Peter Line Legend through and through
If you’re old enough you’ll remember this.
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The good old days when resort bandits and super heroes dominated the slopes. The days of idolising a rider just because he was shit hot on a snowboard but didn’t seem to give a shit what anyone thought. A time when a few iconoclasts led the way and wouldn’t be pushed into any particular mould just because it would suit a sponsor’s marketing plan. The days when duct-taped gloves and boot-ends simply added to your kudos, and when professional snowboarding was anything but, well, professional.
Peter Line, ladies and gentlemen, was that time.
Life as Peter as we know him all began twenty years ago at Crystal Mountain, Washington, when he first strapped his small frame into a Burton 140 Elite with swallow tail and a fin on the base. Five years down the line and Peter had his first board sponsor, Division 23, offering him a pro model.
It wasn’t long before he was stomping through the ranks and creating his own version of snowboarding. It was Peter Line who introduced switch tricks into the game. Then came the corks and spins and /voila/ – from backside corkscrews to backside rodeos, Peter Line was responsible for a lot of that crazy shit you see on the hills today. “Obviously I feel proud to have been able to be a part of snowboarding's progression and to have helped advance something I love,” he admits. “Not many people can be so involved and change a sport or anything they're really into. I feel privileged.”
Not a wonder then, that Peter has donned the ‘legend’ label for some time now. But what does he think of this term, being that he is still riding and filming? “I like it, it's a nice transition term as I get older. I always have it in my back pocket to pull out as an excuse when I'm out riding with the young kids. I've been pro for fifteen years and still riding and filming - that's a long time for the snowboarding industry. I've seen many good riders come and go within my career. So I guess the term legend means even more to me than just that I did my part well and moved on. I've been here for the long haul and am still trying to progress the sport.”
Peter has attracted some interesting labels during his snowboarding tenure: innovator, genius and talented businessman to mention but a few. He’s also been called a ‘weirdo’. “It's better than people thinking of me as typical or normal,” he laughs. “I've never really been a follow-the-crowd type person. Those people put me off, the non-thinking conformists. I've always really hated team sports too, I don't know, maybe I am strange…”
Strange? Possibly. Smart? Definitely. It only takes a quick look at ‘Peter the Entrepreneur’ to realise that. It was with no baby step into the business world that he entered the scene. Instead, he went big, co-founding Forum and Foursquare, and owning part of Electric Eyewear. And although Peter doesn’t consider himself a corporate guy (“I never ran any day-to-day operations, so I would never consider myself a businessman”), he somehow found himself making solid amounts of money from snowboarding. “Forum and Foursquare were companies that we started that were snowboarding through and through,” Peter says. “I could have moved on for bigger pay to companies who didn't have that as their drive. That wasn't an option for me. Having ownership in the companies was a way for a smaller, core company to afford me.”
Peter set out to create the world’s best snowboarding team with Forum, and many still argue that he did just that. With riders such as Devun Walsh, JP Walker, Bjorn Leines and Jeremy Jones, Peter put together a team of eight riders who represented all that was progressive and cutting edge. From the pros’ images to the ads Forum created, the brand was simply cooler than cool and kids everywhere wanted a piece of it.
Having made a massive success out of his snowboarding brands, Peter has decided to explore other avenues. He had a stint on ESPN as an X Games commentator (“I wasn't hired back the next year because someone high up thought I was too wired for the show”) and he co-owns a town car service in Seattle called Crown Black Car: “It's basically a taxi service where we have tattooed rocker dudes driving. It's tight.”
To read the full feature, check out Huck #012.
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Peter Line (text) by Zoe Oksanen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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