumps and jumps instead of banging gates meant that I didn’t have much of a future racing, and considering myself as an anti-establishment Freestyler I thought racing was a bit staid (though for sure, ski racing is as – or much more! – exciting than Freestyle!).

Notably, too, ski ballet was the third discipline of Freestyle, and while Wayne Wong was quite good at that – and still is! –  I was absolutely, embarrassingly awful…..and ballet  – for better or worse – faded away, which helped alleviate my fragile teen ego that had gotten bruised a bit by sucking so hard at ballet.  That said, my passion for skiing and tendency towards enduro activities and competitions ultimately came together in Skimo racing, which in hindsight I’ve done for a lot longer than I was into Freestyle.

And I was able to resurrect a triple daffy for the famous “Pray For Snow” video done by the ever-talented Juan Grande a few years ago, tho not without some trepidation…..

I hadn’t really thought much about this period of my life nor Wayne Wong until this winter when brother Paul gave me an AARP magazine (he’s a subscriber??) that had an article about….Wayne Wong!  He seems like an unlikely candidate for the newsletter for the American Association of Retired People  – do they have many Freestyle enthusiasts among them? – but clearly once again his famous congeniality transcended the sport, and the article centered around his most recent job:  an ambassador at the Deer Valley ski resort in Park City, Utah. 

And around that same time I somehow heard about the new(??) French sunglass brand Vallon, which not only had revived the style, but also did a white version that was the Wayne Wong signature style!  I, of course, had to get a pair: 

And got a pair for my old pal Scott Martin, who though a near-US ski team racer before getting a bit sidelined by an ACL tear, was also a fan of Wayne. 

 Perhaps now that Wayne Wong is a part time Utahn I might have a chance to get together with him for an (spendy!) beer at the Goldener Hirsch and we can reminisce about those good old times at Whistler!