Inside the Extreme Machine

behind every sky-surfing daredevil is a fat guy making money

article by Michael Angeli Fashioned out of aircraft-grade aluminum, a street luge looks like a long, flattened hunting bow with skateboard wheels. Riders lie supine on a form-fitting seat and steer by leaning. Braking is another matter. You plant your feet gynecological exam-style and hope for the best. Your second option is a hay bale.

Tossing his worn-out wheels to adoring kids and causing a riot comparable to the Red Cross' passing out fresh water in Somalia, Biker Sherlock has the flowing hair and heavy lids of a rock star drawn by R. Crumb. There are flints pounded into the soles of his shoes--when he stops, sparks fly. Talented and boastful and with a nose for the limelight, he clicks with publicity, like banana oil on a stripper. And Sherlock is one of the few X Games athletes who can claim a major sponsor.

"Converse is manufacturing a street-luge shoe with me attached," says Sherlock, 29. "The shoe's called the Rodan, like that Japanese sci-fi monster, so when it comes out it'll be like, 'Biker Sherlock versus Rodan.'" Although the wheels he tosses to the crowd are the most-cherished items (comparable to a foul ball hit into the stands), some kids settle for stickers with the word Dreg on them.

"I own a skateboarding company called Dreg, like the dregs of society. We also make lugeboards--but let's face it, the money's not that great there. I have another business: We make glass bongs."

When someone suggests that his bong enterprise probably does better than Dreg and his Converse sponsorship, Sherlock rolls his sleepy eyes and nods. "Don't even kid. I sell them everywhere."

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Introducing extreme sports, alternately hailed as a cultural upheaval and dismissed as a millennial version of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Forget 100-mph fastballs, blitzing linebackers, high-sticking wingmen and boxers going dental. Welcome to a daredevil domain where your teammate is guts and your enemy is gravity, where the Jumbotron meets the hay bale. U.S. News ? World Report tells us our "creativity and individual expression" have been squashed by sports that have remained unchanged from generation to generation, and American business knows an opportunity when it sees one. That's why sportscasting superpower ESPN has colonized youth culture with a three-year-old traveling extravaganza called (for the moment, anyway) the X Games. This year, ESPN assaulted the beaches of Oceanside, about 40 miles north of downtown San Diego (the venue for sky-surfing and street luge), and Mariner's Point on Mission Bay.

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Cheerful sentries redirect lost street-luge fans to the top of winding Rancho Del Oro Drive in Oceanside, where the luge riders are crammed into a starting paddock, preparing themselves for the race. We're a far cry from Indy's pit row; instead, it's high school shop class. Rashers of long folding tables serve as work surfaces for tinkering on the sleds, which essentially involves changing wheels and slapping sponsor stickers on the bottom sides, where race officials won't see them until it's too late.

Judging from the names of the participants--e.g., Biker Sherlock, Rat Sult and Dr. Gofast--you might think that there's more going on in street luge than just the wet whisper of skateboard wheels in a game of follow-the-leader. Looking to spice up the competition, race organizers came up with the idea of running six racers on the track at once (competition is in pairs and fours). But the modification offers little in the way of chills and spills. There is one major crash, involving four riders--a typhoon of arms and legs, the riders on their backs and desperately trying to kick clear of one another. But for the most part, the sport resembles the Soap Box Derby. At least Sherlock delivers, winning two gold medals and one silver (the most, it turns out, of any athlete in the X Games).

"You could be doing this, you could be luging," Sherlock confesses later that night at Hurricane's, the place where X athletes hang. "You could practice and be in the next contest. We teach our girlfriends how to do it, 60-year-old guys do it, it's not a hard thing at all. It's not difficult." Then where's the X factor? "Not here, bro. Not in this race."

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The official symbol for the X Games is a man with a globe for a head and an incongruent X for a body, but a more appropriate logo would be a man shaped like a couch. ESPN legend has it that programming director Ron Semiao was dozing off in front of the TV when the idea of staging an extreme-sports Olympics hit him like a Keith Olberman one-liner. Having to program 24 hours a day for two channels, ESPN management wasn't about to let this one get away (anything's better than televising vein-busting Irishmen setting heavy boulders on a bird feeder). They immediately green-lighted the idea.

