The following article was originally printed in the October 2024 Issue of Slush. To access the full article click here.
By Jonathan Van Elslander
Four years into the show, a new Bomb Hole episode announcement is still big news. Old heads, mysterious recluses, and social media stars all generate different responses from the show’s followers. And the raw numbers – comments and likes on each episode's Instagram announcement – show evident trends. Despite snowboarding’s long history of gender inequity, women get as much or more social engagement than men with similar levels of fame. Contest snowboarders get bigger responses than filming focused riders. Pros from previous eras get more reaction than current day pros – JP Walker got as much engagement as Travis Rice, Tina Basich more than Robin Van Gyn. But the most the Bomb Hole’s commenters ever surprised me was the announcement of someone I had never heard of, someone who received more comments than Travis Rice, almost as many as Shaun White, and more than double Mark McMorris. That was when the show announced Casey Willax.
But the intensity of the engagement was as unexpected as the magnitude. People seemed over the moon about his appearance, the comments elated and full of insider references. People referred to Willax by nicknames and shouted out canned affirmations like they were his close friends. Meanwhile, I didn’t even know if he snowboarded.
While Willax may not have more fans than legendary snowboarders, the nature of his celebrity gives him a much more intense relationship with the fans he has. This is because Willax is arguably the most popular snowboard YouTuber, with more than 120,000 subscribers (almost quadruple the Bomb Hole), and the formula for success on YouTube hinges heavily on emotionally connecting to viewers. Willax’s videos aren’t just snowboarding, but instead use snowboarding as a backdrop for dispatches that portray his emotions and introspections. In watching hours of these videos, fans watch Willax as both a snowboarder and a person, and coming to know (or think they know) his character.
These sorts of relationships, when fans develop a pseudo-social connection to a celebrity, are referred to as “parasocial relationships.” They’ve become something of a hot button topic of our times, giving rise to moral panic as major media outlets describe them as “imaginary friends for adults,” “unintended by-products” of culture, “helpful,” or “harmful.” Articles tell stories of lonely people eating dinner in front of a YouTube video of a family also eating dinner, or of fans who blow their life savings donating to live streamers for personal shoutouts. The topic, to those not familiar YouTube or live streaming, can appear confusing, a little sad, and deeply intriguing.
The best place to start is with the Youtuber. For those that don’t know, Willax is a poised, good-looking man in his early thirties, whose blonde hair and strong jawline gives him the appearance of the prototypical surfer. He is jocular and friendly, and seems at home talking about himself, his success, and the people who watch his videos. But he is also thoughtful and cogent about the nature of what he does. And he sees YouTubing as an extension of traditional snowboard media; when he was younger he was drawn to the day-in-the-life-style of Torstein Horgmo’s edits or lifestyle clips of skateboarders enjoying each other’s company. Those sorts of media (think the 2002 skate video Chomp On This), which focus on personality and create a parasocial impetus for viewers, long predate YouTubing. When Willax started making videos, connections from fans were “almost instant… I only had 150 followers but 50 of them are throwing out crazy connections.”
Interacting with those fans is essential to Willax’s success. “The number one thing has been responding to every comment on YouTube that’s ever been posted… the basic ones, the ones like ‘epic video’ with a ‘thanks so much.’ But I make sure I personally answer any comments with depth.” Fostering an emotional relationship with fans gives them a deeper connection to the content, creating more loyal followers and, in turn, more success. And as the channel has grown, the importance of those relationships hasn’t changed: “When you get those people, even just one, who send you big messages… that’s what re-sparks my fuel to do this.” Interestingly, Willax says that the connection with his fans not only goes beyond snowboarding, but seems predicated on something entirely beside it. He says “probably 85%” of the messages he receives are about other topics. When I asked him if he thinks fans relate to the personal aspects of the videos more than the snowboarding, he responded, “that might be the only thing they relate to.”
YouTubing isn’t the only media that is associated with intense parasocial relationships. The other most cited arena is podcasting, where hosts like Chris Grenier of The Bomb Hole (whose fans also regularly refer to by a nickname) also trade in emotional connections. That show has made an impact on snowboarding by allowing guests to open up in an accepting environment, guided by Grenier and his endearing and sensitive hosting. Grenier says fostering those emotional relationships with fans is also essential to his show’s success: “It’s huge. I made a mission statement right away when we started the show. Our goal is to build and strengthen the snowboard community through humour, authenticity, and common struggles. Our sense of community, and growing that, was always super important.”
But the peculiarity of parasocial relationships is visible to both Willax and Grenier. Some psychologists suggest that intense parasocial connections are often driven by loneliness. When I asked Willax if the fans who reach out are lonely, he responded “Absolutely. They’ll even say it. I get a lot of people who ask, how do you deal with being lonely. A lot of people have mental health issues. A lot of people are looking for answers.” Of the messages Willax receives, the majority are actually about personal issues, mental health, or learning to be resilient in life. Grenier says the same, both that sobriety, mental health, and self-improvement dominate his inbox, and that many of the people who reach out are missing connection in their own lives: “Some people who reach out are for sure lonely. Struggling with substance abuse or anything and they’re open and vulnerable about it… I think it’s really special for someone to be open, to be vulnerable. It’s better than the opposite.”
