Tanner Hall: The once and future king
Almost a week before Christmas, 27-year-old Tanner Hall is driving south to Mexico.
His destination is Ensenada, a port city in Baja tucked along the ocean, called the "Cinderella of the Pacific."
This is where Tanner has found the fountain of youth.
At the Ongley Institute founded by Dr. Milne J. Ongley, Tanner is receiving a series of injections into his joints with a solution that contains, in part, sugar and sterile water.
Ten years of extreme professional skiing has Tanner waking up every morning with aches and pains like an old man. These injections, he says, lube him up like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz. They bring youth back to his body. His rebuilt knees don't hurt all day anymore. He almost feels like a kid again.
There is hope.
He tells his father back home it almost seems too good to be true.
Glory is fleeting, after all. Tanner knows this. Oh, how he knows this.
In the last year and a half, one of the most spectacular and accomplished skiers in the world has truly been razed by mortality.
Another horrific crash nearly ended his career - if not his life - and sent him into more rehabilitation and surgeries. Then alcohol abuse and drug addiction followed. And then his best friend died suddenly, tragically.
The kid from Kalispell, who has reached the highest of heights, crashed worse than ever before, at the bottom.
And so for the fourth weekend in a row, Tanner drives the road toward Ensenada, with the sea on his right, alone in his mind, chased by his demons, watched over by his guardian angel and a family supporting him all the way - ready to start a new chapter in his life and ready to be king again.
Like a good mother, ?Darla Hall can tell the story of the day she picked up her 8-year-old son after a day of skiing at Big Mountain. He told her he would be the best skier anyone had ever seen.
"He says ‘I'm going to ski for money. People are going to pay me to ski,'" Darla recalls. "Of course you can't go, ‘Oh Tanner, pipe dream.' I says, ‘You know what, you go for it. If you can make a living out of doing what you love to do, you go for it ... He was going to ski for Rossignol and Oakley and be the best that they'd ever seen."
That's exactly what Tanner Hall did.
Raised in Kalispell, the freckle-faced, blonde-haired kid with tons of energy and ADD became one of the most successful and influential skiers alive, with sponsors lining up to court him.
His mother's memorable story acts as the introduction to the new documentary "Like a Lion: The True Story of Legendary Skier Tanner Hall." Released last fall and directed by Eric Iberg, "Like a Lion" is a retrospective on Tanner's life, with an unabashed look at the good, the bad and the ugly.
Produced by his company Inspired Media Concepts and with a soundtrack also off the company's new record label, Inspired Music, "Like a Lion" charts Tanner's rise as the rockstar king of freeskiing.
After dropping out of school at age 17, Tanner went on to become the face of his sport, bright baggy-clothing and controversial quotes included. Many believe his coarse livelihood throughout the years has diminished his accomplishments.
But once he's on skis, there's no denying - his talents exceed our imagination.
At the Winter X Games in 2008, he won his record seventh gold medal. Only Shaun White, the Olympic gold medalist and snowboard poster boy, has gone on to achieve more at the Super Bowl of winter sports in Aspen every year.
Tanner has skied all over the world, winning every conceivable competition in his path - big air, bumps and jumps, superpipe, slopestyle - and at the same time has earned a reputation as not only a circuit competitor but a premier backcountry skier, evidenced in numerous ski films he has made with his best friend and talented peer, C.R. Johnson.
"The best skier on the planet? Perhaps. The most complete skier alive? Absolutely."
"A pioneer of the sport."
"An icon."
"A legend."
People have had plenty to say about Tanner throughout the years. It hasn't always been good though.
Following an arrest in Vail, Colo., in 2005 for public drunkenness, Tanner was called out in a newspaper column titled "Is freeskiing's face a good one?"
"The face of freeskiing is a 21-year-old with long, curly blonde hair, an unmatched competitive drive and a will to stump for the sport for as long as it takes," Devon O'Neil of the Vail Daily wrote. "The face of freeskiing is also an outspoken whiner, a high school dropout, and, all too often, a black mark."
After the arrest, Tanner wrote a letter to the editor of the Vail Daily apologizing to the community, friends, family and fans.
This doppleganger has always haunted Tanner, through outspoken comments, a misdemeanor marijuana charge and an immature braggadocio that has followed the Montana native his whole life.
But that isn't the whole picture, not according to friends and family.
"He helped create the sport to be so big, but then the sport that he created judges him the hardest," Iberg, a close friend of Tanner's who pitched the idea for "Like a Lion", said in an interview. "So with this film we can show all the people that judge him, like why is someone like they are? We already are such a small community but even though we're such a small community there's a lot of people who don't have first-hand interaction with the people that they idolize or talk shit on."
"Nobody, and I mean nobody, in the industry would say no to him. Nobody," his father Gerry, who still lives in Kalispell with Darla, said in an interview recently. "And his head got too big."
When asked what it's like to have a son who lives the life that Tanner does, Gerry responded,
"You just hold onto your heart, you know. You're just worried constantly. Not just when he was on skis. The whole lifestyle, and navigating life. There are so many obstacles out there."
Like drugs and alcohol. In "Like a Lion," Tanner opens up about his partying and admits that when he drinks, he gets crazy.
But life has a funny way of cleaning people up sometimes.
