Powder
Issue: December, 2007
Assignment: A profile of the long-absent, former ski superstar J.F. Cusson, detailing his 2007 comeback.
DEK: For four years, a key member of the New Canadian Air Force was missing. J.F. Cusson has finally returned.
In a field halfway between Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska, which is to say in the middle of nowhere, over twenty thousand people have assembled for the annual rite of spring known as Arctic Man. Earlier, teams of skiers, snowboarders, and snowmobilers engaged in a bizarre contest to see who could descend, ascend, and then descend a series of mountains faster than the next lunatics. A bunch of people won various classes, and now the party ensues in the same manner as the race: full throttle.
It’s after one in the morning and Team Fat Chick’s camp is raging. Consisting of a good-sized RV and a ridiculous-sized bonfire, only three things distinguish this camp from the thousands around it; the ten-foot banner of a Botticelli-bodied mud flap girl, a bottomless tray of Jell-O shots, and a group of French Canadian skiers who would look out of place even if the surrounding mountains were covered in the sort of snow these guys are paid to ski, which they’re not.
The skiers push through the crowd toward the fire when a very drunk young man stops the one with the thin greasy hair and a dark patch beneath the nose that might be a mustache or might just be dirt.
“Hey … aren’t you JF Cusson?” he says.
“Yeah, man,” the voice is stunted and meandering, like the sound of drunk footsteps across a gravel driveway.
“Holy shit! Craig!” he shouts to a slightly older (but no less drunk) young man who’s thrusting a bottle of bourbon in people’s faces like a microphone. Craig’s eyes narrow as he assesses the French Canadian.
“That’s JF Cusson. The best skier of all time,” Craig agrees. A small celebration ensues as Craig and Kurt Konz, veterans of several High North Ski Camp campaigns, realize they’re in the presence of a bonafide ski legend.
As they both calm down, something occurs to Kurt that has occurred to a lot of people over the past four years. “Wait,” he asks Cusson, “where the hell have you been?”
When the complete history of skiing is written, two things are certain: it will require a chapter on the contributions of one Jean Francios Cusson, and Cusson will not return the historian’s phone call. During his most prolific period, from 1997 to 2002, Cusson delivered a series of jaw-dropping competition performances and film segments that set the bar of innovation ever higher, while frustrating the hell out of fans, media, and peers by regularly waiting until the proverbial last run of the day to get anything done. It’s possible that no skier has compiled an influence-to-effort ratio as profoundly out of whack as JF Cusson.
As part of a crew of former Canadian Mogul Team standouts including JP Auclair, Vinnie Dorion, Mike Douglas, and Shane Szocs that came to be known as the New Canadian Air Force, Cusson was among the first skiers on the planet to seriously tackle the transitions of what was then called the “snowboard park.” In the mid-90s, every time these skiers left the ground they were liable to do something no one had ever seen. As often as not, Cusson led the way. “He was the biggest innovator,” says seminal filmmaker Johnny Decesare, whose State Of Mind introduced the Air Force to the world. “Whatever it was, he did before anyone, he took it to a level beyond, and he did with style.”
Cusson won the first two major terrain park competitions in the sport’s young history: the 1998 U.S. Freeskiing Open slopestyle and the 1999 X Games Big Air. He’s credited with inventing the 360 mute grab, Lincoln loop 180s, fakie backflips and the misty flip. His film segments, most notably Poor Boyz Productions’ 13 and Propaganda, feature game-changing moments like fakie landings in the backcountry and wait-rewind-that hospital air over perfectly sculpted hip jumps. In 2002, Cusson left Salomon, where he helped invent twintip skis, for a team of owner/superstars at the up-start manufacturer Armada.
But Cusson was as bad as he was good. For every great magazine shot, there were hundreds never taken because he was sleeping. His segments invariably looked repetitive, because he had a tendency to shoot them all on the same four or five jumps in April. Combined with the mustache and the brightly-colored mullet, he didn’t just have a reputation as reclusive and weird—he earned it.
Worse, a string of grueling injuries took him out for increasingly longer periods of time. It began with three broken collarbones in a row in 2000, followed intermittently by two torn MCLs, one torn ACL, and several broken ribs. But if his bones, joints, and muscles took the initial abuse, it was Cusson’s brain that suffered the long term effects. “JF was never that comfortable in his own skin,” says Douglas. “The more he got hurt, the more his fame got to him.”
“I had a reputation of doing stuff no one had ever tried before. That was my person, my attitude. When I lost that, I had no more reason to keep [skiing],” Cusson says. He’s somewhere between Anchorage and Arctic Man on Alaska’s Glenn Highway, the Chugach Range many miles to the south and still dominating the view through the SUV’s windshield. Phils Larose and Belanger, as well as Thomas Rinfret and Arnaud Kugener, are up ahead in an RV that will serve as Plehouse Films’ home base for more than two weeks of exploring Alaska for answers to the question: what can a crew of skiers do without a helicopter in the world’s biggest mountains?
