I DON’T DONATE. I’m not active in any environmental causes. It is embarrassing, but I give virtually nothing back. This is sort of like admitting I’m an ass. Well, actually, I am admitting I’m an ass.

Celebrity Charity

So what’s wrong with me? It’s not that I don’t see the virtue. Global warming, Third World debt, AIDS, refugees, cancer—I am convinced, I’m sold. Leo, Bono, Elton, Angelina, Brad, Lance, you’re all right:Every second and dollar counts. If we (I guess I mean you) don’t volunteer time, money, and know-how to help overcome these crises, the planet will boil into a giant, AIDS-infected refugee camp. Yet I sit back and let the rest of you do the heavy lifting while I wring my hands and watch An Inconvenient Truth, nodding my head in agreement without getting up to help. The least I could do is write a check. The money is even tax-deductible. But I sleep easy without giving a penny.

Actually, I have given a few dollars to environmental candidates, but trust me, it was an aberration brought on mostly by my loathing for their opponents. In fact, that seems the only way to cajole me into giving: Make me dislike something enough and there is a chance that I will be moved to contribute to the contrary cause. Which is why celebrity activism can be so dangerous. If the wrong celeb endorses the right cause, he or she can taint the whole undertaking. And I mean you, Daryl Hannah (environment), and you, Michael Bolton (women and kids at risk). Nothing could ever have made me less sympathetic to childhood bed wetters than Mark McGwire’s throwing his weight behind that cause.

I have a recommendation for certain celebrities: If you really want to do your pet cause some good, speak out against it. Would anything raise more money for the environment than Janice Dickinson and Michael Jackson doing an infomercial debunking global warming? Even I might become a little more involved.

Still, why aren’t I already? My parents didn’t really give, either. My mom spent more time buying vacuum attachments from the Fuller Brush man than she ever did with the folks from the Boys Clubs of America. When I asked her why we didn’t give to charity, she said that we had our own needy individual here at home. She was referring, I assume, to my autistic younger brother, rather than me or my father, but her argument, even then, struck me as self-serving. We were solidly middle-class—new cars, expensive carpets, an ocean view. In my mother’s defense, she has since gone on to do substantial community service. But, at a crucial age, I watched and I learned.

Now I have a family of my own, and I wonder what my two daughters may be picking up from me. We live in New York City, where being solidly middle-class can make you feel impoverished. Note the verb feel. We are not actually poor by any metric you could employ. If you look at our income, our net worth, our caloric intake, whatever, we are among the best off on the planet. So, again, no excuse.

I wish I could say there was some philosophical underpinning to my total lameness, but I can’t think of any. And while I know incompetence is no defense, when I have given my time to a cause, I have proven consistently feckless. A few years ago, I volunteered to mentor some kids who were underperforming even by the standards of their own underperforming elementary school. Within a few weeks, the children assigned to me stopped showing up at the program—no one ever told me why. And when I enlisted to help clean up a state park in California that had been damaged by brushfire, I was chastised by the program’s representative for inadvertently destroying what flora remained.

I have not been any more generous with my money than I have been effective with my time. My company will actually match most employee donations up to a certain point, yet last year I screwed up and missed the deadline. (I give a few bucks whenever the company sets up a table in our lobby to collect for various charities and nonprofits, but I do that mainly for the free cupcake.)

It makes for awkward social and professional situations. I have participated in a fellowship and seminars where the focus was on philanthropy and community service and found myself speaking in generalities to obscure the fact that I give practically nothing. I’ve written cover stories for major magazines about charity, yet didn’t feel moved to mention that I may not be the most qualified to cover the subject.

I suspect that I’m not the only one, though. There are probably millions of us. The greedy. The selfish. The me-firsters. This country was practically built on egocentrism. Wasn’t Manifest Destiny just another way of saying, “All this land? Screw you. It’s ours.”

Well, now we’re stuck with it. And writing this has made me so disgusted with myself that I will make a pledge. I will donate my fee for this article to a good cause. I’m thinking about the Rosie O’Donnell foundation. You know why? Because Donald Trump seems to hate her, and that makes me sort of like her.

Now, if a prick like me is willing to open his wallet, what the hell is stopping you?

The post The Charity of Others appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

Yet nothing here was ever meant to see a blizzard or a week below zero. Beneath our highly technical veneer, the clothes seem to wink, in the end it is only fashion. The sleek showroom, the racks of neoprene jackets, the sturdy, telemark-like boots—this isn’t for the real outdoors. What Prada wants the purchaser to understand is not that he might want to scale Mt. Rainier or head into the backcountry or go out of bounds, but rather that he’s eminently prepared for the virtual outdoors. It is all meant to incorporate the wearer, the Prada Sport customer, in the thrilling narrative of a place called Frontierland.

Add up all the positive connotations of the wilderness—the expansive vistas, the sylvan splendors, the pine-scented mountain air, and the pioneers’ noble triumph over all that untamed nature. Subtract the downside—frostbite, starvation, heatstroke, blackflies, mosquitoes, infant mortality, and typhoid epidemics. Now call the remainder Frontierland, with a capital F, not in a nod to Disney but…oh, hell, it is a nod to Disney. Frontierland represents all that is compelling, gratifying, and ultimately America-asserting about the outdoors, without all the messy hardship. Frontierland is the safe and antiseptic outdoors of television commercials, where models wearing colorful parkas and beefy boots drive SUVs to cavort in scenic settings and engage in hot new (to Madison Avenue) sports like rock climbing and snowboarding. This virtual outdoors flourishes in pitchwomen’s fantasies and lensmen’s imaginations, free from disturbing danger but brimming with the edgy frisson of risk-free (at least on Madison Avenue) thrills. It is as far removed from the real frontier as the Chevy Suburban is from a kicking mule.

But don’t for a second get Frontierland, with all its rugged beauty and extreme sports, confused with the other outdoors, which we will call the frontier, or the wilderness, or the desert, or the mountains, or—well, call it anything you want, but remember that this is where bears can maul you and rockslides can crush you and swelled streams can drown you and even your own traveling companions might eat you.

America, as it is defined today, by its mission to sell as many cars, clothes, and sodas as possible, is awash in Frontierland. Take note of the companies that are now associating themselves with Frontierland, firms selling everything from cell phones and long-distance telephone service to chewing gum and bottled water. The visual language of Frontierland has become the lingua franca of advertising, so much so that even marketers pitching products as removed from the outdoors as life insurance are linking themselves with Frontierland’s adventurer-citizens. When did this happen? When did the outdoors as theme park become the dominant American advertising motif of this fleeting fin de siècle, with snowboarding, rappelling, whitewater rafting, rock climbing, and BASE-jumping replacing the log ride and those banjo-playing bears?

It wasn’t always so. When America was actually being settled, advertisers weren’t interested in reminding potential consumers of the perils they faced on the real frontier. In the era before rubberized cotton, being in the wilderness meant being wet, always, unless you were bone dry and dehydrated, or maybe holed up in a snowbound cabin for two months with enough cornmeal to last you only one. No, if you were selling a stove, a wagon, patent medicine, anything, you wanted to tout the civilized qualities of the product, its place in the modern homestead, its use in the royal courts of Europe, anything to distance it from slow death on the range. There was adventure aplenty right out the cabin door, but it was a grudging necessity back then, a means to an end. You trapped enough furs to open your own trading post, panned enough gold to return to Boston and buy a bar. Not too many folks were heading outdoors to get away from it all, despite Thoreau’s meditations and Whitman’s exhortations.

