Sea of Dreams
Around here, the fields unravel in typical prairie patchwork, marked by cattle and barbed-wire fencing.
But this is no flat-state mirage.
Atop his wakeboard, Earl Ball skims the water at an exhilarating 18 miles an hour. Obstacles shoot up from the water around him — ramps and rails and colored buoys. Wearing a pair of saggy board shorts, a helmet and a life vest, Ball zooms forward, carving a path through the supersized flotsam, hitting ramps and flying more than 15 feet in the air, pirouetting in 360-degree spins across the water.
His hands grip a rope tethered to a pulley 30 feet above him, like a ski lift dragging him around the lake.
When the sky-high carousel revolves around to the dock, two more boarders join him, each grabbing his own rope to be flung across the water. As the riders circle, the lake remains placid; it was engineered that way, with a center island that absorbs annoying wakes.
Tanned and pierced spectators have gathered dockside, munching nachos and speaking in coastal dialect. They know the riders by their helmets: Earl Ball in baby blue, Carter Collins in pink, Jason Bleich in black.
Ball and Collins work here, at Kansas City Watersports. Bleich, as usual, just showed up. The trio is here practically every day. This morning, a crane dropped a new obstacle in the lake: a series of ramps forming a Cadillac-sized speed bump and a thin, raised ledge painted with “No Fear” emblems.
Today’s dockside analysis: These dudes are sick. Gonna straight kill it out there, brah.
However improbable it may seem, surf culture has come to Kansas.
The pasture 30 miles south of Kansas City existed in the standard backcountry time warp, far removed and years behind anything happening on the West Coast.
There wasn’t an ocean, so Mike Olson decided to build one.
People thought it was his midlife crisis. In 2002, Olson was nearly 40 and had just sold his shallow-well company, Continental Exploration, which had ranked as the largest crude-oil producer in Missouri and Kansas back in the mid-’90s. The former fuel baron traded his business for a wad of cash.
Then, like he’d done as an oilman, Olson went prospecting. Olson had a vision. He believed that a place’s destiny should not be bound by its geography. He wanted to conquer the perception that cultural shifts start at the coasts and wash inland. He wanted to create a Midwest surfing oasis.
He checked zoning ordinances and land values and average rainfall at plots around Kansas City. He traveled blacktop roads to survey fields filled with livestock. In March 2003, he drove past a giant crater on the eastern side of U.S. Highway 169 near Spring Hill; the land had been excavated a few years earlier to help level an interstate expansion. The oversized dust bowl was just a few miles from Hillsdale State Park. Olson had done his research and figured it was situated perfectly. Second to Cabela’s, the park was the No. 2 statewide tourist stop, having drawn more than 1.6 million people in 2002, says Ed Gray, senior research analyst at the Kansas Department of Commerce.
Olson bought it.
There, he would construct a cable park, a trick heaven for landlocked and motorboatless wakeboarders.
The first such parks sprouted in Germany in the 1960s. The overhead cables pulled water-skiers and knee-boarders in circular laps, and the phenomenon has since boomed in gas-conserving European countries. At least 135 of the parks exist around the world (more than 60 of them in Germany). The concept arrived in the United States in the early 1980s, though skiers, who were used to the maneuverability of motorboats, weren’t thrilled by the monotonous circle jerk.
But the idea gained popularity after a riding revolution in the mid 1980s. That’s when California surfers attached foot straps to their surfboards so they could be towed behind lake boats or, more daringly, far out into the ocean and directly into monster waves. Their boards evolved into a thinner, less buoyant and more durable design similar to a snowboard. The new sport was expensive, though; wakeboarding required, at the very least, access to a motorboat and a large body of water. It was a late bloomer in the extreme-sports family, finally added to the X Games lineup in 1996. Now, even in Kansas City, wakeboards outsell slalom skis by more than 20 to one, says Jen Walton, a buyer at Sitzmark, the metro’s pre-eminent board shop, located near 105th Street and Metcalf in Overland Park.
Mike Olson, who had boarded in his youth, had joined his brother-in-law’s oil business in high school, eventually buying him out — and working straight though the sport’s emergence. After unloading his company, he wasted little time re-creating the feeling of childhood freedom. “I got distracted and woke up one day and realized life was passing me by, and went out and bought a wakeboard,” he says. “It definitely changed my lifestyle and brought it back to where it should have been.”
