- The following is a presentation of HBO Sports.
♪ ♪
- Surfing on snow,
in the back of my mind,
I always knew it could be a sport.
I mean, I saw a sport, but I did not see Shaun White
on the cover of "Rolling Stone" twice
or snowboarding being in the Olympics.
But it's been exceeded...
I wouldn't even say dreams,
'cause I never dreamt anything
on the level that we're on now.
♪ ♪
- Live from beautiful Vail, Colorado.
The bluebirds are singing. Not a cloud in the sky.
Here we are in the fullness of progression,
celebrating the legacy
of the one and only Jake Burton.
The crowd, they are deep, linin' up both sides
of this modified superpipe at the Burton U.S. Open.
- And what better way than with all that
magic Jake Burton spirit in the air right now.
- And quite honestly, I can't think of a better rider
to kick off than this guy right here,
Danny Davis, starting things off.
- Whoo. - Yeah, here we go.
- Chopping block today, baby!
- These riders will not be holding back.
Well, here we go.
♪ ♪
- Danny Davis sets the tone. - Whoo!
- Feel that energy.
- Ridiculous. - Whoo!
- It is game time.
- Rah!
- Unbelievable.
- Just feeding off each other.
All: Oh!
- Look at how big he sends it.
- That was huge, dude.
- Full send all day.
Whoo-hoo!
- Oh, my God, dude.
- And if that looked big on TV,
try standing on the banner line.
Oh!
♪ ♪
- Ah!
♪ ♪
- Jake interview take one, mark.
- With us live from Stowe, Vermont,
is the man who did for snowboarding
what Bill Gates did for computing.
- The man who some say started the sport itself
is Jake Burton Carpenter.
- Jake is really that badass grandpa of snowboarding.
- When you think about snowboarding,
the first person that you think about
in terms of the history is Jake.
The godfather.
- The sport itself can be traced back to Jake Burton,
an iconoclast who, starting in the late '70s,
taught the world how to surf on snow.
- When I started Burton, I had no idea
that the sport would get this big.
I saw it as, like, a back hill alternative to skiing.
- Jake had the vision.
- People followed his lead.
- What's important, you know, being around this industry
is really having a passion for it.
- Oh, he was, like, Mr. Laid Back, cool.
Underneath, man, he is driven.
- He will compete, he will put a goal, he will achieve it
and put another goal, he will achieve it.
- If you ever challenge him to something,
that's when the real Jake came out.
- I tell any company that wants to compete against us,
they better have that going for 'em or...
Or you're gonna be in a world of hurt.
- He was so cutthroat.
- He had the eye of the tiger in him.
- And he was always kind of talkin' shit.
- The most unassuming person you could meet.
- A lot like a father figure with no filter.
- He's created an Olympic sport,
a wildly popular lifestyle, and a global industry,
all because of a toy he played with as a boy.
- I was born in 1954
in New York, right in Manhattan.
And I grew up on Long Island, pretty close to the ocean.
My earliest positive memories were definitely about snow.
Not having to go to school.
Sledding.
The sledding hill was such a great vibe,
like your skate park now or something.
My family was middle class.
My two sisters and my brother were all
sort of overachievers.
I was just sort of a wiseass.
- Jake inherited traits of both of our parents...
Our mother's sense of humor and of mischief.
She was really a soul mate of Jake's.
Dad, he was very disciplined, determined in his way.
And he said what was really, really important
was to have passion.
That belief really blossomed within Jake.
- When I was seven, these friends of ours had
a house in Vermont, and so we'd go up there
and my dad learned how to ski in his 40s.
I just loved it immediately.
- I can remember being in a chairlift and...
And looking down and just seeing this, like,
broad smile on Jake's face and the parka wide open
flying behind him and just, you know, going straight down,
and you could tell he just loved it.
- I really got into skiing. I was like...
In my town, I mean, this is Long Island, but I was,
you know, like, maybe the best skier in the town
and I really was also sort of wannabe surfer.
My parents never got me a surfboard.
I'll never forgive 'em for that.
One year, they were going to get my Christmas present
out in the back, and I was like, "Oh, my God",
they're gonna bring in a surfboard."
But it was a new desk.
I was like, "Fuck, are you kidding me?"
So when the Snurfer came out,
I just fell in love with it immediately,
'cause I could read snow so well from skiing
and I wanted to surf so badly.
- Jake said, "Here, let me... I wanna show you this... "
You know, this present I just got."
And he just instinctively made it work.
- ♪ Strange face, with your eyes ♪
♪ So pale and sincere ♪
- The Snurfer for me was magic.
That meant an opportunity to surf on snow.
- ♪ You have nothing to fear ♪
♪ ♪
♪ For the dreams that came to you ♪
♪ When you were young ♪
- The minute I started doing it, I just felt like,
"God, this is the sport."
- ♪ Spring has sprung ♪
- It was a 4 foot long piece of wood
that was about 6 or 7 inches wide.
Brunswick made them.
They sold 800,000 or something like that.
But it developed this sort of cult,
in a positive sense of the word.
From the very beginning, I was passionate about it,
but I don't think I was thinking about it
as an opportunity
until the age of maybe 16 on.
It was percolating in the back of my mind.
- ♪ You sail to the sky ♪
♪ On the crest of a wave ♪
♪ ♪
- I went to college
and I started a job my senior year
for a company that sold
little companies to big companies.
I needed something else. It just wasn't rewarding.
I'd had the idea in the back of my head
of making snurfing a sport,
and I couldn't believe that it hadn't happened.
- Jake was a nonconformist.
He didn't feel there was a prescribed way
you had to follow, as long as you had a plan.
- I figured if I could make 50 snowboards a day,
I could make 100 grand a year.
The whole thing started
as this sort of get-rich-quick scheme.
So I started the company in '77,
making my first prototypes in New York City.
And then I said, "I gotta move to Vermont."
- You don't get to the first snowboards
if you didn't already have skis,
which had edges, which had P-Tex,
surfboards, which had fins,
and then there were skateboards,
which were horizontally laminated.
Those were the chromosomes that formed the DNA
of those very first snowboards.
- I made pretty much exactly 100 prototypes.
I tried furniture construction,
boat construction,
and then I tried surfboard construction.
But those boards were very fragile.
And then I started working with skateboard construction.
Pretty light, pretty flexible,
and it worked.
♪ ♪
I drove down to Montpelier, Vermont, and incorporated,
did all the paperwork and everything.
It was a big moment for me.
You see, here's the... How the board looks.
Here's the silk screen right here.
Now, this is how the board looks when it leaves here,
before they put the matte on.
But it's all urethane.
And it's got a serial number.
Silk screen on the bottom too.
I hired two relatives and a friend,
and we were making 50 snowboards a day.
The problem is, in the first year,
all I could sell was 350.
I went from myself plus three full-time employees
to basically myself.
The toughest part of it was just the loneliness of it.
I didn't have any sort of camaraderie or people
that were snowboarding with me or anything like that.
And as a kid growing up,
I was very lonely for a long time.
- Jake was 12 years old
when our brother, George, was killed in Vietnam.
And then Jake was only 17 when mummy died.
He was really feeling kind of lost and alone
when that happened.
- I just became incredibly independent.
