| Tuba, Stink Bugs, Ancient Greek Logicians, and other Musings with John Symms |
By Joshua N. Wisenthal
JWISE: Tell me about your pre-superstar ski career life story. What was childhood like for John Symms?
JS: I grew up on a farm which is something I recommend to every child, born or un-. My parents’ house is an easy walk from orchards of apple, peach, cherry, and pear trees, and grape vineyards. I still miss that every summer I spend away from home. I played a lot of sports. I was really into baseball, but I quit in high school because the baseball season conflicted with the ski season. I was also really into music. I was high school band president, first-chair tuba in marching band and wind ensemble, and first-chair saxophone in the jazz band. All band all the time. Obviously I was the coolest kid (biggest nerd?) in the whole high school.
JWISE: What are your ski roots? Where did you learn? Did you compete?
JS: My mom was a ski racer from her childhood all the way through college. Ever since I was a little kid, she was a ski instructor at Bogus Basin, right next to Boise, Idaho. She always brought me up to the hill with her when she had to work, so I learned how to ski really young, age 4 I think. Then my mom started me ski racing when I was about 9. She was always really tough on me to be a better skier. And she would often practically give me lessons. It was pretty frustrating for me at times, but I’m convinced that I’m a much better skier now because of it, and so I’m quite thankful for all the coaching she gave me. Everything else is the generic freeskier story: I was an okay racer, but an underachiever because my friend Mike Derbidge and I were chronically skipping training to go and jump off of cliffs or build jumps out of bounds. Then the day after my best race ever, I decided that I wanted to quit racing (much to the dismay of my parents) and start doing things like the US Freeskiing Open. So I started doing that and a few other smaller contests around Mt. Hood and Mt. Bachelor. I never had a park in Idaho though, so I wasn’t ever very well prepared for the contests.
The year I graduated from high school, I moved to Mt. Hood and washed dishes to ski for the summer. That was a good snow year, so the public pipe was good, and Windell’s let me into their lane a time or two. So I got a lot of excellent training that summer and then moved to Salt Lake and trained at Park City for the whole winter. So that year I was prepared like I had never been before, which brings us to our next question.
JWISE: When you broke into the scene, did you envision being a competition skier or a backcountry soul rider?
JS: The year I broke into the scene, I was definitely all about contests. I had spent my whole youth hiking and building jumps and I was really excited to have access to Park City’s park all the time. I was learning new tricks all the time then too, so I just couldn’t wait to get back into the park and keep learning more. As for envisioning things, I just envisioned myself as being a pro by whatever means necessary, and contests looked to me like they were my best shot at making that happen. Consequently, that’s what I was all about at the beginning.
JWISE: How did your life change post-US Open success?
JS: My life changed very drastically after my success at the US Open. Really, it was going to change no matter what. That year was my first year in college, and I had decided that I was either going to make something happen that year or just chill out, ski for fun, and focus on doing well in college.
In fact, I wasn’t even planning on going to the US Open that year. After a few years of not doing very well, and because of a feeling that the judging at the Open was not very fair (feeling like there was no point in going if the judges weren’t going to be “looking out” for my runs), I had decided to skip it. It wasn’t until I made it into the X-Games at the X-Qualifiers (wasn’t that contest great? I wish that they still did that) that Tag Kleiner from Smith got me a spot and convinced me to go. It’s all from serendipity, or something like that.
Anyway, how did my life change? I got sponsored head to toe, and I only had gotten free goggles before that. I got invited to invitational contests, which had never happened before. People wanted to film with me. And I finally had all the excuse I needed for putting school on the back burner and really focusing on skiing. Everything was totally kicking ass way better than I had ever hoped that things would kick ass. That was the best year of my life by a long shot. I still get a warm, tingly feeling sometimes when I think about that year and what a rush it was. Wow.
JWISE: Filming with Poor Boyz for RFA must have been a huge rush. Did Johnny D. force you to do the double stink bug?
JS: I wasn’t really on the radar until about halfway through the season, so I hadn’t made any plans with Johnny to film with him that season. And most of the shots that I got in the movie were shots I had gotten filming with Justin Loeloff before Johnny’s movie was even on the horizon.
The real rush was learning that I was really going to be in one of Johnny’s movies. Those were the movies I always watched and analyzed while growing up. I always told my friends I would be in one someday, but I also always thought that I was talking shit when I said that. So even when Johnny started talking to me about filming, I figured it would be for the credits or something like that.
Johnny didn’t force me to do the double stink-bug grab. I did it to be original, and I thought it was cool. Brandon Becker, Tommy Ellingson, Seth Warner and I were trying to do new, different grabs all summer, and that was one of them. I’m stoked that Johnny put it in the movie, because I was doing those all the time, and I thought they were cool.
