What happens when the story you came to write doesn’t become the story anymore? What happens when that story does a 180-degree turn in mid-air, then a 540 and finally a dizzying 1260, spinning your perception completely around?
I had heard Shaun White had become too big for his snowboard bindings. He didn’t hang with other members of the close-knit Team USA community. His “people” shut down halfpipes at ski resorts so White could ride by himself. He wasn’t the cool kid we once called the Flying Tomato anymore, a thatch of reddish-orange hair rising 22 feet off a wall of ice.
No, he was now the Descending Diva — S.W.E., Shaun White Enterprises, the $15-mil-per-year action sports icon — the world’s richest, most famous and now most isolated extreme star.
He needed to be put back in place, I thought. He needed to remember the, well, dudeliness that got him here.
Then the story forked. Maybe I should explain.