Skivermont.com Interview

Q&A with Jake
August 15, 2007

What initially inspired you to develop snowboards 20-some years ago?
Actually, it was more than 30 years ago. During the late 60s, I modified Snurfers until 1977 when I started Burton and built my first production prototype. I was a complete loser in shop class in school, yet there I was, working out of a barn in Vermont, figuring out how to manufacturer a snowboard. There was no road map. I combined some skateboarding and a little bit of surfing experience with the Snurfer, then added some common sense--which is probably why it took so long to make a product that was rideable. The rest is history I guess.

Were you surprised at how quickly the sport grew, and how big it would become?
It definitely wasn’t easy in the beginning. In 1977 I made my first Burton snowboard in Londonderry. I hired two relatives and a good friend, and we set out to make 50 boards a day. We accomplished that, which was great. The problem was, we only sold 300 boards that entire winter, mostly to ski shops. I’d go out with a station wagon full of boards and I’d come back with a station wagon full of boards, like a traveling salesman, Willy Loman-type stuff. Finally I hit rock bottom. I went back to New York for a couple of summers to teach tennis and tend bar just to keep the business afloat, sending money orders up to Vermont to pay my bills. What pulled me through was my belief that surfing on snow was a good idea and that, eventually, more than 10 people would realize that. In the fall of 1979 I went back up to Vermont and hired some high school kids to assemble all the partially produced boards. We started getting orders, and that year we doubled our sales. I thought, if I can keep doing that, we’ll be okay. You could only ride those early boards in powder, and that’s all we had—we weren’t allowed on ski resorts. We got into the tiny ski areas, but if you wanted to snowboard, you had to hike. Consequently, the market was 15- to 17- year-old-boys who were willing to buy the board out of a box and teach themselves to use it. I owe everything to them. It took a while for people to catch up with snowboarding. We brought a demographic back to the mountain that hadn’t been there in a while. Kids weren’t skiing much then, and they were building video arcades in the basement of the lodge to accommodate them. Once the kids jumped on, it was just a matter of time before people had to respect the athleticism. Board sports are just so cool, whether it’s surfing or skateboarding or snowboarding.

Snowboarding is now a full-fledged Olympic sport. Is that worldwide recognition and acceptance good for snowboarding, or does it take away from the sport's renegade image?
I could lie and say that the Olympics are just another international event, but that’s simply not the case. At the same time, it’s not as big a deal as most people outside of our sport tend to believe. Snowboarding is not a sport that was ‘made’ by the Olympics, and it seems to have little impact on the core of the sport. What the Olympics do provide is a forum to present to the rest of the world what our sport is all about. Some of those people will never snowboard and some of them may well come into our sport, but whether they’re future snowboarders or not, we certainly want to leave them with a good impression. Unfortunately along with this opportunity to talk to the outside world about our sport comes a complete loss of control over how it’s presented. The entire production is controlled by a ski federation and that can be problematic. For the riders themselves, the Olympics represent a huge opportunity. The mainstream exposure that comes along with an Olympic title is huge and no one deserves that more than the riders that are going through the process of qualifying and competing in the Olympics.

How excited are you to see snowboarding's current top athletes increasing the amplitude and degree of difficulty of riding in the pipe?
It’s always amazing to me to watch the progression of competitive snowboarding. Every year at the US Open, it’s inspiring to see the riders mixing things up and pushing the sport to new levels. But snowboarding is so much more than competitions, it’s really a lifestyle. So I think the thing I enjoy most is seeing how much fun riders like Shaun White, Mason Aguirre, Hannah Teter and Kelly Clark have competing and progressing the sport.

Of snowboarding's competitive disciplines -- racing, boarder cross, half pipe, slopestyle, etc. -- what's your favorite and why?
Racing and boardercross definitely represent the past of the sport whereas halfpipe and particularly slopestyle are the most progressive competitive disciplines. Clearly the addition of boardercross in the Olympics is a big change. I’m stoked for the thousands of boardercross riders out there who now have an opportunity to compete with this kind of exposure. At the same time, I feel that the hundreds of thousands of slopestyle riders got shafted in the process of adding another event. If the powers that be who determine what snowboarding events to introduce to the Olympics don’t want to talk to the industry so be it, but at the very least they should talk to the kids who are participating in the sport and are watching it. On a participation and interest level, slopestyle is the event that best represents what’s going on in our sport. It’s unfortunate that slopestyle is not part of the Olympic program.

How often do you get out on your board these days? And will we ever find you throwing big tricks in the pipe?
I ride over 100 days a year. I definitely enjoy taking a few runs through the park now and then. But really, my favorite part about snowboarding is when there’s fresh powder and taking tree runs at my home mountain, Stowe.

There has been a resurgence of "cool" for skiing, now that skiers have twin tips and are sharing park-and-pipe time with snowboarders. How much of that skiing cool comes from the precedent set by snowboarding?
Snowboarding went from being insignificant, not even a bug on the windshield, to being sort of a nuisance to the ski industry – I mean this is at the trade shows and everything – and then all of a sudden we were a threat, and then we were the heroes. It was such a weird transition. In the early days, it was a lot of hard work communicating with the resort owners to convince them to accept snowboarding. We just lobbied them and showed them what was going on. If there were issues we’d try to talk them down and address the whole thing using common sense. We couldn’t have done it without the local support, but at the same time the local kids needed somebody to come in and make a presentation. We did that at a lot of mountains. I can remember making a presentation in Aspen and them telling us, “Sorry.” They didn’t want the snowboarders, the skiers complained. It was frustrating. But the sport had so much momentum at that point, it was like, “Your loss.” Now Aspen hosts the X Games. Anyway, to me, it’s just kind of funny when I think back on all we had to do to even get snowboarding accepted, and now look at us.

You see more and more 40-, 50-, and even 60-something's on board these days, suggesting the mainstreaming of the sport. Is that a positive thing, or do you miss the counterculture spirit of earlier days?
Snowboarding is so much fun, I think everyone should enjoy it – regardless of age. And the counterculture spirit of snowboarding is alive and well. Just look at our team.

What's the next big thing for snowboarding?
The women’s market is definitely out-pacing growth in the men’s market. Traditionally, snowboarding has always been a male dominated sport. It’s super exciting to see the tremendous growth in the women’s market. I also think we’ll see some changes in what resorts offer to snowboarders on the hill. Parks and pipes are cool, but I think that there’s a better way to offer freestyle features and challenges to riders in a more natural way. I remember talking to Craig Kelly about how ‘freestyle’ and the ‘mountain experience’ do not have to be mutually exclusive. I think the best runs of most people’s lives are when they’ve merged the two and it’s just a matter of time before the resorts figure out how to offer it to all of us.