And I think that I attribute a lot of my success
to that independence that I developed
through that experience of losing people
very close to me.
I'm not a great salesman,
but I would load up the station wagon,
go out and try to sell 'em to retailers door-to-door,
and do demos and...
One time, I remember, I went out with 38 snowboards
and I came home with 40,
'cause one dealer had said, "I don't want this crap."
And I was going down to New York,
I was teaching tennis and bartending.
Friends and stuff would just laugh at me, and it was like,
"You know what? I'm gonna prove them wrong."
Gonna prove to them there was a sport here,
and that was all I... I didn't care about the money anymore.
And once I just focused on the sport
and putting everything...
All of my energy and my love and my time and my money
into making it a sport,
that's when everything sort of started to work.
Because there were these pockets around the country.
There were these places where people had snurfed,
and they got it.
We would advertise in the skateboard magazines
and a little bit in the ski magazines.
We would send out these brochures.
We would send them out
with a little mail order form in it.
And then you'd open up an envelope and it would be like,
four snowboards for a family in Connecticut.
Then the Japanese came along,
and they ordered 100 snowboards,
and I was like, "Wh-wh-wh-what?"
The next year, I had one kid working part-time.
We're packing up the boxes like,
"Hey, that's our 700th board."
It was like, wow, if you double numbers,
you remember how quick they get so big.
That was the moment it was like,
this is going in the right direction.
- Action. - All right.
I'm Jake Burton Carpenter of Burton Snowboards
from Londonderry, Vermont.
- Here's this guy, he's goin' door to door,
ski area to ski area, evangelizing this opportunity
for people to enjoy the winter sports world.
- It's a good sport, and hope everybody around the country
gets into it.
- And in an era before the Internet,
the Burton catalogue itself was the biggest touchpoint
to snowboarding that people had.
Jake would write the intro to the catalogue every year
and that intro was Jake's opportunity to evangelize
his vision of snowboarding to the community.
He was on a mission
with snowboarding as his bible.
- ♪ Ooga-chaka, ooga, ooga ♪
♪ Ooga-chaka, ooga, ooga ♪
- ♪ When you hold me in your arms so tight ♪
♪ You let me know everything's all right ♪
♪ I-I-I'm ♪
♪ Hooked on a feeling ♪
- Dear rider, snowsurfing is wintertime's finest high.
The experience of riding down a steep hill with fresh powder
can only be compared to surfing
a hollow 6-foot tube.
If there is as much as 3 inches of snow,
you can ride from your own backyard
to the Rocky Mountains.
But the finest riding is found on that deserted back hill
where there is nothing to interfere with you,
only your friends, your board, and plenty of virgin powder.
- ♪ I'll just stay a victim ♪
- Jake.
- ♪ If I can for sure ♪
♪ ♪
- It was New Year's Eve, 1982.
I saw him coming out of the bathroom.
And he had a smile
that lit up the room.
And he said his name was Jake and he made snowboards.
And I was like, "Oh, that's cute."
We went out to dinner, but he was working a lot
and he seemed kind of tired.
Right before dinner ended, I go,
"Well, show me this thing."
And he kind of woke up, you know?
He was like, "Oh, okay. I'll show it to you."
I went to my house and I got a pair of high top sneakers.
I fell and the board went flying,
but it was fun.
I was living in New York City.
I was going to Barnard College.
I was the least likely to get married.
I was the least likely to have kids.
You know, I was a little tribeless.
He would show up at my apartment in New York,
and I knew he had been working,
like, 12 hours a day,
and he would fall asleep on the couch.
My friends said to me, "Are you out of your mind?
This guy?"
But he had this spark.
We adored each other.
Ah!
- I love you. - I love you.
But it was difficult having a long-distance relationship,
me being in New York and... And him being in Vermont.
We had, like, these weepy two days
where we're both crying
and, you know, "Oh, my God, I can't believe it's over."
And I just remember going back to my room at school and...
And, like, not being able to move,
and he called me and he said, "We can't do this.
We can't break up, right?"
And I said, "Yeah, you're right."
He said, "Well, let's get married then."
♪ ♪
- ♪ Once I had a love, it was divine ♪
- Get the ball!
Donna's lookin' just as beautiful as ever.
- Whoops. - I'm totally naked!
- I'm not shooting below your...
I'm not shootin' low.
Ooh.
- ♪ In between ♪
♪ What I find is pleasing ♪
♪ And I'm feeling fine ♪
You don't really want one, do you?
- I'm going shreddin'. - Yeah?
- I'm the shred queen.
- Teaching her how to ride was tough,
but she's so passionate that you can't stop her.
She didn't pick snowboarding. Snowboarding picked her.
- Jake and I, we created our own community
around snowboarding.
We created our own family,
and that's how it always felt
from the beginning.
- Jake was a fictional character
before I met him.
Jake was like God.
- It's safe to say I was shittin' myself
when I met him the first time.
- I don't know if intimidated is the right word,
but I've always really respected him and admired him
that I was a little bit, like, shy when I was in his presence.
- I met Jake in 1982 when I went to apply for a job
at his new factory in Manchester, Vermont.
- And it wasn't, you know, like...
like it is now where people look at Jake Burton
and put him on this pedestal and think he's this,
you know, super god.
He was just a guy that was making these boards.
♪ ♪
- I first saw a snowboard before I even knew Jake.
I took to it straight away.
He was the best guy on the hill for a while there.
We just watched what he did.
- Jake had a small barn in his backyard.
We converted it into a small woodworking shop.
- There's a process, before we put the fins on
and the bindings called dipping.
You have to dip the boards in polyurethane to seal 'em.
It was a little toxic.
The ventilation system we had wasn't that tech.
It was a respirator that was connected to a hole
that we had drilled in the wall,
so we were basically breathing in fresh air.
But in hindsight, some of that urethane
was probably comin' out... Up and around, so...
you could get a headache.
- They would blow marijuana through the hole,
and we'd come out, like,
completely stoned, and we couldn't get out.
You know, you can't stop.
- We were hiking these little hills around the factory.
Jake is like a goat, really into hiking,
and we weren't necessarily.
The rest of us, we kind of grew up on ski areas.
- This one resort, Bromley, you could drive up
to this village that was quarter of the way
up the mountain.
If there were four of us, one guy would stay in the car,
the other three would snowboard down the hill,
and then we'd meet at the bottom and do it again
and again, and then ultimately,
Sno-Cat drivers would give us rides.
- I used to pack boxes of brownies
and thermoses of hot chocolate for the Cat drivers,
and they would drive us all night long.
- Suicide Six in Woodstock, Vermont,
that was the first national snowboarding championships.
They would take a picnic bench and bury it in the snow,
so you had the two legs sticking out
so you could push yourself out of the gate.
- It was a pretty crude contest,
but after that, Burton picked it up,
and we've run the event ever since.
There was slalom.
And there was downhill.
- Go! Go, go, go!
♪ ♪
- Snowboards didn't turn back then.
Nobody knew how to stop.
Doug Bouton went 63 miles an hour
wearing basketball shoes.
You were so happy just to survive the whole thing.
You didn't even care if you won or not.
But then it became
an important way to show people
what you could do on a snowboard.
♪ ♪
- It was Jake inheriting that event
that gave him the people
to help evangelize the sport for him
in a way that was tactile.