Tanner's best friend and roommate for seven years, C.R. Johnson, went into a coma after a skiing accident in 2005. Tanner sat by his bed in the hospital, hoping for his friend's recovery. Johnson did come back, but he was different.
"They say most times when somebody has a bad head injury like he had, usually they come back the other way. Anger is a huge issue," Gerry said.
"C.R. was 180 degrees opposite. He just turned into one of the coolest people you could ever imagine. He thanked the Lord every day for what he had."
In "Like a Lion," Johnson echoes this.
"Every single day I ski, every single day I'm out with my friends, I love so much," Johnson says in the documentary. "It's like the richest day, the fullest day. Every day is an absolute blessing and I don't want to take it for granted."
Tanner had his partner and best friend back at his side, but the demons were still there, too. In May, 2009, Tanner suffered another major crash, worse than the famous Chad's Gap accident that broke both Tanner's feet and became a popular, horrifying YouTube video.
While making a ski film at Stevens Pass in Washington, Tanner hit a jump going too fast and overshot the landing by almost 70 feet. On impact, he blew out both ACLs and broke his tibial plateaus, essentially destroying his knees. In the documentary, Tanner admits that 5 mph faster, and it would have been "lights out."
"It just sucks mentally," Tanner said in an interview while driving to Mexico recently.
"I mean it's just hard knowing you're going to be out for up to basically about a year. That's a lot of time for your mind to just sit and wander. Basically the hardest thing in dealing with injuries is just keeping your sanity, you know what I mean? It's a lot of work in the gym and a lot of work in physical therapy. It's a lot of pain."
With pain came painkillers, and Tanner was soon struggling to ween himself off, his dad said. But there was Johnson to the rescue. His best friend was there at his side at every moment.
"C.R. basically babysat him during that time and got him off that stuff," Gerry said. "That's what C.R. was really good at."
And then, just when the sun started to shine again, tragedy.
On Feb. 24, 2010, at Squaw Valley in California, Johnson crashed on a rocky stretch of mountain and died.
He was 26 years old.
The sun is glowing across the Pacific at the edge of the continent and any sign of snow is far, far away.
Tanner hasn't touched a drink in over three months, his dad says. He won't even look at prescription drugs.
He has new goals, new dreams to accomplish. Inspired Media Concepts, is doing groundbreaking work online with a website/ski-film television channel (www.inspiredmedia.tv). A new recording studio was built in Jamaica for Inspired Music. Armada Skis, co-founded by Tanner also, has established itself as one of the most respected ski companies around, with equipment and apparel sales growing annually.
Always something. Tanner is always thinking about something.
Especially being back on skis.
The Olympic committee is about to decide if halfpipe events will be included in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. And rumor is that it will be.
"That's pretty much the main goal right now," Tanner said. "My mind is kind of shifting now towards pretty much only three winters away. I'm just trying to get in the right mindset ... until that day comes where I'm going to be standing at the top of a pipe for the very first Olympic halfpipe ski ever."
It would be fitting if the kid who helped start it all, carried it to the top, could be there for that. But will he be? Can the king return?
"Physically, he's healed," Gerry said. "Mentally, can he overcome all that's happened to him? The jury's out, although with the Olympics I have no doubt that he can do it. He'll be a king in the ski world forever anyway. He doesn't have a thing left to prove. At least not in skiing he doesn't. There's plenty of other things he needs to prove a little bit probably. The main thing for me was that he turned out to be a good kid. That hasn't changed. That's still the one thing I want more than anything.
"But he loves these kind of challenges," Gerry added. "Don't ever tell him he can't do something."
Who knows who the real Tanner Hall is? At times he has been a wild child with no cares in the world but his own, saying and doing whatever he wants with no regard for consequences. Other times he is the superstar who took a week and visited a fan in Maine who had cistic fibrosis.
He is, in the end, the kid from Kalispell, who found something he loved doing and did what everyone wishes they would do - pursue a dream fearlessly, relentlessly, no matter what.
And all with the help of his older brother, Tyson, who helps run Armada Skis; his mother and father, who live in Kalispell but constantly visit Park City, Utah, where Tanner lives full-time; his friends like Eric Iberg and Cali P, a reggae artist who signed onto Inspired Music; and of course, his best friend and guardian angel.
"No matter where he is I feel he's looking out for me and I feel like he stands with me every single solitary day, somewhere somehow," Tanner says of Johnson in "Like a Lion."
"I got my guardian angel. Not too many people can say their best friend is their guardian angel."
He's almost to the border now and cell phone service will be lost soon.
Winter X Games is just over a month away, starting Jan. 27 in Aspen. People are saying because of Tanner's absence for the second year in a row, a new era is dawning in freeskiing. Xavier Bertoni, Duncan Adams and others who grew up idolizing the kid from Kalispell will be flying high in the spotlight, while Tanner Hall will be climbing back into his skis, trying to find that old feel. Trying to fly again.
Glory is fleeting.
But a new era is dawning.
"There's a lot of stuff that can go bad in life and you just have to wake up every day and see the good in it and be positive and keep putting positive energy into it. That's kind of my new outlook on life," Tanner said.
"It's a lot of heartache. It's a lot of emotions. It's a rollercoaster ride. But you know, what don't break us makes us ?stronger."
Reporter Dillon Tabish can be reached at 758-4463 or by e-mail at dtabish@dailyinterlake.com