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Outside magazine, September 1998

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The Happiest Guy Alive
He's Rich, He's Popular, He's Good-Looking, He's Talented, He's Won a Gold Medal, He's Pretty Much Got Life Nailed. Shall we continue with the reasons Jonny Moseley is the happiest guy on earth at this moment — this ephemeral, intoxicating, telling moment?

By Karl Taro Greenfeld


	(Jorg Badura)

Jonny "Big Air" Moseley, 23, is rolling in a white 1997 Chevy Blazer down Squaw Valley Road, past the Resort at Squaw Creek, where there used to be a Jonny Moseley Suite, along the foot of the KT22 ski lift, which climbs to the Jonny Moseley Run, and into Tahoe City, past banners proclaiming "Congratulations Jonny." He flips through a CD case, searching for tunes, when suddenly he remembers what he really wants to hear.

Opening the glove box, he withdraws a cassette, which he pops into the tape deck. A clicky studio synthesizer drum track comes on, accompanied by a twangy, spacey guitar. Then a gentle, rich voice begins to sing: "I'm a Muffin Man, I come from Muffin Land, I'm a puffin' lovin' Muffin Man." It's a ridiculous song, reminiscent of Dr. Demento or The Gong Show, and not the kind of stuff to which Jonny — whose musical tastes veer toward the reggae of Bob Marley, the tropical hip-hop of Wyclef Jean, and the old school thrash of Pennywise — would normally listen.

"Dude," Jonny says, grinning his wide-toothed smile beneath his yellow wraparound Smith shades. "That's me singing. I got totally trashed one day and went into the studio with this guitarist and he had me sing this song."

"He's got muffins on his mind, He eats muffins all the time ..."

He guns the V-8 engine and the Blazer lurches forward. "The guy wants to release it as a single."

"Muffin Man"? Jonny Moseley's debut as a professional singer?

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"I mean, if it were like the week after the Olympics, then maybe," Jonny says. "That would have been sweet. I could have been, like, it wasn't about the skiing or the gold. It was all about 'Muffin Man.'"

He parks the car alongside a stone retaining wall, next to the Mandarin Villa Chinese restaurant in Tahoe City. "See, 'Muffin Man' has two meanings. There's like, muffins, like the kind you eat. And then there's muffins, as, like, girls. And I'm the Muffin Man. And this — "

Jonny points around him at the car interior, the stone wall, the parking lot, but what he is really doing is gesturing at his whole lifestyle — the gold medal he won at this year's Winter Olympics, his family's many houses and boats, his good looks, his killer smile, the crates of fan mail, the endorsements, the big post-Olympics income, the fame, the recognition, the whole golden life.

"This is Muffin Land."

There is a specific geography to Muffin Land that includes the Moseley residence in Tiburon, Marin County, California; a ski cabin in Squaw Valley; and his family's houseboat on a private island in the Sacramento River delta. It includes Tiburon's Paradise Cay Yacht Harbor and the attendant Yacht Club, built by the Moseley family, as well as a compound on the Caribbean Island of St. Croix. There are also the numerous Marin County lots worth millions of dollars that were originally purchased by his grandfather, Tim Moseley, a prosperous inventor of nautical instruments. There are a Jeep Wrangler, a 1964 Pontiac Bonneville convertible, and the Chevy Blazer. There are yachts, speedboats, Waverunners, race cars, and motorcycles. There are repair shops, junkyards, and scrap heaps. There are also backhoes, tugboats, and dredging barges.

Born to this pre-Silicon Valley northern California elite, Jonny was shaped by a way of life that included winters in the Tahoe snow, summers boating on the bay or at the Saint Francis Yacht Club's island up on the Sacramento River delta. His older brothers, Jeff and Rick, were good athletes, competitive skiers and sailors; Jonny's father, Tom, a prominent developer and contractor, was always an avid skier and sailor, teaching his boys to be as at home in the snow and on the water as they were on dry land.

But there is also a mental space to Muffin Land, a state of achieved bliss that allows Jonny to move through life with a grace and poise rare in a 23-year-old. While most males his age have been sweating through the armpits of their white button-down shirts during job interviews or moving back home after graduating from college, Jonny's been having dinner with Cindy Crawford, or MTV VJ vixen Serena Altschul, or another famous, important, or totally hot-looking person. Never forget that Muffin Land is home to the Muffin Man — and Jonny is also about the ladies, about finding the ladies and calling the ladies and meeting the ladies and having a good time with the ladies.

Yet Muffin Land is also about being a great athlete, about being the number-one-ranked mogul skier in the world and about winning two World Cup overall freestyle titles, five combined junior and professional World Cup titles, and 14 World Cup events. It is about landing a radical 360 mute grab air at the end of the biggest run of your life and in the process revolutionizing your sport. It is about busting a version of that same jump for The Late Show with David Letterman in the driving rain on a cordoned-off New York City street. (It was Letterman who gave Jonny the nickname Big Air.) It is about appearing on ABC's The Superstars competition broadcast in April and surprising the field by finishing second, ahead of athletes like Kordell Stewart and Herschel Walker and Lennox Lewis. And it is most certainly about the gold medal he won with that spinning, skis-crossed jump in the moguls at Nagano — the jump that catapulted him onto Oprah, Rosie, The Today Show, and Good Morning America.

In short, Muffin Land is about success and accomplishment and amazing good fortune. And it is about its lone resident, who may or may not know the true value of the passport he holds.

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KARL TARO GREENFELD is the author of Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation (HarperCollins). This is his first article for Outside.

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