When I was growing up, I went to baseball camp at UMass Dartmouth, the Division III college in the Massachusetts town I grew up in. One summer, Rhode Island College’s Jay Grenier was my coach. As we sat in front of a TV watching hitting tutorials, he told us what I thought at the time was the craziest thing I had ever heard.
“I love showing up two or three hours early to a game and watching the players warm up. Take batting practice. Field ground balls,” he said. “I like that part more than watching the games.”
All these years later, that’s how I felt watching Lucas Magoon at Red Bull Heavy Metal Boston.
The man’s snowboarding has always been executed with surgical precision, and I’m not just saying that because he recently lost a piece of his finger in an incident with a winch on a street trip in Michigan.
Photo: Cooper Hett/For Snowboarder
Dating back to the days of the Technine film Familia and beyond, watching Gooner boardslide to 540 on a street feature has always felt similar to watching Manny Ramirez swing a baseball bat. It looks effortless, even though you know it’s anything but.
It's why the masses fall in love with folks like Ramirez and Gooner. It's why just a few miles away from City Hall Plaza at Fenway Park, echoes of “Manny being Manny” rang out for years. It's why throughout all of Heavy Metal, you could hear cries of "Gooonnnnner" ripple through the crowd.
On the Saturday of Heavy Metal, I got to do something that I may never get to do again. I got to watch Magoon session a feature on his own, over and over again, simply for himself. When others were zigging, Magoon was zagging.
He decided to 50-50 one of the makeshift railings installed on either side of the downrail in Zone 1 rather than hit the feature that was intended to be hit. He didn’t end up hitting Zone 2, so when the masses moved on to that area for practice, he stayed at Zone 1, and hit the same line over and over and over again. Some tries were switch, Some tries included a tailtap and 180 out. Some tries he ollied over the pole jam.
Every single try at it was surgical, though. We truly got to watch the master at work, and hardly anyone was there to appreciate it.
The master is in his mid-thirties, though, 36 to be exact. Even legends can’t outrun aches and pains, and so in between sessions, Magoon foam rolled. He used some CBD cream. He drank his Dunkin’ coffee and his smoked a cigarette. Even the legends prove to be human.
Photo: Cooper Hett/For Snowboarder
You’d think that someone with as much rail jam success under his belt as Magoon would be used to something like this. Riding amongst all the young guns, though, it was clear, he was having as much fun as anyone out there. That was clear in Zone 3, when he hit the wallride, then ollied the Jersey barrier intended to keep the riders from the rest of the crowd. He slid right up to the press enclosure, with a big smile on his face. He was having fun, perhaps the most fun.
“It's so sick. Keeps the fire going,” he said after the awards were handed out, and Jess Perlmutter and Benny Milam were named the overall champions. “Yeah, it keeps us all running. This is historic dude, so sick. I think there's, like, one time someone got a chance to try to hit something here, so, yeah, this is f*cking cool. I think it's a great thing Red Bull does, and they should keep it going. It seems like great turnout. They should run it back again next year.”
Photo: Cooper Hett/For Snowboarder
As the winners were crowned and the crowd dispersed, Perlmutter, just 15 years old, was mobbed with congratulations just a few feet away from where Magoon was being interviewed. Chris Grenier, a street rider himself and the announcer for the day’s event alongside Todd Richards, came up to congratulate her. So did a number of other riders, as her dad stood close by holding her snowboard.
“Gooner,” she called over to her fellow Killington local when the crowd dispersed. “Can I get a photo?”
The past, present, and future collided all at once, and the people of Boston were there to witness it.
Related: Jess Perlmutter Rode With Her Idols at Red Bull Heavy Metal Boston— Then She Won