In late 2002, he took his family to Walt Disney World but ditched the Magic Kingdom and headed to Orlando Watersports Complex, one of the nation’s three cable parks. (There’s another in southern Florida and one in Texas.) OWC had brought the gentrified sport back to basics, offering on-site gear rentals and pay-by-the-hour ride times to make wakeboarding as accessible as, say, bowling.
“I was so overwhelmed by the concept that you could show up and have nothing but a pair of shorts and ride for two hours and leave. I fell in love with the concept,” Olson says.
In November 2002, he dug his newly purchased pit into an 8-acre basin, fed by a 3-acre retention pond. Next to a hole that was now bigger than a football field, he built a wide dock, erected five towers and bought a German cable system. (Internet listings for similar equipment show prices starting at $250,000.)
But Olson’s big, wet dream shriveled. The next summer, Kansas suffered one of the worst droughts in state history. The U.S. Department of Agriculture declared 34 counties disaster areas. The back stretch of Olson’s depression remained dry; the front resembled a dirty toilet bowl. Olson started the cable system anyway, trying to surf the swamp. His father began mailing him newspaper stories about the oil industry, urging him to reconsider.
“It’s a hard concept to describe until you go out and experience it,” Olson says of the park. “Even with the towers up, it was hard to imagine. My wife’s family thought I was insane.”
Olson remembers the day the rain came: March 4, 2004.
“I literally sat down and almost wanted to cry because I finally felt like something was going to happen.” The ground was frozen solid, so the lake rose fast.
For a legion of would-be dry-land surfers, so did expectations.
Though he now dressed in sandals and board shorts, Olson had lost none of his business acumen. KC Watersports had a lucrative foundation: Sponsors that had formerly been forced to advertise inefficiently by outfitting individual boat riders would now have their own stadium for ad placement.
Wakeboard maker Liquid Force hung a banner on the dock and offered some demo gear. Red Bull tossed in a set of logo-embossed bar tables. Sitzmark comped some gear to park employees and offered to sponsor events. Liquid Force, Alliance Wakeboard Magazine and surf-branding powerhouse No Fear would all eventually help fund logo-printed trick apparatuses. (This year, Toyota and Corona signed on as event sponsors. Collins also got to wear the Chiefs’ KC Wolf costume and bust moves on the water for a spot that will air during Chiefs games.)
At the same time, the sport had been gaining momentum throughout the region. The local tournament scene, formerly structured for slalom skiers, had been revamped to accommodate the trick-happy spinoff. In 2003, Skier’s Wharf Extreme, a major surf shop at the Lake of the Ozarks, opened a Blue Springs branch to grab a share of the burgeoning market and donated a $50,000 Tigé competition boat to the newly formed University of Kansas Wakeboard Club. (Last semester, the team had 22 full-time riders.)
Landlocked boarders were pirating rides wherever they could.
In Stilwell, kids reportedly tugged themselves behind golf carts on a sod farm.
One rider videotaped himself surfing Meyer Circle’s sea horse fountain on Ward Parkway, hitched to a car doing doughnuts in the roundabout.
And even though erecting structures on public lakes is prohibited, street-inspired adaptations such as flat bars and ramps emerged at Clinton Lake, Smithville Lake and the Lake of the Ozarks.
By that point, Olson had a small crew just waiting to showcase its talents.
A pharmacist by profession, 27-year-old Jason Bleich is now the only regional rider sponsored by Liquid Force. He has earned a reputation for talent and approachability; well-financed beginners started inviting him to ride along on boats that looked like they belonged in music videos.
Earl Ball, a college grad from a small town in Iowa who had wanted to work at KC Watersports so badly that he’d slept in his car and eaten jam sandwiches while he waited for the park’s grand opening, can stick rail slides and ramp jumps with Tony Hawk efficiency. Now 24, he pursues the Endless Summer style of employment, bouncing between the KC and Texas parks seasonally so that he can get paid while riding.
Carter Collins, a 20-year-old KU student from Olathe, doesn’t have a boat and says he used to be a “shop rat,” killing hours watching videos and window shopping at board stores. A onetime competitive figure skater — as a kid, he’d made the Junior Olympics — he’s capable of dramatic midair maneuvers.
