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Outside magazine, September 1998

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The Happiest Guy Alive (cont.)


	(Jorg Badura)

Jonny is the quiet, solid center of Muffin Land; he is the vessel of vast amounts of his family's love, his friends' respect, and his fans' adulation. As an athlete, Jonny's the winner of some genetic blackjack game in which he's been dealt nothing but aces and faces. Nevertheless, his work ethic when in training and his deep aversion to complacency are the things that pushed him past simple excellence and made him nonpareil. "He works 50 percent harder than any other person on the tour," says Cooper Schell, the U.S. Ski Team's moguls coach. "He does everything possible that he can do to succeed."

It was his superb conditioning that surprised those outside the sport of skiing when Jonny took second in ABC's The Superstars competition. The most striking segment had Moseley lining up against Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Kordell Stewart for an obstacle-course race entailing a climb over a wall, a tire drill, a blocking dummy, a high jump, and hurdles. Stewart, at 6-foot-1 and 212 pounds, was all angular slabs of bulging muscle beneath a tank top, while Jonny, at 5-foot-11 and 180 pounds, looked like your average-size frat boy. Moseley handily beat Stewart in a mad dash down the course.

As an amateur, Jonny's pure athletic skill and competitive drive had been enough to carry him to the podium. But when he went out on the World Cup tour, he admits, "I just got smoked." At first he thought that what was required was merely better conditioning and greater strength. "I went and I got strong," he explains. "I just started working out like a banshee, you know, hardly skiing. To some degree, it helped."

It took another year for him to realize that in order to become good — "I couldn't go out and win an event at will, and that's

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what I consider good" — he would have to become a better technician on the slopes.

So the summer before the 1997-1998 World Cup season and the 1998 Winter Olympics, Jonny moved into Schell's house near Mount Hood, Oregon. "Coach Cooper took it on like a mission," says Jonny. "He just engineered everything, studying videos and getting it down to a science so that he could figure out what was wrong with me. There was just something that wasn't clicking." They agreed that Jonny needed to improve on the moguls, during the tight turns that constitute the technical portion of a freestyle run.

And then there was the psychological training. "We discovered that for me there was a difference between stress and pressure," Jonny says. "Stress is when you're out on the hill training and you're doing your best runs and you look up and you know there's some other dude out there that's got mad skills that are better than you. There's no way you can be relaxed and try to compete well when you're under stress. But pressure is when you know you have the skills, when you know you can win, but you got gnarly butterflies. Then it's just a matter of turning that into frickin' power, you know, just going for it and letting it flow."

The key to winning, Jonny discovered, was to ski to ski, not to ski to win. As long as he loved skiing, his athleticism and the hard hours spent working on technical skills would allow him to make repeated trips to the podium.

This off-season, however, has been more casual for Jonny. His usual training regimen has been thrown askew by the demands of celebrity. And though never a party animal, he has been known to have a soft spot for certain substances that after the Nagano Games were commonly associated with Canadian snowboarders.

"I used to bake once in a while," he says of smoking marijuana. "But never when I was in training, and never when I was less than three months out from the tour. The main reason I don't now is because of the drug testing. Before the world championships, at the Olympics, you get tested, and when you're on the U.S. Ski Team they test you all the time. So I don't need that hassle, that reputation — my sponsors would hate it. Same thing with drinking. If I got a DUI, then there'd be all that bad attention. I mean, if I didn't have to worry about the testing and the press, I think I'd smoke more pot. I don't take any of the hard stuff."

And the big party this weekend?

"We'll see," he says. "But it's definitely the kind of atmosphere — old friends, no responsibility — where it's tempting."

This is one of those days, one of those beautiful northern California days, when the air is clear and crisp like it's being pumped in from some cosmic purifying unit that is invisible beyond the horizon, and the tingle of it is making everyone feel giddy at the upcoming weekend and the party on the houseboat up on the Sacramento River delta. Even the Muffin Man has got the feeling as he helps load a keg of Budweiser into the back of a friend's Ford Expedition.

"It's gonna be wild, a total rager," Jonny promises. "This is the first time I've gotten to hang with my friends since the Olympics."

Towing ski boats and jet skis, the caravan of sport-utility vehicles, with Jonny's Blazer in the lead, sets off over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge on its way to the delta. Along the way, Jonny calls the owner of a sporting-goods chain in the area and pleads with the man to let a certain young blond female named Melissa off work for the weekend so she can come up to the delta.

"I'm having a party," Jonny says into the phone. "And Melissa tells me she has to work and she can't get the day off. I think she'd have a great time up there if you could just give her the day off." The owner of the company is unrelenting.

Jonny hangs up, disappointed. "I blew it," he says, shrugging. "I should have been harsher. The guy wants me to do an appearance for him. The least he could do is let this babe go for the weekend. Dude, what I should do is get my agent to call him back and tell him, you know, it's one of those scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours deals."

Instead, Jonny's buddy Trevor, sitting in the passenger seat, calls back and pretends to be Jonny's agent.

"I'm calling on behalf of Jonny Moseley," Trevor says in his best cigar-chomping agent's voice. "And Jonny feels it is very important for Melissa that she come and experience this weekend with Jonny. Jonny hates for Melissa to be missing out on what promises to be a very exciting and rewarding time for her. And frankly, between you and me, Jonny is not happy about this." There is a pause, then Trevor hangs up.

"No muffin?" Jonny asks.

"No muffin."

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