It’s a pretty safe bet Rodney Dangerfield never set foot on a snowboard. That pretty much leaves Steve Fisher as the guy who gets the least respect for what he has accomplished in the sport.
Fisher, 24, recently added another bullet point to his riding résumé when he upstaged and upset Olympic superpipe gold medalist Shaun “The Flying Tomato” White 10 days ago at Winter X Games 11, the sport’s biggest annual showcase. Combined with his X Games gold in 2004, the Breckenridge local originally from St. Louis Park, Minn., became only the second two-time winner of the event, along with White (who won in 2003 and 2006). And although he always knew he had the skills, even Fisher wasn’t sure if the achievement was attainable.
“He told me he didn’t think ESPN would let him win,” snowboarder-X gold medalist Nate Holland of California said about the subjective superpipe discipline in which riders are judged on overall impression. “Then he made ketchup out of the Flying Tomato.”
Fisher’s paranoia at this year’s X Games was not entirely unwarranted. After winning the marquee event at Winter X at age 21, he let the pressure of defending the title get the best of him, finishing dead last among the field of 20 riders in 2005. Never mind that no snowboard superpipe gold medalist has repeated as Winter X champion in consecutive years, Fisher says he wasn’t even invited to compete last winter because X Games organizers “forgot.”
“They told my coaches on the U.S. (Snowboard) Team that it ‘just slipped our minds,”‘ Fisher said. “But instead of adding me to the start list, they decided to make me qualify. I was too stressed on qualifying to do anything in competition.”
White, meanwhile, attained the celebrity status typically reserved for rock stars after winning 11 consecutive snowboard contests last winter. Tied for the most gold medals ever won at Winter X (six), the 20-year-old from Carlsbad, Calif., serves as the event’s strongest promotional tool, regularly appearing in television spots for the ESPN-produced event, the only contest he has entered all season.
Given that Fisher’s 2004 win at Winter X came after White dropped out of competition because of a knee injury, conspiracy theory over potentially generous judging awarded this year to the most popular rider at the unsanctioned event wasn’t much of a stretch. It wasn’t until White sketched a landing on his final pass through the pipe that Fisher earned his due.
“People were saying that I would never win again if Shaun was present,” Fisher said. “They were saying it was a fluke that I ever won an event, period.”
Although Fisher’s results – including two second-place finishes at the U.S. Open and victories on every major snowboarding tour dating to the FIS Junior World Championships in 2002 – speak for themselves, he still found himself hearing the question “Why aren’t you winning anymore?” more often than he wanted to. He left some long-standing sponsorship contracts this season and signed new agreements with Sims Snowboards and Giro helmets and goggles before answering that question on his own terms.
“I don’t think my riding ever got any worse. I just had a lot of expectations from a lot of other people,” said Fisher, who bookended his X Games gold with wins at the Paul Mitchell Progression Session in December and the U.S. Snowboard Grand Prix at Mount Bachelor, Ore., last weekend. “But I think the reason I’m winning now is because I bought a snowmobile last year and spent from February to the end of the season out in the backcountry. I didn’t even touch a halfpipe. Now I’m just having a lot more fun than I did in the previous couple years.”
Fisher appears poised to move beyond the prevailing hype and trappings of professional snowboarding and embrace the activity in its entirety. With support from a core group of friends that includes U.S. Snowboarding team members Gretchen Bleiler, Tommy Czeschin and Tricia Byrnes, he has a new attitude, and, just maybe, even some new respect.
“I don’t think it’s really about proving yourself or anything,” Fisher said. “I just do it for me. I don’t care if anybody says it’s not good enough for them.”
Staff writer Scott Willoughbycan be reached at 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.