Of course, for the 29-year-old Cusson, the first question remains unanswered: where the hell has he been?
A lopsided grin appears—not really a smile, just a reaction. “Dude, I was golfing.”
In 2000, Cusson went to a driving range on a lark to hit balls with a friend who was an accomplished golfer. When he wasn’t slicing or shanking the ball, Cusson was bombing drives past the 300-yard mark and making his friend question the years of practice he’d put in just to get shown up by Cusson.
The young and active often deride golf as an old man’s game, and while Cusson was amused to discover he had athletic gifts off the snow, golf was nothing more than a hobby. At least, it was until the winter of 03/04, when the adjectives “young” and “active” seemed to desert him.
After months of lackluster effort, spring found Cusson with pitifully little accomplished even by his standards. Pressing to get things done on a late-season trip to June Mountain, California, he overshot a landing in the terrain park and tore his ACL. In that moment, as the pain shot through his leg and he realized his film segment would not get done, Cusson quit.
“I’ve thought a long time about that,” he says, staring out the window at a three-story glacier crawling toward the highway. “Why did I stop loving skiing? It was the fear. When you get hurt a couple of times, before you jump you’re always wondering if you’re going to hurt yourself again. It started, half the time I wasn’t going to jump. Then it became three quarters of the time. Then ninety percent of the time. I realized, ‘Fuck, I’m always scared and I don’t like it. Why am I still doing it?’”
Golf has a way of seeping into the brains of those who play it, slowly turning a hobby into an obsession, and as Cusson fell out of love with skiing he fell in love with the game. So three years ago, as the freestyle revolution that he helped spark took over the X Games Superpipe in prime time; as the ski company he helped launch started moving real units, as the promise of a brighter future in skiing that he once symbolized became a reality, Cusson traded it all for a nine-dollar-an-hour gig landscaping his local golf course near Mount Tremblant, Quebec.
Cusson became a ghost. Friends, team managers, photographers and filmers who’d spent the past seven years with him took turns piling unreturned voicemails on his phone. Rumors started; JF was touring on the PGA … JF was broke and depressed in his parent’s basement … JF was making millions on the poker circuit. When SBC Skier put together an article about the New Canadian Air Force in the fall of 2005, Auclair, Douglas, Szocs, and Dorion all admitted they had no idea where he was or what he was doing. “He was impossible to get a hold of,” says Auclair. “I was worried about him.”
In November, 2005, Auclair went to an early season party at Tremblant. As he always did when in Cusson’s neighborhood, he figured he’d add one more voicemail to the pile and was shocked when his friend didn’t just answer the phone, but actually met him at the bar.
“I was super happy to see him,” Auclair recalls. “He seemed great and it brought back a bunch of memories. But as the night went on, I could sense some bitterness.”
It turns out, there was some truth to all the rumors. Cusson was in fact making a serious run at professional golf, and was winning local tournaments. And he was piecing together a meager income, at least in part, playing online poker. He was living at home, and the whole thing did occasionally depressed the hell out of him.
“As a professional skier, it’s really easy to have an ‘out’ when you’re done,” Cusson says now, “working as a team manager, somewhere in the industry. I worked all those years to build my career. I had a name, a good reputation, which is priceless, and I turned my back on it. There was no way out anymore. It was up to me to start from scratch, and I went from making six figures to almost none. For the first time in my life, I was actually kind of poor, not knowing if golf would work out. It was stressful at times.”
In the bar at Tremblant, Cusson admitted that he was mulling the idea of a comeback. Auclair, who has masterfully managed his own career through a degenerative back condition that should have sidelined him years ago, assured Cusson the sport would welcome him with open arms. But the night ended, they went their separate ways, and another winter passed without anyone knowing where hell JF Cusson was.
When the skiwear brand Sun Ice re-launched in 2006, they needed something that would create a buzz about the company quickly and their marketing manager, Felix Rioux, knew how to do it: sponsor the comeback of JF Cusson. Rioux had no idea if Cusson would even want to come back, but he knew Cusson needed golf clubs. Sun Ice, in addition to making a line of golf outerwear, is owned by the Canadian distributor of Adams clubs.
“He thought it was a joke at first,” says Rioux about the offer sponsorship offer he made Cusson in March of 2006. “When I called him up, it was good timing. He’d been out of it and had come to reflect on his time in the sport and realize he didn’t have it so bad.”
Cusson’s golf game is legit. Currently, his competitive efforts are spent on a series of underground Calcutta-style tournaments where the players have a chance to make thousands of dollars out of large gambling pots. It’s a common way for Quebec golfers to make ends meet and perfect their games before making a run at the Canadian Tour or the PGA, and Cusson recently won three tournaments in a row. When the head of Sun Ice’s golf division finally played a round with Cusson to humor Rioux, he came back stunned at Cusson’s potential. Cusson’s long-term goals are still very much on the green, not the white. But he admits that Rioux had a point.
