Colin Wiseman 2016-10-20 05:00:51
MARK MCMORRIS’ POSITIVE VIBRATIONS
“I wanted to go for a hike, but this rain…”
Mark McMorris is referring to the Vancouver, BC drizzle. It tends to rain there in the spring. It’s a stark contrast to his current home in Encinitas, CA. Mark’s Canadian, but he grew up in the Saskatchewan prairies. It’s a thousand miles and a few mountain ranges east of the Pacific Northwest rainforest.
Mark’s in Vancouver rehabilitating a broken femur, which he suffered during the Air + Style contest in downtown Los Angeles in late February. He’s at the gym for three hours per day, then spends afternoons hiking the north shore or rolling around downtown on his skateboard, in between flights here and there for the kind of obligations that come with mainstream celebrity status.
At only 22 years old, Mark’s become used to the spotlight. Multiple X Games victories helped him get there, along with Travis Riceendorsed appearances in Brain Farm’s The Art of Flight and at Baldface Lodge for Red Bull’s Super and Ultra Natural contests. But the Olympic bronze medal in 2014 was what really did it. That led to an MTV reality show, McMorris & McMorris, focused on him and older brother Craig, a ripping snowboarder and erstwhile TV personality himself. Now Mark’s got a signature console game about to drop, and, as evidenced by the fans who stopped him for a picture in the coffee shop downstairs 20 minutes ago, face recognition on the street.
It’s a tricky act to balance. Mark has nonendemic brand obligations, an entourage of coaches and trainers, a full-time manager, a spot on the Canadian national sports program—how does he retain his sense of self? Some kind of authenticity? He probably has a lot of people telling him what to do, how to behave, how to ride.
But when we sit down at a hidden restaurant in Mark’s temporary home at the Hotel Georgia, he doesn’t have a prepared script. He’s open and honest about his fears, his aspirations, coping with injury, and finding a path in snowboarding when he comes from a place where hockey players outnumber snowboarders 1000-to-1. He’s insightful about the reality of snowboarding’s perception in the mainstream and existence on the fringe; aware of his role in getting people into the mountains; conscientious when it comes to interpreting snowboarding for the masses as a national sporting hero.
We begin making small talk and he tells me about how stoked he is just to cruise on his skateboard, about a recent day catching waves off a Jet Ski in front of Camp Pendleton with pro surfer Josh Kerr, about his plan for a full return to snow by the time this article hits print. The conversation turns to his recent injury.
“It felt like such a long time getting through those first two months,” Mark says. “It feels like you can never snowboard again because you’re so mangled. I wondered if my leg was going to heal right. I was scared.”
“I got hurt in LA at the Air + Style late at night,” he continues. “They took me to a hospital that was super sketchy, and then my physio who was at the event with me said, ‘There’s no way we’re getting surgery here.’ We left against the doctor’s consent and had to pay $600 for an ambulance to take me to USC to see a trauma surgeon who works on all these NFL guys, and he said, ‘You’ve got a clean break; you’re going to be fine.’ The next morning, I had a pretty big surgery. I stayed at the hospital for four days with a catheter in, and that was the worst part. I was hating my life. I was almost ready to give up.”
Mark hasn’t watched the video of the crash. It’s not pretty. He sat down after missing a triple cork and hooked an edge while sliding down the landing. The force was too much to handle. It took a titanium rod and a few screws to put his femur back together. The first few weeks were brutal: two weeks housebound in Encinitas just getting his leg moving, icing it, rolling his wheelchair to the beach and watching the waves. But things slowly improved, and he made his way to Vancouver to focus on getting back to 100 percent. By now, it seems like he’s taking it in stride—he’s used to the constant maintenance that comes with a life spent sending off icy kickers.
“Our sport can be more physical than something like basketball or football at times,” Mark says. “You don’t get hurt as much, but when you do, you get smoked pretty hard. I work on my body constantly. It’s all this to do what I love—you’ve got to be serious to do what you love for a living, or else you’re just taking it for granted. It’s all part of it though; you just have to try and snowboard smart and careful and don’t do anything stupid.”
“But what exactly is stupid? Where do you draw the line when it comes to risk?” I ask.
