Joe Pack is 5-foot-6, 130 pounds and he's barely 15 years old. There are still a lot of places he can't go and a lot of things he can't do, such as work at McDonald's or drive a car. In the circles he travels in, that doesn't present a big problem, but it does have its, well, drawbacks.
"Young guy jokes," says Joe, rolling his eyes. "I think I've heard them all."Hardly a day passes when a teammate doesn't ask him if his parents know where he is, or when he'll be able to help with the driving, or if he's worried about being taller than the sign so he can get on the ride.
"But I've learned to live with it," Joe adds. "I look at what I'm doing as a big head start."
In the annals of freestyle ski jumping - Joe's chosen sport - no one has ever had such a big head start. Three years ago, when he was barely old enough to be a Boy Scout, he became the youngest male to ever be licensed by the international federation to do inverted aerial jumps on snow. Ever since, when the U.S. has asked him to jump, he has asked, "how high?"
"Joe's is an unusual situation, although it should become more common in the future," says Jeff Chumas, the program director for the United States Freestyle Team. "He was in the right place at the right time, and as a result he's being provided with more experience and opportunities than anyone else has ever had."
A former aerialist himself, Chumas knows whereof he speaks. When he was 12, he only wishes he could have had access to the same facilities as Joe Pack, who first learned to jump on the state-of-the-art, year-round facilities built in Lake Placid, New York, and then, after his family moved to the Park City area a year ago, looked out his backyard window and cast his eyes on the even-better-than-state-of-the-art, year-round facilities built over the past 18 months at the Utah Winter Sports Park in Bear Hollow.
Not that it was any coincidence that the Pack family moved from New Hampshire to Utah's new ski jumps. Jim Pack, Joe's father, is a salesman who can live where he wants as long as it's near a good-sized airport. When he realized that the Salt Lake airport is considerably closer to the Bear Hollow ski jumps than any airport's proximity to Lake Placid, he was on the phone to U-Haul.
"The whole family decided Park City would be a great place to live," says Jim. "Of course Joe's need to be near a (jumping) facility figured high in our decision."
The Pack family in general tends to be rather athletic. Joe's older brother, Jeremy, plays collegiate soccer and his older sister, Jaime, is a softball player who was all-State this past season at Salt Lake's Hillcrest High. Jeremy was also a ski jumper when he was younger, only not as an inverted aerialist but as a conventional, or nordic, jumper. It was because of Jeremy that Joe first went to Lake Placid as a 12-year-old. His original intent was to also be a nordic jumper.
But he started his training in the summertime, when nordic jumpers, who practice on plastic when the snow is gone, still have to wear full gear to protect themselves from falls. It was while wearing a helmet and full training suit that Joe, sweating profusely, looked next door to the freestyle jumping facility, where the jumpers were wearing swimming suits and landing in a pool.
"That looked better to me," says Joe, who walked over to the freestyle coach, Bruce Erickson, and with the brashness of a 12-year-old said, "I can do a flip and I'd like to try that."
To which Erickson, motioning toward the trampoline nearby, said, "OK, let's see what you've got."
At that point, Joe did a forward flip in front of the coach - not off the trampoline, but off the solid ground.
Twelve years old or not, that was good enough for Erickson, who gave Joe the key to the freestyle jumps. For the next two years, Joe gave Lake Placid's jumps a continual workout.
At Bear Hollow, it's been more of the same. While spending the past school year as a ninth-grader at Park City High School, Joe helped inaugurate Utah's new jumps. No sooner would the cement dry or the new steps be nailed in place than he would be flying through the air. In the first-ever major competition hosted by Bear Hollow this past spring, Joe finished fourth in the Junior National Championships - behind three 18-year-olds. At the Freestyle National Championships held in Breckenridge, Colo., he finished as the 15th top aerialist in the country, regardless of age.
Later this summer, he'll take his first trip outside the United States when he flies to Australia with the U.S. Junior Freestyle Team to compete in the Youth International Freestyle Championships on Mount Bueller.
If things continue to progress as they have to date, it won't be his last international trip. "He's got at least two Olympics available to him, in 1998 and 2002," says Chumas, "and he'll only be 26 in 2006, which is still plenty young enough. If he can stay with it and avoid getting burned out, he's got a lot of competition ahead of him."
Joe has a similar timetable in mind. "The next Olympics (in Norway next winter) is a little too close," he says, "but I'm hoping to be a contender for the World Cup team in 1998 and competing in the Olympics that year."
In the meantime, he's learning to live in a slightly older world. "The next youngest guy on the team is 18," he says. "And one guy is really old. I think he's 29."
The jokes can work both ways.