At twilight on June 16, after the crane drops the No Fear barge into the park’s stunt flotilla, the trio and a crew of local riders spend about 20 minutes hitting the new obstacle, crashing into it like test dummies. This is the experimentation phase — they’re learning the dynamics of their new toy by hitting ramps at different speeds and entry angles. The crack-ups are spectacular. At one point, Collins launches himself more than 10 feet in the air, spinning like a top and clearing the object entirely. Bleich, however, hurls himself straight into the raised ledge, knocking his legs out from under him and sending him headfirst into the water.
They’re trying to master their moves by July 9, when some of the best riders in the nation will hit town for the fifth annual USA Wakeboard Cable National Championships. (At last weekend’s competition, Carter and Ball took first and second place, respectively, in the amateur division; Bleich hurt his knee and withdrew.) Collins won this season’s April Fool’s Day competition at KC Watersports by ramping off jumps to nail a batwing (grabbing the board behind his head and then stretching out horizontally like Superman) and a tail glide (swinging his board above his head like a parachute, then sticking the landing). Ball won best trick on the newly installed 90-foot slider — a thin, flat ledge similar to a skate rail — by ollieing onto the beam, then hitting a backward dismount.
Though Kansas City has a relatively shallow talent pool — no local has ever gone pro — KC Watersports has flipped the learning curve, allowing athletes to hit man-made hurdles before they become competent all-around riders.
“For the people who participate on a regular basis, I’m seeing consistency on rails and sliders that you don’t see on a regular basis,” says Corey Marotta, who works at Alliance Wakeboard Magazine and rode the park last summer. “The more chances you have, the better you’re going to get at it. You’ll see a kid out there who may not be able to ride his board very well, but he’ll hit a rail better than anybody you’ve ever seen. That’s because he’s had time to learn that, which wouldn’t happen behind a boat.”
No, if you’re out on what’s supposed to be the prairie, what happens behind a boat depends on an uncontrollable force of nature. Namely, the beer-drinking, twentysomething Midwestern male.
The inevitable ripple effect of KC Watersports: People see something cool and want to take it further. But in Kansas City, they’re still limited to other man-made bodies of water.
The jump is hidden by tall grasses along the embankment of a backwater cove at Smithville Lake, a 7,190-acre state reservoir 20 miles north of the metro. Bobbing in the shallows in front of a 10-foot finger of land, it’s more like a wall than a ramp, aimed at an 80-degree angle and supported by a rickety criss-cross of two-by-fours. It looks like a barricade made to stop wakeboarders, not lift them.
Bound to a wakeboard, Casey Rice, a 26-year-old Smithville resident, floats in the murk behind a boat about 100 yards from the launch site. His friend Carson Swisher, a 27-year-old Brooksider, sits at the helm. His T-shirt reads: “Inland Surfer ’03, Team Rider, World Wakesurfing Championship.” He’s good, but not that good — he won the shirt, along with a board, by registering on a wakeboarding Web site. Their boat, an ’86 Supra, is an old-school water-ski vessel. Rice, a delivery driver for UPS, partnered with two other friends to rerig it, welding an overhead tower mounted with lights and board holsters, ripping out bench seats, installing bilge pumps and numerous ballast bags, moving the engine to the front of the boat, and adding a stereo system and onboard cooler.
The duo first rode cable in Orlando back in April 2002. Afterward, they were inspired to build a 50-foot “dragon” rail — its shape follows the profile of the mythical beast — in the Ozarks. Both ride well, performing stud-defining moves such as spins and midair flips. Swisher’s the guy who rode the Meyer Circle fountain. He says he recently contacted the Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department to apply for a permit to board Brush Creek — willing to slide on sewer run-off for a good ride — but was denied. (Steve Lampone, the department’s deputy director, tells the Pitch, “The situation with Brush Creek is that after periods of excessive rainfall, the quality of the water would not be such that we would encourage people to do anything that would cause extended contact with the water…. From a pure safety standpoint, it wouldn’t be something that we would recommend.”)
Still, Rice and Swisher wanted something beyond the controlled environment of the cable park, so they put up this “land gap” jump. As big and steep as any KC Watersports ramp, it cost about $100 in raw materials and will remain at its spot in Smithville until the water patrol discovers and removes it. (Erecting a water structure without a permit for a special event is a misdemeanor with a maximum $1,000 fine, says Corporal Jeff Bair of the Missouri State Water Patrol.)