You could run an entire luge race on the belly of Jack Wienert, the man Semiao chose in 1993 to be executive director of what were then called the Extreme Games. Big as a Frigidaire and cool under fire, Wienert, a former car salesman, is the guy you want on your side. But Wienert, who helped the Missouri Tigers win the Sugar Bowl in 1966, didn't find the prospect of hand-holding kids on skateboards entirely appealing.

"Hey, I made the statement that I was going to be the first guy off the bungee platform," Wienert recalls of that first year in Rhode Island, when the games included bungee jumping.

"My neurosurgeon hears about it, says I'm nuts. At my age, overweight, all that blood rushing to my head, forget it. But not me, I'm doing it. So I go up the platform. And they start to wrap that shit around my ankles, OK? I take a look down, turn around, raise my hand and say, 'First extreme chicken.' I mean, I totally bailed out. I don't have those kind of guts anymore."

Instead of guts, he had salesmanship. It was tough to sell the idea of people jumping from planes on sky-boards or racing on their backs down the streets of Newport in motorcycle leathers or leaping off a tower with giant rubber bands tied to their ankles. At best, it suggested a fringe element.

"They thought that we were going to bring in a bunch of purple-haired, body-pierced, needle-pushing, dope-smoking kids," says Wienert. "We couldn't tell them in advance that when all was said and done, the state would benefit with $15 million in revenue."

But there were problems. For one thing, there was the word extreme. "The word extreme, I am told, doesn't translate too well into foreign languages," says Wienert. "And we have 21 different languages on our broadcast. Another problem was that the word extreme got used extremely too much." And then along came Mickey.

Not long ago, Disney Corp., the Vince Lombardi of image cultivation, gained control of ESPN when it bought Capital Cities/ABC. For the company that turned Hercules into a stand-up comic the word extreme didn't translate well, either. The title Extreme Games was abridged to its present X Games moniker, an obvious sop to the much-coveted Gen X market but a hoot to the porn industry.

"When we first heard that the name would be changed, almost 90 percent of this company went pfft," Wienert says, flapping his cheeks and making a raspberry sound. "But the top ten percent--the Eisners, the Ovitzes--had its mandate, and it was a good change."

The games that took place this past summer in San Diego provided competition for men and women in nine categories: in-line skating, skateboarding, snowboarding, sky-surfing, sport-climbing, stunt bicycling, street luge, barefoot waterski jumping and wakeboarding. There was also the X Venture Race, a kind of Baja 1000 for hikers, staged on a course extending from Mexico to California. After two years, bungee jumping was dropped from the X menu because "it got to be like watching diving. Everybody was doing the same thing. It's real hard to sit for three hours and watch guys leap off a bungee tower," says Wienert. "I mean, the fans are just waiting for the cord to break. And we spend all our money on the cord not breaking."

As diverse as these competitions are, with the exception of the X Venture Race, they all have one similarity-- none of them are team sports. Most of us were raised to believe that a team sport is--repeat after me--"a microcosm of society," that the red, white and blue was founded on the principle of all for one and one for all, Albert Belle notwithstanding. The centerpiece of Michael Eisner's empire is a building on the Disney studio lot called Team Disney, so there can't be a problem with translation. What happened to the whole being greater than the sum of its parts and pulling together as a team? Isn't the Eisner Sports Programming Network trifling with the American way?

"Well, I think the American way is changing," Wienert counters, threatening to light up a cigar nearly as long as a luge sled. "These new sports exemplify the change in the American way. The family isn't the core unit that it used to be. Mom and dad are both working or they're divorced, with latchkey kids. The American way was built on kids playing stickball and soccer in the street. In California, they did things on the beach. The beach might still be there, but government no longer provides facilities and money for American teens. With fewer places to go, these kids are going to do something for themselves--alternative sports."

One of the things they won't be able to do, at least at the X Games, is make money. First-place prize money ranges from $4000 for sport-climbing to $7000 for wakeboarding. The most common complaint that is heard among extreme athletes concerns the weak (continued on page 128) Extreme Machine (continued from page 84) trickle of endorsement money flowing their way.