JWISE: But isn’t that trick just a poorly executed truck driver??
JS: No way. We were doing that grab way before the X-Games made the double grab the new single grab. That was also before it was decreed that grabbing would only be used as a technique for proving that you could reach out farther than anybody else could. When we were doing grabs like that, we thought that being compact in the air looked cool (I swear to God, people used to think that compact looked cool). We were trying to do something cool and different, and somehow a bend-over-and-grab-your-ankles position with slightly spread legs, locked knees and an abruptly protruding ass didn’t ever occur to us (I have no idea how, it must have just slipped our minds). So I was actually trying to grab close to my bindings (and trying to grab the inside edges of my skis) when I did the double stink bug (refer to Shanghai Six for further evidence that I do in fact do that grab on purpose).
JWISE: You tore up your knee and took a season off. What were the circumstances, and how did you prepare yourself for a triumphant return?
JS: Remember that huge jump on which Mike Wilson did about a million different variations of a rodeo 5? I tried to hit that jump, and it was the scariest thing I ever did. My heart was fucking pounding looking at it, and I really should have just not done it. But I felt like I had to prove myself and bullshit like that. So I hit it and came up just barely on the knuckle and *POP*.
To prepare myself for a return, I worked out obsessively. I also rode my bike – the Panasonic Blue Streak, a bike my grandmother gave me, which has been stolen twice and recovered both times – everywhere I went. I got into what was easily the best shape of my whole life. And I thought about skiing all the time. People claim that that makes you better at whatever it is you’re thinking about.
JWISE: Did you seek advice from any other pros who had faced similar problems, like Skogen Sprang for example?
JS: Not really. Julien Regnier gave me some advice about it. It was something like “oh my god, stop being such a pussy.” Fairly good advice, I guess.
JWISE: How did your sponsors react to this situation?
JS: My sponsors were pretty supportive; more supportive than I expected them to be, anyway. Calling each of them up was really scary. But they all kept me, so everything turned out okay.
JWISE: How do you feel about corporate sponsorship of individual skiers, namely Simon Dumont with Target or TJ Schiller with Paul Mitchell?
JS: It’s great. It means that skiing is becoming “cool” in the mainstream sense (and I always wanted to be “cool” in the mainstream sense, and could never pull it off, but now guys like Simon are helping me to live my lifelong dream of being cool), which means that promising young skiers can realistically hope to make a good living out of skiing if they stick with it and succeed. A lot of people might argue that it’s “selling out.” But most of the time, I think that “selling out” is a dysphemism jealous people use to mean “cashing in.”
JWISE: What brought about your change from Orage to DNA?
JS: Orage dropped me. Jon Atencio from Scott USA got me together with Ryan Westenskow and all the other good people at DNA and they signed me up. And everything’s been a real bowl of cherries ever since.
JWISE: What about the travel aspect of the sport? Are you able to balance your athletic pursuits with any steady relationships?
JS: Travel is my favorite part of this whole thing by far. Skiing has taken me to a lot of places I may have never gone otherwise. It does have its drawbacks though. Being gone for the entire winter every year makes it tough to have a normal life with solid friends and important shit like that.
I’m really lucky though. My girlfriend Laura has stayed with me even though I’m gone half the time. And she keeps the guilt-tripping to a minimum. So I’m able to balance my ski habits with steady relationships, but it’s mostly thanks to Laura.
JWISE: What advice would you give to an aspiring pro skier about maintaining a healthy love life?
JS: Use your dull wits and excellent luck to stumble onto a great girl. The rest should work itself out.
JWISE: How does education fit into the equation ( ed note: solid play on words right there) for you? Do you ever use your knowledge of the Pythagorean Theorem to calculate jump distances?
JS: I wrote an article about exactly that for WeSki (Julien’s magazine) last winter. Other than that, I don’t think so. Really the most notable thing that my knowledge of math has ever really done for me is make me a bigger dork than most people in your average random sampling of people.
JWISE: Where do you see yourself working in the future? Is there room for a mathematician in the ski industry?
JS: I don’t know. Is there? All you ski industry wizards out there: if there is, please call, me. I ought to be ready to work a few years from now.
JWISE: Who deserves a thank you in this world?
JS: Mom and Dad and my entire family, for all the usual reasons; Laura and all my other good friends, for helping me “balance my athletic pursuits with steady relationships;” Mike Derbidge, for always being a huge badass, and thus pushing me to become the skier I am now; all of my sponsors, past and present (Salomon, Scott, DNA, Park City Mountain Resort, Symms Fruit Ranch, Smith, Orage); Berman and Johnny, for making great ski movies and putting me in them; all the fans; the academy; our distinguished chairperson; Lenny Kravitz; and all the money-making players who have passed beyond this mortal coil, and bravely left us for the great unknown.
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