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The Cult. By common consent, skiing is the greatest device for social mixing since the decline of the office party. Among its rituals are the hot buttered rum around the fireplace in the evening, the songs, the exchange of stories on the day's moments of triumph or disaster. "Where else can two young people get to know each other better than at a ski resort hundreds of miles from home?" asks one resort owner. "A girl can look real cute in a ski outfit, especially in those stretch pants," a ski tour director points out.
Skiers develop a language of their own, happily swap such German terms as geländesprung (a jump), schussboomer (one who dashes headlong straight down a slope) and sitzmark (the imprint left in the snow by a fallen skier's hindquarters), refer familiarly to moguls (bumps in the slopes) and snowplows (a novice's slow stop maneuver). Even skiing's hazards "provide a bond of sorts. Ski magazine estimates that in an average year one in every ten skiers will injure himself more or less seriously. Every ski lodge boasts its quota of walking wounded. Most innkeepers consider them poor advertising. Grumbles one healthy skier: "They wear their plaster casts like badges of honor. As a come on, they usually ask you to autograph the cast."
Stalking through his Squaw Valley lodge last week, Alec Cushing signed no plaster casts. He is not the type. He sees no reason for making small talk with people he does not know, feels little of the easy camaraderie that skiers cherish. Most skiers concede a grudging admiration for his salesmanship, immediately follow with the charge that he sold Squaw Valley to the Olympic nations, not on the basis of what was there, but on what he hoped the state would provide. In fact. Cushing at the time owned only one chair lift and just six acres of level land on the valley floor. But by the imperatives of terrain, every one of the ski runs ends at his front doorstep. In effect, he owned home plate, and the authorities could not do without him even if they wanted to.
"I'm Terrible." Western skiers dislike Cushing because he is Eastern, because he barged into Squaw Valley, ultimately (and legally) took the ski operations there away from a California native who planned the area and owned most of the valley land, and because he has the annoying habit of walking precipitously away from a guest, leaving a conversation dangling in midsentence. Says the wife of a neighboring resort owner: "I'd like to like Cushing, but he's so rude. We've been introduced 26 times, and he never remembers me." Admits Cushing: "I'm terrible with the public. I don't like that professional, oily quality, but I guess I'm wrong. People at resorts like to say the owner talked to them. Here they say, 'That sonofabitch Cushing didn't speak to me for the 13th consecutive day.' "