Seeing is believing for ski area operators.
- And then Stratton signed up to do the event.
- Go.
Then we named the event
U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships.
- Jake said, "Hey, we're gonna do things on a higher level."
He brought a professionalism to that side of it.
- How is it snowboarding in your home land?
- We are now in Japan 45,000, I don't know, 50,000.
- How about in Australia?
- Australia, we have, uh, no one.
- People could just post up right at the finish line
or at the hairiest turn or whatever
and watch the show.
Andy Coghlan beating Peter Bauer
by a 100th of a second.
I mean, it was tight.
- Yahoo!
How?
- Women were always a big part of the community,
right from the beginning.
The women compete on the same courses.
And I remember saying to Jake,
"What do we do about prize money for the women?"
And he's like, "Well",
why wouldn't we just pay them the same?"
- Let's hear it for Jenny Ha.
Andy Coghlan.
- You figured out that getting ski resorts
involved was gonna be something,
and I think Stratton was the first one.
- Yeah, Stratton does a terrific job
of hosting the event,
but the riding in the resort thing
was a difficult process.
And so I met up with Paul Johnston and he said,
"Nobody wants you on the hill."
He said, "But nobody had a good reason not to let you"
on the hill, so we're gonna give you a shot next year."
And there were a lot of conditions.
We had to certify people, you know, 'cause he said
if we screwed it up, we were out of there.
Snowboarding was perceived as the antithesis of skiing.
We had to fight for our right to get on the hill.
- When you're learning how to snowboard at first,
we refer to the turns as a heel turn and a toe turn.
The heel turn is when
you're putting the pressure on your heel...
- People used to have to go through a mandatory lesson,
and we had these laminate passes,
and then they'd wear 'em around their neck.
- It had to be done.
We had to be the assholes for a minute there.
- We ran it for a full year that way,
and the program was very successful.
This year, we've decided
to expand it to the full mountain.
- Once we got Stratton, we leveraged that
into getting onto other resorts,
but it was very challenging.
- The resorts are run by conservative
ski industry guys, and for them to see young guys
come in, they wouldn't always show the respect.
- Quite a lot of them are uncooperative.
- They're just like a missile.
- Some of them have had a little bit to drink.
- And most of them have no brakes on 'em.
- If you ask them very nicely to leave,
that they're endangering the public, they swear at you,
they tell you to get lost, mind your own business.
- One time at, like, a trade show,
we had this little slideshow of snowboarding
and these two guys walked by and they were looking at it.
And then right as I'm about to talk to the guy,
he says to his buddy, he goes, "What a waste of good powder."
I was like...
- Jake had had a gentleman working for him
called Paul Alden.
- Stratton at this point is probably more interested...
- His number one job was to go to the resorts
and get them to allow snowboarding.
Paul Alden opened up most of the resorts in the U.S.
- But these resorts,
they weren't built for snowboarding.
They were built for skiing, and we started adapting
the ski technology, and we went through the whole process
of learning how a ski is made.
- Jake made appointments to visit ski manufacturers,
and they all said, "You're out of your mind."
He had one last trip set up to Keil-Ski
outside of Salzburg, Austria.
And it was a huge snowstorm.
- I got there in the middle of the night,
and they greeted me, and they had a lot of automation
and just a really cool place.
Talked to them about making something that's molded
and has steel edges in it and P-Tex base
and a wood core,
and he was like, "Yeah, no problem."
- So he said, "How about if we live in the Alps?"
I'm all in.
♪ ♪
- I didn't go over there to make boards for Europe.
I went over to make boards and ship them to the U.S.,
and then I started getting these inquiries
from these people that want boards in Europe.
- He said, "Hey, you should run Europe."
The next thing I knew, I was setting up an office.
I mean, it was almost like it just propelled itself.
Like, there was demand.
We didn't know what the hell we were doing,
so we asked people, "Hey, how do you do business here?"
- I met Jake in 1985.
My first impression was, "The guy is crazy.
What is he doing here?"
He said, "You know what?
"I would like to start European operation.
Maybe you're gonna help me."
Few weeks later, he sent a letter, and we met,
and we sat together, and then we started writing down
how to set up the operation in Austria.
After two hours, he said, "Now we have a deal."
I said, "What do you mean we have a deal?"
"Yeah, we have a deal.
We're gonna start Burton Europe."
- This is my... My friend, Hermann Kapferer.
I'm so happy that I could meet Hermann
and lose so much money together.
- We are so happy.
- It is really a special opportunity.
- Our goal is to lose money. That's it.
- Dear rider...
here at Burton, we take our fun seriously.
And we made snowboarding what it is today...
Winter's hottest sport.
The number of mountains offering snowboarding
in North America has tripled to over 250.
It's only a matter of time
before the remaining areas catch up...
And snowboarders will be welcome
on any mountain they choose.
♪ ♪
Freestyle riders are no longer confined to the pipe.
The entire mountain and everything on it
has become one big playground.
Our secret?
Full-on commitment,
full-on intensity,
Full-on...
evolution.
♪ ♪
Jake.
- Now, Jake isn't alone in the '80s.
There were a lot of people trying to make something
way better than the Snurfer.
People like Dimitrije Milovich in Utah,
Chuck Barfoot in California,
and then you had Tom Sims.
- Tom and Jake, they just had it out for one another
or maybe... maybe something happened we don't know about.
- Whatever animosity there was between Tom and Jake,
I do believe it started
at an action sports retailer trade show
where Tom was hawkin' skateboards
and Jake had the Backhill.
Tom walked by and saw what Jake was doin',
and sure enough, 12 months later,
at the next trade show
there were those plastic first Sims boards.
Jake earnestly believed that Tom stole his idea.
- Let's get back to basics.
- Snowboarding really evolved and grew
between the West Coast and East Coast.
- The West Coast was definitely more freestyle.
It was complete opposites.
- We were definitely just so much more driven
by having fun.
I would say those guys were having fun on the East Coast,
it just didn't look fun to us.
- We were coming out of a ski racing tradition.
We thought that's where the sport was going.
- Here in California, skateboarding was
what was happening.
Snowboarding was the next evolution.
We had this ditch it would take hours to dig out
and make into a halfpipe.
Tom Sims showed up with some photographers.
Why are we gonna let this guy ride it?
He just seemed like a guy from Southern California
that was trying to capitalize on something
that might be a new fad.
- I'm Tom Sims and I invented ski-boarding 18 years ago
in 1963.
- Sims saying he invented the sport,
you know, that was just crazy, and Jake was like,
"There is no inventor of the sport."
- This is a snowboard that was made in the 1920s.
You might find a lot of people out there that claim to have
invented the sport, but this is a sport that evolved over time.
- Come on, Jake!
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!
- Tom and Jake had completely different ways
of going about doing things.
- Whoo! - Come on, Jake!
- Jake grew up in the ski world,
a little more East Coast.
Tom came from that skateboard, West Coast surf.
- The rivalry between Jake and Tom
really played out like a game of chess.
The kings and the queens, let's say, are the contests.
Jake had the U.S. Open,
so Tom started the Sims Worlds.
- At the Worlds, Tom would just make turns down the hill
and then have the guys go set gates on his turns.
And that was the course.
- He's rippin'.