And those who were giddily seeking greater isolation and flagellation upon America’s savage hinterland? They tended to be utopians, cultists, cranks, or visionaries along the lines of the Shakers or utopian socialist Robert Owen or Mormon founder Joseph Smith. No advertiser would find in these niche groups the kind of brand leveraging that would move a few hundred thousand wagon wheels. But the real frontier did throw up one iconic hero, who was duly leveraged and branded to move a few million pickup trucks and a billion or so packs of smokes: the Cowboy. As every schoolboy now knows, this stoic range-rider was as much a product of mythmakers as he had ever been a historical fact. He stood, one dust-covered boot in the actual frontier and one in Frontierland, embodying square-jawed manliness, stolid existentialism, and manifest destiny, and for at least a generation he reigned as our most identifiable national hero. From the Marlboro Man (b. 1955) to Gunsmoke (also b. 1955), the Eisenhower era of Pax Americana required his presence as a no-nonsense marketing tool.

But by the late sixties and early seventies, our appetite for simplistic two-dimensional heroes began to seem naive in the face of Vietnam, LSD, and Watergate. Even in Hollywood, ambiguous heroes like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry pushed aside the cowboy, who went out in a blaze of bloody Technicolor glory in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid—though the Marlboro Man lingered on, in an amazingly effective advertising afterlife, long after two of the models who portrayed him died in the early 1990s of lung cancer (the same era that the brand sponsored the Marlboro ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Team, a promotion in which “Marlboro Miles” coupons could be redeemed for backpacks and even kayaks).

Once the cowboy passed from the scene, the archetypal outdoorsman of 20 years ago was the type who slogged through the ads in early issues of ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø and its progenitor, Mariah. A shaggy, masculine, post-hippie guy in waffle-soled boots, cut-off jeans, and a Pendleton wool shirt, resolute in his quiet iconoclasm, not giving a damn about how he looked as he turned his back on a soft society. He was venerably counterculture, and while American advertising is one of the most efficient machines in the world at co-opting counterculture trends, the marketers and admen wanted no part of this particular, tree-hugging fringe. Not yet. This outdoors guy was atavistic, a nineteenth-century relic—think the Ted Kaczynski look with gorp instead of gunpowder and a map of Alaska instead of an antitechnology manifesto. For a while, the two companies that worked hardest to associate themselves with the great outdoors were Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds, and what they were seeking to hook into was great quantities of breathable oxygen—this being the subconscious fantasy of every potential lung cancer victim.

Between those fringe-jacketed longhairs pounding Rocky Mountain spring water in ads for Coors beer and the emergence of Frontierland, there was a lull. In their cursory glances outdoors, our national myth-spinners—Madison Avenue, Hollywood, Seventh Avenue—saw only the hook-and-bullet crowd. Nothing sexy here. Cat Diesel caps, bulky sweaters—or even worse, Deliverance and squealing Ned Beatty. Wool was for losers in the disco years, when sleekness in the form of Halston and Darth Vader was the aesthetic cue. Advertisers wanted to look forward, and those shaggy beards were screaming the sixties—the 1860s.

So what changed?

Polyester, really, made the outdoors sexy. “It’s a pretty simple equation,” Joe Walkuski, a textile R&D executive for Patagonia Inc., told ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø in 1997. “Comfort in the outdoors is based on oil refinement. It’s not an easy issue.” But it was a trend that Patagonia itself pioneered with its introduction of petroleum-based fleece, in which polyester micro-fibers are stretched, shorn, and treated into a warm, breathable, and decidedly un-petroleum-like fabric. And back in 1969, chemical engineer Robert Gore had stumbled onto the incredible properties of the polytetrafluoroethylene membrane, which could be stretched and bonded to material to form a waterproof, breathable wonder fabric.

Patagonia sold its first fleece jackets in 1985, almost a decade after the first Gore-Tex shells hit stores. And when Madison Avenue finally did another wilderness fly-by, in the late eighties, the shaggy hiker had morphed into a neon-colored high technologist, swaddled in Polartec and polypropylene. His tools were no longer a walking stick and a poncho, but space-age diving watches, composite skis, and titanium mountain bikes. Especially compelling, for advertisers, was the idea that all this gear was actually essential to the lifestyle—it was functional and it exuded the requisite amount of hipness. Its cachet only grew as affluent young Americans, tired of Eurail passes and Florida spring breaks, discovered international trekking and adventure tourism. Already the boom was being documented and celebrated in both this magazine and in Patagonia’s catalogs: glamorous images of attractive, athletic travelers covered in grime and hunkered over their packs in the Karakoram, creating the notion of the Himalayan range as playground. Even better, from a marketing standpoint, this person, it could be implied in a magazine photo of a Your Brand Here—clad outdoorsman, was clearly engaged with life in a way that was meaningful and fulfilling.

This, of course, was because the outdoorsman himself was still heading into the frontier—not Frontierland—for the same life-affirming reasons that John Muir had gone into the Sierra Nevada. More and more people were hiking, camping, skiing, and kayaking in more and more remote locales, and they were buying gear that could stand up to backcountry punishment. But what the marketers saw was that these new adventurers looked simply terrific. And so Madison Avenue tromped off into the wild after them, huffing up the trail in crocodile loafers, taking copious notes.

The new sports were crucial to the nascent Frontierland. Snowboarding, for example, provided countercultural street cred while extolling the basic American myth of rugged individuality. Hence its passing, in record time, from an outlaw sport to an icon of hyperadolescence to an ofÞcially sanctioned Olympic event. “Within ten years,” says Thomas Frank, author of the advertising critique The Conquest of Cool, “snowboarding went from being considered dangerous to being on a postage stamp, which is the definition of orthodoxy.” Frank points out that the harder adventure-sports athletes have tried to resist the commercialization of their sports, the more attractive their sports have become to advertisers. How better to illustrate the sexiness of youth than with sky-surfing or snowboarding, sports that didn’t even exist when boomers fancied themselves snarling threats to the establishment?

To the credit of the outdoors companies, the gear makers didn’t really pander to the mainstream. They didn’t need to. The mainstream rappelled over to the activewear aisle. In the early 1990s, high fashion was stumbling and designers from Donna Karan to Giorgio Armani were stuck in basic black potholes. Enter the austere, relentless functionality of expedition wear. The heavy zips, the pulleys, the straps, the toggles! It was all so divertente. “This stuff was loaded with detail and þair and fashion when traditional fashion was putting itself to sleep,” says David Wolfe, a fashion-industry consultant at the Doneger Group. Thus gear took over fashion. And fashion appropriated gear, as America’s doyennes of high fashion succumbed to the call of the wild. A skier and mountain biker himself, Ralph Lauren began shifting his look from rustic frontier to Frontierland. “I wanted to design clothes for these sports because I love them,” says Lauren of his forays into gear design. “I wanted RLX to be real athletic equipment.”

So Polo begat Polo Sport which begat last spring’s RLX, which is actually more technical than some technical apparel. Prada spun off Prada Sport. This fall, the Gap and Old Navy focused their marketing efforts on zip-up fleece and nylon vests, which appeared 70 feet high on billboards above Times Square. (It doesn’t hurt margins that a fleece jacket is made from approximately a pound of polyester staple fiber, which wholesales for about a buck.) Meanwhile, virtually every performance item has drifted into the mainstream—hip-hop stars wearing The North Face on MTV, everyone wearing Teva sandals everywhere, an army of Phish fans streaming into shows in Patagonia Synchilla Snap-Ts. By the millions, Americans embraced the narrative of the wild and rediscovered the driving myth of the culture as a disaster yarn—only this time in a Polartec jacket, a pair of Timberland boots, and most of all, a Land Cruiser, 4Runner, Range Rover, Cherokee, Expedition, Explorer, or Xterra.

