TERRY KIDWELL | POWDER & RAILS | VICE | PT 1/2

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ANNOUNCER: Are you ready?
Hunks of Metal.

[CHEERS]
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PAT BRIDGES: Anybody who's ridden a board backwards,
should care who Kidwell is.
Anybody who's ever ridden any pro model snowboard should
care who Terry Kidwell is.
He was a guy who just went out, and without him you might
never have had that opportunity.
Because there weren't any Shawn Whites, where wasn't any
Olympic snowboarding.
I mean, even look at it today, there are still four ski areas
that don't allow snowboarding in the
United States, or three.
But imagine, take those three ski areas, multiply that by
100, that's the world that Kidwell lived in.

MIKE CHANTRY: To us, he's the godfather of freestyle
snowboarding.
He started it off, and did more than anybody else,
trick-wise.
Developing the tricks, he brought skateboarding tricks,
and other kinds of surfing and stuff to the sport, and
adapted them to the sport, more than
anybody at that time.
STEVE GRAHAM: He was the first one to make it look skate, the
first one to throw real McTwists, just was the man.
In my opinion, that guy deserves $10 for every board
that's sold.
I mean, the whole reason I really got into snowboarding
was seeing all his stuff, and it made it look a lot better
than just doing some race in tights.
JEFF BRUSHIE: He was definitely a big
inspiration for me.
Just seeing those photos and his early video parts.
But, yeah, he was kind of like a guy that I looked up to.
From when I didn't even own a snowboard yet, and I was
looking at the early snowboard magazines of Terry Kidwell
doing McTwists on windlips.
I was like, this is sick.
MIKE CHANTRY: He was the one that created the freestyle.
He was the freestyle master.
Everything else came after.
He was the originator.
He was the original deal, the real deal, and there's been
never anybody like that.
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TERRY KIDWELL: In the very beginning, it was pretty much
like Allen Arnbruster, Bob Klein, Tom Burt.
And Allen Arnbruster had put a pair of water ski bindings,
sideways, on a K2 water ski.
And we just went down the street and built this jump,
and we just rode straight down and hit this jump.
I mean, we really weren't snowboarding.
That was my first day, I was instantly in the air.
I wasn't even trying to make turns.
DAMIAN SANDERS: Everybody sucked real bad back then.
We all sucked.
And Terry was one guy, and Bob Klein, I remember,
was pretty damn good.
But those guys could actually jump and control the board and
land in there.
And all the rest of us were just flailing idiots, we'd hit
a jump, and get as high as we could, land for a second and
just splat, tumble down the hill.
But it didn't matter back then, it wasn't about sticking
the landings, it was just about showing off, and getting
as big air as you can, And if you could link turns, you were
really good.
JERRY DUGAN: Terry had all of the things, of all the things
I like, in the guys I worked with in the beginning.
He had this big explosive style.
At the same time, he could--
he's a tall guy too, he'd compress, and get this like
skate vibe to his riding.
And he did skate all year, that's what he did when he
wasn't snowboarding, he skated.
He brought that, just like Palmer and all those other
guys, brought that into their riding.
They all skated the Mile High Ramp all summer long, which
was the big Tahoe halfpipe where they had the contests.
TERRY KIDWELL: Skateboarding was our main influence.
We were looking at what Stevie Caballero was doing, and
Christian Hosoi.
And we were just trying to ride our snowboards like a
skateboard, for the most part.
But from there, it definitely progressed into
hiking around Mt.
Rose, and pretty much build jumps, skip powder runs, do
what we can do up there.
And then we ran across the Tahoe City Quarterpipe, and
that's where we really started to try do skate tricks on a
snowboard for the most part.

Hi, Mom.
Hi, cameraman.

Yeah.

I fucking landed on the rocks.
SHAWN FARMER: I mean, I feel like he had that Christian
Hosoi style.
He was just cranking out those rockets.
He always rode a wider stance, he had this wide stance.
He'd come off like a knoll and be like jacked, like the thing
would be vert or past vert, and like just all the way down
the hill, and just touchdown, and you'd see his whole base,
and everything.
MIKE CHANTRY: His style was smoother than
anybody back then.
He just had this flow, and the movements and everything that
he did it was just flow from one, to the next, to the next,
to the next.
So we'd start doing photo shoots and video shoots at the
Tahoe City Pipe.
So I was like, I'd watch his riding, and watch how we rode
on that, on the old crappy piece of stuff.
And I started talking with Tom, and I says, you should
pick him him.
There's talent there.
TOM SIMS: Terry Kidwell, who was friends with Mike Chantry,
when I met him at the quarterpipe, he was
kind of a quiet guy.
He listened to AC/DC 24 hours a day.
He was into his music, and into his snowboarding, and not
braggadocios, or extroverted.
He was just a mellow guy.

