Shaun White: Big Hair, Big Air and the Killer Inside

Snow boarding is a young sport, only 15 years into its mainstream popularity, but every year, the halfpipes get bigger and the tricks get wilder – in Nagano, Japan, in 1998, the longest rotation was only 720 degrees – and a lot of that has to do with the influence of White. He’s an elegant athlete, strong and precise, so good that keeping up with him means literally taking your life in your hands: Double corks, a trick that White pioneered, put top-ranked snowboarder Kevin Pearce in the hospital with a brain injury right before the Olympics. “Doing these tricks is the most vertiginous feeling you can ever get, especially during the day, when the snow matches the sky,” says White. “You’re up there spinning, like, ‘Where am I?’ and your life depends on finding the blue line marking the pipe. It’s kind of like tennis: You have to be quick and react quick.”

On TV, White may play the eternal radical little dude – a goofy guy whose radicalism is sweetly unthreatening – but in person, he’s not only intelligent and sophisticated but a stone-cold killer. Like Tiger Woods, whom White has called a “great guy deep down who just made some bad calls,” he’s as competitive about business as he is about sports: Between his own video game and his endorsements, including Target, Burton and Oakley, he made an estimated $9 million in 2008. Bud Keene, the halfpipe coach for the U.S. snowboard team, puts it this way: “Imagine an experiment where you mix the DNA of the most naturally talented athlete of a generation, say a Michael Jordan or a LeBron James, with the DNA of the hardest-working athlete imaginable, a Rocky Balboa or a Cal Ripken. Finally, you throw in the DNA from the most driven and uncompromising athletes you can think of, a Lance Armstrong or a Tiger Woods, and – voila! Out pops Shaun.”

Last year, when White realized that his celebrity was creating a problem at public halfpipes – he was afraid to try new tricks because there always seemed to be a kid around with a cameraphone, ready to post a YouTube video of him falling on his butt – one of his sponsors, Red Bull, put together a plan out of a sci-fi movie: For an estimated $500,000, the company built White his own private halfpipe, a 22-foot monster with a foam pit, in a backcountry bowl near Silverton Mountain, in Colorado. That’s a nutty thing to do, like building a race-car driver his own track. “People Google Earth-ed the pipe, and there was a big debate on the Internet if it was real or not,” says White, smirking a little. “For sure, it was real. And it was pristine. A normal halfpipe is mauled by the public by 2 p.m., so this was just the perfect scenario.”

White turned pro about a decade ago, and since then he has won every major snowboard contest at least once. He began snowboarding at six and went pro at 13, while also skateboarding under the mentorship of Tony Hawk, who considered him the most promising young skater he had ever seen. “Shaun’s confidence is a family thing,” says his brother, Jesse. “Our mom moved to Hawaii on her own when she was 18, and my dad marches to the same drummer. He just has it on the inside.”

White’s mom, a waitress, and father, a city employee, brought him up with a progressive attitude in Del Mar, a beachfront town near San Diego – he was named after a professional surfer, Shaun Tomson, and his parents imagined he might become one too. When Shaun was eight, his dad bought him a surfboard with a picture of the Tasmanian Devil on the back and took him into the waves. “After one big wave, I got washed, and I was like, ‘I hate this,'” says White. “Taz just rocked me in the face.”

His accommodating family hunted for a sport at which White and his siblings would excel, and found it in skiing, reachable with a few hours’ drive to the San Bernadino mountains. White was so instantly fearless on skis that his parents put him on a snowboard to slow him down. “I kept hitting other people with the poles,” he recalls. “I was a monster child.” Pretty soon, he wanted to snowboard every weekend, but the family didn’t have much money, so they bought a van to crash in at the mountain. Then White started winning contests – small purses at first, but with enough panache to get noticed by sponsors. He became the sport’s youngest prodigy, dashing around the world with Mom and Dad. “Then I would go home to California, and everything was normal,” he says. “I’d show up to play on the soccer team, and kids would be like, “Where were you – Japan? Anyway, Ninja Turtles are rad.'”