- Fins were coming off the board.
We saw high backs.
We went right back to Jake
and told him all these new ideas.
- Then rooks, bishops, pawns, knights are the team rider.
- The Burton team showed up, they all had speed suits on
and they're like, "Ah!"
I mean, they were trained and padded up.
But it was daunting for them to come out to the West Coast
and have to compete in a pipe,
'cause they never got to do it.
- Jake's team didn't do great.
The blind spot of Jake
with freestyle snowboarding was obvious
when Sims introduced the Terry Kidwell Roundtail.
♪ ♪
Terry Kidwell was
the number one freestyle rider for Sims.
"And he's like, "Listen, Tom, I want a round tail.
"I want a tip on the tail of my board
'cause I wanna ride backwards, I wanna land backwards."
- Yeah!
"- "Terry, we're gonna give you
the Kidwell signature model board."
It was the first snowboard that you could ride backwards
pretty much as good as you could ride forwards.
Very disruptive product in the marketplace.
- Tom Sims as a designer,
Jake had tremendous respect.
He was like, "That guy knows"
how to design a great snowboard."
- But meanwhile, you had this archetype
of the modern pro snowboarder named Craig Kelly.
- Oh! - Good style.
- Craig Kelly rode with Sims, and he clearly had style.
And he was riding everything.
He was riding Alpine and freestyle.
And Craig won the overall World Championship
several times.
- And Craig Kelly, who was winning the most contests,
felt underappreciated in that whole paradigm
of the Sims team.
- Craig and I had always had
a relationship through the years
and we talked about, if he ever got an opportunity
and was looking for a sponsor, give us a shout.
- Craig was an engineering student.
He knew how to strategize.
He knew how to achieve the best end result.
Tom's sittin' there saying,
"Well, I don't have the deep pockets of Jake.
"In order for me to succeed at this,
"I need to bring on a partner who has more capital,
"has more resources.
I need to license the name."
Vision took over the Sims team.
- Vision Streetwear was much more of a skateboard
and an apparel company, and they were not
as interested in the sport of snowboarding.
And then Craig decided to make a move.
- Craig, he actually approached me and said,
"Hey, do you think Jake and you would be open
to taking me on as a team rider?"
And I said, "Oh, my God."
Like"...
You know, act real cool.
One of the things Craig said to Jake directly was,
"I'm gonna ride for you, but you gotta listen to me."
- Craig was an engineer, but I wasn't into feedback.
I gotta make these decisions. I gotta decide
on the graphics for this board or the shape for that board.
And then when we started making the first board
with Craig, he knew so much more
about the sport than I did.
I had to listen.
- I was poorly treated for a while.
And once I tried to escape
the environment of poor treatment,
the people that were treating me poorly said,
"We don't want you to leave."
- Sims sued Craig.
The judge just figured that Craig was just
some kid snowboarder and ruled against him.
"The judge said, "You can make product with Craig Kelly,
but you can't put his name on it."
So we made a board called the Mystery Air,
which we sold in a box.
- I can't say what kind of board it is,
where it's made,
or... or who I'd even like to ride for.
I'd just like to be able to do all those things right now.
- And then we appealed the whole thing,
and they immediately reversed the decisions.
We started pumpin' out Craig's boards.
♪ ♪
He taught me how to listen to riders
and how to get their feedback and incorporate it
into the product.
And now, that's our soul.
I've been listening ever since.
- In first place, riding for Burton Snowboards,
Craig Kelly.
- And thanks to Jake, because this contest wouldn't be here
if it wasn't for him.
And thanks again to Sims
for giving me the motivation to try harder this year.
And thanks to the Ninth District Court of Appeals
for making it all worth my while.
- There was two sides to Jake, it seemed like.
You know, he loved to party, loved to travel.
You know, he was just one of the guys,
but he was very competitive and driven.
You know, he just wouldn't stop.
- He would go dark sometimes and get super frustrated.
And that frustration was built out of that competitiveness.
- So competitive, would never take no as an answer.
That was the drive that made him who he was.
- Sorry, you guys. I mean, I get too, uh...
This stuff is so important to me,
and I get obnoxious and loud and opinionated and...
- You do, man.
- Once snowboarding started to hit critical mass,
all of a sudden this guy, Bob Weber,
popped up on the space
selling the patent to the snowboard
to the highest bidder.
Bob Weber had the foresight
to patent a snowboard at some point.
Jake had the most to lose, had that patent emerged
into more nefarious hands.
- So I had to buy it.
But part of the appeal was this was an opportunity
to fuck Sims.
- Get a letter from the Burton Corporation
that, you know, "You're gonna have to pay us money"
because we own the patent for snowboarding."
It threw a whole, like, panic
into a lot of small companies.
They were just struggling to get by, struggling to grow.
- It's a good, savvy business move,
but Jake was not prepared for the backlash.
- The industry rebelled against it.
- Right away, I said, "We'll give all the money
that we get under royalty to charity."
And then that still wasn't enough.
So then I just said, "You know what?
I'm just gonna bury this thing."
And I never looked at it again.
- Jake had to be like, "All right, screw it."
But Burton never got that target taken off their back.
- Biggest PR fuckup of my life.
- Whatever came of that rivalry,
at the end of the day, Jake said
Burton was a better company
because Tom was a great competitor.
- So, shots, what do you guys think of this house?
Has it been... - We love this house.
- Has it been great? - It's been great.
Right, Ruff?
And we had this really simple house.
I remember it wasn't insulated.
He would bring the mattress down to the living room
in the winter, next to the wood stove.
We were scrappy.
- Okay, let's go look at the new house
and the status that it's in right now.
- Ruff says goodbye.
- Now we're driving down the road.
Here we are. You got the little barn,
the garage on the left side.
Here's the house.
- Really nice to have those many years together
before we started a family.
- Is it gonna be a big step up like that?
It looks kind of awkward.
- You take a left. I take right.
We go into the kitchen.
This is the kitchen.
- Okay. - Okay.
- To be honest, there's one reason we bought this house.
Ultratron dish, commonly known as the Vermont state flower.
With this apparatus, you can watch football games
in the East Coast, then... Or basketball games...
- The '90s was, I'd say, about finding
some people that we could trust.
- I started out working in this shop
that sold Burton products.
And after the Mystery Air,
I heard Burton was gonna hire sales reps,
and they never had reps before.
I just had this feeling that I wanted to be a part of it.
When I first started, Jake was super intimidating.
At sales meetings, he'd always say,
"Don't fuck it up."
And you'd just be like, "All right, I got this."
The '90s were the boom years.
The trade shows were crazy.
We had ski on one hall
and then snowboard in the other.
And the ski side people are wearing ties
and it was really quiet and calm and civil.
And then you went to the snowboard side, dude,
and it was like a three-ring circus.
- It was like a boom town.
Snowboarding had 600, 700 companies.
- There was a... A line called Crap Snowboards.
- And all of a sudden, skiing was stale
and snowboarding was taking off.
- That's when the ski companies started
making snowboards, so the same people
that were giving us shit, all of a sudden they're going,
"We make the best snowboard ever."
- Salomon, the biggest player in skiing, was like,
"We're gonna buy our way into snowboarding."
People who didn't want anything to do with us
ten years earlier wanted to squeeze us
for everything that they could get.
