BELOW The McMorris’ grew up on the lake and spent most of their summer days in the water. “I bought a new Sea-Doo recently,” Mark says. “Actually, my dad bought one with my money. Just after the [Sochi] Olympics, he said, ‘We need a new Sea-Doo—I bought the first one, you’re buying the second one.’” Photo: McMorris Archives “Positivity is an easier route to take, and I think everybody remembers people that are positive and happy.” 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 fam-ily’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 lo-cal 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—ev-erything. 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 snow-board 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 [Haakon-sen], 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.” 076 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 14.1: Page 76
