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Exclusions and more terms apply. This is Nikki Glaser from the Nikki Glaser podcast. On a more serious note, I'm still thinking about that commercial with Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg hating on each other. Because when you listen to the reasons for hating someone or something, you realize just how stupid they really are. There is too much hate in this country, and it's got to stop. So join us at iHeart in standing up to it. If you see hate, speak up.
Call it out. And you can learn more by following at What's Up With Hate. And we continue with our American stories. The sport of snowboarding skyrocketed when a young East Coast college graduate made some innovative designs that have lasted to this very day. Here's Greg Hengler to tell us the story of Jake Burton and the sport that became a worldwide phenomenon. Sean White for the gold.
Oh my lord. How perfect can you possibly land? Double McTwist 12-60. Sean White one more hit. Will it be enough?
Frontside 12. Perfect. That is the run that he needed, and he put it down.
Oh! Sean White takes the gold. Snowboarding is now a well-established sport and has come in leaps and bounds.
White is the new gold. With its own culture, superstars, and equipment, competitions and events have become international staples. Snowboarding has evolved into different styles, including alpine racing, freestyle, freeriding, backcountry, and more. But where did it all begin? It began in 1965 with the Snurfer. The Snurfer was invented by a Muskegon, Michigan engineer named Sherman Poppin. This contraption was a mono-ski. Two skis strapped together and ridden with both feet facing forward in the direction in which you are traveling. Like a skateboard or a surfboard, it had no binding. And like a sled, it had a rope attached to the nose to help with the steering. Ironically, skateboarding was birthed in a similar spirit when in the 1950s, kids attached roller skate wheels to small boards that they steered by shifting their weight.
Here's Sherman Poppin discussing the birth of his Snurfer. I developed the Snurfer on Christmas Day, 1965, as a toy for my kids. And the motivation was, I lived on a shore like Michigan and always wished I could surf, but we never really had good waves. Anyway, I had these old Kresge skis and I put them together and we started riding perpendicular to the direction of travel, which is part of the patent. And it turned out that it was an absolute blast. And my wife watched us through the window and she said, you know, that is really a fun thing. And that night, she dreamed up the name Snurfer, which is a contraction of the word snow and surf. It was my dad who was out playing with us in the dunes who put the tether on. He'd fall down and the board would go down the hill. It was stupid.
And I said, I agree. So the tether got on. Two purposes. One, you could just hang on to it so you wouldn't lose the board when you fell off. The other thing was you could sort of pull on it and swing it and literally steer.
The motion is exactly the same as riding the board today. Poppin patented the Snurfer in 1966, and in February 1968, he began holding snow surfing competitions at a Michigan ski resort every winter that attracted enthusiasts from all over the country. A year after Poppin patented the Snurfer in Cedarhurst, New York, the life of 13-year-old Jake Burton Carpenter started to unravel. Jake's older brother George was killed in Vietnam. And a few years later, his mother died as well. Jake even ended up getting expelled from his boarding school.
Here's Jake Burton. I mean, I was a wife when I was young and to a fault. And when I got kicked out of Brooks was a school and I went up to see the headmaster who was a headmaster when my father was there and when my brother was there. It was brutal. I mean, my dad made me get in the car, go five hours, see this guy, you know, for a five-minute conversation, and then a long drive home. And that is when I decided to turn my life around and start applying myself to whatever the hell I needed.
Beautiful morning. In 1968, the 14-year-old Burton was one of the thousands of kids who purchased a Snurfer for 10 bucks and was hooked. It became such an obsession that the 10 years and 100 prototypes later, Jake Burton Carpenter produced the Burton Backhill, one of the first snowboards he built with his saber saw out of his apartment on the Upper East Side of New York City. As for the name of his board, Jake figured Burton was a better brand name than Carpenter. Fresh out of college with a degree in economics from NYU, Jake traveled with his snowboard creations to Poppins National Snurfing Championship in Muskegon, Michigan in 1979. There were protests about Jake entering a non-snurfer board, so a modified open division was created and was won by Jake as the sole entrant. That race was considered the first competition for snowboards and is the start of what we now know as competitive snowboarding.
Here's Poppins. When we had our contests, the college kids were, this is sort of like the hoolie hoop of one college kids, they just took it over. Because it would run on one or two, three inches of snow. And there's a little ski area in Michigan north of Grand Rapids called Pando. And Pando let us have one off-beat chair for five hours when we run our contests in downhill and slalom. And that's the way it was. And in 1979, 14 years later, Jake showed up at one of our downhill slalom things. And he had snurfers, but he put a little piece of inner tube over to slip your sorrel under. That's how it all got started.
That was the beginning. And he and on the east coast and Tom Sims on the west coast were developing them at the same time. In an interview with Snowboarder Magazine, Burton paid full respect to his west coast competition stating, without Tom Sims to compete with in every sense and vice versa, snowboarding wouldn't be where it is today.
Here's Jake Burton being interviewed in 1980. How'd you get into it? Well, a company called Brunswick Corporation used to make something called a snurfer a long time ago.
