Different Slopes

CBS had its “60 Minutes” with Alpine skiing champion Bode Miller on Jan. 8, but there was a lesser-known “30 Minutes, Tops!” episode Miller agreed to -- not quite at the point of a bayonet -- weeks earlier at some ski chalet in the Rocky Mountains:

Reporter: You don’t have to do it.

Miller: That depends on your perspective.

Reporter: You don’t.

Miller: I’m certainly obligated to.

Reporter: You think you are?

Miller: Absolutely.

And away it went ...

On an interview table was a copy of Miller’s autobiography: “Bode: Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun.”

Must be something in there worth discussing ...

Why did he write a book?

“I didn’t,” Miller said.

But it’s an autobiography.

“I didn’t write a word of it,” Miller continued. “I’m not kidding. I did not write one word. I did sit-down interviews, I had talks with the guy [co-author Jack McEnany] and I just said -- this is exactly what I told him, I said, ‘Write a book that encompasses what you know my beliefs are, paints the right kind of messages.’ ”

You said in your book that you weren’t going to read it ...

“There’s lots of quotes in there that are quotes,” he said. “Apparently, I wrote the book. It says I wrote it. Apparently everything in there, I wrote.”

*

Bode Miller’s world is different from ours.

It wasn’t like this for the ramp-up to the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, before the little-known Miller won two Alpine medals, silvers sandwiched around a Jay Leno appearance, then becoming, in 2005, the first American in 22 years to win the World Cup overall title. That led to more fame and fortune and inspired the autobiography he never read or, apparently, wrote.

It is like this before the 2006 Turin Olympic Games, where the world turns its four-year focus on the likes of Miller and others who can make their countries proud with medal-winning performances.

This whole idea sickens Miller -- a home-schooled iconoclast, raised on a family commune without indoor plumbing in New Hampshire -- this idea that he could somehow be propped up by a capitalist society and be used.

Miller is a massive talent and a mass of ethereal thoughts and contradictions.

He hates the media, yet almost never ducks a direct question.

Jonna Mendes, a longtime U.S. ski team member, says of Miller, “He is totally different from every athlete I’ve ever seen.... You can tell Bode wants the attention or he wouldn’t say the things he does.”

Can someone be petulant and engaging?

Miller rants against commercialization but makes commercials.

He is technically a member of the ski team but travels the World Cup circuit in Europe in his own recreational vehicle. (Note: So does superstar teammate Daron Rahlves.) He does not, in the eyes of some, appreciate the bend-over-backward ways the ski program has been tailored to accommodate Miller’s individual needs.

“Bode has come to age during this phase,” men’s Alpine coach Phil McNichol said, “and it would be nice if he actually recognized and appreciated the fact that it’s probably one of the only reasons why he’s still here.”

Miller is all over the slope -- literally, figuratively, intellectually and otherwise.

He says dumb things but is very smart.

And every time he opens his mouth, it seems to set off alarms.

Late last year, he ripped the anti-doping policy, making some salient points, notably about guys getting medals stripped for taking cold medicine, but it just didn’t come out right.

“He is a little bit hypocritical right now, for sure, and I think that’s part of his struggle,” Picabo Street, a onetime ski team renegade and Olympic gold medalist, said of Miller.

Street says Miller, still only 28, is “trying to put the whole puzzle together in his mind” and that it’s hard to do on an international stage.

“He’s kind of kicking and screaming and making some mistakes, but he’s going to learn a lot from it,” Street said.

Maybe Miller already has.

His latest bombshell, those “60 Minutes” comments about skiing “wasted,” were followed by a contrite apology.

Of course, it took U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn. Chief Executive Bill Marolt’s flying to Switzerland to get it -- but maybe this is part of the maturation process.

Like his skiing, Miller takes things to the edge.

You don’t converse with Miller as much as you joust.

“I love discussions,” he says.

If you say “nice day,” Bode is apt to point out the thunderclouds.

There is even a school of thought that says Miller might have set up CBS to prove his point that the media, even the outfit that employed Edward R. Murrow, will celebrate the most salacious sound bites at the expense of greater context.

“It’s hard, as a publicly traded company, to stick to your moral high ground,” he says in general of media conglomerates.

Not surprisingly, U.S. ski team officials are at tips’ end.

McNichol has wondered publicly whether Miller needed to be on the ski team -- he could represent the U.S. independently in the Olympics, as does slalom specialist Kristina Koznick.

“I do worry about his influence on the team,” McNichol said.

He takes solace that other ski team members “haven’t been tainted and slanted by Bode.... So far we’ve been lucky.”

The U.S. ski team is in a tough spot because it is buttressed by corporate sponsors and probably needs Miller more than Miller needs it.

America is just trying to get Miller to the starting gate at Sestriere -- and whatever happens after that happens.