ESPN's cup, however, runneth over. The network sold out its sponsorships in a corporate downpour of Keystone Light, AT&T, Mountain Dew, Taco Bell, Nike, Chevy S-10 trucks, Pontiac Sunfire, Slim Jim ("official training snack of the windsurfers," someone cracked), Visa, Rollerblade and the U.S. Marines.

"The athletes have a valid statement there," Wienert concedes. "But in our little world we're asking them for this one week to work for the common good--we're front-page news for the next week."

"Eventually, when we get a venue with the room to do it, we plan on having an athletes' expo area for the promotion of their individual sponsors. But, frankly, this isn't the state fair. This is a sporting event put on by the number one sportscasting cable network in the world. We're a business. It's not a carnival."

Mariner's Point on Mission Bay is the venue for the bulk of the X Games. It looks like a theme park for Gen Xers. A 60-foot-high block of scaffolding in the shape of a harp is covered with fake rock and is peppered with different "holds" for sport-climbing. The sight of the snowboarding jump, rising up nearly 100 feet in the air and covered with man-made snow, spawned rumors that the women contestants took one look at the jump and dropped out of the competition. Grandstands surround the U-shaped "half pipes" for the skateboarding and in-line skating competitions. Hip-hop, trip-hop, jungle and alternative music pours out nonstop from a sound system that could blow away the red dust on Mars. In the press tent, free copies of The Generation X Field Guide and Lexicon are available for those who don't already know that sweater puppies are breasts and that you get a blue steeler by looking at them. With lots of dishrag-hemmed jeans and lumbar tattoos on the women, the park here takes on the aspect of MTV's Beach House on food stamps. The orgy of corporate huckstering is outdone by a group of skateboarders who sweet-talk girls into wearing their sponsors' logo stickers on their bare stomachs, made obvious by the abundance of hip-huggers.

In the superhero scheme of things, there would be no use for barefoot waterski jumping. It doesn't interface with caped crusaders as dramatically as, say, rock climbing (think Spider-Man), sky-surfing (the Silver Surfer) or the crime-fighting virtues of the street luge (which could pass for a reptilian Batmobile). If you're looking for the one athlete who most exemplifies the guts-and-glory, improvisational, bust-a-move spirit of alternative sports, the barefoot water-skier is he. Even his helmet, reminiscent of the style worn by circus performers who get shot out of cannons, suggests heroic lunacy. Here is an event that, doughnuts to dollars, was created not out of intricate thought, trial and error or generational evolution but grew out of a Fourth of July picnic gone awry.

"We like to think it's the exclamation to the X Games," Ron Scarpa, last year's champion barefoot skier, says. "Today I was scared. Every time I jump I'm a little bit scared. That's what makes it exciting. There is a red zone, a danger zone, just before the ramp. If you fall there and hit the ramp, it's like concrete. You can get killed. A fellow competitor was killed barefoot jumping last season. On the same day, in France, another guy was partially paralyzed doing the same thing."

Built like a Lego figure, with a fine down of hair covering his body, the 34-year-old Scarpa is one of the senior citizens of the games. And although he complains that the salt water is a problem for his eyes (the barefooters evidently haven't heard about goggles), his vision is clear.

"To be honest with you, these extreme sports aren't going to go ballistic. The media like them because they're Gen X stuff. And the money--forget it. ESPN has helped with the exposure, but just skiing in this event is a big expense for a lot of the people who travel here."

Scarpa suffers defeat in the finals. Wisconsin boy Peter Fleck edges out South Africans Evan Berger and Warren Fine, the latter hitting the water with such impact after a 90-foot jump that he snaps his towrope. After winning, Fleck (who first got his feet wet on Madison's Lake Monona, where Otis Redding died in a plane crash) is hectored into taking a reporter from Entertainment Tonight out to a nearby lake to teach the reporter to ski bare-foot. An ESPN official, concerned about time, wants to know how long it will take.

"It'll take longer to get out to the lake than it will for him to get up on his feet," Fleck says with a shrug.

