“It’s growing by leaps and bounds,” says King, 22, employing an apt clich to describe a sport in which the primary object is to launch oneself off a boat’s wake into the air, ideally while performing gymnastics that would do Bart Conner proud. Wakeboarding is nothing if not eye-catching, and what’s more, say enthusiasts, it’s not that tough to learn. (A NEWSWEEK tester with no water-skiing experience managed to get up on his third attempt. Any gymnastics, however, were strictly accidental.) The boards themselves, made of compression-molded fiber glass over a foam core, run a shade over four feet long and are fitted with rubber bindings on top and a small fin under each tip. As water sports go, wakeboarding is most similar to traditional trick skiing, which also features aerial maneuvers performed on a boardlike contrivance. But a wakeboard’s fins allow the rider to dig in for greater acceleration and thus become airborne more easily. And, at least as important, its larger size makes landing again a more forgiving endeavor. A rapidly expanding list of manufacturers expects to sell about 120,000 boards this year, up from 95,000 last year. At Performance Ski and Surf in Orlando, Fla., owner Bill Porter says wakeboards are outselling traditional trick skis by 20 to 1.
In many ways, wakeboarding is to waterskiing what Snowboarding is to snow skiing: a younger, hipper and more accessible alternative. One big plus is that since wakeboarders prefer slower boat speeds to generate a bigger wake (thereby achieving a more powerful launch pad for tricks), the speedy, customized ski boats favored by traditionalists are unnecessary. “We were out in Seattle and they were pulling some wakeboarders behind a 60-foot trawler,” says Porter. Even a personal watercraft, such as a Jet Ski, will work.
But most important, perhaps, to wakeboarding’s success is that its push-the-envelope image elevates it to the level of more established adrenaline sports. Top pros, decked out in their sponsors’ latest fashions and gear, demonstrate cutting-edge tricks in grunge-infused specialty videos like “Wake the Beast” and on the pages of the edgy monthly Wakeboarding Magazine. There’s a burgeoning pro tour, and this summer the sport’s best will take their place alongside other recreational radicals in ESPN’s Extreme Games.
The trickle-down effect reached 10-year-old Danny Gruber last year. “I saw some people doing it and it looked really cool, so I decided to try it,” explains the grinning fourth grader upon returning to the dock from a wakeboarding lesson at Orlando’s O-Town Watersports. He got his first board this past Christmas and has been a regular rider since. “It’s great. I get a lot of airat least two or three feet.” For a guy who stands about four feet, that’s rad for sure.
