THE RIVER RAT REMEMBERS Episode 12 Water Skis: Searching for the Holy Grail

[Guest]

Join former AWSA Executive Director Bruce Kistler as he recounts incidents from the Golden Age of water skiing. Interesting people—legends, characters and unsung heroes. Curious places and events. Moments of discovery and wonder. Accidents, mishaps and miscues. Glimpses from inside the organization. Personal stories from a lifetime on skis.

 

 

Episode 12 Water Skis: Searching for the Holy Grail

 

Like most skiers, I never stopped looking for the Holy Grail: Skis that would make me a better skier, magically, overnight, without any effort on my part. That secret hope is the root of all water ski marketing.

 

When I first started competing in the mid-1960s, my kit consisted of a flat-bottomed Cypress Gardens Alfredo Mendoza slalom and a pair of 54” Stilley Plywood trick skis. Someone later gave me a set of cracked Hedlund jumpers.

 

The hottest thing on the market at the time were square-tipped Cypress Gardens Trik-Masters, but unfortunately they weren’t in the budget. Big Al suggested that we make our own and he found a seasoned ash plank at a specialty lumberyard. Using a borrowed ski to trace the shape, we cut out a set of blanks, then steamed them over Al’s kitchen stove and clamped them in a jig to the appropriate curvature. So far so good. I reasoned that the skis would slide easier and turn better if I rounded the bottom edges—no sharp edges to catch—so I spent hours with a rasp, file and sandpaper putting a nice smooth bevel on them. Little did I know that by doing so I was ruining the skis. The best way to make a ski track like it’s on rails and resist turning is to bevel the bottom edges. Lesson learned the hard way.

 

However, I discovered that I could purchase unfinished trick ski blanks directly from the Stilley Plywood factory in South Carolina. These Mike Osborn model tricks were lightyears ahead of my original banana peels: shorter, wider, lighter, beveled top edge, nice mahogany top. They were darn good skis for an unbelievable price.

 

It soon dawned on me that this was a business opportunity. So, while still in high school, I created the Bruce Kistler Ski Shop with the goal of making enough to pay my college tuition. This was before Overton's and Bart's. Who knows, if I had known about the huge market that those retailers were able to exploit, maybe I would have continued in the business as a career rather than getting a teaching degree and working for pennies. As it was, a couple times each year, an eighteen-wheeler would pull up in front of my house and I’d get my latest shipment. I sold trick blanks at tournaments and eventually started taking orders for finished skis with custom binders. Chip Debus discovered a material called Linotex, a tough, red neoprene rubber that made great bindings. It so happened that a factory near my hometown was a large user of Linotex and I was able to buy rolls of it from them. At the time, I had a summer job working for Big Al, who was the foreman of a plastics fabrication shop. I made knockoff patterns from some Northland heel and toe pieces that I had, as well as a pattern for a unique "funnel toe" rear trick binder that, I think, I got from Jim McGraw. No one, before or since, has manufactured it commercially. Albert made punch dies for each shape and I would spend my lunch break sitting at a hydraulic punch press, cutting out stacks of binders. For years, red binders were a common sight among the Lake Clarke crowd.

 

I also began making custom trick handles and got pretty good at splicing diamond-braid ski rope. I made the toe straps out of nylon Army-surplus cargo straps and availed myself of the fabrication shop’s heavy-duty gromet machine. I used Glad-handles and drilled them out to make a secure loop attachment rather than the simple interior knot attachment. I hand-sewed cloth-backed neoprene foam to the insteps. The result was stronger and more secure than the leather strap Al Tyll trick handle I had been using and a rough but functional facsimile of the Casad handle, which later became the de facto standard in competition.

 

For a while, I skied on Stilley Plywood jumpers and sold jumper blanks. The jumpers were thick and clunky and had tapered tails. They were very strong but I discovered that the bottom ply would eventually blister and peel off in chunks. That experiment last less than a season.

 

At the 1968 Canton Nationals, Senior Judge Milt Nash led me over to the Cypress Gardens Skis booth. He said to the head knocker, “This is the young fellow I was telling you about. He’s an up-and-comer in the East and Cypress Gardens ought to sponsor him.” The guy took me to a trailer and pulled out a box of round-tip Trik Masters and an El Diablo slalom and handed them to me. He said, “I’m sorry we're out of jumpers. Give me your address and I’ll ship you a pair.”

