Judge Judy

I got this free “special events” pass from Stevens Pass this year. Thanks Matt and Chris. It’s pretty damn special too cause as an employee I get to charge food and shit to my pass. For every dollar I load up on my pass, Stevens matches it so everything is basically half price. Which makes eating and drinking coco with the kids affordable. Anyway the pass is dope and I want to keep it so as part of the special events crew I’m supposed to work a couple of events. Being gone for the majority of the winter, I’ve missed all the events, except for the last two which were Thursday and Friday. Damn, got to take two days of work off to fulfill my obligations. The two events were Helly Hansens Shop Wars and Salomons Ender Ender contest. Two different contests on two different nights by two different sponsers but with the same kids and same jump. Squirilly but actually they worked out to be two completely different deals. My job was to be one of the judges of the contest. “Sure I’ve judged before, throw me in there!” I told them. Actually the last contest I judged was in 1997, in Crested Butte with Benny Pelligrino. We were two of the 5 judges for the World Extreme Contest. I remember we sat there and laughed at all these Extreme Dream clowns that were splatting off anything they could huck themselves off of in hopes of being the next Matt Goodwill. Then we let this dude make the finals cause he ran the course naked. Even funnier because when I moved to Seattle this kook remembered me from the contest and called me out for letting that guy in the finals and not him. I was like, dude you were in 51rst place, that’s sucking as bad as the guy in 500^th, so shut up. Plus you were riding Clickers.

Anyway back to todays big air contest, judging was supposed to be on some shit like amplitude, difficulty, style, and some other crap like that. Seeing how the kids couldn’t land jack shit, there were a bunch of 1’s thrown out. A crashed 360 got a 1, crashed 5 got a 1.5, 7 = 2, 9 =2.5 and a 10=3. If they by chance landed any of the mentioned, the scores got doubled. Take off switch, add a point. Make it look like your spinning in a hula hoop, minus 4 points, make it look good add up to 3 points. Straight air that bitch and crank out a grasser, 10. Out of the five judges, 1 kid was a skier. It was so rad hearing the announcer claim the kid was spinning un natural. I’m like what the fuck? Un natural? That shits frontside or backside, shut up. No one got a 10, and in the end, the ski team from EVO Seattle ruled on all the local shops. The next night on the Ender Ender contest, the kids actually started to figure out how to land things, so it got a little more interesting. Or maybe all them Sessions beers that Joe Neese threw down our throats made things seem better. I think a FS 7 nose won it for the sideways kids and a corked cab 10 won it for the ski guys. Regardless, I paid my dime and did my time.