- Everyone was pro partying, going apeshit.
- I drank a lot of Jack Daniel's last night,
about seven beers today, and I'm gonna win it.
- Get off me!
- We sort of went from being a nuisance
to a bona fide threat.
- Give me your camera, punk.
- Well, snowboarding's gonna keep growing,
and probably the scariest word associated with it
is maturity.
- We started to have kids in the '90s.
- First day of walking.
We're not sure if he's gonna do it.
He's ready to go.
This is it, man. The kid is walkin'.
- From the moment they could walk,
they were part of the gang.
- The deceased was found in this position.
Christmas gift overdose.
Closest next of kin was at the scene.
- Our family was getting bigger
and the company was growing, growing, growing.
- I'm Monique and I work in hard goods.
I babysit all the guys in there.
The girls take care of themselves.
- Planning on sticking around for quite some time.
- The company was trying to mature,
but it was a wild party.
You worked hard and you play hard,
and Jake was just kind of this mystery
that would walk through the office.
- Those kids, I learned so much from them.
And watching them go through these stages
is so much fun to be around.
Yeah, I'm starting to think a lot lately
about what snowboarding means to me, and, you know,
having kids now, I got three boys
and it's... it's really
like a kid to me in that it's gonna keep growing,
and that's reality.
And we're having to figure out how to deal with that
without losing the personality of the sport
or the individuality of the riders.
- Right around then is when
we had our first big journalist.
And we wined and dined her, and we're like,
"We're gonna get some great press,"
and she just totally slammed our culture.
Ah!
- "These are a bunch of derelicts."
- Whoo!
- "This sport is going nowhere."
- Dear rider, the best thing about snowboarding
is that all of us decided independently
to get involved in it.
It's not a sport your parents or some coach shoved
down your throat.
♪ ♪
This is a common bond...
That unites us all.
♪ ♪
Jake.
- You wanted Pennywise, you got it.
- Snowboarding is different.
You feel free. You feel also cool.
Actually, it's a... It's a funny word to say,
but you feel cool.
- What I love about snowboarding is,
you can do your own thing and you can wear what you want
and ride how you want, and it's such a personal style.
- To do what I feel like doin'
without anyone telling me how to do it is...
Just makes snowboarding kind of an extension
of your personality.
- Snowboarding to me is freedom.
It's just, like, an artform.
♪ ♪
- When you hold a snowboard in your hand
and then ultimately mount it up and ride it,
what you're holding is an object
that's got a spirit in it.
♪ ♪
The top, the base,
you are having a relationship
with a piece of art
that symbolizes your beliefs and your identity
every single time you get on it.
It's cultural commentary.
People were defining themselves.
- Snowboarding's got so much attitude
and so much creativity.
You talk about something that's youth-driven,
I mean, that's our energy source.
Our design needed that.
- At one point, we had 60 different logos.
Which was, to traditional design,
suicidal.
But he understood he was also accountable
because of what we had all created together,
and it was this radical space of freedom.
- Creative people
and the people around the product
and the team, you gotta give them room
to do what they believe in.
- We took a page from Madonna's sex book
where she talks about her genitals.
We scratched it out and replaced it
with a discussion about a board instead of her crotch.
And that ran as a national ad.
- A lot of resorts, they just said,
"Okay, we can't buy your product,"
and certain shops got all bent out of shape about it.
You know, you gotta live sort of on the edge
and once in a while, you know, you spill over it.
Nobody's trying to shock anybody.
Just trying to have a little fun.
- It was freaking full-on
build it as you go,
destroy to create.
That's what the '90s were.
That confluence of music, art, sport, life,
that was why I think snowboarding just exploded.
- $50,000 of mega prize money!
The top riders are here today to show us, you, the people,
and the crowd,
and believe you me, the crowd is...
- ♪ I'm the humdinger, the microphone singer ♪
♪ Super bell-ringer, here to bring ya ♪
- It's fun and everyone's figured it out.
- ♪ Coming right out of your speakers ♪
♪ And never reaching the peak-a ♪
♪ Perfection, direction, in any section ♪
♪ My style is kicking like Chinese Connection ♪
♪ Most Valuable Poet, eighteen years strong ♪
♪ The island of wrong is where I belong ♪
♪ A musical crony, down when I was bony ♪
♪ I'm one of the funkiest masters of ceremony ♪
♪ Jam, jam, jimmity jam ♪
♪ Let me, let me, let me tell you who I am ♪
♪ I'm the humdinger, the microphone singer ♪
- There were so many contests.
In order for you to get the right field of riders,
you had to offer better prize money,
$50,000 to $100,000.
Network television was like, "How can we cash in?"
ESPN starts the X Games.
- Here is the first woman to spin off the big jump.
- Still say it's the worst new sport,
but it might be the most profitable.
- ♪ Like a poor hustler, like a homeless beggar ♪
♪ When it come to rappin', I'm the Alpha and Omega ♪
♪ Supercalifragilistic, kickin' the ballistic ♪
♪ If you don't know my track record ♪
♪ Check the statistics ♪
♪ I'm mad like LL, I'm badder than... ♪
♪ I'm colder than zero ♪
♪ And burn you like a jalapeño ♪
♪ I'm the humdinger, the microphone singer ♪
♪ Microphone singer, microphone singer ♪
- Terje Hakonsen pulling out some insane air,
putting him in first place in sky hang
compared to the rest of the riders.
- Terje came along and right from the start,
it was just... it was clear that the kid had incredible talent.
- Terje was one of those unique individuals,
'cause he was pushing so far out to the edge.
He was doing things others couldn't even comprehend.
- He just elevated the sport, just the level of performance,
and I think he learned a lot of that from Craig.
- I just turned 15, and Craig Kelly came to Norway
in '90, and we got to ride with him.
So I just tried to copy him 120%.
Craig mentioned to Burton that they should invite me
to this talent camp.
The team manager at the time, she was like,
"Oh, we wanna do a contract with you."
And I was like, "Well, I haven't"
really done a contest yet."
I think I got some help from Craig,
but I took it.
- Terje just spend every minute
that he could around Craig.
Craig had an incredible career,
and then he stopped competing.
Through the moves that Craig made in his life,
he demonstrated to Terje that, you know, in this sport,
you can shape your future and...
And shape the sport any way you want.
When Terje was the best rider in the world,
all of a sudden, we found out one day
that snowboarding was gonna be in the Olympics
and it's gonna be run by a ski federation,
and nobody in the industry was really involved
in that decision.
What's really critical to us as a company,
and me personally, incredibly important,
is that the sport doesn't lose the individualism that exists.
The bottom line is that it's the athletes' decision,
and if they wanna compete for a gold medal,
then so be it.
Terje called me up saying,
"Hey, I'm not gonna ride in the Olympics.
'Cause it's just not my cup of tea," is what he said.
- Jake's just like, "Totally understand you.
Totally get you."
He supports the guy who wants to go,
and he supports a few of us who didn't go.
- The fact that the greatest snowboarder on Earth was like,
"Nope, I'm not going," that...
That's snowboarding.
- The Ski Federation was running the event,
and they didn't know how to run a snowboarding event.
We got to the venue and the word "snowboarding"
was spelled wrong.
It was like, "Okay, this is gonna be interesting."