“I don’t ever guinea-pig jumps,” Mark says. “I learned my lesson. I went first off something in Australia in August of 2013, the year before the Olympics, and I came up short and bruised both my heels really badly. I was out for three and a half months, just from doing a straight air. Even if I made it, was it really worth hitting it? No. I have to make those kinds of decisions now, and not take stupid risks. But injuries will happen, and you’ve just got to work your hardest to avoid a situation where you might increase your risk of getting hurt.”
Fair enough. It seems to me like lining up an 80-footer with the intention of chucking a triple cork comes with a high level of inherent risk, but when pushed to explain his headspace rolling into such a thing, Mark doesn’t see it as much more than a natural progression.
“I’ve been super lucky that my head hasn’t messed with me ever, really,” he says. “When I have to do something, I just do it at some point. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. There’s pressure, but there’s also somebody that has way more pressure than you, somewhere out there, and is performing just as good. You’ve got to harness it for energy versus getting scared. I’m just stoked to have the opportunity to be in that position, to have people cheering for me. Everybody’s head is different, but I try to find the positives and remember to smile. You can be pissed when you don’t land, but you can never talk down upon snowboarding. Say if the course wasn’t that good, don’t blame it on the course. Positivity is an easier route to take, and I think everybody remembers people that are positive and happy. That will allow us to spread a good message about snowboarding, to show what it really is: a good time. There’s always going to be that core side to snowboarding, but I’d like to let the sport evolve to the masses. Let’s bring in more jobs, let’s get more people snowboarding, let’s do that by showing people it’s fun, even when it’s serious.”
Mark has a lot to be thankful for. He definitely beat the odds to build a life as a snowboarder. He hails from Regina, Saskatchewan, a city of about 200,000 people in the middle of the Canadian prairies. Regina’s international claim to fame comes from a joke made by Mick Jagger in the mid-90s that it’s the “city that rhymes with fun.” It’s about the flattest place in Canada.
Mark’s dad, Don, owned a grain farm, while his mom, Cindy, worked as a nurse. Mark describes them as “straight shooters, great Canadian folk.” They were both athletes—Don a hockey guy and Cindy a figure skater. As Mark grew up, his dad became a politician. He was the Minister of Transportation and Highways, then the Health Minister, and is now the Deputy Premiere of the province. When his political career took off, Don sold the farm and moved to the family’s lake house, an integral part of Mark and Craig’s childhood. The siblings started riding when Mark was five years old, during a family ski trip to Lake Louise, AB. From then on they’d spend time at the local hill, Mission Ridge, and its 292 feet of vertical. Don, for his part, took off by himself for five days and learned to ride because he didn’t want to miss out on good times with his boys. Mark was consumed by a variety of competitive sports from a young age, particularly hockey, and it wasn’t until he turned 13 that snowboarding became a serious pursuit. But it began with watersports.
“When I was a kid, I was so stoked on the summers,” Mark says. “I’d wakeboard and skateboard all the time. We’d be behind boats so much, wakeskating, wakeboarding, wakesurfing, slalom skiing—everything. I still go back there and we barefoot all the time, flying across the lake when it’s dead calm—you sit on a wakeskate and just pin the Sea-Doo, stand up and it’s like walking on water. We would get super into that in the summer and compete, and then winter would come and I’d go, ‘Yeah, I’m going to be a snowboarder.’
“Funny thing is, I was at the Byerly Toe Jam, a wakeskate contest in Ontario, and that’s how I got my first real sponsor, O’Neill. I made the finals there and the team manager was Max Henault at the time, a pro snowboarder. He saw my snowboard footage and he said, ‘You should come shred a lot more.’ Then I never really did competitive watersports again.”
Mark got involved with the newly formed Saskatchewan snowboard team, and he credits coach Russell Davies with his development as a rider at an early age. “We would get picked up and driven to the mountains in Alberta a couple times a month, mostly to COP [Canada Olympic Park],” Mark says. “We would ride Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and would drive home all night Sunday.”
Canada Olympic Park, which was built for the ’88 Calgary Olympics (remember Cool Runnings?), is essentially a top-to-bottom terrain park right on the edge of the city. It’s setup for progression with everything from 10-foot tabletops and ride-on boxes to XL stepdowns and kinked rails. Five-minute laps via a high-speed quad make COP a perfect place to groom one’s freestyle skills, and the often-icy snow teaches solid edge control and a propensity for landing on your feet. “I played a lot of sports growing up, but snowboarding was just the most fun because nobody told me what to do,” Mark says. “I could just do what felt fun and cool, watching videos and trying and replicate it in my own style.”