The duo invited Bleich, Ball and Collins out today, but all three begged off.
“It’s fun, man. It’s out of the ordinary, and that’s pretty much what we go for,” Rice says. “You only do stuff like this if you want to get arrested,” he adds, joking.
They’ve brought their video camera and have been replaying footage from yesterday’s sunset test runs. On one replay, Rice hits the bottom of the ramp, and his knees buckle; he launches with the grace of a car-crash victim being thrown through a windshield.
Every extreme sport has its own paparazzi, and Swisher serves that role for Kansas City’s wakeboarders. After abandoning a paper-pushing job at DST last August, the corporate-America dropout founded his own film company. He has since filmed pros at competitions in Florida, in the Ozarks and in Wichita, along with a handful of local icons at KC Watersports and at other water holes. Meanwhile, he bunks with college friends (their living-room furniture includes a foosball table and a life-sized cutout of Jessica Simpson in a “Girls Gone Wild” ball cap) and shoots weddings and church events to make ends meet. Back in May, he showed a teaser of his work in progress — a highlight reel of Bleich ripping jumps, flips and big air in a wetsuit last winter at Clinton Lake — to a small crowd of enthusiasts who had gathered at Curley Brown’s, a bar in Spring Hill. Swisher’s debut aired alongside the national premiere of Liquid Force’s Encore video, made to coincide with a pro-tour stop at KC Watersports. At Curley Brown’s, the new cultural dichotomy was obvious: A horde of baggy-clothed twentysomethings in crook-billed caps sat at stools alongside the weathered-looking, chain-smoking, rural-Kansas regulars.
Back at Smithville Lake, Swisher revs the boat engine to tow Rice into the jump. “We’ve landed off it, just nothing cool yet,” he says.
“I’m not drunk today,” Rice yells from the water, clearly hoping that his sobriety will improve his performance. “Hold on. I’m peeing.”
On their first attempt, Swisher drives the boat too close to the jump, sending a wake into Rice’s launch area and forcing him to abort the mission.
On the second attempt, Rice rockets off the jump, clears the finger of land and pitches face-first into the shallow landing area on the other side, disappearing in a watery explosion.
Swisher turns the boat around to pick him up and drag him back to their starting point. But this takes awhile because the bog resembles a clogged storm drain, thick with mud and brambles and some floating litter.
On another start, Rice slams hard into an underwater log, breaking a chunk out of the bottom of his board. Then he borrows Swisher’s board, tries the jump again, and sticks a one-handed landing.
While Swisher and Rice motor back to their take-off position, some fishermen in a dinghy stop directly beside the jump and begin casting into the landing strip.
A hundred yards from the fishermen, Swisher slows the motor to wait. Then the boat floats over Rice’s tow rope, sucking it into the propeller.
Swisher kills the engine. For more than half an hour, they take turns diving in the murky water, trying to uncoil the knotted mess.
Rice sucks on a hunk of chewing tobacco. The sun is blazing, and there’s no breeze, but he’s in good spirits, yammering in an exaggerated drawl about the supposed dangers of Midwest wakeboarding, such as man-eating catfish and snapping turtles that can take an arm clear off. Eventually they’ll simply cut the tow rope, losing about 5 feet in the process.
Swisher gripes that he hasn’t even had a chance to ride yet.
“It would be a lot better if you didn’t have to do all this ruckus, but that’s the price you pay to do this on a public lake,” Rice says.
And it’s why plenty of other kids are happily paying $22 for two hours of hassle-free continuous riding on the opposite edge of the metro.
Judging from the crowd at KC Watersports, the next generation of Kansas wakeboarders will be young, paunchy and sunburned and will exhibit little to no athletic ability.
In the hours before Ball, Carter and Bleich hit a twilight session, the park looks more like a public pool than a training ground for extreme athletes. Since it opened on Memorial Day 2004, Olson estimates that 50 percent of the park’s clients have been first-timers. That’s the drawback of inventing a scene — it takes time for the talent to develop.