“The whole thing is going to come to a head at some point,” McNichol said, “preferably after the Olympics.”

Miller’s performance this year on the World Cup circuit has been overshadowed by the last-hurrah charge from the almost lovable Rahlves, but Miller has the dial-it-in ability to earn medals in all five Alpine disciplines -- downhill, super-giant slalom, giant slalom, slalom and the combined.

He is a once-in-a-generation talent who makes even the Austrians stop and watch.

He has developed from a slalom specialist who couldn’t finish races into an all-events dynamo -- his 20 World Cup wins have included at least two victories in each of the five disciplines.

Oh, and he basically revolutionized the sport with his frenetic technique on shaped skis.

Jimmy Cochran, a ski team member from one of America’s most famous skiing families -- his Aunt Barbara won the slalom gold at the 1972 Sapporo Olympics -- says Miller almost has the ability to call his own shots.

“He has such an amazing ability to turn it on, when he needs to, say, in a big race,” Cochran said. “He can just click it on and go.... He’s gifted like that.”

At Salt Lake City, Miller stunned spectators by pulling himself out of a near-horrific crash in the downhill portion of the combined event to win the silver with a second slalom run that dropped the jaws of the crustiest ski observers.

The lead-up to Turin is going to be interesting, for sure.

Miller is definitely a different snow cat -- and what he might do next is anyone’s guess.

His parents, Jo and Woody, raised Bode and his siblings near Franconia, N.H.

In the autobiography he might have written, Miller describes living off the land, hauling the toilet seat in from the outhouse on freezing nights, and living “as people did a hundred years before us.”

He recounts his father’s arrest at an anti-nuke demonstration.

His parents eventually split, and Miller was put into public school in the fourth grade. He honed his edges on Cannon Mountain and would later graduate to the Carrabassett Valley Academy, a Maine prep school that has been a pipeline to the U.S. ski team.

He never took to conformity, but he was a prodigy, a talent so raw and rare that he skied like “a cat thrown across an icy driveway,” according to one ski rep.

Miller’s let’s-buck-convention mentality would not always play out well on the ski team or the world stage.

He once responded to a French journalist’s question about the war in Iraq by saying, “I felt I was representing my country better than my country was representing me.”

Many are concerned that Miller, in these international times of tension, might say or do something in Turin that will sully America’s image.

That would be in contrast to Street, once booted off the U.S. ski team for insubordination, who became a flag-bearer and America’s perky face at the post-Sept. 11 Salt Lake Games.

Miller’s look fluctuates somewhere between “pout” and “smirk.”

“He’s not representing the whole ski team,” veteran Erik Schlopy said. “He’s representing himself.”

Miller claims he debated himself all summer over whether he would even participate in the Turin Games -- and says he still isn’t sure.

“I struggle with it all the time,” he said last fall in one of the last lengthy print interviews he was willing to tolerate. “I pride myself on being able to maintain my priorities as I see them shifting.”

Miller begins the book he might or might not have penned with the Olympic Oath, which states in part, “The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

Miller loves the oath but has a problem with projected medal counts.

He says he was appalled at the how the media exploited U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps’ quest for winning seven gold medals at the 2004 Athens Games. Phelps won six.

“It was unbelievably unhealthy and, in my mind, an unethically sound approach to attach that to him and to the Olympics, and to say that was the American ideal going in there,” Miller said.

Now, of course, the medal projections are falling on Miller.

How many will it be, Bode: one, two or three?

Miller says the USSA’s motto, “Best in the World,” runs counter to his inner voice.

He says medals should be a byproduct, what he calls an “overlap” of hard work and perseverance.

“It’s unbelievably frustrating to know that people in the U.S. see a medal count, where we beat another country, and somehow, they don’t feel pride that people in their country are doing all this stuff,” Miller said. “They simply think they’re better than the different country because we got more medals.”

He runs a tennis camp -- Miller was once an elite player -- and says one of the cool things about it is “to see a little fat kid who can’t do crap but loves to play anyway, and learns twice as much as the kid who has all the ability in the world.”

And focusing on medals sends the wrong message?

“It’s not a good idea at all,” Miller said. “I see kids quitting sports and dropping out because they don’t want to disappoint their parents; because they know their parents want to see winners.... Kids drop out, even though they love the sport. And there’s unbelievable lessons to learn there and unbelievable personality development.”

If Miller does show up at the Olympic start gate -- “I’m borderline, all the time” -- expect him to rattle some gates and stir up the status quo.

“I just think it’s within my ability to change that, or at least to highlight the message a little bit,” he said. “To go there, to compete, to put down performances that people can recognize are Olympic performances and not have the connection directly to an Olympic medal.”

In ski circles, people roll their eyes and call it “The Bode Show.”

In Turin, another curtain is about to go up.