- It was a driving rainstorm,
"and they said, "Okay, we can't have the men's downhill.
"We would never have this prestigious ski event
"in a rainstorm, but no, the snowboarders, they can go.
"They can get... Risk life and limb
and not be wearing goggles, it's raining so hard."
- There's a lot of negative effects around the Olympics.
But the positive effects that I look at
and what I really love is, it's really nice
to see the world come together and celebrate something.
- It was 1998, and I was 14 years old.
And I remember everything about that day.
I remember where I was.
I remember what the weather was like.
And I watched snowboarding become an Olympic sport.
And from that point forward as a freshman in high school,
I devoted everything I had to this sport,
to this career, to this community.
I started riding for Burton
two years before the 2002 Olympics.
And I was just, like, rookie rider on the team.
The first time I ever really got a gauge for Jake,
I walked away blown away.
I think it just took meeting him
and seeing his passion and his love for the sport.
That really gave me motivation and inspiration.
- What changed between Nagano and Park City?
- The weather cooperated
and the riding was just phenomenal.
The venue was super well prepared.
I mean, the best venue ever.
And just a lot of things happened right.
And the fans that were there...
The people that were there were just fantastic.
And so many of them had never seen
a snowboarding event before.
That was the incredible thing.
- At the 2002 Olympic games,
snowboarding made this leap and transition
from something that people maybe were even afraid of
to something that people embraced.
Ross Powers, JJ Thomas,
Danny Kass, and myself having such a successful Games.
- Kelly Clark has done it!
The first gold medal for the American team!
- America really opened their arms after that.
♪ ♪
The men swept the podium.
And the boys had big celebration
to go on the "Today" show.
It was a pretty early wake-up call,
and the boys weren't gonna make it.
- They are all passed out.
- And so Jake stepped up.
- A great thing about board sports
is, there's no real bad habits,
'cause if you do something wrong,
you end up on your butt real quick.
- He had every right to be the face of our sport
'cause that was kind of our coming out party.
- So then we got going and snowboarding
was partying and having fun.
And the next thing you know, we were devastated.
- Three Americans and four Canadians
were in the lower group when the avalanche happened.
Among those killed was the world-famous
36-year-old snowboarder Craig Kelly.
He was described as an icon
and a leading figure in the sport.
- When people think of snowboarders,
sometimes they think of that brash,
Generation X-type personality.
What kind of person was he?
- He was on top of the world.
He was a professional snowboarder.
He made plenty of money.
And then he went out and became a guide,
which just speaks so much about his passion
for being in the mountains.
He was doing it simply because he loved it.
- If this kind of thing could happen to him,
it could happen to anybody.
Does that speak to the sport and just how risky
it actually is?
- I think it speaks more to just how risky life is.
He did everything right.
It was just incredibly bad luck.
He was, in many ways, the soul of the sport.
♪ ♪
- When we lost Craig it was like...
was losing, like, that big brother
that helped you out.
Most of the guys tell you to relax,
don't be so serious.
♪ ♪
- I've always pretty much followed...
my heart.
Something inside of me said, "I wanna do this for fun.
This'll be the way to have the most fun."
♪ ♪
For a while, professional snowboarding
seemed like a lot of fun to me,
but now I'm thinking more about really just enjoying
the purity of snowboarding,
why I fell in love with the sport to start with.
♪ ♪
- The cool thing about snowboarding
is that it's not just competitions.
There's so many, like,
different aspects of snowboarding.
- They go out on the mountain with friends
or people that don't compete
that just do it because they love it.
And that's what anyone that snowboards
should be doing it for, because they love it.
♪ ♪
- That's the thing that, as a kid, I didn't know.
I just wanted to do tricks and I wanted to win
and I wanted to flip.
♪ ♪
But really, once you have your first day of freeriding
riding really good snow, that's when you've found
the soul of snowboarding.
- Just the feeling of weightlessness.
♪ ♪
This deep powder turn will make your whole day.
But I've definitely had snowboarding become
a very serious part of my life as a job.
Having to deal with the snowboard business
is always an interesting thing.
♪ ♪
- In a post-Y2K era,
Burton is the dominant player in the marketplace.
And that's when Burton bought Channel Islands.
And then in skateboarding, he bought Alien Workshop.
They started a sneaker company.
Burton emerged as...
the big B.
- We had become the big guys.
We were forcing growth, we were forcing product
to retailers that didn't want it or didn't call for it.
- Any time that you're an industry leader,
you could be viewed as the big bad wolf.
- Everybody wants to see that top dog fall.
- And it hurt Jake. "Burton's the man.
Burton's the corporation."
That hurt him.
- At some point, do you get too large?
- You know, you look at a company like Nike
and it just, you know, blows your mind
to think what they have accomplished.
- He's telling me he doesn't wanna be Nike,
and everywhere I look, there's stuff that has
nothing to do with snowboarding.
- We lost some heart and soul
because I think we were focused on growth at all costs.
And then you say, "Uh-oh",
kind of what's happened to the culture here?"
- In 2003, Shaun White emerged as...
the face of American snowboarding
to the mainstream.
♪ ♪
And Shaun's meteoric rise
was largely in parallel to Burton's drive for growth.
- Shaun first came to the U.S. Open
when I think he was 8 or 9 years old.
It was kind of like a sideshow.
It was like a circus act almost
watching this little kid.
Next year, he'd come back and he'd get a little better
and then a little better.
- I was slowly, like, moving my way up the ranks,
going pro, finally landing on the pro team
with Burton Snowboards at a very, very young age.
- He comes from humble beginnings.
He saw the cause and effect firsthand
of doing good in snowboarding competition.
He has fun snowboarding, but he loves winning.
- There was a point in my career where
I didn't really wanna ride for Burton.
The team was massive
and I didn't feel as much of a part as I used to.
And I started taking these meetings,
and Jake got word of it and flew out to meet me.
He was like, "We gotta... no, no, no."
Like, "Shaun's a priority."
I was just so pumped to be accepted.
I was rising in the ranks. I had sponsorships.
Magazine covers.
There were moments where, like, I was winning everything
and people would be like, "He's the guy! He's the man!"
And then, like, you win a little too long
and they're like, "I hate that guy."
- The community's not feeling Shaun's rise
as much as they might have if he had done more
to be part of the community.
But to be a true champion,
can you be that kind of... community guy?
Jake always said that Shaun
was the most competitive person,
and that's why he was a champion.
Jake always understood that about Shaun
and respected that about Shaun.
- Where would my life be today
without Jake taking a chance on me when I was younger
or sticking with me after I was injured,
or, you know, like...
Like, pull the fire alarm at a hotel, being an idiot.
He just calls me laughin', "Did you have fun?"
Like, "You idiot."
When you're pro at 13 up to 30,
you're gonna make some mistakes along the way,
like, just in life in general.
And he was always there to support and back me.
- He's got an incredible sense of style.
He is a superstar.
- 33 million people watched him win
the Olympic gold medal.
That's just the United States.
- He's transcended the sport.
It's not something we should be ashamed of.
It's something we should be proud of.
- Every snowboarder really does benefit from that.
♪ ♪
- Now, Travis, I was watching a lot of footage today
of your snowboarding, and I don't do that.