 

In January, my new Ramp Masters arrived. When spring came, I put on my wetsuit and rode them for the first time. No ramp, just cutting back and forth. When I was finished, I kicked off the skis and climbed in the boat. I turned around—and there was one blue ski floating on the water. The other had sunk to the bottom. It’s still out there somewhere at the bottom of the Conowingo reservoir.

 

Two years later, I was back in Canton for another National Championships, this time in the Men’s Division. Following the tournament, we skied a set with Chris Redmond. As we were coming in, a man came up to me and introduced himself as Roger Teeter. He was with Composite Structures Corporation and was doing product development for O’Brien. He had a pair of experimental trick skis that he wanted me to try.

 

With all the great skiers at the Nationals, I still don’t know why Roger asked me, an unknown from the Eastern Region, to test his cutting-edge fiberglass and aluminum honeycomb trick skis. Anyhow, I was glad to give him my assessment. “These are the lightest, quickest skis I’ve ever used,” I told him. “I love how they come clean off the wakes, but—I hate to tell you this—they turn like a truck. You need to get rid of the square edges. If you put a top-edge bevel on them, you’ll have the best trick skis on the market.”

 

“Interesting,” he replied, "that’s what Ricky McCormick told us.” That winter, Roger sent me one of the first production pairs to come off the press. They had rubber edges with a top-edge bevel. The binding attachment area was an exterior fiberglass plate. In later models, the reinforcement layer was flush with the top sheet. The skis carried the O’Brien logo but they were the prototype for Roger’s own brand that was soon to hit the market: EP. They were great skis and they helped me advance to another level. I sold them soon after I moved to Florida. I wish I had kept them. They were museum pieces.

 

During this time, Teeter was also experimenting with inversion boots. Inversion therapy for the relief of back pain was gaining attention from many long-suffering water ski jumpers. Roger started with a pair of padded aluminum cuffs that clamped around your ankles. Each cuff had a large inverted hook protruding from it. Wearing these, you could swing your legs up and hook yourself to a horizontal bar. Hanging upside down from your ankles, your body weight created spinal traction that decompressed your vertebrae. I remember groups of skiers at the Nationals waiting in line to try the strange monkey cuffs. Teeter later devised a tilt mechanism that allowed the wearer to attach the cuffs while upright and then tilt upside down. Today, Teeter inversion tables are sold online and at sporting goods stores nationwide and Roger is the pitchman in his own TV commercials. I have a Teeter inversion table and still use it.

 

Years earlier, long before the transition to fiberglass skis, O’Brien became famous with the introduction of the revolutionary tunnel concave slalom ski. It was an overnight sensation. It seems that everyone had an O’Brien. I had one. The tunnel concave was a technological advance but the skis were also beautiful. Each one was unique, a work of art in wood. I later had a fiberglass EP tunnel.

 

Not all new trick ski models that came along passed muster with me. Some wildly popular brands were a bomb. One of these was Taperflex, endorsed by Al Tyll. I found them to be slippery and uncontrollable. Another was Saucier, one of the first fiberglass brands. Their trick skis had square edges and they turned, well, like trucks. I recently listened to a podcast by Cory Pickos, who skied on Saucier in his early days. In the recording, he marvels that he did so well on them.

 

After I hurt my back, I stopped jumping and I eventually stopped slaloming in competition as well. Moving to Florida, I used my Composite Structures O’Brien trick skis until graduating to a Cypress Gardens Technique, later to a Kidder KD7000, and ultimately to a Radar Graviton for toes and a D3 Aira for hands. Maybe my current skis aren't the Hold Grail, but they’re light-years ahead of the huge plywood banana peels that are hanging on my garage wall in my personal mini-museum.

 

[fu_man]

It boggles my mind that people were able to do tricks in those long skinny 54s. Seems like those long tips would catch water and dump you quite easily.

[BKistler]

And at the time I probably weighed 85 lbs. soaking wet. They made stepovers hard to learn.

[Cooper_Trelawney]

@BKistler that was a great read. Thank you for sharing those memories. This is titled Episode 12. Did you post 1-11 here on BallofSpray too?

[BKistler]

Yep. Hope you will read them.