Posted November 15, 2009 | Filed Under Document
Written by Peter Kray | Comments: 2
The Sports Illustrated story was called, “In Search of Strau: What’s become of the daredevil king of collegiate skiing?” I was in high school when it ran. The photo on the page was the first time I ever saw him, standing on the stage at the NCAA Championships on the top podium.
He was golden and glowing like a statue in the sun. Like a movie star with his broad Swiss face, his white crooked smile and his wheat white hair blowing in the wind. His eyes were as blue as deep water and he stood out from the crowd like a sunflower he was so tall and tan.
He was the quarterback just come off the bench to win the game, except with something tattered and about to be broken. In the scar that cut from his right temple to his cheek. In the careless way he raised the silver trophy in his right hand. You wanted to be there to catch it for him. To tell him that his red speed suit was torn and his biceps showed through at the arm. To show him how his long black skis were both bent at the tips, and how the two other skiers on the stage, the posters, green, red and blue banners and people in the crowd were all falling out of focus in a swirl of color behind him.
His fluid, aggressive style in the downhill and Super G was described as ‘angry,’ ‘feral,’ and even ‘pathologically transcendent.’
The story counted up the long list of come-from-behind victories and heartbreaking wrecks in two columns right beside each other until they began to seem like the same thing: the stunning wins where he careened down the course and everybody forgot to breathe as he zipped by, or the quiet after the crash before the blood hits the snow and the skis are still sliding. From triumph to tragedy, one after another, they read like the made up rumors of some distant, crazy cousin.
His fluid, aggressive style in the downhill and Super G was described as ‘angry,’ ‘feral,’ and even ‘pathologically transcendent.’ It shocked collegiate racing. He skied so close to the gates that they would explode from their moorings. They were left flopping in his wake. Sometimes it seemed he skied right through them.
For two years at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York – where Bob Parker of the 10th Mountain Division had gone to college, and where I would go too – he built his own East Coast legend. He won races from way back in the field when the spectators were starting home and the courses were rutted and rotten. He ran from the top of the mountain all the way to the bottom on icy blue pavement like tilted frozen lakes through the trees where it’s only glory or ruin; where only because of their balls, their fear or their fuck-it-all that skiers first see if they can survive, then win. And Tack won downhills by a whole second sometimes, which is good as a mile in skiing. Or he crashed so spectacularly that a hush ran up the hill.
“Is he dead?” “Will he ski again?”
They would rush back to the orange fencing when they heard his split-time come over the PA system. Those early East Coast drunks, leaving their beers on the bar as they ran outside for that glimpse of a shooting star – the vapor trail of snow as he was passing. Shouts erupted from the finish line as the adrenaline went through someone. Or there was a collective gasp as he sailed into the woods like a car off the road and everybody waited for the explosion; the blue and red fiberglass poles burst like fireworks, the horse breaking its stable and the raceworkers standing dumbstruck as it happened.
“Tack ‘Tornado’ Strau,” the announcer would say. “Let’s hope he’s not hurt too bad, ladies and gentlemen.”
But he never missed a race. No matter how badly hurt he was, he was always back the next weekend. He hid the bulk of tape around his fractured ribs with an extra turtleneck and told his coaches he was cold. His broken wrist with bigger gloves. He took off an eye patch on the lift and stayed off the drugs to pass the piss test, choosing alcohol over Percodan.
Between his ribs, his arms, his legs and hands he broke 17 bones. But it said you would have to look to see where it slowed him. It said, “He smiles like a joke he shouldn’t tell, with perfect white teeth and thick Swiss lips that are always burned and cracking. He laughs like coffee, like some party or fistfight about to happen.”
He drank after races with his growing legion of fans, the “Scarecrows,” who took to making phony casts, wrapping themselves like mummies in toilet paper and blacking their teeth with markers and charcoal to cheer him. At the NCAA championships in Lake Placid, he annihilated the field in both his disciplines. Then, almost as a joke, he entered and won the slalom. In the post-race interviews he revealed to a reporter that a week before he had torn the medial collateral ligament in his right knee during a training run. He said the doctor told him he needed surgery and at least four months off before he could ski again.
