X-treme values.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: Rundles Wrap-up

I HAVE A TEENAGE SON, AND LIKE MOST PEOPLE OF HIS generation he likes to push the limits.

My wife and I have noticed that in the last couple of years he has sometimes come home from snowboarding early because a friend he went with fell and got a concussion.

One of these friends had to be taken back to Denver in an ambulance and, while he has recovered, it was recommended that he no longer snowboard. It hasn't deterred my son at all, the other kid was just unlucky.

Then, over the holidays, I ran into a woman I hadn't seen in a while, and she told me the sad tale of her snowboarding son who somehow ran into a tree, suffering a serious head injury. He'll be OK eventually, she said, but in spite of wearing a helmet, he'll be recuperating for several months.

And just last night at a high school basketball game I ran into a couple I have known for nearly 20 years, and they recounted how their 21-year-old son didn't come to the game because he had just gotten a concussion--snowboarding.

My wife and I recollected all these tales and tried to think back to our own younger days, and we couldn't think of anyone we knew back then who suffered a head injury skiing. We went up to the mountains all the time; we even thought we were a little bolder than our parents. Yet about the only thing that happened over many, many years was the occasional broken leg.

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So what's the difference? Is snowboarding inherently more dangerous than skiing?

The answer is no. The only difference is a cultural influence.

My role model for skiing was Jean-Claude Killy, who was the star of the 1968 Winter Olympics, winning several gold medals in skiing--regular skiing. My son watches the X Games, and thinks nothing of attempting jumps and flips. Just going downhill doesn't do anymore; no, now if we don't get a little crazy, catch some major air, come close to killing ourselves, then it was just another boring afternoon on the slopes. Ho-hum ....

Everything is in the extreme these days. The champion skier Bode Miller, who will represent the United States in this month's Winter Olympics, recently admitted he often competes hung over to the point of being drunk, and he refused to say he wouldn't repeat the stunt. He said skiing drunk is "not easy," so I guess it heightens the extreme nature of the experience.

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What's all this have to do with business? Unfortunately too much.

I...