Beneath a large sun deck scattered with picnic tables and onlookers, ten or so people lug wakeboards along the carpeted dock. There’s a group of KU Med students, a Johnson County Community College student who discovered the place on the Internet, a bunch of teenagers who usually ride motocross, and the semi-pro Wakeboard Nebraska crew, pit-stopping here en route to a competition in the Ozarks.
A few people carry wakeskates — wakeboards without bindings that resemble skateboards, another design spinoff that’s gaining popularity. Ability levels correlate directly with skin tone: Pale, sunburned or faux-tanned riders usually spend hours making it a few feet off the dock. Most beginners spend a day learning to stand before finally making a lap.
Sitting in the lift operator’s booth, Ball hands a rope to a guy in yellow board shorts. He’s a newbie, the manager of a Pizza Hut in Paola. In an instant, the rope goes taut. The rider’s arms yank forward, and he flies headlong off the dock, crashing into green water. Undaunted, he tries again. This time, when the rope snaps tight, he overcompensates, leaning too far backward and skipping forward on his butt, his progress measured in a series of impacts: slap slap slap.
Those who successfully make it off the dock usually get thrown around the first curve, when the cable changes directions and the rider has to learn to turn against centrifugal force. Lean too far forward and your board’s nose submerges, kicking you heels over head. Too far back and your board slides out from under you, leaving your legs spread for a watery ball smack. Corner too hard and you catch an edge, which feels like tripping but at 20 miles an hour.
After a few sessions, plebes who are still riding in that shaky, hunched-over, poop-squat stance may decide to huck themselves off a jump or slam their crotch into a slider.
The Wakeboard Nebraska riders, however, have elevated today’s show to a trapeze act. Using the rope’s tension like a slingshot, they pull down and lean forward, launching into the air and executing somersault- and cartwheel-style tricks. One rider crosses the water in a pendulum motion, arcing wide and then launching off a steep-angled ramp. Another plows straight for the head-high A-frame, sliding up and down it like it’s a high-speed escalator. A third rider hops onto the 90-foot slider, skimming halfway across it before slipping back into the water.
Watch enough wakeboard videos and you’ll learn that each of the sport’s outposts has its own eccentricities. Floridians, with their water-skiing backgrounds, slice technically, nailing tricks with little flair. Californians, with their skate-surf heritage, slash showier, grabbing their boards for signature moves. Most of those riders prefer to protect their territory from tourists.
Heartland boarders suffer no “locals only” mentality, though, which is obvious as the better riders edge past the beginners who float like buoys at KC Watersports. There are no egos. Veterans offer tips. Beginners watch them for inspiration.
Working the lift, Ball and Carter remain enthusiastic and supportive. After watching one rider wipe out more than ten times in a row, Ball holds the guy in the proper starting position before he launches. When Bleich arrives for a warmup run (they’ll have the park to themselves for a practice session after it closes at 8 p.m.), the three look as though they’ve been ripped from an OC casting call: an amalgamation of dark muscle, projected confidence and sun-bleached hair in various stages of dishevelment.
Ball uses a nearby dry-erase board to tally the number of hot Bettys he’s spotted: A brunette with a navel ring showing beneath her pink top boosts the count to … two! A new park record! The presence of women is irrefutable proof that the scene is growing.
When Ball sees another employee practicing tricks on the dock, he offers a set of basic guidelines to avoid looking like a poseur:
When you can do a cool trick more than three times in a row, stop counting the number of times you do it.
If you stop counting the number of times you do a trick, then you have to stop telling people you can do it and just do it.
And if you know you can do it, then stop practicing those tricks in front of everybody on the dock.
At sunset, he backs it all up. The lake has been cleared, and Ball rides the freshly submerged No Fear hulk first, sticking the first recognizable trick: Riding with his left foot forward, he hits a ramp and spins 270 degrees in the air, landing backward and sliding 28 feet across the length of a 4-foot-high ledge. He passes the rope behind his back, rotates another 90 degrees back to his original position, and clears the ledge to slide smoothly back across the water.
Cheers from the dock carry across the water. Kids are identifying the tricks now.
“Switch 270 on, 90 out,” one spectator shouts approvingly, in a once-foreign jargon. Mike Olson flooded an empty field, and the trick riders came. “You’ll see a kid out there who may not be able to ride his board very well, but he’ll hit a rail better than anybody you’ve ever seen.” “You only do stuff like this if
you want to get arrested.”