“Why risk it?”
“It’s like being pocket rich,” he said. “You spend it when you can.”
And then that immortal quote: “If it weren’t for gravity, I’d probably be in Nebraska building engines.”
The ECAC coaches couldn’t believe the U.S. Ski Team had never heard of him. The good ones are discovered by the time they’re 14, on the company dime, traveling and training. To make it onto the World Cup from college was like being born again. Tack Strau was discovered when most college racers are playing out their scholarships, deciding whether to take a job pimping skis or to go into investment banking. He was in talks with a ski manufacturer for a two-year contract, lining up his summer training schedule with the U.S. team at the glacier on Mount Hood, then Portillo and Europe in the fall, when he crashed at Whiteface during an early morning practice run. He lost an edge on blue ice and went into the trees. It was almost shtick with him. Except the ambulance came, and the other racers who saw the crash went to wait for news at the bottom.
His helmet was cracked in two. There were more broken bones. Doctors worried his brain might start swelling. But by the time his parents drove up from Pennsylvania, search parties were forming to try and find him. No one saw him leave the hospital. No one saw him in town. It was as if he jumped off a bridge and kept falling.
His teammates drove along the frozen lakes and rivers in their Jeep Cherokees and wood-paneled station wagons, staring into the ice for a glimpse of his beat blue parka, or that blown white paper of hospital cotton. They stopped at the dark little North Country bars, drinking Cokes and Genny’s and pinning up pictures of him. The police interviewed the doctors and orderlies. They put out an All Points Bulletin. For two weeks in the bone-chilling cold, firemen, police and ski racers led search parties into the woods on snowshoes and cross-country skis, following the white-breath of the German Shepherds and Bloodhounds.
It was after Christmas when the reporter drove to Pennsylvania to piece together what might have happened. In the narrow winding roads and the unyielding cold he found the farm in an open field beneath a hill, cloaked in that emptiness of fast December: “January’s desolation.”
Romeo, “Rom,” was from Saas-Fe, in Switzerland. He was handsome, dark and serious as a young priest in his high-collared wool coat except for the gray at the temples, the blue-eyed worry and the places on his face where the sun had been. As a boy he and his brother took the train to Zurich to see Giant and East of Eden. They listened to Hank Williams. They sold the family hotel to move to America and buy a farm, but the brother moved home when the crops first failed. When the mountains didn’t live up to his expectations. “Can you blame him?”
There was a picture of the wooded hill behind the house, up into the trees where Rom built a tow with a cable and an old Ford engine. Each summer he cut and burned the thick brush and saplings. When Tack was born they would wrap him in blankets and pull him on a sled. He was on skis as soon as he could stand. Sometimes they would run the tow until it was out of gas and dinner was on the table. When there was a moon they would go hiking. His legs grew strong on the snow. He learned to be light on the ice and to wait in the trees until he saw the opening.
“Sometimes he would fall so hard, when the cold makes you so sick, and he would get up and be laughing,” his mother said. “You knew you were in trouble when he started laughing.”
Elsa was like the queen of a Norwegian fairy tale, “as blonde as a winter morning.” She was a Scandinavian model that came to America with a farm equipment convention. She was fondling black and orange handled chainsaws in a silver evening gown when a tall young man in a green wool jacket and worn black boots stepped from the crowd and asked in Italian where she was from. Romeo wanted to know if she would have dinner with him.
“I don’t know,” she said, when the reporter asked, writing on the wooden chair on the well-swept wooden floor in the room where all the red and blue ribbons were fluttering like curtains.
“He always said skiing in the summer ruined it for him.”
// photo by Graham Gephart
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Well done! I’m looking forword to the book. The attitude of the web site is right on!
Nice story … reminds me of the Hermanator!