There certainly have been pro players who have had their careers shortened or ended by accidents on the snow—a fact that Elevation Outdoors Editor and Boston-phile Doug Schnitzspahn can support with the evidence of former Red Sox pitching star James “Gentleman Jim” Lonborg who blew out his knee skiing in the ’60s and never was the same again. Or who the macabre might want to bolster with a mention of Michael Kennedy, who tried to mix football and skiing on the slopes of Aspen with tragic results, as a post-pattern play down the mountain led him directly into the unyielding defense of a spruce.
But the truth is that football and skiing have always gone hand-in-hand in this state. Like magic seasons intertwined, from that first golden light of September until the lifts start to turn, then through Thanksgiving (one of football’s two private holidays, along with New Year’s Day). Through Christmas and into January until the Super Bowl is passing by, and the pigskin season is always suddenly over in a blink, and the TV is finally shut off (at least until the Stanley Cup Finals), and all there is left to do is hit the slopes.
It’s like two freedoms following each other, the deep relief of the crisp fall air that seems to hit you somewhere in your gut. And then the empty joy of gravity as you go speeding down the mountain with all that giddy adrenaline of motion blowing through your chest. I imagine that in cities like Pittsburgh or Green Bay or Buffalo, that when football season ends, depression season starts, and winter feels the darkest. That there is little to do but start drinking heavily and hibernating, while looking for Super Saver fares to Acapulco and Key West.
But here in the mountains, football and skiing just seem to wind together, with only the short months of summer to really separate one season from the next. Jeremy Bloom certainly knew how to merge the two sports into one long adventure, returning punts for the CU Buffs while the leaves turned, and becoming three-time world champion in freestyle moguls skiing once the mountains had turned white. And Steamboat Springs’ own Skeeter Werner, the sister of Buddy Werner—one of America’s greatest skiers and the first non-European to ever win Austria’s Hahnenkamm—married Doak Walker after first teaching him how to ski, wedding Colorado’s parallel worlds of gridiron punch and alpine arc.
Walker had a Hall of Fame career in the NFL, and in college football the “Doak Walker Award” is given to the best running back each year. That when he died in 1998 at the age of 71, it was because of injuries suffered while skiing, only makes sense. You would think at that age that no one would take a tackle anymore. And out of the two sports he loved so dearly, if there was going to be another injury it seemed the most likely that it would happen on the slopes.
Which I guess is where the two sports finally part. The way that skiers ski forever, but football players all retire. It seems you can fall downhill all your life, but there are only so many good years where you can collide across a line of scrimmage, blitzing and sacking and throwing bombs, and busting your buddies in the mouth. And while I can’t imagine ever playing another Blood Bowl, I absolutely cannot wait for another ski season to start.
Read more Peter Kray at shredwhiteandblue.com.
