Mike has long been revered for his inventive and fun approach to riding street. Drop to front board while filming for Vans’ Evergreen (2020) in Salt Lake City, UT. Photo: Oli Gagnon “I’ve always been a dreamer. Just a classic dreamer looking for their treasure.” MIKE WAS BORN in Worcester, MA, where he lived in a triplex full of extended family. “It was my parents, me and my sister [Julia] on the middle floor, my aunt and uncle on the top and my grandparents in the bottom,” he says. “I have a lotta good memories there, like the first time I ever got sick off cookie dough ice cream. We lived there till I was five or six and then moved over the bridge into Shrewsbury.” Shrewsbury is just 15 minutes from Worcester, where Mike’s par-ents, Elizabeth and Bernie, continued to run their family business, Maurice the Pants Man, a popular discount clothing store. Mike’s great-grandfather, Maurice, founded the store and his grandfather, Ar-nie, ran it after Maurice was in a car accident that left him unable to work. Mike remembers folding jeans at one of the storefronts before the business really took off and his parents sold it. They ended up buy-ing one location back, but about that time cheaper alternatives flooded the discount-clothing market and drove Maurice the Pants Man out of business. Elizabeth returned to school for cosmetology and Bernie started selling insurance, which is what they do today. As they shifted from the old business into new careers, Mike says there was a palpable difference in his parents’ demeanors. “There were times when everything’s good and there’s parties and ev-eryone’s happy,” he says. “Then, as things start to change, you see how money affects the family and how the frequency of the get-togethers, and the hugs, diminishes a bit, or so I felt. Over time my idea of money started to change, and I wasn’t interested in things like seeing my dad’s new car. I started to see that there was more investment in these shiny new things, which did nothing for the family except maybe even cause more problems because you think that it’s gonna change things. I was 14 or 15 around that time, and that’s when I could tell there was stuff be-yond independent problems going on in the house, like, a different atti-tude being tossed around. But that’s when I was already really into BMX, skateboarding and snowboarding, so I was usually out of the house.” Mike’s obsession with snowboarding had begun a few winters prior during a trip to Stowe, VT, with his dad. He’d been skiing for several seasons, but after watching a snowboarder ollie over a bush and ride down into a gully beneath him on the lift, his whole world flipped. Immediately upon Mike’s return to Massachusetts, he counted out $28 from the change bucket in his house and went straight to Home Depot to buy a plastic snowboard. Following some trial and error on his neighbor Mike Steele’s hilly front yard he upgraded to metal edges and began cutting them down the icy trails at nearby Ski Ward. “[The mountain] was like six to 10 minutes from my house in Shrewsbury,” Mike says. “Once I started really boarding, I was there around three times during the school week and Saturday and Sunday. That’s where the whole social scene started for me. You’d see different people from school there, your crushes, people are making out on the chairlift for the first time. It was a really fun time. Then, you know, people are like, ‘That kid can snowboard.’ It can kind of become a part of your identity. It totally became my identity.” Along with his close friend, Nick Esposito, Mike ripped Ski Ward’s T-bar-serviced halfpipe and park and made the most of every square inch of terrain the hill had to offer. As the duo got older, they began making the 30-minute trek to Wachusett Mountain. Then they started hitting places farther out, such as Loon Mountain, NH, Sunday River, ME, and other resorts, to compete in rail jams, which Mike won with regularity. The pair pushed each other on hill, in the streets when they filmed handrail clips while in their teens, and eventually in the class-room when they attended college together at the University of Plym-outh. Although Mike had been a lackluster student in high school, his competitiveness with Nick drove them both to graduate with high honors. “I don’t have a brother, but this is what I imagine it’s like,” he says. “It’s love at the deepest level, but you want to be pushing each other. At the time it’s for yourself, very selfishly, but it works for both of you if you’re both in that mentality.” 036 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 19.1: Page 36
