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Outside magazine, September 1998

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The Happiest Guy Alive (cont.)


	(Jorg Badura)

Jonny has, in some ways, always been in training for assuming the mantle of Muffin Man. Being the youngest of three boys gave him a taste for competition early on; his brothers were brutal gamers who didn't cut Jonny breaks because he was the youngest. He had to make the same runs, jump the same moguls, and bust the same huge air as his big bros. And if he didn't tabletop that helicopter, they would let Jonny know he was a pussy.

"I always wanted to be the best," Jonny says. "I think competition is key. At an early age, because my brothers used to work me, I realized what competition did, how it made me feel. I realized what it meant to me. I love the feeling of winning."

He would take any dare, stand up to any challenge. His high school soccer coach at Marin County's elite Branson School used to sic Jonny on the opposition's best player, and Jonny would inevitably shut him down. "Jonny was always a good athlete," says his mother, Barbara Moseley, who works as a real estate broker. "All the boys were good athletes. And that competition had to make Jonny even better."

Jonny realized that he was, as one former ski coach says, "something special" after he won the junior nationals in Lake Placid for the first time: "I was 15 years old, and what I found out about myself was that I was good at competing, not just skiing. I loved that feeling. I liked being in the gate, all jacked up, nervous. I actually liked that feeling. I enjoyed competition. And when I found out about winning, I liked the competition even more."

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Initially, one of the perquisites of skiing was that it meant Jonny missed a few weeks of school every winter. But gradually, as Jonny racked up victories in major events, it began to seem possible that skiing was more than a means of skipping school and delaying college. "When I was 16, I won junior nationals again," Jonny recalls. "Then next I won junior nationals and North American amateurs; I mean, I won everything in sight. For a couple of years there I was getting way better, I was getting awesome. And when I made the U.S. Ski Team, I realized I could get paid to ski."

Happily, skiing just happened to be the thing at which Jonny was best. But whatever you threw at him — soccer, baseball, calculus, acting, auto mechanics — he would soon develop the appropriate skills. He was a solid student at Branson, a featured actor in productions of Oklahoma! and Our Town. And from his father, he learned the basics of auto mechanics and how to fix everything from a flat tire to a bilge pump. It was his father who taught him that Muffin Land requires constant vigilance and care — the houses don't maintain themselves, the cars don't fix themselves, the boats don't refit themselves. The good life requires a good pair of hands. And in a metaphysical sense Jonny learned that Muffin Land must be nurtured. You can't take it for granted. If you're the Muffin Man, then you gotta give something back to Muffin Land.

Today, Muffin Land is in disarray. There are boats and jet skis to be put up on trailers, trailer hitches to be fitted — and, for a party Jonny is throwing this weekend, kegs of beer to be procured and vodka to be stowed away. At the moment, the Muffin Man is struggling with one of Muffin Land's reigning edicts, a philosophy described by one of Jonny's friends, Trevor Pressman, as the Way of Mo. The Way of Mo is a sort of old-money, WASPy precursor of the DIY punk-rock ethic applied to hard-to-service items such as carburetors and tugboats. When something needs fixing in Muffin Land, you fix it yourself.

"My dad taught me that you don't go to the store for anything," Jonny says. "No matter what it is, no matter how screwed up, you can somehow fix it right here. You just gotta roll up your sleeves and get busy." You head down the block to the immense, concrete, Moseley-owned shed known as The Shop and find whatever tools and parts you need. Here on the San Francisco Bay waterfront just a few miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, adjacent to the Moseley-developed Paradise Cay Yacht Club at the end of a vast, Moseley-owned cul-de-sac, The Shop is a forbidding industrial space where you suspect a resourceful engineer and a sufficiently innovative mad scientist could concoct a missile with enough throw weight to convince Indian nationalists to think about global, rather than regional, nuclear war. It is the sort of grimy, tool-rich environment to which every child who ever assembled an Estes rocket or fueled up a Cox model airplane dreamed of having access.

Right now, all Jonny needs is compressed air to inflate a flat tire on a decrepit trailer holding one of his jet skis. As he walks around The Shop floor looking for the air tank and compressor, he passes bushels of gaskets, crates of brake fluid, piles of spark plugs, engine casings, greasy bolts, plugged exhausts, rotted mufflers, and pieces of just about every post-World War II nautical or automotive part ever made.

But you have to be in The Shop every day, as Jonny has not been lately, to know where, say, the air tank might be. If you have been away, winning gold medals and hanging with Cindy Crawford, then you come back to The Shop and The Shop's randomness and chaos defeat you.

So Jonny shrugs, puts his hands on his hips, and takes a call on his StarTAC cell phone to give a cute blond directions to his houseboat party this weekend.

A few minutes later, driving back down the street in the Blazer, he runs into his father, driving his own Blazer to The Shop. (Members of the Moseley family seem to spend the day driving various trucks and sport-utility vehicles between various pieces of Moseley-owned property.) A conversation takes place, driver to driver, in opposite-facing Blazers.

"Dad, where's the air tank?"

Tom Moseley props his elbow on the truck door. "You know, if you were down at The Shop more you might know these things. Maybe Dooley has it."

Dooley is a hippie who works around the boatyard. Dooley was last spotted cranking some Neil Young from the beleaguered speakers of his red Volkswagen bus as he started up the sputtering engine. Jonny drives over to Dooley's boat and reconnoiters, but the pump's not there, so Jonny climbs back into the Blazer and returns to his parents' garage, hoping that a can of aerosol flat-tire fixer might fill the trailer tire. But the one can of flat-fix that Jonny can find is an ancient specimen that emits only a gentle wheeze of fluorocarbons before it gives out. Another character-building lesson in the Way of Mo.

The flat tire sits in its divot, weeds growing up around it.

Jonny appears ageless — to look at the man you immediately think you have a sense of the boy. His brown, proto-mop-top hair; hazel eyes; pale skin flecked with soft freckles; protruding, masculine nose; and gentle, full lips give him a look similar to that of Tom Cruise circa Risky Business. (Rosie O'Donnell pointed out the similarity when Jonny appeared on her show.) And because of the easy physicality of being a professional athlete, he wears his looks with equanimity, becoming all the more handsome because he is not defined by his good looks.

Jonny is that rarest of ultra-successful professional athletes in that he manages to combine the supreme confidence required to shred at the highest level of his sport with a gracious humility that makes it impossible to begrudge him his accomplishments. "He is really cool about who he is," says Shane Anderson, a fellow professional skier. "And he doesn't have to act big to make sure you know he's a big deal."

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