Wakeboarding

Wakeboarding is the youngest sport in this archive, and it is the child of three older ones. The first is surfing, which the Polynesians brought to Hawaii a thousand years ago and which Captain Cook's crew recorded in 1778 with the astonishment of men who had never seen a human being stand on water. The second is water skiing, invented in 1922 on Lake Pepin, Minnesota, by eighteen-year-old Ralph Samuelson, who reasoned that if you could ski on snow you could ski on water and who, after two days of trying, succeeded behind a motorboat with a pair of pine boards and a clothesline. The third is snowboarding, which Sherman Poppen invented in 1965 in Muskegon, Michigan, by binding two skis together for his daughter — the Snurfer — and which Jake Burton Carpenter turned into a sport and an industry in the late 1970s.

The idea of being pulled on a board behind a boat occurred to several people at once in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which is usually a sign that the time was right. Tony Finn, a surfer in San Diego, began building the Skurfer in 1982 — a small foam-and-fiberglass board with rubber straps, halfway between a surfboard and a snowboard, designed to let a surfer ride when there were no waves. Jimmy Redmon, in Texas, was building similar boards at the same time. The first world championship was held in 1989; the first professional tour, the Pro Wakeboard Tour, in 1992. The sport's name settled on 'wakeboarding' in the early 1990s, and the bindings evolved from rubber straps to lace-up boots that hold the rider's feet as firmly as a snowboard. The first wakeboard-specific boat — the Correct Craft Air Nautique, with an inboard engine, a tow tower, and ballast tanks to sink the hull and make a bigger wake — was introduced in 1997, and the wakeboard boat is now the defining vessel of the sport: the wake is the wave, and the boat makes the wave.

The modern sport divides into two disciplines, both of which were recognized by the International Waterski & Wakeboard Federation in the 1990s. The first is boat wakeboarding, in which the rider is pulled behind a tow boat and uses the boat's wake as a ramp; the second is cable wakeboarding, in which the rider is pulled by an overhead cable system at a lake and uses floating ramps and rails, which makes the sport possible without a boat and without fuel. The first wakeboard rail — a slider — was built in 1995, and the rail and the kicker turned the wake from a ramp into a park. The first wakeboard invert — a backflip — was landed in 1990; the first 900-degree rotation was landed in 2009. The sport's first Olympic appearance is scheduled for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, which will bring the youngest sport in this archive to the oldest stage in sport.

For the empty nester, wakeboarding is the rare hobby that is as much a social event as an athletic one. The boat holds friends, the water holds the day, and the wake holds the rider for the few seconds of a run. It is the sport that asks for a summer, a lake, and a willingness to fall in front of the people you love — which is, perhaps, the lesson the empty nest is already teaching you.