♪ ♪
- ♪ I need a gun ♪
♪ To keep myself among ♪
♪ The poor people ♪
♪ Who are burning in the sun ♪
♪ They ain't got a chance ♪
♪ I need a gun ♪
♪ 'Cause all I do is dance ♪
♪ ♪
- Burton is a family business.
Experts continue to guess at your annual sales,
but you don't have to tell us.
Is that part of your decision to stay private?
- One day I ask him,
"Have you ever thought about selling Burton?"
And he told me, "Anyone who owns Burton Snowboards"
"has to love snowboarding more than me,
and I don't know anyone yet."
- I mean, it's the best job in the world.
Why would I ever walk away from it?
Not too shabby, huh?
- The snowboarding lifestyle is something that we all live
as a family and many of my friends.
It's just all meshed together.
- Hit it, son.
Nice.
- There was never a division in our lives,
"This is work, this is play."
It was all the same.
You had to be up for adventure at any moment
at any time.
I used to call him our cruise director.
- Whoo! - Whoa!
- Looking back, we were living a different lifestyle,
but it felt pretty normal.
♪ ♪
- He was our baseball coach, our flag football coach.
- Towards the second, look alive.
- And it was never about winning.
It was about fun.
Oh!
- That's not nice.
- It's like, did we really have a basketball hoop
in the middle of our living room?
- Safe!
- Not only did he want you to stay up late and have fun
and take tequila shots and party,
but at 6:00 a.m., he was pounding on your door
going, "Let's go!"
And you're putting all your sunblock on like,
"Oh, my God, what's happening?"
♪ ♪
- He's ruthless.
- Jake will go through life like he's flying.
♪ ♪
- I think I was 11 years old,
and we had this cat named Midnight.
One day, Midnight brought in a bird.
And the bird was kind of, like, still moving a little bit.
And so my dad, I shit you not,
gave the bird CPR right there on the kitchen counter.
Little, like... little beats
and then put his mouth to the beak
and tried to give it a little bit of air
and, like, tried to revive this little bird.
And that's when I realized...
my dad had such an appreciation for life.
- You all right?
- Good as gold.
I was feeling like shit
and I had a little bump on my neck.
I just wasn't expecting I had cancer.
- Like, stage IV.
And the doctor says to Jake, "You have testicular cancer."
But you are so happy because it is curable.
You know, the chemo is brutal.
It's an awful, awful chemo.
But he was so damn determined.
♪ ♪
He was a fighter.
For sure.
♪ ♪
- The following winter, I went with my family
on a trip to Baldface Lodge.
I was still sick from the treatment.
But we only did it for a few days.
So I sort of had the strength to do it.
♪ ♪
The love and the fun started coming back.
♪ ♪
- Snowboarding again was that light that drove him.
- Okay, that's it.
Thanks, Donna, and thanks, everybody, for coming.
We'll see you at our house for the barbecue.
Can't believe it.
I feel much better now
than eight months ago.
- Whoo!
♪ ♪
- Dear rider,
I write this letter every year,
and every year I say how snowboarding has grown,
but after a personally tough year,
I spent a reflective week riding with the ones
who've been by my side through it all.
It reminded me not just of what we've created...
But why it really matters.
Have as much fun as possible.
Jake.
- I was back to snowboarding 100 days a year,
and I got a knee replacement from a lot of wear
on the lateral portion of my knee.
- I had done Jake's knee replacement.
He was out of the hospital quickly,
and about I week later, he said,
"Hey, you wanna go for a workout?"
I'm talking a week out from a knee replacement.
And he's up and down and moving and bending
and he's on the rowing machine, and I couldn't believe it.
I mean, it was absolutely phenomenal.
He said, "You know, I think I can snowboard."
Couple days later, he said, "Do I look okay?"
And I said, "Yeah, you look fine."
And he goes, "Well, I'm not seeing really well."
It seems like something's double or blurry."
As we left, I said, "Okay, buddy, listen,
"tomorrow morning, if you're not feeling better,
call me first thing right away."
And he said, "Okay, no problem."
"Should I call you and that guy standing right next to you
that looks like you?"
- And so I went to Dartmouth-Hitchcock,
and they very quickly analyzed what was going on,
and within 24 hours of me being there,
"they said, "If you have what we think you have,
"tomorrow, you won't be able to swallow.
"The next day, you won't be able to open your eyes.
And the next day, you won't be able to breathe."
[tense music
♪ ♪
I had a ton of fear.
I just didn't see how I was gonna ever get better.
All I could do was write, and it was such a gift,
because you can't talk when you're on a ventilator.
And I was blind, but I could scribble.
And scribble I did.
♪ ♪
- I just had this stack of white paper
and a clipboard.
And whenever he needed to say something to anybody,
he would write it.
It was a lifeline.
It was a way for him to communicate
because his body is paralyzed, but his mind is fine.
♪ ♪
- Would kind of hold his hand
or show some kind of physical contact
to let him know I was there.
- The low point was talking to my kids about suicide.
♪ ♪
- Those doctors were telling me,
"He will get through.
"We can't tell you how long he'll be paralyzed...
But we can tell you he will come out of this."
♪ ♪
- Eventually, I would see these little, like,
hints of improvement.
You know, that I could open my eyes.
And I could do something a little better
than the day before.
And once you get to that point,
then it's game on.
Then it's up to you.
- When a friend would come visit him,
he would just light up and he would just glow,
and that's where he got his energy
and his love and his passion
was through his community and through his friends.
- One day he wrote, "Okay, now I wanna live."
♪ ♪
- As he started to get better, I was like,
"How are you... like, dude,
you were, like, dead last week."
This dude straight up has nine lives.
Scribblin' on notes, and they were pretty hard to make out.
But if you could make out a note,
it would have the exact same Jake humor.
- He wrote, "Doesn't make want good."
And then he'd get pissed
and I had to put another sheet and...
And after the fourth one, I finally read it.
And I'm leaning over his bed and I have a Burton T-shirt on.
And he had written,
"Didn't know we make shirts that big."
- And we're all, like, in tears, like, over him,
and he's like, "First time I've seen
three dipshits in a while."
- We would have chair dance parties.
We'd all sit in chairs and kinda sway our hips
'cause that's what he could do.
- I needed it. I needed the support.
I don't think society understands
how emotions comes in to making you better.
The power of what your people that are close to you
can do for you.
What you've put into the relationship
with them comes back.
♪ ♪
- I learned more about my dad through those cards
than I had my whole life.
- It's almost like I'm glad this happened.
♪ ♪
Because we learned to love and appreciate each other more.
- He probably came home a little too early.
Like, he was still not quite, like, all there.
We went on a little hike... A little walk...
And he was ahead of me,
and I was like, "Are you sure we should be doing this?"
And he was really out of balance.
And he fell into this little ditch.
Like, face down, arms to the side.
And I had this evil split second
where I wanted to take a picture of it.
I told that story later and he was like,
"Dude, why didn't you get the picture?"
♪ ♪
- I love the process of healing.
♪ ♪
I was determined
to recover from that terrible disease.
♪ ♪
- Six months later, he was snowboarding.
Six months later, we were surfing.
He was just raging the recovery.
- Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven. Whoo-hoo!
Three.
Two. One.
♪ ♪
Whoa!
Runaway trot.
