Keene has the golden touch
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By Jesse Roman
Stowe resident Bud Keene is on the phone a lot these days.Just last week, he spent two hours chatting with a writer from Rolling Stone magazine. This week, he’s talking to Time magazine.
It’s gotten to the point where he’s turning down tiny publications such as the Denver Post (circulation 255,000) because there’s just not enough time.
It’s the residual effect of another gold medal, of being the most decorated snowboarding coach in history, and especially of being Shaun White’s coach.
White — snowboarding’s Michael Jordan, Tony Hawk, and Muhammad Ali all rolled into one — transcends his sport. It’s now unclear which is more famous: White, or the sport he champions.
Two weeks ago in Vancouver, the 23-year-old from Carlsbad, Calif., with the flowing red hair dropped the two most technically difficult halfpipe runs in history to win his second-straight Olympic gold medal. Before Vancouver, White was already an icon; after Vancouver, where he landed his latest biggest trick yet — his new Double McTwist 1260 — he’s even further off the charts. Keene, as his coach, has also been lifted to celebrity status of sorts. And now, the phone won’t stop ringing.
“It’s cool. My stock definitely goes up working with Shaun,” Keene said last week in an interview in Stowe. “The best halfpipe rider on the planet has chosen me, which is great.”
Coaching gold
When White asked Keene to be his coach in the summer of 2005, neither was exactly an unknown. White was already winning X-Games, was one of the best riders and skateboarders in the world, and was the favorite for halfpipe gold at the upcoming Olympics in Torino.
Keene was the head U.S. halfpipe coach, and it seemed inevitable that they would work together.
“It was inconceivable that he wasn’t going to be on the Olympic team” in Torino, Keene said. “We had already some degree of familiarity, but in the summer of 2005 we decided to formally hook up and start working together in anticipation of the Olympics. We both figured the greater familiarity we had, the better.”
From that point forward, Keene and White were together all the time. They spent months in New Zealand perfecting his tricks.
“We basically lived together on the road. We both had amps and electric guitars; we’d play and sing, find a drummer and jam,” Keene said. “We had some great times sitting around playing cards, riding dirt bikes in New Zealand, or playing cricket or whatever.”
Over time, their bond has grown bigger than coach and rider.
“Bud is great; he is the guy I can go to and talk about anything,” White said. “He is great to hang out with, ride with, and obviously is a pretty good coach. In the end, though, it’s cool to say that Bud is my friend and that I owe a lot to him.”
That connection, camaraderie and familiarity are crucial.
“He’s doing death-defying stuff out there,” Keene says.
All that work turned into a gold medal for White in Torino.
Terrifying
Four years later in Vancouver, not a whole lot had changed — at least on the surface. White was still the overwhelming favorite to win gold, Keene was still his coach, and both had worked to develop new tricks no one else had dreamed up, never mind executed.
But Vancouver was different.
Keene wasn’t the halfpipe head coach; he was there to help all the athletes, but he was mostly Shaun’s guy. And the expectations were stifling.
“This one for me was much more pressure-packed. Silver would be a defeat for Shaun,” Keene admitted. “We worked incredibly hard to get ready, and we were more than ready. He is by far the best in the world, but still, anything can happen on any day. It could have turned out that we didn’t win — it was terrifying.”
Shaun White was such an overwhelming favorite, had he not won the gold medal, it could have been the story of the 2010 Olympics. Nobody would remember the rider who unseated the Olympic champ; everyone would remember only that White had failed.
In the past several years, White, with Keene coaching, has set the bar. He invents tricks that blow the competition out of the water, and his rivals spend the next year learning them, just so they have a chance. By the time of the next big competition, White has a new arsenal, and the cycle starts over.
Keene and White worked together through most of 2008 and 2009, preparing for Vancouver. White spent hours falling on the hard, icy halfpipe in Park City, Utah, perfecting his new Double McTwist 1260.
“He took slam after slam,” Keene said. “There was no safety net. He broke seven boards. Shaun has heart; nobody can deny that.”
How do you coach and prepare an athlete who symbolizes his sport, who’s the undisputed best in the world, for a gold-medal repeat?
“I coach him exactly the same as I would coach anyone, a 10-year-old kid, a boy, a girl, anyone. The challenges are exactly the same; the goal-setting is the same,” Keene says. “He is a 23-year-old kid with the same fears and doubts as everyone else.”
The big difference, of course, is the freakish ability and the uncanny way White can rise to the moment.
“Whatever adjustment I suggest, Shaun can immediately transfer to the snow,” Keene says.
“The more I’ve worked with the elite-level (snowboarders), I’ve found they have a quality of coming through when the moment matters. When the spotlight is on him, the higher the stakes, the higher the pressure, the better Shaun reacts, and the better I react.”
Cultivating a talent as unique as White’s is less X’s and O’s and more about motivation. Keene jokes that he’s surprised he hasn’t been awarded an honorary psychology degree yet.
“You’ve got to be able to reach into their mind and flip a switch,” he says. “It’s one of the most nebulous things. I can’t tell you how to do it; I can’t tell you how I do it. You’ve got to get to know the person, see inside their head.”
Keene’s style was on full display just before White’s fabled second run in the Olympic finals. With the gold medal already wrapped up, and White about to make what was essentially a victory lap, Keene prepared his rider to unveil the much-anticipated Double McTwist 12. According to Keene, White has a history of not being able to pull off tricks unless the pressure is on — unless it really matters. Victory laps hadn’t been his best moments.
