A few days before Stein Eriksen was to return to Utah's Deer Valley to resume his role as director of skiing, he relaxed at his Montana cabin.
"This retreat is so valuable to me," he said. "It's almost like medicine. After five months here . . . I'm excited about the ski season."He said he's ready for this ski season. After nearly 40 years in the ski industry, he's still excited about marketing at Deer Valley and its plans for development. He's ready for the press, ski shows, benefits, travel agents, ski balls and VIPs.
For the next seven months, Eriksen will again be a dogged, tireless promoter of skiing.
Over the years of fly fishing in Montana together, the subject of his influences and introduction to skiing never surfaced before. This year, here and now, it did come up.
The major influences, he said, were family and a few friends - supportive parents who were devoted to the growth of skiing in Norway; an older brother, who interrupted a promising ski career to escape from Nazi-occupied Norway and become a decorated World War II Spitfire pilot; and a German skiing friend, Willy Bogner, admired by the young Eriksen boys, who later introduced the world to Bogner stretch pants.
"Until the war our lives were pretty much carefree," he said. In the Eriksen's backyard was a tennis court and behind it a slalom hill. Nearby were the Midstubakken and Holmenkollen ski jumps.
Like other Norwegian boys in the 1930s, Stein was a ski jumper. Besides the big jumps nearby, there was a jump in his backyard, lit by candles for night jumping. It would be years before his interests turned to alpine skiing.
At age 11, Stein was also an avid gymnast, which put some weight on his skinny frame and developed valuable flexibility. Later, this training would help make his graceful front flip one of skiing's most indelible images.
"Actually, my only real concern as a boy," he recalled, "was deciding which sport I would pursue."
Stein's skiing was greatly influenced by his father and mother. His father, Marius, was one of Norway's top athletes - a champion ski jumper and gymnast in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. His mother, Birgit, was the first president of the Ladies' Slalom Club of Oslo.
His father took his reputation and love of sports to Gunerius Petersen, one of Oslo's foremost department stores. There he managed the sports department, helping to introduce alpine skiing to Norway. The Scandinavian countries in the 1920s dominated cross country and jumping but were embarrassingly behind the central European countries in slalom.
Later, his father opened his own shop in Oslo, where Stein says he learned a tremendous amount about skiing. "It was a second home," he said, "and I loved being there among many of the sports heroes of the time."
Stein fondly recalled his father tinkering at home. He invented and patented the first simple adjustable toe piece, screwed into the top of the skis, eliminating the need for a damaging hole cut laterally through the wood skis.
There were other simple skiing inventions, too. The sale of patents helping to buy the family home outside Oslo where Stein learned to ski.
After seeing an early pair of steel-edged skis in Austria, his father brought the revolutionary idea to Norway and promptly began manufacturing Marius Eriksen's Streamlines. The laminated skis with edges were the most popular skis for many years, especially in Europe.
The war years were not easy once for the Eriksens. His father became ill and his mother helped run the sport shop. In 1940, when Stein was 12, his older brother, Marius Jr., was shot down by German fire over Holland and spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp.
Stein, then a recent convert to alpine skiing, and his friends were prohibited from training slalom unless it was with the Germans. The Nazis apparently felt practicing or competing alone was a dangerous form of nationalism.
"We just did it illegally in the back woods, and they never got hold of us," Stein said.
When his brother returned from the war, a 23-year-old captain in the royal Air Force, he resumed his own ski training. He was the Norwegian slalom champion in 1947. Both he and Stein represented their country in the 1948 Olympics.
After a long illness, Stein's father died in 1950, just as Stein was emerging as the world's finest alpine skier. He admits to some regrets that his father wasn't able to see him compete in the 1952 Olympics and 1954 World Championships where he won five medals.
"He was alive in 1950 when I had the fastest first run in the slalom at the World Championships in Aspen, " he remembered.
"My coach called my father in Norway and said, `Marius, your son is the world champion - at this moment. He has another run but he has the best run in the world right now.'
"Father said, `I don't care what happens.' He was so proud he took all his friends out for champagne and they had a ball. I slowed down a little too much in the second run to try to secure my position and I got a bronze medal. But to me it looked like gold."
It's easy to make comparisons between Stein's relationship with his father and the relationship he has with his son, Bjorn, a wiry fifth grader who has inherited his father's athletic grace and friendly demeanor.
"My philospohy with Bjorn," Stein said, "is to give him the tools. Whether he excels will be up to him. The most important thing is that he get great pleasure out of whatever he does."
As they waited for a tennis court to open, the obvious question surface - can Bjorn beat his father yet?
"No, not yet." Then, following a short silence, Stein , who will be 64 in December, added, "And he's going to have to work awfully hard before he does."