First of two parts.
Last year, 20,000 people jammed into City Hall Plaza in Boston to watch big names in snowboarding defy gravity above 300 tons of snow shipped in from New Hampshire’s Loon Mountain.
In 2023, the research firm Fact.MR estimated the global snowboarding market at $310 billion. Decades earlier, those athletes’ predecessors were escorted off mountains like Loon by ski patrols when they dared to enjoy the same slopes the skiers were on. One of the people most responsible for this evolution is Paul Graves of Dublin.
“No matter how many times I got escorted off the slopes or got a rejection letter about staging an event, I knew that this was going to be big,” Graves said in his living room. “I knew it was going to be in the Olympics someday.”
However, describing how he got started, Graves said, “I stumbled upon it — literally — as a boy.”
In 1961, Graves was 10 years old and living in Alabama when his father was transferred to a job in New Jersey. When a school friend asked Graves to go sledding, his friend’s father “told me to go into their garage and grab something to slide on. I grabbed a single cross-country ski. I didn’t know any better.”
Graves spent the day gliding down the hill, standing up with both feet on the lone ski.
“Eventually of course, other kids wanted to try it,” he said.
On Christmas Day 1965, Sherm Poppen of Muskegon, Mich., took his children sliding down a hill on two skis that he had nailed together with a crossbar. According to The New York Times, after receiving a patent for the “Snurfer” in 1968, he licensed the manufacturing rights later that year to the Brunswick Corporation.
Graves was still going down hills on his lone ski, but was tweaking it here and there for performance. This required more skill than doing so on two skis, skill that impressed Brunswick enough that the firm named Graves their pro rider of the Snurfer.
“There was a Brunswick executive that lived near me in Jersey. I was never shy about approaching someone, and I believe that cracked the door,” said Graves. “Even then Snurfer was happy being a ‘snow toy’ while I was perceiving it as an alternative to skiing. It was my idea to start approaching ski areas in Jersey and Connecticut at first and then branching out as my skills progressed.”
“I just knew this was going to be the biggest thing in winter sports,” said Graves, but he had a problem with one aspect of the concept. “It was being marketed as a winter toy. It had to be considered differently.”
On his own, he was making various changes to his own creation, which was a board longer and wider, and he knew that helping his feet stay on the board would lead to a different riding experience.
“Initially, I think I had sandpaper on the board to ‘keep’ my feet on it. Eventually, in the ’70s I took a belt of mine and added straps for the feet.”
Graves knew he was onto something more than a “toy,” but ski slopes were a problem for these early snowboarders.
“We were escorted off a lot of mountains,” Graves recalled. “Bromley, Okemo, Mt. Snow, Killington, Mammoth — I couldn’t name them all.”
He pointed out that many ski areas were on state land, however, so he and others who had gotten the bug couldn’t be prevented from hiking up the mountains.
“Then when we’d head down, though, the ski patrols would be on us. But this was starting to get attention,” he said.
Others who had cottoned to the idea of going downhill on one less board included Tom Sims, a skateboarder and surfer from California. Jake Burton, another snurfing enthusiast, relocated to Vermont and began working with Graves. The attention that Graves was getting included some from the Labatt Brewing Company in Canada. In the late 1970s, the beer maker decided that snowboarding would be a good marketing tool.
“They flew us up to Banff in Alberta, Canada, for a two-week shoot of a TV commercial featuring snowboarding,” he said.
Graves still has the paycheck stubs from the royalty checks he received from those ads.
“I actually had to join the Screen Actors Guild,” said Graves. “My dad had trouble making sense of anything I was doing with snurfing until the royalty checks started rolling in from the commercial. That was probably the first time he realized that I might be on to something.”
During that decade, snurfing exploded to the point that Graves and others created the National Snurfing Association, which even had a newsletter. Back in Muskegon, in 1979, snurfers from all over gathered at a Muskegon Community College winter party for a national freestyle event. The newsletter got the word out, with Graves explaining, “If you snurfed, you knew about it!”
Burton knew about it and showed up with his first Burton board — of his design — and was denied entry. By now, Graves had a sponsor, the Jem Corp., which had purchased some of the snurfer licensing from Brunswick, and Jem Corp. didn’t want Burton to compete with his own prototype board. Graves went against his sponsor, pushed for Burton to be included, and he won his division.
“Up through 1978, the snurfer championship was just a local college beer fest featuring snurfers and a few lunch trays on a hill. It changed in a big way in 1979 due to a location change and the introduction of freestyle and inclusion of outside competitors, namely Jake and me.”
Jem Corp. then hired Graves to introduce a new line of the product and promote it via exhibitions at ski areas. New Haven, Conn., where Graves and his wife Denise were living at the time, was not known as a winter sports mecca, so they moved to Woodstock, Vt. There, Graves opened the first shop dedicated to this endeavor at Mount Tom — “Snowboard East.”
Having relocated to Vermont, “I had to educate the public about it — give exhibitions, lectures and the like. The Woodstock Recreation Department was a big help,” said Graves. “I had the idea of a national championship, and contacted ABC and NBC — there was no ESPN then — and sought sponsors. Coca-Cola was one. Sports Illustrated sent a reporter.”
Graves promoted the event and had his own team competing. One sign they were making it up as they went along was that, on the course, they turned a kitchen table upside down so the legs became a starting gate, but a corner had been turned.
“After years of networking and endless promotion, I received a letter on Sept. 2, 1981, that changed everything,” said Graves. “The revolution was about to start, and winter sports would usher in a new way to enjoy mountain slopes around the world.”
That letter started his path to the center of the tent. The Woodstock Recreation Department announced that in cooperation with Graves’ Snowboard East operation, it was planning to initiate and organize the National Snow Surfing Championships as part of a winter carnival the following February.
“I’d been waiting for this for a long time,” said Graves. “I was already telling people that this was going to be a competition in the Olympics, but nobody was believing me.”