♪ ♪
- We went to Burning Man together.
Burning Man was his home.
It's this place of community and friendship
and looking out for one another,
but just having so much fun,
and he would go crazy.
- Came from... we're listening to Phish, Grateful Dead,
to Drake and, like, all these rappers.
And he's just, like, a different person.
- He wanted to get 100 days every year.
- 100 days.
- I was like, "That's not that big a deal."
100 days snowboarding is a big deal.
♪ ♪
- When you would leave a trip after being with him,
you'd be like...
- No pictures. No pictures.
- There was never a moment where he was, like, down
or tired or anything.
Like, he was swimming across the lake
when he was living in Switzerland.
So as hard as he was going,
he was still, like, getting everything done.
And what do I know?
Like, how am I gonna be the one to say,
"Jake, you need to slow down"?
♪ ♪
Maybe Jake could look at us and say,
"You guys need to speed up."
- You know, he was always living life in the fast lane.
Now instead of going 80, we're going 110.
♪ ♪
- Hip-hop nation!
- He was traveling. He went here and there.
Then he went back to Europe. He went to Switzerland.
He was riding there.
♪ ♪
Sometimes I got the feeling, "This is too much."
- Either he had that feeling...
He knew that what happened before was gonna come back,
so he was living a really full life.
He knew.
♪ ♪
- He called me. I was in Zurich.
He said, "I think I have pneumonia."
And, you know, I was like,
"Well, you're probably not sleeping enough.
"You're probably not taking care of yourself enough.
You need to do this. You need to do that."
- Couple days went by and a week
and an X-ray that didn't look so good.
And he called me and he said, "I'm flying out to Mayo.
I'm gonna get this checked out."
- Donna came.
A lot of people around, and she goes, "Hermann",
"I need to talk to you and, uh...
let's go in a separate room."
And then she said, "I talked to Jake.
He said the cancer is back."
- Then I got a text and it just said,
"My cancer is back.
And I'm prepped to fight it and I'm gonna work hard at it."
- "I was gonna have a good prognosis and I'm, like...
"I got this, don't worry.
And good to know that I have you guys beside me."
- My friend had a feeling, like, he's like,
"His immune system can't beat that.
You know, he's been through too much."
And he was explaining that to me,
and I was like, "No, no, no."
I go, "He sounded good yesterday.
Like, I think he's gonna beat it."
- Dude, I'm buying an alarm clock
for my hospital room, okay?
Let's not get too serious now.
- You've been here before.
You know how to do this.
We know what the outcome is.
That faith and that hope just... For me, it remained.
- Yeah, this one says "adjustable dimmer" on it.
I just wanna see... I'm pretty sure this is a plug-in,
but I'm just gonna... - "USB charging."
- Open it for you. - Yeah, that's...
Thank you so much.
- This one actually is not out on display.
- Mine.
- So we should have a display of it out.
- I remember thinking, "Oh, he'll beat it again.
He'll do it again."
But I think something...
You know, I think he knew he didn't have it in him
to fight again.
- Let's get the biopsy because I didn't wanna...
- It was almost like he was almost resigned...
Like the fighter part was gone.
He was gonna go through the motions, but he wasn't...
His heart wasn't in it.
He was just too tired.
I had arranged for a masseuse to come
in the morning for Jake,
and when I went to wake him up...
you know, he was kind of groggy like,
"Yeah, yeah, I'm getting up."
And then I said to Cox, "Hey, go get him up.
You know, it's been a while."
And Cox said, "He ain't getting up."
♪ ♪
- I didn't understand the word spiritual.
I didn't really get it.
♪ ♪
But I very much developed that, you know,
"live life to the fullest
and don't take anything for granted."
♪ ♪
I learned what family was.
And friends and love and pain.
All that stuff that you hear
really crystallized for me in a very real way.
♪ ♪
- All the boys were there.
His sisters were there.
He was being kept alive by machines again.
And we said, "It's time to let him go."
- I got a text message from Donna.
"Hermann, sorry, it's too late.
He passed away."
It hit me right in the middle of the heart.
I said, "What the fuck?"
Am I really 8 hours late?" It was the case.
♪ ♪
- Everyone came together pretty much on that day,
and, yeah, it was...
Yeah, it was snowing.
So it was probably Jake.
♪ ♪
- I don't think anybody imagined
that being the outcome, 'cause we knew Jake.
We knew that he was in the business of beating...
anything that came his way.
♪ ♪
- But he lived a good life, that dude.
And we've been living a good life
on account of him, so...
♪ ♪
- ♪ I've waited many years ♪
♪ Every print I left upon the track ♪
♪ Has lead me here ♪
♪ ♪
♪ And next year, it'll be clear ♪
♪ This was only leading me to that ♪
♪ And by that time, I hope that ♪
♪ You ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Love me ♪
♪ You ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Love me ♪
♪ I move with the trees in the breeze ♪
♪ I know that time is elastic ♪
♪ ♪
♪ And I know when I go ♪
♪ All my particles disband and disperse ♪
♪ And I'll be back in the pulse ♪
♪ ♪
♪ And I know none of this ♪
♪ Will matter in the long run ♪
♪ But I know a sound is still a sound around no one ♪
♪ And while I'm in this body ♪
♪ I want somebody to want ♪
♪ And I want what I want ♪
♪ And I want you ♪
♪ ♪
♪ To love me ♪
♪ ♪
- Yuto Totsuka.
Wow.
Unbelievable.
- 97! - Yeah, Yuko!
- Great run and a great show.
We're celebrating the spirit
of the one and only Jake Burton
who made this thing possible.
And the one thing that we do miss
as we celebrate Jake's life is seeing that face and his energy
at the bottom of the corral.
♪ ♪
Now, this is the first year
that we are without that energy.
We miss you so much, Jake.
♪ ♪
Right now, as we head back to the top,
it's a who's who in the history of this event.
So many generations of snowboarding
about to take a very special ride for Jake Burton.
♪ ♪
- Shaun. There goes Shaun.
♪ ♪
- Fuck, fuck, fuck.
- Fuck, fuck, fuckety, fuck, fuck, fuck.
- Fuck. - Fuckety-fuck.
♪ ♪
- Snowboarding is a family.
And more than just a sport, it is something that you live.
We can continue to push this culture forward.
It was not a memorial. It was a celebration.
♪ ♪
- The rider.
♪ ♪
The product.
♪ ♪
The process.
♪ ♪
This is my heart and soul.
♪ ♪
I just love the freedom that snowboarding gives you...
♪ ♪
To do whatever...
The fuck...
You want.
Jake.
- Whoo!
♪ ♪
- ♪ Bite my hand ♪
♪ ♪
♪ After I made sure that you were fed ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Gonna speak my mind ♪
♪ ♪
♪ I got chains on, but no, I ain't lyin' ♪
♪ ♪
♪ You like to steer that blade ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Bleed me dry and walk away ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Gonna wash my hands ♪
♪ ♪
♪ I hope you find another chance ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Now you're all ghosts to me ♪
♪ Ghosts to me ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Now you're all ghosts to me ♪
♪ Ghosts to me ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Ghosts to me ♪
♪ ♪
♪ I took you in ♪
♪ ♪
♪ I treated you like you were kin ♪
♪ ♪