Snowboards - A Run Down Memory Lane

The Olympics are making me feel old. I never thought that I’d see snowboarding become an Olympic sport. I bought my first and only snowboard in 1985 (the model shown above). Check out the old v-cut in the tail. What you don’t see is a small metal keel on the bottom side of the board. Fairly primitive compared to today’s boards. Growing up in Rockford, IL, there weren’t a lot of places to take the board. Many local ski places would not allow snowboarding and my family was not the Vermont/Colorado ski types. So, my friends and I would take the board to sledding hills and toboggan runs. We would take turns on the board. You’d take a run, get off the board, walk the board back up the hill and hand it off to your friend.

We dreamed of taking snowboards to “elite” hills all over Wisconsin like Cascade or Devil’s Head. Snowboarding’s not a crime, damn it. We’d have to wait for a driver’s license, but we were ready. The only thing that would get us off the hills would be an over-priced Tombstone pizza (if we had some extra cash) or the stash of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that we brought along to save money.

Well, the dream died in ’88. Not because of the Willie Horton ads, but that’s when we decided that we’d be better off with skis. Fast forward to today and I see that some of the US medal winners weren’t even born at the time I had my very own Burton.

I’m off to fix myself some prune juice and see if I can get my beta-max to work again.