One part technical marvel, one part Conestoga wagon, the sport-utility vehicle is the consummate Frontierland ride. Look at those big tires, those doors, that jaunty spare tire hanging off the rear door. Did I say door? I meant gate, or portal, or whatever you call that hatch I open to load my groceries. Four-wheel drive, high clearance, fat tires, the SUV is perfect for splashing through streams on the way to the trailhead—or for surviving road rage in a Pottery Barn parking lot.

The SUV is the inheritor of that quintessential television commercial locale: the top of a butte. The first of these ads was earlier than you might think—1963—and the car helicoptered up there, piece by piece, was a Chevy Impala convertible. But by the late eighties the SUV had muscled the luxury sedan off that butte, claiming perhaps the single most indelible image of Frontierland—a place somewhere in the desert Southwest where you can drive up a mountainside and end up perched on a redneck spine.

Using focus groups, SUV makers quickly discovered that consumers were responding enthusiastically to this rugged imagery. “We used the frontier as an aspirational image,” says Joe DiMeglia, who supervises the Ford Multi-Purpose Vehicles account at the agency J. Walter Thompson. “We sat behind the glass and asked, ‘What does this say to you?’ And they said, ‘Whatever you want to do, Ford’s got the vehicle.’ Even people who weren’t kayakers or mountain climbers grasped the idea.”

Of course those people, along with hunters and farmers and others who needed trucks for utility and for sport, had bought SUVs all along: Ford Broncos, Jeep Cherokees, International Scouts. And they continued to buy them, piling bikes and skis and kayaks on top of vehicles that they knew wouldn’t bog down in axle-deep mud on a fire road. But pretty soon, everyone had one. You could pick 1991 as the pivotal year, the moment this recreational market went mainstream in an invasion of Range Rovers and Nissan Pathfinders, in victory parades of Gulf War soldiers in humvees who ensured the continuing flow of cheap oil and gas for everyone, in phalanxes of sport utter that had become the armored personnel carriers of choice for soccer moms.

“The SUV became the car for Everyman,” says account planner David Griffith of TBWA/Chiat/Day, whose agency handles Nissan’s new Xterra account. “People didn’t want to buy sports cars—the RX-7, the Supra all went away—but they still wanted something with sporty, athletic connotations. So they bought the SUV. Same as wit clothes: Instead of buying fashion, they bought utility.”

Utility itself became a cultural vehicle. It was no longer enough that your car, stove, watch, freezer, was the best, it also had to be innately, brutally functional. Viking ranges, Sub-Zero freezers, TAG Heuer watches. All meant to show the owner demands the most from his gear. His watch had better be waterproof to 100 leagues and accurate up to 40,000 feet. His stove could emit enough heat to turn an entire calf to smoked meat in 20 eyebrow-searing minutes. And his car—well, who knew when the tarmac between here and the mall might just wash away one day? Because, you know, if that jacket made it up Everest and back down, it will keep you warm should you, in your own glamorous, extreme life, decide to knock the bastard off yourself.

Of course there are levels of authenticity. The climber of K2 buffeted by the brutish elements, the backcountry snowboarder navigating steep and hairy terrain, the groomed-slope skier on an icy Vermont run. And so on, down the line to the guy in a Tommy Hilfiger parka driving a Rav4 munching on a Taco Bell Extreme combo as he muscles down Fifth Avenue on his way to a Knicks game. It’s gone so far that the Nissan Xterra is billing itself as an SUV intended to be used in the outdoors. Wasn’t that what SUVs were for in the first place?

Will it last? Is Frontierland just another trend, or will Madison Avenue always be out to lasso adventure in the service of sales? “There have been about 3,000 generations of human beings, and about 2,999 of them grew up getting all their cues and learning experiences from the outside environment,” says Kalle Lasn,editor of the advertising industry watchdog magazine AdBusters. “But in the last generation something very strange has happened with that relationship.” What happened is the final triumph of the indoors, of the electronic over the actual environment. Frontierland is just another virtual environment, a great place for a fashion shoot. All semiotics, no sweat.

But even in Frontierland there exists some confusion among consumers about the difference between the virtual and actual frontier, and the message itself is shifting. Many of the SUVs purchased today are two-wheel drive, meaning that there is a market for ultraexpensive gear-type equipment that is actually not gear at all. And available now at the Prada Sport boutique in Soho: Prada alpine skis manufactured by Dynastar…

But thank God that somewhere out there, beyond all the mixing of messages and metaphors, the shaggy outdoors guy is still hulking his way up the trail, and the true outdoorswoman is sliding her kayak into a mountain stream. He may be swaddled in high-tech, high-fashion synthetics. And she may have driven there in a zippy compact SUV. But they’re still soaked and muddy and not giving a damn.

The post Under the Billboard Sky appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

To know Terje Haakonsen today, it's best to have known him some yesterdays ago, during a flatline month in Mililani, at the steamy, landlocked heart of Oahu. Psychologically, Haakonsen, the best snowboarder in the world, was as far from the nearby North Shore breaks as he would have been if he were in, say, his native Ã…mot, Norway, or even some scrubby piece of Middle American suburbia; Mililani, a Levittown transposed and down-marketed to Hawaii, has all the tropical splendor of Omaha, Nebraska. Of course, Haakonsen was already famous by that late fall of 1996. He could have gone somewhere, bought a ticket, boarded a plane, headed for some globally renowned dope spot where they would have welcomed a world champion snowboarder. But a kind of inertia, a torpid inability to get up and go, had struck him. Haakonsen sat on that gray sofa, staring at those blank white walls and watching that 27-inch television, which didn't even have cable, and once in a while thought to himself, What the hell am I doing here? “I couldn't motivate myself, because my mind was stuck there, you know?” Haakonsen says. “I was, like, living underwater, like life was happening around me and I couldn't do anything to change what was going on.”

Terje Haakonsen

Terje Haakonsen

Terje Haakonsen

Terje Haakonsen

Guys do strange things for girls. And the reason Haakonsen was frozen was that his girlfriend—a native Hawaiian with a cheery face, curly black hair, and a professional surfer's hard body, whose name we won't mention but whom Haakonsen was obviously stuck on—was here. So most of that sultry, sticky fall, while bright green geckos the length of his hand ran across the concrete back porch and the lawn turned a rusty brown, Haakonsen sat and stewed and felt like he was waiting for something to happen—like one day things would be different from all the other days and then he would know what it all meant. And that day, as it turned out, came.

Today, right now, Haakonsen is stuck again, pinned momentarily in the status quo, in a space where he has more to lose than to gain from any change in his professional circumstances. He's generally acknowledged to be the best in the world in his sport—indeed, he's spoken of as the best snowboarder ever. He can win premier events seemingly at will. Just 24 years old, Haakonsen is the two-time winner of the world championships, three-time U.S. Open half-pipe champion, three-time Mount Baker Legendary Banked Slalom champion, three-time world half-pipe champion, and so on. He rakes in a fortune in sponsorship money, attracts tittering autograph hounds, alters the landscape of a competition through his presence and especially his absence—from, for example, the Nagano Olympics, which he noisily shunned. In short, he's snowboarding's megastar, and though a generally genial, likable sort, Haakonsen also can project attitude enough to remind the world that he is, after all, the one and only Terje.

But lately, by his own admission, Haakonsen has been doing all this without quite the level of joie he displayed in years past. The rock-star attitude remains—he's famous for blowing off appointments with sponsors and media—but mostly gone are the aggressive, sick-trick routines on which he built his reputation, replaced by maneuvers that are efficient, point-earning … safe. “I'm, like, not taking as many chances,” Haakonsen says. He has shaggy, dirty-blond hair, a thick mogul of cartilage for a nose above thin, expressionless lips. “I've gotten more routine, especially on the pipe. I'm doing the same tricks over and over again. I'm not sure why this is happening.” Well, for one, why go bigger than you have to if there is $100,000 at stake for landing your tricks cleanly?