And I rode those for about the last ten years and nobody really improved it. And living back east and just sort of getting flustered with that particular board, I just decided to start making something on my own. In 1977, when Burton began making his own boards, he thought he would get rich quickly. He opened Burton Boards in southern Vermont. He had a logo contest and his sister-in-law won five bucks for coming up with a mountain logo that Burton still uses to this very day. Here's what Burton told Inc. Magazine.
I don't know if I really understood supply and demand. People were like, a skateboard for the snow? I was a punky kid and my dad, who was always in my corner, said that I never finished anything. That was it.
I wanted to prove him wrong. But in the second year of Burton's snowboarding company, things went from bad to worse. Here's Burton. I mean, I was like Willy Loman and I was a traveling salesman and I would load up my car. It was a Volvo wagon at the time and I remember once going out with 38 snowboards and I drove around New York State and visited dealers and I went out with 38 and I came home with 40.
Because one guy had given me two back. Burton decided to stop worrying about immediate profitability and focused instead on cultivating the sport of snowboarding itself. In 1991, he began sponsoring the world's best snowboarders.
And like the Steinway Piano Company, who uses the feedback from sponsored pianists to improve their product, Burton demanded honest feedback from his sponsored athletes in order to better his design. Burton also began marketing his sport to the ski resorts, who were almost unanimous in blacklisting the snowboard from its slopes. And you've been listening to Greg Hengler and you've been hearing from Jake Burton himself telling the story of this sport called snowboarding, which started with Burton just while making the boards himself, Burton Boards, and then trying to sell them and having a hard time. So instead, he sold the sport, cultivated critics, adoption, and ultimately worldwide use. But so far as we're hearing in the story, times were tough.
He resorts, blacklisted snowboarding, and well, he was having a hard time traveling around the country, selling them out of his car. When we come back, more of the story of Jake Burton. It's also a heck of an American dreamer story.
The story of Jake Burton continues here on Our American Story. Hi, it's Jenny Garth. We all know the importance of taking care of our physical and mental health, but what about our sexual health? I've been there feeling totally stuck when it comes to my libido. That's why I started taking Addy.
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Visit addyi.com to learn more about Addy. This is Nikki Glaser from the Nikki Glaser podcast. On a more serious note, I'm still thinking about that commercial with Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg hating on each other, because when you listen to the reasons for hating someone or something, you realize just how stupid they really are. There is too much hate in this country, and it's got to stop. So join us at iHeart and standing up to it. If you see hate, speak up.
Call it out. And you can learn more by following at What's Up with Hate. Today's podcast is brought to you by Ferguson Home. Whether you're a homeowner working on a remodel or a pro managing multiple projects, Ferguson Home is where great ideas become stunning spaces. My wife and I know firsthand, because Ferguson Home was by our side when we built our beautiful house. All of our indoor and outdoor kitchen appliances, most of our kitchen and bathroom hardware came from Ferguson Home. They have the best selection of kitchen, bath, and lighting products, all of which you can find online, or you can visit a local Ferguson Home showroom like we did and get one-on-one support from their amazing consultants who are there for us with their expert advice and support. They'll be there for you, too.
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Call 562-314-4603 for details. And we continue with our American stories. The last segment ended with Jake Burton's decision to put his product, the Snowboard, on pause. And focus instead on cultivating the sport itself.
Let's return to our own Greg Hengler. Here's Steve Hayes, Burton team rider from 1984 to 1995. One of the key things I think that besides Burton and going from resort to resort.
And working with the marketing managers and general managers of the resorts. Actually Eastern Edge was one of the magazines here that had a blacklist. And they would put every resort that didn't allow snowboarding on the blacklist.
Here's editor of Snowboarder magazine, Pat Bridges. Skiing and snowboarding in the 80's, it was a scary place. Lawyers ruled the day. And introducing something new to that environment was not welcome. And he took it upon himself as a challenge. And he literally did the leg work, went door to door and sold our sport.
Granted you could question the motivations and be like, yeah well he's motivated by money, he wants to grow the sport, this, that, and the other thing. Well regardless of his motivations, 20 years later there's 10 million snowboarders in the United States who reap the benefits of that. The daunting task of selling the sport of snowboarding to the ski resort gatekeepers cannot be exaggerated.
Here's a news report from 1985 exemplifying the Herculean task Burton was up against. This is what all the fuss is about. It's like snow surfing. It's been around for almost a decade in the United States and now it's becoming the trendy thing to do on our local ski slopes. But the operators of the hills want them off. The skiers, we try and keep them separated, but the snowboards come down the slopes and they'll go right in between the skiers and we'll kick them off and they'll just lip us off. And they're dangerous because if one of these skateboards or ski boards, whatever they're called, hit a person, they'd break their leg because they're just like a missile. And most of them have no brakes on them. So nobody is allowing them on any of the mountains around.
But where there's a will, there's always a way. Ski hill operators refuse to let anyone with a snowboard onto the chairlift. So they have to hike to the top of the mountain and then find a secluded ski trail where they won't get caught.