The motivation for White, who really has no peer to challenge him, is his dominance; he can’t slip, he can’t even appear vulnerable. The Double McTwist was his trump card. It turned out he didn’t even need it to win, but his level of dominance demands he do more than just win.
The final run was a legacy run, and White knew it — his coach, in so many words, made sure of it.
That concept “is so pervasive with him. He’s showered in it, and the last run at the Olympics was case in point. That was the run he was there to do,” Keene said. “He was there to show the world that run.”
“I look over and say to him, ‘Bud, what do you think? Should I do the Double McTwist?’” White recalled. “He looks back and me and says, ‘Don’t do it if you’re not going to land it!’ It was the perfect comment to get me motivated, and kind of pissed, and set (me) up to stick my run.”
With Keene’s final words “still ringing in his ear,” as White later said, the world’s best rider pulled off the world’s hardest trick, barely getting enough speed, air and rotation to land it cleanly.
“It was by far one of the ugliest ones he ever did, but he made it happen,” Keene said, smiling.
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Shaun White’s view of his coach
The Stowe Reporter interviewed White on Wednesday about his coach, Bud Keene of Stowe.
Q: What’s Bud’s role in your life, career, in your snowboarding?
Bud is great; he is the guy I can go to and talk about anything. He is great to hang out with, ride with, and obviously is a pretty good coach. In the end, though, it’s cool to say that Bud is my friend and that I owe a lot to him.
Q: Why Bud? What makes him good at what he does?
He just calls it as he sees it. With what we do, there isn’t much debating or back-and-forth discussions about what to do. He is really sure of himself, which lets me know that he knows what he is talking about. It’s good to have people that you can trust and rely on when there is so much on the line.
Q: What’s Bud’s style of coaching?
It’s straight-up and direct. We will talk about runs and tricks, but when it’s time to get it done, he will let you know. I really like and respect that. In addition, he knows when to back off and give you space. Sometimes the best advice is nothing at all.
Q: What is one thing or a few things that Bud has done or said that made a difference?
During the 2006 Olympics, I fell on my first qualifying run. Bud pulled me aside and made me take some runs to relax, stay warm, and get my mind off things. It’s just the little things that help, and it’s nice to have someone around who can give you that advice.
Q: Can you share a Bud moment that will stay with you forever?
During my last run at the 2010 Olympics, right before I drop in, I look over and say to him, “Bud, what do you think? Should I do the Double McTwist?” He looks back and me and says, “Don’t do it if you’re not going to land it!” It was the perfect comment to get me motivated, kinda pissed, and set up to stick my run.
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White’s boards fitted in Stowe
Stowe’s connection to Shaun White’s gold medal in Vancouver doesn’t end with his coach.
Graham Lonetto, owner of Edgewise Elite Ski Services on South Main Street, prepped all of White’s boards for the Olympics.
“We take very good care of his stuff,” says Bud Keene, White’s coach, when asked why White is able to fly so much higher than the competition. “His boards were prepped by Graham Lonetto at Edgewise. We figured, why send it to someone else, when we have one of the best ski technicians in the world right here in town?”
Lonetto says Burton Snowboards — whose owner and founder Jake Burton Carpenter is also a Stowe resident — approached him early about working on White’s boards.
“I know they made Shaun’s boards right in Burlington and the guys at Burton were psyched to keep it in Vermont,” Lonetto said.
Lonetto prepped about nine boards for White in the months leading up to the Olympics, then three more right before the Games.
“Most of the boards come with a pretty generic prep, factory-tune,” Lonetto says. He puts them through a stone grinder, then does a ton of waxing work to “flatten them out and really dial them in.”
Different waxing patterns can be applied to the bottom of a board, depending on the conditions, which maximize its ability to glide over the snow.
White snapped a bunch of his custom boards while training, and had only a few left before Vancouver.
So, “two weeks before the Olympics, they brought in three more boards,” Lonetto said. “They knew it was going to be warm and they had a better sense of what the conditions would be like. I heard (White) was breaking boards, so I thought these three would be backups, or something.”
When the Burton people came to pick up the boards, they asked how they looked.
“I said they looked great, and they told me, ‘He’s going to use one of these three.’ I said, ‘Oh, OK.’”
A couple of weeks later, Lonetto saw his board on television as White rode to gold on Lonetto’s custom waxwork.
“It’s pretty cool. We don’t do a ton of work for snowboard athletes, but I obviously know who he is,” Lonetto said. “My mom and dad in Florida even know who he is.”
•••
Keene’s story
Bud Keene moved to Stowe from Virginia Beach in 1983, when snowboarding was still basically nonexistent.
He bought a ski pass, but used it only a couple of times before finding his true passion.
A couple of locals were basically strapping plywood to their feet and surfing down the mountain. As soon as he gave it a whirl, it was instant love. He’d hike up to the Chin four or five times a day just to ride down.
Snowboarders weren’t allowed on the lifts or even on the mountain in those days; the ski patrol routinely kicked Keene out of the resort.
Keene started at his coaching career at the Mt. Mansfield Ski and Snowboard Club in 1989. Four years before that, he had been competing as a snowboard racer. When he arrived at MMSC, the snowboarding program was a year old, and Keene coached racing.
He took a hiatus, but still coached at the club part-time. In 1996, he came back as head coach, to a changed sport.
By then, freestyle had become more popular, and Keene focused the program in that direction. In 2002, Keene left Stowe to coach the U.S. Snowboard Team.
Now, he is in charge of developing the country’s next big stars. He continues to work closely with Shaun White.
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