Watch Your Words

I ran across this article about US Olympic snowboarder, Shaun White. The story of how he decided to get into the sport is interesting.


TURIN, Italy — Snowboarding — and the U.S. Olympic team — may owe a debt to a bossy soccer mom in Southern California.

Shaun White, the free-spirited U.S. snowboarder favored to win gold, says he was a pretty good soccer player but gave up the sport mostly “because of the soccer moms. ... It was just intense to me.”

To hear White tell it, he was one of the best players on his rec team in Carlsbad, north of San Diego, when he was about 11 years old, but showed up late for a game one day because he had stayed too long at a skateboarding demonstration.

That’s when he got an earful from the mother of a teammate.

“This mom snapped on me,” White recalled Monday at a news conference with the rest of the U.S. halfpipe team. “She said, ‘You get out there, and you score!’ And I was just like, ‘Whoa!’ When someone else’s mom yells at you, it’s pretty intimidating.”

White by then was already entering amateur skateboarding competitions and got his first sponsorship deal at age 13. Now, at age 19, the snowboarder known as “The Flying Tomato” for his unruly mane of red hair is one of the Americans hoping for another U.S. podium sweep in Turin on Sunday.