Extreme Sports

SANTA CRUZ, Calif.—Darryl “The Flea” Virostko felt he was telling it all when his explained recently why he risks his life to ride monstrous ocean waves crouched down on a 10-foot surf-board.

“The adrenalin rush,” the amiable 27-year-old surfer explained. “There's nothing like that feeling.”

But what about the danger?

“Knowing it's dangerous is what brings the rush,” replied the short, muscular professional surfer who is a star performer in one of the many activities know as “extreme sports” — which are the fastest growing spectator sports in America today. The risky sports include such daredevil activities as skateboarding, bungee-jumping, snowboarding, rock climbing, inline roller-skating, mountain biking, windsurfing and jet skiing.

However, if extreme sports are winning lavish praise from millions of viewers of the televised and live events, they are drawing a good deal of criticism as well for the reckless endangerment to life and limb that their detractors find in these performances.

Asked about such sports, Mark Ginter, of St. Meinrad School of Theology, a Benedictine seminary in Indiana, quoted directly from the Catechism of the Catholic Church to make his case against the way some of the sports are performed.

“Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We must take reasonable care of them, taking into account the needs of others and the common good (No. 2288).

“The virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco, or medicine. Those incur grave guilt who, by drunkenness or a love of speed, endanger their own and other's safety on the road, at sea or in the air” (No. 2290).

Based on those two statements, would he put the stamp of immorality on many of the sports?

“Yes, you could,” he replied. “And the way you define immoral is to say it is against the virtue of temperance, self control and respect for one's physical life and health.”

Virostko explained that his father had taught him to surf in the treacherous California coastline breakers where he developed into a much sought professional performer in the sport, now earning upward of $50,000 a year.

“There's lots of ways to get killed surfing and realizing that is what gets your adrenalin up,” he admitted. “You can hit your head on the ocean bottom or a board can bang into you. It can be real dangerous. A good friend of mine wiped out on a 30-foot wave that held him underwater until he drowned.”

The risky sports have taken a heavy toll of crippling injuries and deaths since they began to take hold more than a decade ago.

Michael Bamberger, in a 1998 Sports Illustrated article on surfing, said of the Pacific site where Virostko surfs some 20 miles from San Francisco:

“There are immense, jagged rocks, some sticking of the surf, other lurking below it, a cruel wipeout welcoming committee. And there is the sheer magnitude of the swell. Forty-foot waves, measured from trough to crest, are common in the winter months.”

As for parents permitting their children to participate in such sports, Ginter said, “It is the obligation of parents to insist that their children grow in virtue. If the acts are contrary to the virtue of temperance then the parents are cooperating in a vicious activity.”

Extreme Coach?

Jojo Sanders and his wife own and operate an extreme sports summer camp in the Lake Tahoe area of California where children from ages eight to 18 train in extreme sports at a cost of between $1,200 and $1,800 a week.

“What we do is give the youngsters a chance to do things that they have not had a chance to do up to now,” Sanders told the Register, pointing out that his camp is based on the premise that “kids nowadays aren't into canoeing and archery” but instead “they are into jet skiing and bungee jumping and we're just trying to keep up with their demands.”

The Sanders explained that the camp costs are “far from cheap because we're not into arts and crafts. ... We are into sports that are very expensive to set up, such as a $26,000 bungee tower and a go-cart track layout that cost $40,000.”

Germain Grisez, professor of Christian ethics at Mount St. Mary's College, Emmitsburg, Md., like others in his field of study, declined to flatly condemn extreme sports as evil and sinful, but instead gave examples of when and why they sometimes can be immoral and sinful because of the way they are used.

“Providing a performance is skillful and entertaining and precautions are taken to cut risks, I don't see that there is anything inherently wrong with it,” he said.

However, he said “if a person lies about the risk to entice attention [and] actually does put his life in danger for the same reason, he or she is doing wrong.”

“It is wrong to risk death as a means of making more money in entertainment or whatever, or doing it just to show courage,” Grisez asserted. “That is like ‘playing chicken’ on a busy highway and that kind of thing is wrong.

“And, if the person really is intending to die, that is absolutely wrong because that is like committing suicide, which certainly is a sin.”

Asked about the adrenalin-rush motive, he said, “That is a bad motive. It is like someone addicted to drugs and acting for the sake of simply feeling the ‘rush’ experience. It doesn't have any substantive value like exercising a skill that has an inherent value and an entertainment value. The rush is just something you feel and it doesn't of itself require any skill to feel.”

Parents' Views

Dede Spaith of Sonora, Calif., gave her daughter, Chloee, permission to go to the Sanders' extreme sports summer camp two years ago when she was 13.

“She loved the excitement and everything about the camp,” she said of her daughter. “She dropped 85 feet tied to the bungee cord and loved it. She went rock climbing too, and whitewater rafting and go-cart racing.”

Asked if she had any second thoughts after she had agreed to send her to the camp, the mother said: “The only fear for her that I had was that she'd get to like the sports so much she'd want to do them all the time.

“I think doing extreme sports replaces that feeling of wanting to do drugs like some girls do just for the thrill of it and because they want to take risks.”

“I know there have been deaths over the years from bungee-jumping and rock climbing and surfing and other extreme sports,” the mother conceded. “And she does get adrenalin rushes — but she stays in control of herself.”

Asked about the morality of extreme sports, she said she is Catholic and never had a priest question her about the morality of the sports.

“I would be very surprised if a church person would take the position of opposing extreme sports as immoral or in some way against God's teaching,” Spaith said, adding, “I think it is a good thing I am doing for my daughter because she is growing from those experience — taking her down the road to other places as opposed to forcing a child to do something they don't want to do.”

Chloee was asked about her first bungee jump.

“I was kind of scared,” she admitted. “I wanted to do it and I admire Jojo and I knew he would never tell me to do anything that could hurt me.”

On the risks of extreme sports, Chloee said, “I know there have been injuries and even deaths, but accidents happen all the time in life — driving down a road or in a plane crash.”

“All in all, extreme sports are nothing but good, clean fun and lots of excitement,” she insisted.

Joyce Blaksley, of San Francisco, said her son, Brad, 15 and her daughter, Katherine, 14, have engaged in extreme sports over the last two years and enjoyed the ventures.

An avowed believer in the teachings of the Catholic Church in which she was raised, Blaksley said she had “no problem with the morality of what her son and daughter were doing” in the extreme sports field.

“I think there are various things that people do to make them develop their own feelings of self-confidence and self-prestige, and extreme sports do that for my children,” she explained. “Mountain climbing, for instance, is a very dangerous sport, but I don't think that it is immoral. Having done it myself and knowing how I felt when I was finished, I knew that I had a feeling of extreme accomplishment — not immorality.”

Self-Confidence

Virostko says his experience in surfing and a few other extreme sports “is all about confidence in myself.”

“I have confidence in what I am doing because the day I lose that, I will be washed up,” he explained.

But he conceded that the very nature of surfing puts him at risk no matter how much he practices and how much he learns about the surf.

“Yes, it's the excitement of taming a big wave or making some radical maneuver that gets my adrenalin pumping and the excitement you get out of those moments is what makes me want to do more and more surfing.”

Robert Holton writes from Memphis, Tennessee.