The ski patrol says it's got its hands full. Quite a lot of them are uncooperative, smart alecks. You know, you go up and approach them in a very calm, collect manner and they tend to lip you off. You ask them very nicely to leave, that they're endangering the public and possibly themselves.
And they swear at you, they tell you to get lost, mind your own business. So it's quite a problem for us, really. Do you see any compromise in the future at all?
No, no. Skiing is becoming more and more popular and if these boards become more and more popular, there's going to be more hassles, more confrontation. So we just like to say that we don't want them at all. Contrary to what ski patrol officers said, the ski industry was declining. It would be Jake Burton who would open both the chairlifts to the snowboarding community while simultaneously rescuing a flailing ski industry that was dead set on destroying the sport he founded. One by one, the number of ski resorts blacklisting snowboarders got shorter.
Here again is Steve Hayes and Jake Burton. Over time, marketing managers said, you know, I believe Killington was one of the last holdouts in Vermont to allow snowboarding and Killington marketing managers saw the name on a blacklist and they were like, geez, we can't have that. And actually as the sport started to grow, the bottom line was these general managers could not be turning away dollars. There was a little bit of a slump in the ski industry and this was one answer to fill in some of the voids that those guys were looking for extra revenue. So it was very, you know, it took a while before we got onto resorts and that was clearly a huge, you know, move in terms of growing the whole thing and sort of making it bigger.
But it took a long time just to get there. As the sport grew, so did Burton's company. Burton has been one of the world's largest snowboard and snowboarding equipment manufacturers since the late 1980s. And Burton remains the pinnacle of sponsorship for snowboarders. Here's professional snowboarder Trevor Andrew. Oh, Jake is the man. Like, he's one of the realest people, you know. The riders to him, it seems like have always, he's just considered them family.
He's just since day one, you know, he's not the typical, like, owner of a huge company like that that you would expect, you know. He totally is like riding with you and just as stoked as everybody else about it. In 1998, less than a decade after Time magazine called snowboarding the worst new sport, the International Olympic Committee sought it and the youthful audience it promised. Thanks to Burton, snowboarding is now one of the most watched events at the Winter Olympics.
Here's professional snowboarder and Olympic gold and silver medalist Hannah Teter. He just wants the best product and that's what we all want, you know. That's why Burton's like the rider driven company because they're all about input from us, you know.
They want it to look good but they want it to function more so. It's nice to have a boss like that. Not many people get nice bosses but we do.
Here's three time Olympic gold medalist Sean White. I don't know, I've never really felt like he was a boss ever, I don't know. It's been one of those things where he's just like, especially, I don't know if you've met him or not but he's just like this really mellow fun guy.
I think the first thing when we were hanging out he made some joke about what some woman was wearing, you know what I mean. And I was so blown away by it that it caught me so off guard, like this guy rules, like he's all time. Much has progressed since Burton initiated improvements to the snurfer but the raw authenticity that formed the heart of the sport still remains. Here's Burton. Nobody's stopping snowboarders from looking like NASCAR drivers and putting patches all over them and selling to everybody. I mean that's not what people want to see and that's kind of good. I mean there is this sort of sense of cooth that's associated with I think all board sports that we don't want to lose. And I think that that might keep things down a little bit, a little bit smaller.
Hopefully it'll just sort of keep it seen. During his long tenure as one of snowboarding's true patriarchs, Jake's net worth is upwards of $100 million. Ten years after Jake founded Burton Snowboards, fewer than 7% of ski resorts even allowed snowboarding.
But today it's hard to find one that doesn't. Burton's Burlington, Vermont company, which he co-owns with his wife Donna, remains the industry leader with five international offices and 845 employees. Not even Burton himself could have predicted this much success. I had no idea that what would happen with snowboarding. I mean I saw a sport but I did not see Shaun White on the cover of Rolling Stone twice or snowboarding me in the Olympics or the stuff that's happened. And it's been the athletes that have made it happen and we've facilitated it but it's been exceeded.
I wouldn't even say dreams because I never dreamt anything on the level that we're on now. And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And you are hearing Jake Burton's voice. He passed in 2019 but his legacy lives on. And what he had done was essentially create his own sport by merely adopting and improving the snurfer. And then there was just that passion to see the thing happen. It was more than money. It was more than a dream even. In the end it was obstinance and just a grit and a determination to see this sport happen. As Jake Burton said, I saw a sport. What I didn't see was Shaun White on the cover of Rolling Stone twice or snowboarding being an Olympic sport. Only in America sometimes can we not even dream the dreams that become our life.
The story of Jake Burton here on Our American Stories. Ever wake up feeling lousy knowing something is off with your body? You don't have time for guesswork. You need Viome. Forget all the generic health fads. Viome doesn't tell you what you want to hear. It tells you what's actually going on inside your body. By analyzing your gut microbiome, Viome delivers a custom health plan that's as unique as your DNA. It's science, not nonsense. Want energy? What better digestion?
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