“Can you blame the guy?” says pro snowboarder Peter Line. “I mean, everybody knows that Terje's the best in the world. Why shouldn't he just go for the money?”

With Haakonsen, the point is no longer merely to win. Ever since 1992, when he took the half-pipe title in both the U.S. Open and the World Cup, he's established that going big was simply something he did. “He's got phenomenal athleticism and creativity combined with balls,” says Jake Burton, founder of Burton Snowboards and one of Haakonsen's sponsors. “And his moves are usually the biggest, usually the most technically difficult, and the cleanest. His influence has been immense. Before Haakonsen, people never dreamed you could go that high.”

But the equation of competition is subtly changed these days. As a legend, Haakonsen is expected to decimate the field; anything less jeopardizes his status. So these are his choices: He can apply his full skills and humble his rivals, as he did while winning the rep-building Mount Baker slalom three of the past four years. (He ran one qualifying heat fakey, or backward, an act described by Sports Illustrated as being “roughly the equivalent of Steve Young's throwing three touchdown passes lefty and then, out of boredom, heaving a fourth right-handed.”) Or he can phone in a performance and collect his prize money with a wink. Or he can guarantee his stature by refusing to risk it: Last season, partly because of a lingering hip injury but also due to a sort of competitive ennui, Haakonsen competed in only five World Cup events.

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Haakonsen's shadow in his sport is such that when he chooses not to participate in an event, this nonparticipation becomes the noteworthy aspect of that event. After he blew off the Olympics last year (comparing International Olympic Committee chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch to Al Capone and labeling the IOC “ski nazis” along the way), he was accused of orchestrating a boycott and, by his Norwegian countrymen, of being unpatriotic. But no one could deny that Haakonsen's nonparticipation in the first Olympics in which snowboarding was an official sport threw into doubt the validity of the entire Olympic half-pipe event.

“There were so many reasons not to be a part of the Olympics,” Haakonsen says, sitting on the red velvet seat of an Oslo subway car as he travels from downtown to his loft in the tony Frogner neighborhood of Oslo. “I didn't want to make a big deal about that, but the newspapers did. It's not like I was waving the flag, 'Fuck the Olympics.' I was just not a part of it.”

The train glides forward with Scandinavian efficiency. The seats, the floor, the windows are spotless, the people—fair, clear skin, ruddy good health, determined expressions—spotless. Haakonsen, shaking his head, explains the Olympic controversy as an ironic by-product of his actually trying to support his sport. “I don't want to do an event if the event is shitty. The only reason to do it would be for the good of the sport. But the Olympic Committee put the ski federation in charge of snowboarding. And at the Olympics, the way they did it, the way they made it look, they set the sport back years.” He's referring to the competition taking place in a driving rainstorm, with a strict two-run routine that discouraged innovation and encouraged half-pipe restraint—all the result, Haakonsen believes, of skiers rather than snowboarders making the decisions.

Even so, the cattier boarders on the Tour suggest Haakonsen didn't sweat the Olympics because of the possibility that he might lose, a disastrous potentiality that far outweighed any glory that might have come from Winning One for Norway. (Quick: Remember who did win the gold? Case closed.)

“Say he shows up and he wins. Then what?” asks veteran boarder Dave Downing. “He's already the best in the world. Why should he bother?” The one absolute way Haakonsen had of remaining the world's ne-plus-ultra boarder was to spend the Games lolling in Hawaii, which he did. “Every snowboarder who came to the Olympics basically knew he was battling it out for second,” says Line.

On the subway, in the tidy bowels of Oslo, no such debate about Olympic altruism interferes with the sheen of Haakonsen's fame. Aside from a couple of soccer players, Haakonsen is Norway's most famous international athlete. Heads turn and follow; people are sure they know him, but many are not sure how, exactly. He's important, though, that's obvious: Just look at the rude-boy slouch, the hands jammed deep into the pockets of a black Burton jacket. Give him goggles, boots, and a snowboard and he would come immediately into focus: Terje! This is, after all, a country half of which is north of the Arctic Circle, where what we call winter sports are known simply as sports. And a Norwegian world champ—even a controversial, occasionally coasting, slightly confused 24-year-old legend—well, he's still the champ.

An image from Haakonsen's memory: Moving from Sø;rø;ya, an island in the north of Norway, to Åmot, the Telemark village where he grew up; arctic summer, light the whole drive down from Sø;rø;ya to Åmot, five-year-old Terje in the back seat of a 244 Volvo sedan. Haakonsen recalls pulling up in front of a big lawn bisected by a long driveway leading to a small wooden house. That winter he built his first ski jump in the backyard, a pile of snow he used to catch air off while riding a pair of plastic miniskis. He and his brother taught themselves to do 360s, prototricks through which Haakonsen learned some of the fundamentals of how to stay balanced while soaring through the air.

In a remarkable video produced by Volcom, Subjekt Haakonsen—Life and Times of Sprocking Cat, there is a grainy Super-8 sequence in which a five-year-old Haakonsen runs carrying a soccer ball over his head, flips himself using the ball as a fulcrum against the grass, catches some air, and then, when he's back on his feet, uses the forward momentum to toss the ball overhand about 30 yards—a display of astonishing attributes, the most obvious being the phenomenal coordination of a five-year-old able to perform this acrobatic maneuver. But even more impressive is the understanding of the physics of the body as it moves through space—the awareness that each action will create additional energy that can be harnessed to perform another move. This is the principle behind a snowboarder's stringing tricks together, evolving his own skills, pushing a fakey ollie so that it eventually becomes a caballerial and then mutates into an upside-down caballerial—what's known as the Haakonflip.

Though Haakonsen claims neither his father nor his mother was a gifted athlete, he remembers how his father, a chef, used to drop by the field where Haakonsen played soccer with his friends. Wearing a wool sweater, tight-fitting jeans, and work boots, Per Haakonsen would routinely outrun the sneaker-clad athletes training on the track circling the field. Haakonsen inherited that speed, that natural athleticism, first while playing soccer—the sport that remains, along with surfing and, of course, snowboarding, his favorite pastime. Playing for his village against other local villages, Haakonsen was a dominant midfielder, the player who scored most of his team's goals. “I always wondered how far I could go in soccer,” he says. “That question remains, if I could have played at the highest levels.”

Haakonsen first tried snowboarding at age 13, when a neighbor loaned him a swallowtail board. Though he was already an experienced skier, he immediately felt the sweet expansiveness inherent in snowboarding, the greater use of terrain, the sweeping carves, the wider array of tricks. He took to it quickly and easily, maneuvering the backcountry, developing his powerful turns, and later going big off natural moguls. Soon Einar Lofthus, another Telemark snowboarder and already a touring pro, escorted Haakonsen into the world of big air, where Legend Haakonsen, with his sense of balance and soccer player's athleticism, was born.

In 1990, at the age of 15, Haakonsen placed fifth in the world championships. Two years later he was the world champion. Even today, he has no special training regimen, just surfing, snowboarding, soccer, and skateboarding. And the occasional yoga session to help him stay limber. “That was a fun time,” Haakonsen says of this period before his status preceded him into every half-pipe he dropped into. “I was the youngest guy on the tour. I was always learning new tricks, figuring out ways to get better. When I'm having fun snowboarding, it's like meditation. I'm not thinking about anything but what I'm doing right now. No past, no future.”

It is easy to lose sight in this too-wearied, too-calculating professional athlete of the playful, exuberant kid who transformed his sport. But remember him at 18, or watch his videos: He was quiet, full of confidence. He was good, but a lot of guys were good. What set Haakonsen apart, besides the plain fact that he could go two or three times as big as anyone else out of the pipe, was the way he could also tackle big mountains and backcountry, could just look at a frightful line and with no hesitation or fear be the first to take it—in the clannish world of snowboarding, that's what earns respect. “He was this kid who was afraid of nothing,” says Jake Burton.

