The last time I saw Randy Montgomery he was announcing the opening of the Alf Engen Ski Museum at the Utah Winter Sports Park. Talk about a perfect merger of Utah's winter sports past and present. You can't properly preserve the past without a really well-run present. In so many ways, Randy Montgomery was Utah skiing's present.
They held Randy's funeral yesterday in a picture-postcard church house on the east side of Salt Lake City, the available seating supply woefully inadequate for the demand. As the Rev. Tom Goldsmith, minister of the First Unitarian Church, said in his remarks, "Randy's influence was certainly larger than could fit into this church."From the hills and the valleys they flocked to pay tribute to a man whose death, at 52, was as sudden as it was unexpected. There is no sad funeral like a young man's funeral; where the audience is as much in its prime as the one being remembered.
Randy's brother, Jeff, reflected how it was Randy who introduced him to skiing. Jeff wasn't the only one. No sooner had Randy escaped frat life at the University of Utah some three decades ago, journalism degree in tow, than he was off and running, boosting Utah's skiing in more and better ways than anyone before and, I'm guessing, since.
He was suave, he was smooth. He had substance and style. He'd fly to New York, work the streets, and the next thing you knew, there would be "Snowbird" or "Utah skiing" in a headline in the Times, the Post, the Daily News, and the New Yorker.
He didn't sell Utah skiing, he sold himself, which was easier, and Utah skiing hitched on for the ride.
He didn't merely design the "Ski Utah!" posters. He was in them.
Amid today's scandal-scarred knee-jerk attitudes about ski promotion and wooing the world, they'd make him illegal.
When we got the Olympics four years ago I honestly couldn't figure why we just didn't turn the whole thing over to him. If we'd had a brain, we would have.
So little time, so much accomplished.
In his meteoric career, Randy worked at Park City Ski Area, put Snowbird on the map, directed Ski Utah, became the first director of the Utah Winter Sports Park, and just recently came on board with the Salt Lake Organizing Committee as Games Operation planner, responsible to organize the flow of essential equipment and personnel to the various Olympic venues.
In the critical area of making sure everything would be in its place when it needed to be in its place, Randy was our man at the point.
How we'll replace him, I have no idea.
I could have gone to lunch with Randy three weeks ago when he was coming to the Deseret News offices to have lunch with his longtime friend, ski editor Ray Grass. I wish I would have. I wish I'd known then what I know now. I wish I was clairvoyant and I hadn't thought I was too busy and I'd gone to lunch and I'd told him not to take that ride to Vernal last week, when he bounced off his bullet bike and into the path of an oncoming truck.
He was an excellent motorcyclist, a champion racer, as fit as a 25-year-old. Give him a week, he'd give you Route 66, west coast to east coast. Smiling the whole way.
The last guy on earth who'd tell you not to go out there and do it.
That's the only poetry I can see in the cutting down of a remarkable life way before its time.
But as yesterday's beyond-standing-room-only funeral crowd at the Unitarian Church attested, a life definitely not wasted.
In that Alf Engen Ski Museum he helped get started and was going to oversee once the building was completed, the first thing they should do is obvious. The first thing they should do is put an exhibit in on him.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.