MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter Spring 2019

WINTER/SPRING 2019 MLCM 67 “They say you should never meet your heroes, but I wanted to be the guy my fans were stoked to meet. Fresh people in every town—I could party for a week and no one would notice. I didn’t have anyone telling me to go to work in the morning. Now with social media, you have to put work in every day, but back then it was just bag some shots and footage once in a while and you were good.” Except then suddenly you weren’t. Freeride mountain biking was evolving faster than ever. Big airs and big tricks began replacing steeps and lines. Darren Berrecloth was going huge and doing BMX tricks on a mountain bike, while Matt Hunter was gapping huge ravines. Tippie’s clean descents and 20-foot cliff drops with straight airs began to look like yesterday’s news. “People were adding freestyle tricks to big lines and I didn’t have that skillset. I was still pushing myself, but the sport was progressing very quickly and I wasn’t the man anymore. Plus, I was 30 and that is old to a marketing guy. And then one day I wasn’t even pushing myself because I was getting wasted all the time. I turned into a competitive partier. It got dark.” By 2004, before anyone could even say, “What ever happened to that guy?” Tippie was gone. With no sponsors (biking or snowboarding), a failed relationship, and all his money partied away, Tippie slunk back to Kamloops and fell into a mix of boredom, despair, and hard drugs. Brett Tippie’s default setting comes across as just a few notches below ‘Speed Freak.’ So to picture him in a hard drug scenario is frightening, but also potentially hilarious. “If they weren’t too messed up I’d have people gasping for air and crying from laughter,” Tippie recalls. “I’d get free drugs because I was the entertainment, same as how I used to have a promo tab at the bar, just way more ghetto. Parties became more and more nasty, and with a rougher crowd. One time a guy hit me in the back of the head with a baseball bat so I turned around and beat the shit out of him. I’d get messed up and walk on the hand railing of a 20 th floor balcony just for thrills, then take my truck and do doughnuts in the police station parking lot and speed away.” In 2006 I got my truck impounded and was basically a street person for almost a year—homeless in Kamloops, walking around like a zombie, and staying up for a week at a time. It was four tough years that I’m not proud of...very dark.” In 2007 Tippie’s grandmother passed away. His father came and pulled him out of “a gnarly drug house” to come home and grieve with the family. “I went back and did three months sober,” Tippie says. “Then sent myself to rehab. But first I called up an old sponsor and asked for some clothes. I had nothing.” That call connected him with Julian Coffey. “We hit it off,” Tippie recalls. “Julian was the new marketing guy and really took care of me. I was hoping for a couple hoodies and he unloaded the warehouse on me. I was the best dressed guy at rehab.” The road to recovery was rockier and bumpier than any single track he’d ever bombed down, but Tippie had a lot of people in his corner. In the summer of 2007, Derek Westerlund—an old Kamloops friend and founder of Freeride Entertainment— offered to chaperone a trip to Whistler for Crankworx. Tippie, months clean and regaining some of his lost weight and spirit, jumped at the opportunity, not knowing just how drastically it would change his life. “Derek and I walked onto the Longhorn patio and I saw the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in my life. I thought, she must be lost— that girl is hanging out with mountain bikers? But then the crowd parted and I saw she had cycling legs. I was floored. I had to meet her.” Tod Gravel Pit, Kamloops, 1998. JOHN GIBSONS Have board, will travel. Kamloops, BC. March1989. FRED TIPPIE