Now Haakonsen works at snowboarding, reading Transworld Snowboarding like a show-biz player parsing Variety, gleaning workplace gossip and valuable intelligence from the columns: who's where, doing what, and for whom. Sponsorships. Contests. Tricks. This is his business more than his sport, one that has rewarded him exceedingly well; between sponsors, endorsements, and prizes, his annual income is close to a million dollars. “I do have to look at it as a business,” Haakonsen says of deciding what to endorse, where to compete, which publications to appear in. “I have to protect myself. Do what's right for me. A lot of people work for me—I don't know how many, a tax lawyer, agents, team managers, marketing people, so many people. And they all bring me different projects—this jump competition, some magazine. And if it's a good enough concept or it's worth it to me financially, I do it. I guess I'm a sellout, that's how it is.”

So yes, Haakonsen's been getting rich and acquiring fame and all the while losing what he values most about snowboarding: the spontaneity, the risk-taking. Standing in his kitchen, amidst rose-pink walls, boiling a pot of herbal tea and emptying chocolates into a bowl, he's the picture of the kroner-rich life. This apartment on Kirkeveien Street—barren walls, top-of-the-line Bang & Olufsen stereo, gear overflowing from walk-in closets—is an anonymous bachelor's pad. You get the feeling he could walk out of this life in two minutes flat. But this is the pricey part of town, and owning a home here, and bidding on a luxurious penthouse across Frogner Park, and renting the oceanfront place in Laguna Beach, California, and spending the off-season months in Brazil, all these are the perquisites of fabulous athletic success, of a well-maintained business. And Haakonsen feels frozen by them.

“People get stuck and all they do the whole year is pipe, and that's too bad for them,” he complains. “They do the same routine over and over, get the moves down. It becomes like this really precise, synchronized movement, like they're little ballerinas or something. It's no longer this spontaneous sport, like when you're a kid screwing around.”

He shakes his head; he's been describing his own boarding, of course. “Everything around [snowboarding] now is, like, work. It's too complicated. It's changed the feeling. Before, my motivation was always to get a lot of different tricks, different terrain. Like my motivation when I was young, not so long ago, was based more on what tricks could I do, how big I could go, how easy I could make it look, the style. But for the last few years my motivation changed. I got more routine, especially on the pipe. I was still trying to go big, but I wasn't trying new tricks. I was, like, not taking chances. I was, you know, stuck.”

Look back once more: thinking about that stretch when Haakonsen was doing time in Mililani, when he found himself trapped by some antiforce, some inertia, in the midst of a town he couldn't stand, with no idea of what he was doing there. Back then he searched for a way out but couldn't find one. There was nowhere to go, no World Cup to ride, no half-pipe to snowboard, no soccer game to join, and he was just there, planted, and it was hot and sticky and he had nothing to do but sleep late with his girlfriend, visit the strip mall for frappuccinos, and wait for the urge to get out of there.

When he did finally get out of there, he left his girlfriend with a child, Matthew, now 15 months old. Haakonsen and the mother never married, but they share the parenting, Matthew spending several months with his father in Norway or on the road, then returning to his mother in Hawaii.

Matthew, a chubby ball of flesh with curly brown hair and goopy baby lips, recently left Haakonsen's sleek loft in Oslo after spending the month with his father near Salvador, Brazil. Haakonsen can still see him, though, as if he were paddling in the late-afternoon Brazilian surf, Matthew a brown dot on the white sand. While Haakonsen was bobbing in the swell, he felt like maybe this was the point of it all—that idle period, his half-throttle efforts in the pipe, the concentration on his bottom line. Maybe this little boy on the beach, grasping handfuls of sand, not knowing a snowboard from Adam, maybe that was the point.

And all this other stuff was, like, just business.

“I feel different now,” Haakonsen says about snowboarding, but really talking about his whole life. “I don't care about just winning contests, doing what I know will win. I feel like going back to more tricks, going back to taking chances. I feel like trying more new things, taking a different line through life. I want to get that feeling again, of being a kid in the backyard, of making a jump, of doing this because this is exactly what I want to be doing.”

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Jonny “Big Air” Moseley, 23, is rolling in a white 1997 Chevy Blazer down Squaw Valley Road, past the Resort at Squaw Creek, where there used to be a Jonny Moseley Suite, along the foot of the KT22 ski lift, which climbs to the Jonny Moseley Run, and into Tahoe City, past banners proclaiming “Congratulations Jonny.” He flips through a CD case, searching for tunes, when suddenly he remembers what he really wants to hear.

Opening the glove box, he withdraws a cassette, which he pops into the tape deck. A clicky studio synthesizer drum track comes on, accompanied by a twangy, spacey guitar. Then a gentle, rich voice begins to sing: “I'm a Muffin Man, I come from Muffin Land, I'm a puffin' lovin' Muffin Man.” It's a ridiculous song, reminiscent of Dr. Demento or The Gong Show, and not the kind of stuff to which Jonny — whose musical tastes veer toward the reggae of Bob Marley, the tropical hip-hop of Wyclef Jean, and the old school thrash of Pennywise — would normally listen.

“Dude,” Jonny says, grinning his wide-toothed smile beneath his yellow wraparound Smith shades. “That's me singing. I got totally trashed one day and went into the studio with this guitarist and he had me sing this song.”

“He's got muffins on his mind, He eats muffins all the time …”

He guns the V-8 engine and the Blazer lurches forward. “The guy wants to release it as a single.”

“Muffin Man”? Jonny Moseley's debut as a professional singer?

“I mean, if it were like the week after the Olympics, then maybe,” Jonny says. “That would have been sweet. I could have been, like, it wasn't about the skiing or the gold. It was all about 'Muffin Man.'”

He parks the car alongside a stone retaining wall, next to the Mandarin Villa Chinese restaurant in Tahoe City. “See, 'Muffin Man' has two meanings. There's like, muffins, like the kind you eat. And then there's muffins, as, like, girls. And I'm the Muffin Man. And this — “

Jonny points around him at the car interior, the stone wall, the parking lot, but what he is really doing is gesturing at his whole lifestyle — the gold medal he won at this year's Winter Olympics, his family's many houses and boats, his good looks, his killer smile, the crates of fan mail, the endorsements, the big post-Olympics income, the fame, the recognition, the whole golden life.

“This is Muffin Land.”

There is a specific geography to Muffin Land that includes the Moseley residence in Tiburon, Marin County, California; a ski cabin in Squaw Valley; and his family's houseboat on a private island in the Sacramento River delta. It includes Tiburon's Paradise Cay Yacht Harbor and the attendant Yacht Club, built by the Moseley family, as well as a compound on the Caribbean Island of St. Croix. There are also the numerous Marin County lots worth millions of dollars that were originally purchased by his grandfather, Tim Moseley, a prosperous inventor of nautical instruments. There are a Jeep Wrangler, a 1964 Pontiac Bonneville convertible, and the Chevy Blazer. There are yachts, speedboats, Waverunners, race cars, and motorcycles. There are repair shops, junkyards, and scrap heaps. There are also backhoes, tugboats, and dredging barges.

Born to this pre-Silicon Valley northern California elite, Jonny was shaped by a way of life that included winters in the Tahoe snow, summers boating on the bay or at the Saint Francis Yacht Club's island up on the Sacramento River delta. His older brothers, Jeff and Rick, were good athletes, competitive skiers and sailors; Jonny's father, Tom, a prominent developer and contractor, was always an avid skier and sailor, teaching his boys to be as at home in the snow and on the water as they were on dry land.

