When freeski slopestyle was added to the Olympics as a medal sport for the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia, it seemed inevitable that Tom would lead the strong American contingent in the discipline. And yet a major knee injury and the correlating downturn in results left him just barely off the team.
The opportunity to grow his mainstream recognition and solidify an iconic status in the sport seemed to be passing him by. Some people, faced with a similar disappointment, would have dropped off the map or maybe lost their way. Tom, however, has seemingly ignored the result to focus on skiing again.
Much as the action in Tom’s episodes switches from spot to spot and genre to genre, the shoot at Seven Springs hit different parts of the mountain and a wide variety of features. As I first saw from the parking lot, there was a dual direction channel gap jump that they skied—left, right, both knuckles and even straight over the gap—in the middle of the day under bright sun and again the next morning at sunrise. They even went back, as the light faded under low clouds, on a third day when the tireless park staff had made a feature by placing a huge up rail on the rollover of one side of the landing. Slide up that at high speed, then gap to a tube before dealing with a severe drop to the landing, it was not mellow at all.
On the backside of the resort, all the remaining snow had been pushed into a table-top kicker. It was on this feature that Tim tried his triple, and on its hip that Karl Fostvedt bagged the closing shot of Two. The skiers also spent a few hours in Seven Springs’ Streets rail park. It is impossible to hold back talent, so the session that started as a mellow way to kill time while the park staff worked on other projects rapidly evolved into a slaughter fest of technical rail lines. Ware provided the epic finale when he slid the top of a wall ride perched over short transitions.
At each spot, skiers filtered in and out of the action and spectators gathered to scope the scene. Some were local fans, but they were also joined by some of the skiers’ and crew’s families. Much like the videos, the central figures went by the surname Wallisch, but the others joined in effortlessly to help. Mike Wallisch, Tom’s dad, pitched in with a shovel at the rail garden. I caught Mama Wallisch, Patty, cheering in the parking lot and firing up the troops after a break for lunch.
Patty and Mike’s lunch was a full picnic spread. All the fixin’s for enormous sandwiches and also side dishes, drinks and desserts, staged around their car. “I feel like we’re in middle school doing team sports,” I overheard Ware say as he fueled up for another jump session.
During the sunrise shoot, Yaps filled the back of an SUV with an assortment of McDonald’s breakfast items. And a special crockpot filled with pulled pork, provided by the Wallisch clan, was heated up for snacks or dinner on a couple of evenings. At each successive feature, you could count on finding snacks that ranged from a healthy mix of fresh veggies to chips and salsa. With a laugh, Kyle Decker told his mom that he was trying to work her homemade salsa into the films. That might not have happened, but it was delicious enough to make FREESKIER.
Taking care of the gang is clearly another key piece of the Good Company ethos. “One thing Wallisch did this year that I had a lot of respect for,” Decker told me, “is that he said ‘We’re going to sleep well, not be uncomfortable and eat halfway decent food.’” What’s the next step in ski trip cuisine? “Like Chili’s,” interjected Dakoulas after estimating, with pride, that he’d eaten McDonald’s only six times during the winter.
“Ten years ago, I could sleep in a corner and be as productive as I am today,” explained Decker about sleeping arrangements during urban trips, which are notorious for crowded rooms, little sleep and explosive tempers. “When you’re comfortably sleeping, you don’t get that burned out.” That’s not to say that there is any sense of entitlement emanating from Tom’s status as a genuine star—you won’t find craft services or warming tents on their shoots.
Wallisch’s co-producer Tom Yaps clearly believes in the philosophy. “He knows these guys are risking their limbs,” Decker said about Yaps. “He goes out of his way to make sure everyone is taken care of, and that’s how you run a proper operation.”
The way ski flicks are consumed has changed, and with The Wallisch Project and Good Company, Tom is refining this new way of producing and distributing content. The tradeoff with the immediacy and elasticity of access from social media and web-hosted videos is the erosion of the focused impact of hour-long DVDs and the season-opening movie premieres. To put it another way, do true fans exist in an age of six-second Vines, 15-second Instagram clips and two-minute YouTube videos? Part of the response to consumers with short attention spans is the tight editing of the films. Another piece is simply Tom himself.
Good Company has exhibited an abiding dedication to exceptional skiing that core fans appreciate and combined that with insistent pacing in the videos. Skiing is only the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface is the family philosophy and Tom’s unique personality—accessible and apparently effortless. Once the sport starts a dialogue between Tom and both nascent fans and devoted followers through edits, social media and even direct contact, new media also allows glimpses into the other side of life. That may be a short behind-the-scenes video or an Instagram that includes his girlfriend, Steph, or their dog, Derek the Dog.
Many athletes with enormous sales power have become dislikable because they’re not actually good people or they market an untruthful public persona (Tiger, Lebron, Jeter, et al.). If Good Company can be considered a success in a marketing sense, it is that much more admirable because such a key factor in that triumph is how the Company is an extension of Tom’s earnest virtuousness.
One night during the shoot, everyone gathered for a big season-wrap dinner held in a roadhouse that sat just a few feet off a lonely, narrow road a few miles from Seven Springs. It was a genuinely homely place, and more fitting for this group than some fancy steakhouse.
As we sat around a long collection of tables in the center of the dining room, a middle-aged man screamed, “Skiers are in the house!” and pumped his fist in the air. Through the course of the evening many locals spoke with us: A pair of married skiers who told me about the history of snowmaking; a man in paint-splattered shorts and a Sherwin-Williams sweatshirt who explained that he could have been pro as either a snowboarder or skier, it didn’t seem to matter which; and our waitress who mentioned how good McChesney smelled enough times that it became a drinking game.
Countless wings of every variety, a few different pizzas, chips with guacamole and sour cream, bowls of pasta smothered in rich sauce, mozzarella sticks, juicy steaks and even some crab legs. It was all on the table. Halfway through dinner, between toasts, I watched as Tom reached over and demonstrated to Fostvedt how he should crack a crab leg and remove the meat. The shell wasn’t crisp, a little soggy—certainly not as good as you could find closer to the coast. It was easy to appreciate the sentiment. Here was Tom Wallisch showing a friend how to extract sustenance and enjoyment from something so simple.
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