“When you have something, you take it for granted,” he says now. “When you don’t have it, you realize you’re really missing something. That’s how I felt with skiing. I wasn’t traveling anymore. I didn’t see my friends, or other parts of the world. That’s something unique and special about skiing.”
Sun Ice doesn’t need Cusson to win contests or produce game-changing film segments—they have young bucks like Colby West and JF Houle to do that. They need him to do the one thing the rest of the New Canadian Air Force has done for years: get on snow and receive credit for everything he’s given to the sport. “JF is an icon,” says Rioux. “People want to see his face.”
Indeed, Cusson doesn’t just get recognized in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. On a trip to Japan earlier in the winter, he was recognized in the middle of a throbbing nightclub in Tokyo. On the same trip, he signed autographs at the Nippon Open for over an hour. At the X Games in Aspen, he was treated like a returning king, wading through the VIP area at the slopestyle and stopped every few steps by an old friend or a young admirer. “People really missed me,” he says with sincere appreciation. “I felt the love.”
“You see why I like golfing more than skiing?” Cusson says. “I’ve been here six days and skied for one hour.” The RV winds down the Seward Highway, along the southwestern edge of the Chugach. While Arctic Man proved to be a gold rush of drunken redneck B-roll for Plehouse, the piss-poor snowpack resulted in nothing more than a strange jib over some old mining equipment that will be lucky to see the light of day as a DVD extra.
An hour later, the crew crests the top of ridge high above Turnagain Pass, the launching point for slednecking locals from nearby Girdwood. Another film crew has already assembled at the junction from which the ridge stretches north to south, and as rattling two-stroke engines die and helmets come off, another reunion ensues. Andy Mahre, Eric Pollard, and filmmaker Eric Iberg are floored to find not just the Plehouse guys, but the mystery man himself in their midst. “I haven’t seen you in … I don’t remember the last time I saw you,” Pollard says to Cusson.
It’s one more happy moment in the Cusson comeback, but eventually the crews go their separate ways and it’s time to reckon with the part that comes after the smiling and the high fives: skiing.
These are the foothills of the Chugach, and they’re sufficiently gnarly to give any honest jibber second thoughts about blowing his travel budget on a heli to the real deal—this deal is real enough. Cusson made it clear to Sun Ice that his skiing is dependent on the injury factor being negligible, but the injury factor is never negligible in Alaska. The skiers make their way over to the mellowest of the available bowls and scope their options.
Arnaud proceeds to tick off a series of huge 540s and fakie 540s over a small cornice. Maybe it’s his upbringing in the French Alps, or maybe it’s the protective cloud of weed smoke that hangs over him, but the 25-year-old is utterly undaunted by the intensity of the terrain. He skis with a graceful combination of recklessness and precision; in other words, he skis like Cusson used to ski.
Meanwhile, Cusson and Belanger discuss the finer points of trajectory over a twenty-foot rock. It takes them an hour to fine-tune their in-run, and Cusson watches carefully as Belanger gives it three unsuccessful cracks before he clicks in.
Earlier, as he took in the peaks along the Seward Highway, Cusson muttered an old French saying, Sie jeunesse savait, si vieilless pouvait. “It means if the young only knew and if the old only could,” he explained. “When you’re young you’re stupid but can do anything. And when you’re old, you’re smart but you can’t do anything. This trip is a big opportunity, but I only see what’s dangerous and all the bad endings. When you’re young you don’t see that, you don’t doubt yourself. You just go for it.”
Cusson goes for it. He spins slowly, deliberately, through a 360. In that split second, there are glimpses of the body control and air sense that once allowed him to redefine the sport whenever he felt like it, but it all blows up in a cloud of snow on the landing.
Later, as the crew heads out along the ridge on their way back to the RV, they notice a crowd on one of the lower peaks. They make their way up to find Iberg and a bunch of local slednecks staring, cameras poised, at a face opposite them. Pollard, just a tiny speck standing above a fin of rocks with a pronounced wind lip, comes over Iberg’s radio.
“Dropping …”
The speck pushes off and gathers speed as it heads toward the wind lip. Suddenly, it goes airborne, bigger and farther than anyone expected. There’s a collective gasp as Pollard rotates a 180 so casually it’s like he’s looking for change in his pocket. He reconnects with the snow fifty feet below, warping backwards down the face as a cheer erupts from the crowd.
There, writ large in two parallel tracks that seem to appear from nowhere, is the cutting edge of skiing; a cutting edge Cusson was once intimately familiar with and one that has, by his own admission, left him behind. Still, he must see something in it that he recognizes because, for the first time in a week, that elusive grin of his cracks wide open into an honest-to-God smile.