But there is also a mental space to Muffin Land, a state of achieved bliss that allows Jonny to move through life with a grace and poise rare in a 23-year-old. While most males his age have been sweating through the armpits of their white button-down shirts during job interviews or moving back home after graduating from college, Jonny's been having dinner with Cindy Crawford, or MTV VJ vixen Serena Altschul, or another famous, important, or totally hot-looking person. Never forget that Muffin Land is home to the Muffin Man — and Jonny is also about the ladies, about finding the ladies and calling the ladies and meeting the ladies and having a good time with the ladies.

Yet Muffin Land is also about being a great athlete, about being the number-one-ranked mogul skier in the world and about winning two World Cup overall freestyle titles, five combined junior and professional World Cup titles, and 14 World Cup events. It is about landing a radical 360 mute grab air at the end of the biggest run of your life and in the process revolutionizing your sport. It is about busting a version of that same jump for The Late Show with David Letterman in the driving rain on a cordoned-off New York City street. (It was Letterman who gave Jonny the nickname Big Air.) It is about appearing on ABC's The Superstars competition broadcast in April and surprising the field by finishing second, ahead of athletes like Kordell Stewart and Herschel Walker and Lennox Lewis. And it is most certainly about the gold medal he won with that spinning, skis-crossed jump in the moguls at Nagano — the jump that catapulted him onto Oprah, Rosie, The Today Show, and Good Morning America.

In short, Muffin Land is about success and accomplishment and amazing good fortune. And it is about its lone resident, who may or may not know the true value of the passport he holds.
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Jonny has, in some ways, always been in training for assuming the mantle of Muffin Man. Being the youngest of three boys gave him a taste for competition early on; his brothers were brutal gamers who didn't cut Jonny breaks because he was the youngest. He had to make the same runs, jump the same moguls, and bust the same huge air as his big bros. And if he didn't tabletop that helicopter, they would let Jonny know he was a pussy.

“I always wanted to be the best,” Jonny says. “I think competition is key. At an early age, because my brothers used to work me, I realized what competition did, how it made me feel. I realized what it meant to me. I love the feeling of winning.”

He would take any dare, stand up to any challenge. His high school soccer coach at Marin County's elite Branson School used to sic Jonny on the opposition's best player, and Jonny would inevitably shut him down. “Jonny was always a good athlete,” says his mother, Barbara Moseley, who works as a real estate broker. “All the boys were good athletes. And that competition had to make Jonny even better.”

Jonny realized that he was, as one former ski coach says, “something special” after he won the junior nationals in Lake Placid for the first time: “I was 15 years old, and what I found out about myself was that I was good at competing, not just skiing. I loved that feeling. I liked being in the gate, all jacked up, nervous. I actually liked that feeling. I enjoyed competition. And when I found out about winning, I liked the competition even more.”

Initially, one of the perquisites of skiing was that it meant Jonny missed a few weeks of school every winter. But gradually, as Jonny racked up victories in major events, it began to seem possible that skiing was more than a means of skipping school and delaying college. “When I was 16, I won junior nationals again,” Jonny recalls. “Then next I won junior nationals and North American amateurs; I mean, I won everything in sight. For a couple of years there I was getting way better, I was getting awesome. And when I made the U.S. Ski Team, I realized I could get paid to ski.”

Happily, skiing just happened to be the thing at which Jonny was best. But whatever you threw at him — soccer, baseball, calculus, acting, auto mechanics — he would soon develop the appropriate skills. He was a solid student at Branson, a featured actor in productions of Oklahoma! and Our Town. And from his father, he learned the basics of auto mechanics and how to fix everything from a flat tire to a bilge pump. It was his father who taught him that Muffin Land requires constant vigilance and care — the houses don't maintain themselves, the cars don't fix themselves, the boats don't refit themselves. The good life requires a good pair of hands. And in a metaphysical sense Jonny learned that Muffin Land must be nurtured. You can't take it for granted. If you're the Muffin Man, then you gotta give something back to Muffin Land.

Today, Muffin Land is in disarray. There are boats and jet skis to be put up on trailers, trailer hitches to be fitted — and, for a party Jonny is throwing this weekend, kegs of beer to be procured and vodka to be stowed away. At the moment, the Muffin Man is struggling with one of Muffin Land's reigning edicts, a philosophy described by one of Jonny's friends, Trevor Pressman, as the Way of Mo. The Way of Mo is a sort of old-money, WASPy precursor of the DIY punk-rock ethic applied to hard-to-service items such as carburetors and tugboats. When something needs fixing in Muffin Land, you fix it yourself.

“My dad taught me that you don't go to the store for anything,” Jonny says. “No matter what it is, no matter how screwed up, you can somehow fix it right here. You just gotta roll up your sleeves and get busy.” You head down the block to the immense, concrete, Moseley-owned shed known as The Shop and find whatever tools and parts you need. Here on the San Francisco Bay waterfront just a few miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, adjacent to the Moseley-developed Paradise Cay Yacht Club at the end of a vast, Moseley-owned cul-de-sac, The Shop is a forbidding industrial space where you suspect a resourceful engineer and a sufficiently innovative mad scientist could concoct a missile with enough throw weight to convince Indian nationalists to think about global, rather than regional, nuclear war. It is the sort of grimy, tool-rich environment to which every child who ever assembled an Estes rocket or fueled up a Cox model airplane dreamed of having access.

Right now, all Jonny needs is compressed air to inflate a flat tire on a decrepit trailer holding one of his jet skis. As he walks around The Shop floor looking for the air tank and compressor, he passes bushels of gaskets, crates of brake fluid, piles of spark plugs, engine casings, greasy bolts, plugged exhausts, rotted mufflers, and pieces of just about every post-World War II nautical or automotive part ever made.

But you have to be in The Shop every day, as Jonny has not been lately, to know where, say, the air tank might be. If you have been away, winning gold medals and hanging with Cindy Crawford, then you come back to The Shop and The Shop's randomness and chaos defeat you.

So Jonny shrugs, puts his hands on his hips, and takes a call on his StarTAC cell phone to give a cute blond directions to his houseboat party this weekend.

A few minutes later, driving back down the street in the Blazer, he runs into his father, driving his own Blazer to The Shop. (Members of the Moseley family seem to spend the day driving various trucks and sport-utility vehicles between various pieces of Moseley-owned property.) A conversation takes place, driver to driver, in opposite-facing Blazers.

“Dad, where's the air tank?”

Tom Moseley props his elbow on the truck door. “You know, if you were down at The Shop more you might know these things. Maybe Dooley has it.”

Dooley is a hippie who works around the boatyard. Dooley was last spotted cranking some Neil Young from the beleaguered speakers of his red Volkswagen bus as he started up the sputtering engine. Jonny drives over to Dooley's boat and reconnoiters, but the pump's not there, so Jonny climbs back into the Blazer and returns to his parents' garage, hoping that a can of aerosol flat-tire fixer might fill the trailer tire. But the one can of flat-fix that Jonny can find is an ancient specimen that emits only a gentle wheeze of fluorocarbons before it gives out. Another character-building lesson in the Way of Mo.

The flat tire sits in its divot, weeds growing up around it.

Jonny appears ageless — to look at the man you immediately think you have a sense of the boy. His brown, proto-mop-top hair; hazel eyes; pale skin flecked with soft freckles; protruding, masculine nose; and gentle, full lips give him a look similar to that of Tom Cruise circa Risky Business. (Rosie O'Donnell pointed out the similarity when Jonny appeared on her show.) And because of the easy physicality of being a professional athlete, he wears his looks with equanimity, becoming all the more handsome because he is not defined by his good looks.