The fans aren’t ignorant of these parasocial pitfalls either. Fans often tell Willax, “hey it’s weird that I feel like I’ve been hanging out with you every day and you have no idea who I am,” he says. Grenier agrees, but understands where they’re coming from: “People come up to me and say, ‘it feels like I know you.’ Sometimes it’s bizarre because I don’t know them… But also, we have hundreds and thousands of hours of genuine talking on the internet. So they kind of do know me.” But the interactions aren’t always positive. Both say they can tell when a fan gets too intense. Willax says some fans get “stuck” or “too deep,” but that he thinks that’s just part of human nature: “If they weren’t doing this, they’d be too invested in some other thing.” Grenier says “I get concerned when some people send me a message every day, after every post. You wonder if they’re taking care of themselves, of their relationships. Your relationships in real life are much more important than the ones on the internet. People from the internet don’t come help when you get a flat tire. They’re not there for you when you’re down bad.”
But the term “parasocial relationship” was actually coined in the 1950s by sociologists in response to mass media like TV and radio. As children, my sister and I used to remark how our grandparents talked about Frank Sinatra like they knew him. In 1981 John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan because he thought it would help get him noticed by the actor Jodie Foster. Parasocial relationships – both small and benign, and huge and unhealthy – were being fostered long before you could send a celebrity an Instagram message.
Perhaps it's the visibility of the internet that makes it uncomfortable watching fans interact with people they’ve never met. When I began looking into Casey Willax and his following, I felt a strong disquiet in perusing the comments sections, where fans referred to him as Casey or as “C-Dubs” and to themselves and their fandom as “The Dream” or as “Dub Nation”. But snowboarding is its own oddity. When I reached out to a friend about who Willax is, I got a surprisingly defensive response, reproach for insinuating that the YouTube community was separate from the community I knew. Maybe my friend finds belonging on YouTube? When I brought up how fans talked about Willax like they knew him, he fired back: “why don’t you go watch some snowboard videos with T-Ricky, Danimals, MFR, Deadlung, or JibGurl. Maybe you think you know them better.”
One of snowboarding’s many oddities is that an enormous proportion of people involved are only a few degrees of separation away from those well-known professionals. Most people who ride regularly at Hyland Hills know someone who is friends with Danimals or JibGurl, if they don’t know them already. It would be a once in a lifetime opportunity to shootaround with Lebron James, but you don’t have to wait at the top of the jump line in Whistler or Copper very long before an Olympic champion rolls up next to you.
So are pro-snowboarders famous? Craig Kelly, a pivotal figure in the history of snowboarding’s celebrity, once said he was “famous in small circles.” That idea still resonates. Willax says snowboarders are “underground famous.” Tina Basich, long time Sims Pro and the first woman to land a 720 in competition, says she prefers the term “recognized.” Chris Grenier says that “snowboard famous is the right amount of famous. You get a few messages from people who are psyched but you’re never getting bombarded everywhere you go.” But has social media, podcasting, and YouTube changed that fame? Grenier says that since the Bomb Hole began his inbox is “10 to 20 times as full.”
But Grenier, despite a long career decorated with impressive video parts, never reached a level of pro-snowboarding fame that contends with his current Bomb Hole-driven status as cultural kingpin. However, just across the table from Grenier often sits Jeremy Jones, who was one of snowboarding’s most recognizable figures of its most publicly popular era thanks to parts in Mack Dawg Productions’ films and his position as a member of the legendary Forum 8, arguably the most famous snowboard team of all time. For his part, Jones says pro snowboarders are “famous to some. I’ve said that for twenty years.”
Jones says it was more difficult for fans to get access to pros pre-social media, but not for a lack of trying: “I would get quite a lot fed to me through sponsors… but also on tours and premieres. People would approach me, maybe hand me letters, bring photos of the last time they met me.” Just as Willax and Grenier say that responding to fans is integral to their shows, Jones says interacting with the fans was always integral to being pro: “territories mattered to sell product. It was important to connect with those territories, whether it was fans, shop workers, shop owners, resort workers. Tours were always full of that network. Those were things we chased.”
Hana Beaman – the Ride pro whose career spans from the infamous Grenade crew to a recent Natural Selection Tour Championship, and also straddles the beginning of the social media era – says that while the lack of a “direct line” to pros meant the interactions were fewer, it also meant more connection was done in-person. “Those interactions used to happen at more curated snowboard events, and those events don’t happen nearly as much as they used to.” She adds those meetings are, in a way, more fulfilling. “I tell people that actually come and talk to me in real life that I’m so glad. That it makes me feel good, because it lets me know that you appreciate what I do.” Dinosaurs Will Die pro Darrah Reid-McLean wrote in Slush last year about how meeting fans in-person is extra fulfilling, describing a woman who approached her during a trip to Romania. In the article, Reid-McLean writes about how meeting a fan named Irene, who happened to be an enthusiast of Reid-McLean’s snowboarding, helped dull the pain of the thumb she had broken only minutes before. Reid-McLean added to me that those sorts of interactions “mean a lot” to her.
Tina Basich, whose career as a competitive pro-snowboarder entirely predates social media (though she still boards and remains well known), says she watched the fan fare for snowboarding evolve from the early 90s, when she first noticed people lining up to watch halfpipe competitions, to the late 90s, when she realized snowboarding had entered a new era of notoriety. When Basich and fellow pro Shannon Dunn-Downing made a trip to Tokyo, they were followed around town and eventually approached by two hysterical young girls with laminated pictures of them. “That was the first recognition of what was really happening, how people were really into it,” she says. Though they might occasionally be shocking, she says meetings with fans gave her the energy to persevere through injuries and tough times.