Shaun White is the greatest living athlete of our generation.

After watching him obliterate the competition last night in Vancouver, the argument is closed. No one is doing the things Shaun White is doing on the halfpipe, and few are even anywhere close. And while it’s fun to marvel at Shaun White’s technical ability and limitless ability to push the boundaries of the sport he now reigns supreme over, that’s not even the best part of watching him. So, what is the best part?

In a word: Joy.

Shaun White is the best in the world at what he does, and while I suspect he’s proud of that and loves that he’s earned the top honor for himself and his country, I don’t think he really gives a shit. Or perhaps more precisely, I don’t think that’s his reason for snowboarding.

The kid just loves to strap on his board, loves to throw gigantic airs that readjust people’s permanent mouth setting to “agape,” and would almost certainly be doing the same thing on that very night with no television cameras, audience, or medals at stake. You see it in his love for his teammates and the way he went huge on his last run just for grins even though he already had the gold medal locked up.

There’s a halfpipe in front of him, why wouldn’t he shred it?

Watching an elite athlete in his or her prime is always a true privilege. No one commanded a basketball court like Michael Jordan (although LeBron James is having a similar effect on NBA fans). Tiger Woods, despite all the recent shenanigans, is the best golfer of the last 30 years, and probably one of the top 3 ever. Roger Federer is the greatest tennis player ever.

And yet, Shaun White is better than all of them. Why? With the possible exception of LeBron, Shaun White looks like he’s having the most fun out there.

Michael Jordan had to win. He was obsessive about it. He hated to lose. I’m sure he liked basketball, and it was no doubt what he was best at, but Jordan’s interest was in besting another human being at whatever task laid in front of them. Bill Simmons tells a story he heard of Jordan paying off baggage handlers at the airport order to win money from teammates in a bet to see who’s luggage would arrive first. Basketball just happened to be Jordan’s best aptitude. Tiger strikes me the same way. After slavishly playing golf everyday of his life, he’s less interested in the pure joy associated with “grip it and rip it” than in destroying his opponents. Roger Federer seems like a nice enough guy, but tennis players are generally miserable because playing tennis is hard fucking work. Getting good at tennis is even harder. It’s an obscene amount of labor for a sport that’s only sort of fun. It’s the litigation law of the sports world.

Snowboarding, on the other hand, is one of the most universally fun things you can do. Once you achieve even a rudimentary level of skill, you can’t deny the untainted joy of carving down a hill or catching some air off a lip. It’s just plain old fun. And this from a guy who tried it and went back to skiing.

And while basketball, golf, and tennis are also fun, there’s a key difference between them and snowboarding that unlocks the insight into why Shaun White bursts with joy and the others sometimes keep a mechanical, concentrated expression in their sports.

Snowboarding has been around as a sport for only about 40 years, and as a viable professional sports career, maybe 15.  Basketball? Sport for 150 years, professional sports career for 60. Tennis? Sport for 120 years, career for 40. Golf? Been around since forever, as a career for probably 100.

This is important to think about because once a sport establishes itself as a viable money-making option for its elite participants, and as that paradigm exists for more time, the pressure felt by athletes to excel in these sports grows substantially. 12 year-olds are getting recruited by college basketball programs. We’ve seen countless videos of Tiger Woods playing golf as a wee lad with the panoptical eye of Earl gazing toward him ever-tenaciously. And if you’ve read excerpts from Andre Agassi’s book, you know that his father made him hit thousands of balls each day to prepare for a professional tennis career. Hitting forehands thousands of times per day isn’t fun, it’s factory work. It’s a sports sweatshop, no different than spending your adolescence shooting free throws for hours at a time or endlessly practicing your chip shots while your friends got to have fun outside the bounds of indentured servitude enacted by overzealous parents.

That’s not sport. That’s not fun. That’s a job.

Since professional snowboarding only became a money-making entity roughly 10 years ago, the sport’s participants have largely gotten to do what they love free from pressure, at least, so far. Shaun White loved to snowboard, and thanks to what I’m sure are really cool parents, he was allowed to do that as much as possible without some martinet yelling drills at him on the slope hour after agonizing hour like I imagine sadistic figure skating or gymnastics coaches do. I have no doubt that he’s practiced his ass off, but I somehow doubt it was the result of psychotic parents who sought to extort money from him. It was probably just because he was good, and he wanted more.

Snowboarding has largely been able to evolve untethered to the athletic-industrial-complex allowing its participants to continue to enjoy their pursuits absent the grinding monotony of sport as job, which gives so many of its competitors an inviting laidback persona as opposed to the steely-eyed concentation of the small wonders from gymnastics factories.

And whereas we expect, nay, demand, that Tiger Woods win every time we see him and chastise him when he doesn’t since he swears at his clubs and pouts as much as your pigheaded boss when your reports aren’t right, we’re instead allowed to enjoy unfettered a bunch of happy dudes just breaking off tricks because they love it.

I get the same vibe watching the highest level of this sport’s competition as I did farting around in high school with my skater friends trying to grind the curb outside Taco Bell. You sometimes wonder how a skateboarder can spend hours missing the same stupid trick over and over again, yet persevere nevertheless. The reason is the joy of eventual success. Finally hitting a trick you’ve worked on hundreds of times is nearly unparalleled in its level of profound exuberance.

So when you watch Shaun White hit the insane, and previously unfathomable, Double McTwist at the bottom of his winning run, you see the love of sport in the jovial bouncing up and down with his teammates right alongside with the satisfied sense of outstanding accomplishment. Everyone freaked out when he hit that, and watching him nail that just for the hell of it reminded me of Tony Hawk finally hitting the 900, which is one of my all-time favorite sports memories.

Tony Hawk is the perfect person to bring this full circle. Without Tony Hawk, we probably wouldn’t be watching Shaun White in the Olympics. Tony Hawk skated because he loved it, and seeing his devotion and creativity inspired us to give this little upstart sport a piece of our attention. And while Tony’s a savvy businessman to be sure, he never let the pressure of monetizing his sport to allow his fellow competitors a way to make money doing what they love, get in the way of his own affection for his life’s passion. Skating always came first for Tony, never the black hole of chasing dollars.

This has led to a wonderful culture among extreme sports athletes where joy of execution perpetually trumps talk of money in our public consciousness. I have no idea how much money Shaun White makes, and I don’t care. All I know is that Shaun White would be doing this same exact thing whether I watched or not.

I’m sure I could say the same about hundreds of athletes in any other sport too, but I’d be hard pressed to name the snowboarding equivalent of J.D. Drew who seems to approach a baseball game the same way an accountant approaches tax season. He looks like a man who’s going to work, not a lucky bastard playing a game everyday.

Shaun White knows he’s having fun, and oh yeah, he’s a millionaire too. And oh yeah, he just so happens to be the best in the entire world at it too.

We’re privileged to watch the best in the world do what they do. But with Shaun White, the best in the world just so happens to be a smiling kid having the time of his life.

Here’s looking forward to many more years of loving every minute of watching Shaun White do his thing better than everyone else. It’s people like him that make me love the Olympics, and one of the reasons we all watch sport. We hope some of that luminescent joy rubs off on us too.

edagger@crujonessociety.com