Jonny is that rarest of ultra-successful professional athletes in that he manages to combine the supreme confidence required to shred at the highest level of his sport with a gracious humility that makes it impossible to begrudge him his accomplishments. “He is really cool about who he is,” says Shane Anderson, a fellow professional skier. “And he doesn't have to act big to make sure you know he's a big deal.”
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A big deal he is — the biggest star of the moment in freestyle skiing, and on the verge of becoming the biggest star in all of skiing. (Perhaps only Hermann Maier — The Hermanator — and Picabo Street are in his class in terms of wide-breakout popularity.) Jonny was the first skier to cross over the street-styles of skateboarding and its winter cousin, snowboarding, into big-time competitive skiing. The crowd-pleasing 360 mute grab air that won him the Olympics, for instance, was a move lifted from snowboarding. These ingredients make him a marketer's dream. “Right now there aren't too many people who aren't interested in Jonny,” says Tim Vetter, Jonny's agent with Action Sports Management. “With him, it's not a matter of worrying about where the next deal is coming from; it's a matter of choosing the deal that's the most fun for Jonny.”

So far, besides his sponsorship arrangements through the U.S. Ski Team and his gear sponsors — K2 skis and Tecnica boots, among others — he is also affiliated with American Skiing Company, owner and operator of nine resorts nationwide. (“I think you have to go back to Jean-Claude Killy to find someone comparable,” gushes Skip King, American Skiing Company's vice-president of communications.) And Jonny is working on a deal with Polo Sport — a significant step, since it would be his first nonskiing-related mass-market endorsement.

The funny thing is, as you tour Muffin Land with Jonny, you begin to wonder how his life would have been any different if he had not won the gold medal. What if he were just Jonny Moseley, non-gold-medal-winning skier? What if he weren't a professional skier at all but just a ski bum — would he still be the Muffin Man?

“Some things have changed, there's no question about it,” Jonny says of life after the medal. “I mean my time is more valuable. My personal time is more valuable to me, and my time is more valuable to other people. But as far as the basic flavor, my life didn't change that much. I mean, I was loving life before and I'm loving life even more now. I've always been lucky, I mean, really lucky. It's all good. It's all so good I don't even like to think about how good it is. So let's stop talking about it. 'Cause if you talk about it and then figure out why it's so good, then from that moment it probably won't be good anymore. Like, if you have to think about it too much, how good can it be?”

But what is it actually like to be this successful at this young age?

“It feels great! I'm lucky, because I'm 23 and now I have the rest of my life to run with it, to do whatever I want. And that's an awesome feeling. I knew the minute I crossed the line [at the Olympics], this just put everything together. What else can I say? But believe me, not a second goes by that I don't remind myself: I'm really lucky.”

“People don't realize what kind of position you put yourself in on the day you decide you're not going to do the normal life and you're going to try to win an Olympic gold medal. At one point, it's like, wow, that's a noble goal. But on the other hand, when you're 17 or 18, you're putting yourself in the position of total satisfaction or total destruction. From where I come from to what I've done — I'm really, really lucky.”

Having abandoned the flat tire for lack of an air tank, Jonny has moved on to his next round of preparations for the weekend bash he is planning on the family's Tinsley Island houseboat for himself and 30 or so members of his posse. Sitting legs akimbo in whalebone corduroy cargo pants on the oil-slicked asphalt, he hunches over a soldering iron as he rewires a boat-trailer brake light. It is hard work, brutal on the back, and it is currently being made even more difficult by his mother, who has called from Virginia, where she is visiting Jonny's grandmother. He cradles the phone in the crook of his neck, assuring his mother that the upcoming party will not get out of control. He promises her that the two houseboats he has arranged and the numerous gallons of vodka and kegs of beer and speedboats and jet skis and wakeboards won't combine into a sort of high-octane aquatic cocktail that will leave Jonny's reputation tattered, psyche shattered, and guts splattered.

“No problem, it's gonna be OK,” Jonny says as he touches the iron to the resinous solder. “Like 20 people — 25 tops. You want the whole list? OK. Trevor and Josh and Beau and Mark and Toffee and Arman and … oh, fuck!”

The brake light Jonny has just connected isn't working. It just sits there, unblinking, a dull candy-red tribute to Jonny's inability to solder and talk on the phone at the same time. He says good-bye to his mother, who has passed the phone to Nana, his 85-year-old grandmother. “Hi, Nana. How are you?”

A few minutes later the cell phone rings again and it's Hathaway Pogue, an assistant to Dana Davis, daughter of billionaire Marvin Davis, and she's calling to ask if Jonny will participate in a charity auction. (“Next Item: A Ski Date with Gold Medal Winner Jonny 'Big Air' Moseley.”)

And then Jeff, his 29-year-old brother, comes over and tells Jonny he's doing a suckass job with the soldering, and then Jonny's father stops by to agree and tell Jonny he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing and how could a pantywaist job like this be taking this many hours, and Jonny tells his father it's because every passing car is filled with people who want to stop and talk to him and take his picture. And then, as if on cue, an elderly neighbor tentatively makes her way across the narrow lawn between sidewalk and street and asks Jonny if he would pose for a picture, “For my wee grandcousins in Ireland. They watched you win the gold on the Olympics and they love you, Jonny.”

And Jonny stands and puts his arm around the old lady and flashes a hang-loose gesture at the camera and the brake light still isn't fucking working. And then the UPS lady shows up like she shows up every day with crates of ski parkas and Jonny Moseley posters and boxes of fan mail. Today she also has a special box, one that's smaller than the rest, from the U.S. Olympic Committee, and Jonny rips it open and pulls out an immense gold ring the size of a plum and slips it over his index finger. There are dozens of diamonds outlining the five-ringed Olympic symbol, and lettering saying “Gold Medal Winner 1998” along the sides. Jonny shakes his head. “I ordered the smallest ring they had when I got to Nagano,” he says, “because I didn't know if I was gonna win. I guess they upgraded me.”

And he tries to slip the ring off, but it's stuck. And the brake light still has to be fixed because it is on the back of the trailer that's hauling one of the speedboats up to Tinsley for this phat weekend that Jonny has been planning, like, since the minute he finished that Nagano gold medal run. And Jonny is filthy with brake fluid and soot, and his Kappa shirt is streaked black, and he realizes he's crossed the taillight wires and has to clip and resolder them. And Jeff cracks up: “One thing you can definitely say about Jonny: He's keeping it real.”

And then his dad comes back. He's found the air tank.
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Jonny is the quiet, solid center of Muffin Land; he is the vessel of vast amounts of his family's love, his friends' respect, and his fans' adulation. As an athlete, Jonny's the winner of some genetic blackjack game in which he's been dealt nothing but aces and faces. Nevertheless, his work ethic when in training and his deep aversion to complacency are the things that pushed him past simple excellence and made him nonpareil. “He works 50 percent harder than any other person on the tour,” says Cooper Schell, the U.S. Ski Team's moguls coach. “He does everything possible that he can do to succeed.”

It was his superb conditioning that surprised those outside the sport of skiing when Jonny took second in ABC's The Superstars competition. The most striking segment had Moseley lining up against Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Kordell Stewart for an obstacle-course race entailing a climb over a wall, a tire drill, a blocking dummy, a high jump, and hurdles. Stewart, at 6-foot-1 and 212 pounds, was all angular slabs of bulging muscle beneath a tank top, while Jonny, at 5-foot-11 and 180 pounds, looked like your average-size frat boy. Moseley handily beat Stewart in a mad dash down the course.

As an amateur, Jonny's pure athletic skill and competitive drive had been enough to carry him to the podium. But when he went out on the World Cup tour, he admits, “I just got smoked.” At first he thought that what was required was merely better conditioning and greater strength. “I went and I got strong,” he explains. “I just started working out like a banshee, you know, hardly skiing. To some degree, it helped.”

