R.Cunningham
?The largest room in the house is always the room for improvement?
--Dean Bradley, 1993
?You have a message from a man named Brent Tippie,? Corrine yelled from behind the sliding glass door, ?I said you will call him back.?
?Brett, not Brent.? I repled, ?He?s a freerider from Canada. He probably want?s to yell at me.? I had recently written two pieces that focused upon the danger that freeriding?s popularity could wreak havoc upon land-access efforts. The second part was a follow-up, and I had interviewed Brett to inject the views of a top pro in the mist of a flurry of pro and con letters from passionate MBA readers.
Brett is about as real a person as you get--if he hasn?t got anything sincere to say, he usually won?t say anything. It seems that our telephone conversation, a month earlier, sparked Tippie?s imagination--especially the discussions about how best to inform new free riders about the ?rules of the trail.? Tippie, a pro snowboarder during the winter months, recalled a booklet that was attatched to a Burton Snowboard he picked up years earlier--when the term freeriding was originally coined.
?I remember that it has a list of do?s and dont?s of the trail,? Tippie said, ?but they used humor too, like: Don?t speed through groups of people.? Then they would follow that with: ?Don?t wash your car while it?s raining.? It sounds silly, but I remember that I read it cover to cover because it was funny. Something like that would be good to have on every bike sold at dealers.? Tippie laughed, then added; ?Bike dealers could offer a test and, if the customers got all the answers right, they would get fifty dollars off the price of the bike. That would sure get people to read the rules!?
I asked Brett to search for the Burton brochure, and vowed to work on getting permission to reprint the rules in MBA. Snowboarders flipped skiers upside down by breaking, then rewriting the rules--the same way that freeriders overthrew stuffy rank-and-file mountain bikers. I thought it would be interesting to review the suggestions that Burton, the most prestigious name to emerge from snowboarding?s freeriders, used to minimize their sport?s destructive elements. I imagine that, by shifting a few nouns and verbs, Burton?s booklet could be a perfect primer to the mountain bike version of the same movement.
?Thanks for the suggestion,? I said, ?Not just about Burton?s rulebook. I forgot that telling a funny story is a lot more persuasive than standing on a pulpit and barking at the crowd--especially if it isn?t good news.
After Brett hung up, I realized that, in spite of all the mail that the freeriding article generated, Tippie was the only person who bothered to offer up a positive solution.
|