Michael, Sonny, and Skiing

Wednesday, February 11, 1998

It is extraordinary to have had two such prominent skiing deaths recently, Michael Kennedy and Sonny Bono. But the fact of the matter is that there is almost no excuse for even an injury in modern recreational skiing, even if you want to go pretty fast and on expert trails.

During the past twenty-five years immense advances have been made in ski equipment. If your equipment is properly adjusted, your skis will detach if you fall, and so your ankles and your knees will escape injury, though you may be shaken up a bit when you hit the snow. For a while about ten years ago leg injuries became so rare that wrist injuries were actually more common. Ski pole straps were spraining people's wrists when they fell — but now the ski poles are made to fall free during a crash.

Just about everything has now been done in the direction of safety as far as equipment is concerned. Of course the equipment has to be properly adjusted. If you buy the best bindings in the world and fail to adjust them you have wasted your money and might as well nail your boots to the skis.

In fact, the only serious ski injury I have had was during cross-country skiing. I hit some ice, fell, and broke an ankle. This is because cross-country skis don't release during a fall. They can 'propeller' and take an ankle with them. As far as I am concerned, cross-country skiing is more dangerous than downhill skiing.

The death of Michael Kennedy cannot be blamed on skiing, might even be said to have had nothing to do with skiing. Much has been said about the 'tragedies' in the Kennedy family, but there is an atmosphere in that family that invites disaster.

Many people have driven across that bridge in Chappaquiddick without driving off into Poucha Pond and drowning a young woman. The evidence at the scene was that Ted Kennedy was probably drunk and going much too fast on the bridge. Another Kennedy overdosed on heroin and died in Florida, still another rolled his Jeep over and paralyzed his female companion. Then we have the infamous West Palm Beach rape trial of Willie Smith, and Michael's imbroglio with a 14 year-old baby sitter, for which he could have been tried for statutory rape.

There is a recklessness in all of this for which the term criminal is entirely appropriate.

And consider Michael Kennedy. At age 39 he was playing a version of touch football while skiing without poles and also trying to make movies of this family sport. It emerges that the Ski Patrol there in Aspen had repeatedly asked the Kennedy's to cut this stuff out, told them that it was dangerous, and that the night before the fatal collision with a tree, an official of the ski area had phoned Ethel Kennedy and asked them to desist.

Of course they didn't, and what they got, they got.

In my opinion this behavior was inexcusable and reprehensible. It was an insult to the essence of skiing and even an insult to the mountain itself. Downhill skiing is about controlled speed, with the emphasis on both 'control' and 'speed.'

I myself think of skiing in terms of long, fast 'S' turns down a long, intermediate slope where the sensation is one of almost effortless control and a strange kind of freedom. These long smooth turns can be controlled with a minimum of muscle. Michael Kennedy was thumbing his nose at the sport, joking it up with touch football, showing off, insulting the very mountain itself. He was daring Nemesis and it turned around and bit him.

There is an anecdote about his father Robert Kennedy that belongs here. In the Spring of 1968 I spent a weekend skiing at Heavenly Valley in California (where Sonny Bono died), a glorious sun-burned weekend of Spring skiing. The management of the area was still furious about a visit a day or two earlier by Robert Kennedy. He was running for president against Gene McCarthy, and took time out to ski with his entourage at Heavenly Valley.

It was bad enough that Kennedy demanded free lift line tickets for his whole crowd, which he grudgingly received. But it was intolerable that he also demanded that they go right to the front of the long lift line. When he tried to push his way ahead of everyone else they pelted his group with half-eaten hot dogs, coffee cups, and whatnot, soon forcing the angry exit of the whole Kennedy group from the ski area.

Not long after that, Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles, and the joke in the governor's office in Sacramento was that Sirhan Sirhan must have been on that lift line in Heavenly Valley.

The common theme in much Kennedy behavior obviously is that because they are Kennedys they can get away with absolutely anything, no matter who is offended, injured, even killed. To my mind, Jack Kennedy was the brightest and most attractive of the lot, but we see this recklessness in him too — in his risky liaisons with countless women, his repeated contraction of venereal diseases, his fast-lane behavior in Hollywood, his at least nodding relations with mobsters like Sam Giancana.

In these Kennedy males, it is plausible that recklessness goes back to old Joe Kennedy, the founding father, who played things close to the line and often over it, both in business and in his own sexual behavior. Not every ambassador to the Court of St. James has had his gunmen shoot it out with Al Capone's thugs in a bootlegging argument.

When Franklin Roosevelt was told that he could not appoint Joe Kennedy chairman of the new Securities Exchange Commission because he was a crook, FDR replied that that was exactly why he was appointing him: he would know how to keep an eye on the other crooks.

There no doubt are many Kennedy's of later generations whom we don't read about in the tabloids. But about the egregious Kennedys it is impossible to avoid Nick Carroway's judgment in The Great Gatsby about the bored and dangerous rich who hung out with the Tom Buchanans: 'They're a rotten crowd.'

Scott Fitzgerald had something in The Great Gatsby when he has their behavior result in corpses all over the North Shore of Long Island.

The death of Sonny Bono appears to have been an entirely different matter, yet some recklessness was involved there too. He is reported to have been skiing off the trails, maneuvering in the deep snow in a grove of trees. Probably he felt exuberant, sought the joy of a shot of adventure. Yet the fact is a skier not totally familiar with that mountain has no way of knowing what's under that deep snow. He could be surprised by a log or a boulder, and go out of control among the trees. Sonny Bono must have been going pretty fast through that deep snow in order to sustain the injuries described. The risk he was taking was not justified by the prospect of a few minutes of deep powder skiing among the trees.

Of course, sometimes even the experts take risks. The great racer Buddy Werner died in an Alpine avalanche, for example. They knew there was danger, and decided to go ahead with some movie making — but down came tons of snow, rocks and trees. And then there was the French racer who tried to ski straight down the lift line past the steel towers. He hit a tower at maybe 75 mph and became an instant peanut butter. But he had to know this exploit had a kamikaze character.

Far short of all that, there's plenty of fun on the regular slopes, if you respect the sport and adjust your equipment.

Michael, Sonny, and Skiing

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