It took another year for him to realize that in order to become good — “I couldn't go out and win an event at will, and that's what I consider good” — he would have to become a better technician on the slopes.

So the summer before the 1997-1998 World Cup season and the 1998 Winter Olympics, Jonny moved into Schell's house near Mount Hood, Oregon. “Coach Cooper took it on like a mission,” says Jonny. “He just engineered everything, studying videos and getting it down to a science so that he could figure out what was wrong with me. There was just something that wasn't clicking.” They agreed that Jonny needed to improve on the moguls, during the tight turns that constitute the technical portion of a freestyle run.

And then there was the psychological training. “We discovered that for me there was a difference between stress and pressure,” Jonny says. “Stress is when you're out on the hill training and you're doing your best runs and you look up and you know there's some other dude out there that's got mad skills that are better than you. There's no way you can be relaxed and try to compete well when you're under stress. But pressure is when you know you have the skills, when you know you can win, but you got gnarly butterflies. Then it's just a matter of turning that into frickin' power, you know, just going for it and letting it flow.”

The key to winning, Jonny discovered, was to ski to ski, not to ski to win. As long as he loved skiing, his athleticism and the hard hours spent working on technical skills would allow him to make repeated trips to the podium.

This off-season, however, has been more casual for Jonny. His usual training regimen has been thrown askew by the demands of celebrity. And though never a party animal, he has been known to have a soft spot for certain substances that after the Nagano Games were commonly associated with Canadian snowboarders.

“I used to bake once in a while,” he says of smoking marijuana. “But never when I was in training, and never when I was less than three months out from the tour. The main reason I don't now is because of the drug testing. Before the world championships, at the Olympics, you get tested, and when you're on the U.S. Ski Team they test you all the time. So I don't need that hassle, that reputation — my sponsors would hate it. Same thing with drinking. If I got a DUI, then there'd be all that bad attention. I mean, if I didn't have to worry about the testing and the press, I think I'd smoke more pot. I don't take any of the hard stuff.”

And the big party this weekend?

“We'll see,” he says. “But it's definitely the kind of atmosphere — old friends, no responsibility — where it's tempting.”

This is one of those days, one of those beautiful northern California days, when the air is clear and crisp like it's being pumped in from some cosmic purifying unit that is invisible beyond the horizon, and the tingle of it is making everyone feel giddy at the upcoming weekend and the party on the houseboat up on the Sacramento River delta. Even the Muffin Man has got the feeling as he helps load a keg of Budweiser into the back of a friend's Ford Expedition.

“It's gonna be wild, a total rager,” Jonny promises. “This is the first time I've gotten to hang with my friends since the Olympics.”

Towing ski boats and jet skis, the caravan of sport-utility vehicles, with Jonny's Blazer in the lead, sets off over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge on its way to the delta. Along the way, Jonny calls the owner of a sporting-goods chain in the area and pleads with the man to let a certain young blond female named Melissa off work for the weekend so she can come up to the delta.

“I'm having a party,” Jonny says into the phone. “And Melissa tells me she has to work and she can't get the day off. I think she'd have a great time up there if you could just give her the day off.” The owner of the company is unrelenting.

Jonny hangs up, disappointed. “I blew it,” he says, shrugging. “I should have been harsher. The guy wants me to do an appearance for him. The least he could do is let this babe go for the weekend. Dude, what I should do is get my agent to call him back and tell him, you know, it's one of those scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours deals.”

Instead, Jonny's buddy Trevor, sitting in the passenger seat, calls back and pretends to be Jonny's agent.

“I'm calling on behalf of Jonny Moseley,” Trevor says in his best cigar-chomping agent's voice. “And Jonny feels it is very important for Melissa that she come and experience this weekend with Jonny. Jonny hates for Melissa to be missing out on what promises to be a very exciting and rewarding time for her. And frankly, between you and me, Jonny is not happy about this.” There is a pause, then Trevor hangs up.

“No muffin?” Jonny asks.

“No muffin.”
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The Saint Francis yacht club owns an exclusive enclave of the elite that's hidden away on private Tinsley Island in the middle of the Sacramento River delta. The sumptuous houseboats, verdant green lawns, bocci courts, swimming pools, and barbecue pits are concealed from the surrounding freshwater inlets and estuaries by shrubby atolls bearing such inviting nicknames as Dogshit Island. If you didn't know this place was here, or if you weren't a guest of a member, then you would never find it. The location and memberships, as well as title to the valuable houseboats and slips, are passed from generation to generation. Jonny's grandfather was one of the Saint Francis's charter members in the 1950s. He bequeathed his prized slips to his son Tom, whose kids, Jonny included, have been coming here since they were little.

It's the bejeweled heart of Muffin Land. “This is a special place for me, a very cool place,” Jonny says as he powers up the channel in his family's ski boat at the head of a small regatta consisting of Jonny's buddies in attending jet skis. “I mean, look at it. Awesome, huh?” The Moseleys' mooring is one of the finest, with afternoon sun striking the deck while the interior of the yellow two-bedroom houseboat is shaded by sycamore and pine trees along the shore. The sun casts the water in buttery golden light that illuminates the entire placid waterfront like a movie set.

A keg is tapped. Jonny catches up with old friends. Beau and Josh, Trevor and John, Toffee and Jeff, these are the guys he grew up with, attended high school with, played baseball and soccer with. They are good-looking kids with ripped stomachs and chests and handsome, chiseled features; these were the popular kids in high school, and now that they've all gone on to California's elite colleges — Stanford, Cal, UCLA — and are starting their careers, they seem flush with potential and vast promise. Jonny's success as a gold-medal athlete serves as some sort of precursor in most of their minds for the inevitable success that must await them as well.

“You're a superstar athlete,” Trevor tells Jonny. “I'm gonna be a film director, Beau's going into advertising, Jeff's gonna be a rock star, and Josh is going to be a sportscaster. When we all make it, it's gonna be like this powerful little network.”

More boats pull up alongside the houseboat. The deck becomes crowded with revelers, all hoisting plastic cups of keg beer or sipping vodka fizzes. His brothers are there, his friends, even his first high school girlfriend, and the vibe is one of celebration and respect.

“After I won the gold medal,” Jonny says, “I couldn't wait to get home and celebrate with my friends. That's what I wanted to do more than anything. The other stuff, the Letterman and TV stuff, that was cool, totally cool, but this is what it's all about.”

That afternoon, Jonny heads out for a spin on a brand new Kawasaki 1100 jet-ski that he won — along with $20,000 — in the The Superstars competition. The late-afternoon water is glassy, and the wind shimmers through the reeds lining the banks. Jonny rips huge curls through the water, forcing the jet ski into high-speed skids across its own wake. He's deep into it now, in the heart of Muffin Land, burning through the water going nearly 55 mph aboard a jet ski that he won, basically, because he's the Muffin Man. And later there will be wakeboarding and water-skiing and diving into the club's pool while the other club members applaud his outrageous dives. And there will be a touch-football game and bocci and a barbecue.

There's also this cute blond with a cruel face down from Tahoe, and later there will be her as well, and the two of them retreating into the houseboat's master suite.

Maybe later, in the distant future, Jonny will know sad things, too. Maybe life will someday deal him an eight and a seven instead of an ace and a king. Maybe he will know the frustration of being unable to attain all of his goals, unable to fulfill every dream, having to settle for not being the best. Maybe he will even know what it is to fail.

But before all that, there will be Freddy on guitar and Owen on bongos and Jonny Moseley singing on the deck of the houseboat while two dozen of his friends lie around, sipping cocktails on boats and on jet-skis bobbing in the gentle current, listening to Jonny's song.
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