How’s he one to talk about style when he makes a living off 1440s? Well, Mark sees style as something that goes beyond rotations. “You see some guys who can do the gnarliest tricks, but they can’t even go edge to edge,” Mark says. “In between the jumps, it looks like they’re going to die, and I don’t want to be that guy, I just want to be a good snowboarder. I appreciate people like [Jake] Blauvelt, Terje [Haakonsen], Danny [Davis] and Nicolas Müller—those guys who have the best fundamentals. They’re just such good snowboarders and they make snowboarding look fun. That’s what I want to show in my riding.”
Style aside, it didn’t take long for Mark to find himself in international competitions. He made the US Open Slopestyle final at age 15—“I was wearing a pink helmet and dropping in right behind Scotty Lago,” Mark says—and in 2010 won Canada’s biggest contest at the time, the Ride Shakedown big air in Quebec City. The Shakedown win led to sponsorships with Oakley and Burton, who still support him. From there, Mark became the best slopestyle rider on the planet, with slope wins at X Games in 2012 and 2013, the US Open in 2013 and 2014, that Olympic bronze with a broken rib in 2014, another X Games victory in 2015, and a slew of other contest podiums.
There through it all was his brother Craig. Mark credits Craig as a driving force in his development as a snowboarder and a person. “Craiger Bear, he’s two years older than me,” Mark says. “I pretty much owe everything to him because if he did a backflip on the ground, then I’d have to do a backflip on the ground. If he did this trick, I’d have to learn that trick, and if I did it, vice versa. We’d do anything to push each other’s limits, and we’re so lucky to have each other.”
Craig, for his part, is a professional rider, residing in Whistler and filming backcountry parts with the Manboys crew. He’s also parlayed his onscreen prowess into a budding career in broadcast media—he’s a host for both the summer and winter X Games, he called the Sochi Olympics for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and he had his own show for CBC at the Rio summer games, alongside commercial gigs for the likes of Coors Light and Five Gum.
“We used to travel together a lot, but over the last little while we’re always on different programs,” Mark says. “In the offseason we’re together a lot more—a month after I broke my leg, I was coming home from physio in Vancouver and I texted him, ‘Hey buddy, you should come down, we should go to the Canucks [hockey] game tonight.’ He texts me back, ‘Dude, I would, but I broke my leg.’ I was like, ‘What, why didn’t you think to tell me this?’ And he said, ‘I know, the heli took two and a half hours to get to me in the backcountry, compound fracture.’ So instead of a hockey game, I went to the hospital and chilled with him. Both our seasons were over, and I think it might have helped that he had me to be crippled with.”
In 2015, he was able to get out and ride with Craig in Whistler while putting together his documentary In Motion, which followed Mark from the global contest scene to the BC backcountry with seasoned shreds like Nicolas Müller and Mikkel Bang. He’s still learning the ropes of backcountry travel, but has the skills to set down tricks in powder landings. He’s been splitboarding a bit and aims to be a well-rounded rider—not so much for his career, as he’s done just fine with the contest thing, but more for his own love of all aspects of snowboarding. He wants to see snowboarding grow, and he wants to use his position to spread positive vibrations, to show the casual fan that there’s a lot more to snowboarding than what they see him doing on TV.
“Snowboarding is going to grow, but it’s not always going to be what it once was,” Mark says. “It won’t even be the same next year. There are so many different sides to it and that’s the sickest part. We have so many ways to spread our message now, whether through web stuff or movie projects, and I also think social media has helped snowboarding gain a lot of following because people get to see snowboarding more often. Pros can give people personal messages of how fun snowboarding is, and it’s a really positive thing. Being able to go on the Burton Snapchat, for instance, and have 10,000 people see me just saying, ‘Hey, I’m leaving rehab, check it, this is what I do,’—they get a personal connection and people love that. That’s where we have an opportunity to spread our message. You can be bitter about a changing industry or you can try and make the best of it. Be positive, see the positive, everybody is dealing with the same situation.
“In the end, you just spread the message that snowboarding is awesome, and that people need to get out and experience it for themselves. It doesn’t even matter if you’re riding down the hill, just go splitboarding and get out in nature. Look at us, we’re in the city with so many people and there’s all this vast terrain we can see out the window and hardly anyone’s out there. We need to encourage people to get into the mountains. It’s the best way to find peace of mind.”
Well said for a flatlander.
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Remember To Smile
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