He was riding, I think, a Winterstick at the time, but
they were so fragile, because they were foam, urethane foam
core with fiberglass wrap, they wouldn't hold up to the
rigors of a halfpipe.
And they had very little rocker, and so it was hard to
launch them.
So, I went to my car gave him a new snowboard, and it was
almost hardly even spoken.
He was just on the team instantly, because there
really were no snowboards that would even work on a
quarterpipe.
TERRY KIDWELL: I don't know if I was the first one to get a
paycheck for riding or not, but I believe, it was for me,
it was that '84, '85 season, and we had done probably a one
page contract, it was for like $200 a month
for five or six months.
MIKE CHANTRY: Terry was the--
Terry, Klein, and Allen, and those guys were all
Winterstick when they started.
Because the Winterstick would support them.
They'd send the boards, but they were getting pissed
because those guys were breaking them all the time
with the airs.
But Tom showed up with the boards and they instantly
converted over, and Terry was the first one to jump.
TERRY KIDWELL: Mike always had his camera going.
Seemed like everywhere we went we were getting filmed, for
the most part.
It was like, he was always, always there.
He seemed like the main instigator to set up things to
go do, and he made sure everybody got a phone call as
far as, let's go ride the quarterpipe at Tahoe City
tomorrow, or we're going to go hiking up Mt.
Rose.
It seemed like he was always the guy that
got the trips together.
But he was, I think, the main reason why me
and Tom Sims met.
So without him, things could have been a lot
different, I guess.
TOM SIMS: Two of the guys that were very important in those
early days of halfpipe riding, who dominated at the Tahoe
City Quarterpipe was Keith Kimmel and Allen Arnbruster.
MIKE CHANTRY: Allen Arnbruster had the talent and ability to
be better than anybody.
We called him Gumby, because he could tweak and contort
more than anybody, and get in the most unreal
positions on a snowboard.
We see these cliff jumps of him, these photos of him just
going of these huge, to flat.
And he's like, yeah, whatever.
Terry would be like, oh, my knees.
Allen was just like, screw it, he'd just go right off.
TERRY KIDWELL: I mean, when we first started riding, Allen
was the best skateboarder of us all.
And when we all started snowboarding, he pretty much
was the best rider of our group of five or six people.
So he was pretty much pushing the rest of us
to catch up to him.
And we were always watching what he was doing and trying
to copy him, and stuff.
And he just took a different path, and his snowboarding
started going downhill, and really too bad, because he was
just such a phenomenal athlete.
MIKE CHANTRY: I think the notoriety he got with Sim's,
and stuff, just kind of went to his head.
He was a friend of the bong, like the rest of them in the
beginning, but he decided to jump into other things.
And, he just permanently borrowed stuff from everybody,
to fund his habit.
SHAWN FARMER: One time Tom Sims bought him a plane ticket
to fly out to Vermont to the US Open.
And he sold the plane ticket and bought a bunch of blow and
rode the bus, did coke the whole way, all the way to
fucking Vermont, from here, Dude.
Can you imagine?
TOM SIMS: Allen was pretty much out of control in his
personal life.
He could have been neck and neck with Terry Kidwell, and
gone on to great things, but the coke dragon dragged him
down pretty bad.
But I never really kicked him off the team, he basically
ended up in prison and was de facto off the team, because he
wasn't around.
TERRY KIDWELL: He started cooking the coke up into crack
cocaine, and then he got hooked on it, and pretty much,
pretty sad, but he spent most of his adult life in jail.
More than likely, as far as his last conviction, he's in
jail for the rest of his life.
MIKE CHANTRY: You know, we all gave him three chances to
straighten out, but he never did.
He'd always come back, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good and
he'd always do something screwy, to
wind up back in prison.
Now he's there forever.
He's in Folsom.
TERRY KIDWELL: I've gotten to see him a few times throughout
the years when he'd gotten out, and then
didn't last too long.
And he would get the urge to smoke again, and he'd end up
getting in trouble, and he'd go right back.
And he ended up with the three strikes, you're out.
No he's in for life.

It's kind of a tough one for me.
He was my best friend through the high school years, and
it's really, really was tough one to see one of your friends
take that path.

Yeah.

Holy shit.

Hang in there.