HEBER CITY — To borrow an old line about injured football players, Joel Loane's knees look like they've been in a knife fight with a midget.
Loane's legs bear criss-crossing scars where surgeons have played tic-tac-toe with scalpels, repairing five knee injuries — among them whacks he took as a 1961-62 Brigham Young University football player.
So zippered are the legs, you'd think he'd be the last person with any business on a ski slope.
But that's exactly where Loane has created an amazing success story: business and ski slopes.
"Sure, doctors told me to give up skiing, but it's not something I listened to," said Loane, 56, chief executive officer of The Skiers Edge Co. of Park City and a man who began skiing at age 5 on mule-drawn sled trips to the Sugar Bowl at Tahoe.
"A lot of people give in mentally, but you don't have to quit skiing because you've been injured."
To prove it, Loane built a contraption bearing the same name as his company — the Skiers Edge — that has revolutionized everything from injury rehabilitation for recreationists to high-tech training methods for World Cup and Olympic skiers. Austrians. Swiss. Germans. French. Dutch. Canadians. Norwegians. Icelanders. New Zealanders.
Ten leading national ski teams, including Loane's first client, the U.S. team, use his device, marketed by a public relations/advertising staff in Park City and packaged by a 12-person order-fulfillment team in Heber City.
"One of the biggest compliments I've had was when the Austrian ski team came to us in '97. That's like the New York Yankees saying, 'Whatever you've got, we want,' " Loane said.
At the 1999 World Championships in Vail, Colo., 32 of 36 medalists said the same thing. They were Skiers Edgers. So were 100 percent of men's alpine medalists in the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano.
Theo Nadig, Swiss head coach, calls Skiers Edge, "The No. 1 ski conditioner in the world."
What makes the gizmo so beneficial?
It simulates the side-to-side movement of skiing, building lateral strength, aerobic capacity and agility; exercises the lower back, hips, buttocks, abdomen, quadriceps, hamstrings and calves; and it sharpens stance, rhythm, timing and edging.
"In one season, the Skiers Edge will take a beginner to an intermediate, an intermediate to advanced and advanced to expert," Loane said.
And the expert skier?
"It will take you to ecstasy on the mountain," Loane said.
All because Loane got a few too many bum knees from sports and bad raps from his demanding dad.
Bobby Loane, Joel's father, was a talented, multi-sport athlete, excelling in football, track and golf and a good enough outfielder/pitcher to get a couple cups of coffee in The Show with the Washington Senators in 1939 and the Boston Braves in 1940.
"He was very domineering — the kind of father who'd walk out on the field during a game and chew me out," said Joel, recalling his San Francisco Bay-area boyhood. "He didn't make it a lot of fun."
But Bobby did instill a no-quit mentality in his son.
Joel Loane said he figures that's one reason he beat polio, which paralyzed him for several months when he was 6.
"I just remember my dad constantly telling me, 'You're fine.' " Loane said. "Like, of course I'm getting over this.
"I've always had competitiveness drilled into me. Anything I put my mind to, you can't stop me."
While Stanford, UCLA and Oregon recruited him in football, Loane picked BYU out of the blue, though he wasn't a member of the LDS Church.
"West Coast schools were too close to my father," Loane said.
Knee injuries pretty much finished Loane with school.
"I got bored. I dropped out," he said.
That hardly meant dropping hunger for achievement.
He applied for a job at IBM and was turned down. He signed with Norelco. Within seven months, he was the top office-products salesman in the San Francisco financial district.
Within a year he was asked to teach salesmanship courses — by IBM.
"That gave me a lot of fun — and a job offer," Loane said.
Subsequently, he headed marketing or manufacturing divisions for Litton, Honeywell and International Telephone.
After suffering a knee injury in 1983, Loane was told by a doctor to junk his seven-miles-a-day running habit.
"I've always had to work out. I had to come up with an alternative," Loane said.
He haunted scrap metal yards and assembled a crude Skiers Edge in his garage and living room.
"I never intended it as a revenue source," he said. "I just had to keep skiing."
Skiing with buddies the next season, he carved so aggressively they accused him of spending months practicing in Europe.
"The machine rebuilt my power and balance. I was linking turns right away on the mountain," he said.
By 1987, he was building 28 machines in his garage for the U.S. team.
"We became their official supplier," Loane said.
Other national teams copycatted after that.
Actually, the machine is the second-best thing to come of Loane's surgeries. After one, he met a pretty nurse named Joanne. They've been married 13 years.
"Whatever you say in the paper, put down that Joanne is by far the best thing that ever happened to me," Loane said. "We've shared the same dreams and enthusiasm. This business never would have taken off without her."
President of the company, Joanne has a knack for everything from accounting to Web sites.
"Day-to-day is my forte," she said. "Joel is the one who foresees down the road."
They moved the business from Menlo Park, Calif., to Park City in 1994 to be where the action is.
"It felt more credible to be near the U.S. teams," Joel said.
Another company tried to buy him out once, Loane said. Then it tried marketing a similar machine.
"It was a disaster for them, and I sincerely miss them," Loane said. "Competition drives and enhances your business."
Spoken like a true son of Bobby Loane, a man who must settle for being No. 1.