Book Review: Pretty Good for a Girl

When I first started riding motorcycles, I couldn’t keep away from the twisty, densely forested highways of the Santa Cruz mountains and would often hear people tell me, “wow, you’re pretty fast for a girl.” I loved hearing it! It made me want to go faster, not necessarily just so that people would drop off the “for a girl” business, but because I loved being good at something, especially something that most girls didn’t even do, let alone be good at.

So while cruising Borders looking for a book called Positively False, a book about Tour de France champion Floyd Landis, I stumbled upon Pretty Good for a Girl: The Autobiography of a Snowboarding Pioneer by snowboarding all-star Tina Basich. Neat. Rad. So I bought it. I couldn’t find the Floyd Landis book which was frustrating, given that it was two days before Christmas and I had to find one more gift for James.

Then Krystyna Kubran came by later that night for a visit with her horse-sized Great Dane, Duke, and I decided to give her the book for Christmas. I figured a fellow girl racer might enjoy it. And I didn’t get a chance to buy myself another copy and read it until just this week!

So it’s not the in-depth, scathing report on being a girl in male-dominated sport that I was hoping for; where’s the scandal? The drama? The snowboarder equivalents of “racer chasers,” “nut swingers” and “track whores?” The lingerie pillow fights? I’m sure she wanted to keep it positive, which is probably what I would do too if I were her, but I always like a little drama. It’s still a fun, fast read though, and there are so many similarities between her experiences as one of the first few girl snowboarders (like wanting to keep the ponytail flag flying out the helmet to display her femininity) and our experiences as the token girls out on the racetrack.

Pro Womens' Snowboarding Pioneer Tina Basich

A quote:

“…if girls could see me snowboarding, maybe they would want to give it a try, too. It’s frustrating growing up and hearing people say things like ‘Oh, girls aren’t interested in that. They don’t care about video games, they don’t care about car racing, they don’t care about riding motocross.’ It’s such an old school attitude because we do care. And with our generation if we see another girl out there doing it, especially if it’s considered a ‘guy’ thing, we want to try, too.

“Maybe the reason more girls don’t play football is because there aren’t many girl football teams? Not because we don’t care. I had to ride and do well in competitions and be in photo shoots, not just for myself, but so girls would see this sport and it wouldn’t fade for them or take a back seat to guys.”

Tina Rocking the Half Pipe

What’s interesting about Tina’s book is that even from the beginning, mens’ and womens’ snowboarding competitions were separate, even when there were only three girls in her event and thirty in the guys’. The number of women snowboarders exploded throughout the nineties though, so I sometimes wonder if motorcycling as a sport would have taken off faster with women if we had our own place to compete, our own place to dominate, and our own place to win money. Not that we can’t do it against the guys, just…I really just don’t think it’s as equal as some people think. The bigger bikes are just so physically demanding to ride, and we all grow up with such different expectations put upon us. Sure, there may be a girl that comes along that can beat all the men in the world, but she would have to be, like, a freak of nature! I’d sure love to see that day though…

My ten year old niece Noelle, packing her softball gear bag, would like to add the following.

“There’s this kid in my class who I really hate.”

“Yeah?” I asked, half paying attention to my book review and half listening to her. “Why do you hate him?”

“Because he calls me his girlfriend.” A pause. “He’s really annoying.”

“What’s his name?”

“Ethan. He’s a poop.”

I LOLd.