Standing out like a $200 haircut in Kmart and overlooking Mission Bay is ESPN's broadcasting set, a masterpiece of technology and artificial grunge. With cordless mikes, a $50,000 plasma TV, tungsten lighting, four cameras and a swooping jib, the beach house's decor screams the Hamptons. But it's mussed up just enough to suggest George Clooney, bachelor. Forty hours of ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC coverage begins right here, with slacker-friendly anchorwoman Chris McKendry, who may or may not have been ordered not to wash her hair. And if I'm not mistaken, she wore the same outfit two nights in a row.

"We are trying to reflect the culture that we find ourselves in, yeah," admits Jeff Ruhe, senior vice president of event management. "Open cabana, California colors. We definitely know who's watching."

That would be males between the ages of 12 and 34. According to Nielsen ratings, the X Games deliver the highest concentration of male viewers of sports television in that demographic.

Without question there is an element of danger involved, and the specter of serious injury is real. But from a historical standpoint, extreme sports are nothing new. Whether it's cliff-diving, standing on the wing of a biplane, running with the bulls or cycling in a velodrome, thrill seeking has been around as long as men have had balls and women wanted to cut them off. The notion of a new dawn based on the pursuit of peril and embracing the sports-drink slogan that "if you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room" is about as fresh an idea as the roller skate key. In the perspective of an ESPN employee who chose to remain anonymous, "Most of these events are just made-for-TV spectacles that aren't truly athletic endeavors. They're created out of the excitement of someone possibly killing himself. Street luge is a classic example--guys who had never piloted one of these things before are jumping on them and making prime time." To Wienert, those are fighting words. "You tell me how much guts it takes to go down a ramp," he says, "throw your bike in the air and hope you land on your wheels. I'm going to tell you something. As an athlete--and these are athletes--it takes the same guts as it does to face a Randy Johnson fastball."

Swiss sky-surfer Viviane Wegrath, (continued on page 169) Extreme Machine(continued from page 128) like Pasadena-born luge rider Pamela Zoolalian, is the only distaff competitor in her sport at the X Games. "As a woman I try to show the performance, the movement, the dancing in the sky," says Wegrath. "What's hard for me are all those helicopter moves that they do. They're really painful, really hard on your body. Circulation becomes cut off or there's too much blood rushing to a particular part of the body--it swells up and it physically hurts. And I'm not so much into that pain thing."

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Sky-surfers disdain helmets in favor of hearing the sound of the wind. The pitch of the wind indicates when the board is centered beneath the jumper. Of course, in the event of a chute malfunction, a helmet wouldn't help much.

"We try to keep the risk as small as possible because it's just too nice to live," says Wegrath. "They have special riggers, special pilots, automatic secondary chutes that open even if you pass out. It's very safe. My boyfriend and I kissed and opened a bottle of champagne during one jump."

Troy Hartman, who just won the gold medal for the sky-surfing competition, recalls how his parents, informed that their son had a passion for skydiving he couldn't resist, thought he was crazy. "Not because of the jumping," he says, "but because of the money. It costs a lot. They knew it was safe. They just thought I was wasting my time and money." Gazing on a row of unpacked chutes, lined up like silk squid, Hartman, 26, professes no fear. But he quietly mentions the dream. "In the five years that I've been jumping I've had the dream twice. We all have it, no matter what. The dream starts with your parachute not coming out. You hit the ground and then you sit up. And you're sitting there, wiping yourself off, looking around. Everyone's ignoring you, just walking back to pack their chutes. And you're like, Huh? Isn't anybody going to come over here and help me with this? You just get up and walk off."

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In the spirit of T-ball, five-pitch or YMCA basketball, every athlete who manages to compete in the X Games receives a commemorative gold medal. Everyone is a winner, so what is the point?

"We just want to spend 12 million bucks," Jack Wienert says. "No, here's the deal. You know what the last images were in NBC's closing ceremonies for the 1996 Olympics? Faces of alternative athletes. Those were our kids. We have approximately 40 hours of outstanding programming that nobody else has. We have all the rights. We don't have to negotiate with anyone about anything, as opposed to traditional sports. No one dictates to us." Luxuriating in his chair like a couch potato waiting for his favorite TV show to start, Wienert sums it up: "The real value of the X Games for ESPN is that we were first."

"Most of these events are just made-for-TV spectacles that aren't truly athletic endeavors."