From BE to Bond to Boards to Brands:
The JJ Collier Adventure By Steve York
I
t was a warm spring evening in May of 1985. John Joseph Collier (or “JJ,” as he’s commonly known) and friends were gathered at the former Chalet movie theater in the Boone Heights Shopping Center. It was just after JJ’s 14th birthday and the guys were celebrating at the movies. The film was “A View to a Kill,” a James Bond film featuring Roger Moore’s last performance as the fictional Ian Fleming MI6 British secret agent. And it was that movie that marked one of the two most pivotal decisions in JJ’s life. In the opening scene Bond’s mission was to retrieve a microchip from a fellow agent frozen beneath the Siberian snows. Recovering the microchip would prevent movie villain, Max Zorin, from using it to destroy California’s Silicon Valley and building a worldwide microchip monopoly. Bond narrowly escaped with the microchip amidst a barrage of heavy artillery fire, fleeing on a single snowmobile ski blade and racing snowboard-style down treacherous slopes and into the arms of a beautiful, blonde submarine pilot. So, why was a Bond movie pivotal in JJ’s life? To answer that, we need to back up a little. JJ comes from a very dynamic family. They moved to Banner Elk when JJ was about six. His father “Big John”— as the family often calls him—is a retired, highly-decorated and heroic Lieutenant Colonel in the Airborne Ranger Special Forces/Green Berets. His mom
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Katherine is a retired and highly-respected “RN” with years in both the ER and OR at Cannon Memorial Hospital. Then there’s his younger brother Dave, who runs a Charlotte screen-printing business, and his younger sister Kristan, a professional private caterer in Massachusetts. All are successful, very creative, competitive and athletic. Given that family chemistry, it’s not surprising that during high school JJ became a tri-athlete and a formidable competitor. Both JJ and younger brother Dave were also avid trail bike enthusiasts in the early 1980s, tearing across rugged mountain terrains around home. JJ steered his BMX Mongoose California bike and Dave road atop a Vector model. Back then both were sporting the trendy ‘80s west coast skateboarder “look” and emulating daredevil feats of world-renowned bikers pictured in BMX magazine. As fate would have things, it was in one of those BMX magazines that JJ first saw an ad for Burton snowboards. Pivot #1 Back to the original question: Why did that Bond movie so impact JJ’s life? It was that opening scene when Bond used a single snowmobile ski as a makeshift snowboard and careened down those shear Siberian slopes. That scene pivoted JJ’s focus from trail bikes to snowboards. “That’s what I want to do!” he declared. “After all, we don’t have waves and skate parks like California,”
JJ thought to himself. “But we do have these mountains!” By November of 1986, both JJ and Dave had begun blazing down snowy Beech Mountain slopes on their Burton Elite 140 snowboards. And, to hear JJ tell it, “Dave was not only a great competitive snowboarder, he was also right on my heels and always driving me to excel.” Within two years, and with “Big John” behind the wheel, JJ and Dave were on their way to the 1988 U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships in Stratton Mountain, Vermont. There, JJ won first place in the Junior Moguls competition defeating 67 riders from around the nation and even landing a sponsorship from Burton Snowboards. Throughout the next decade JJ became a snowboarding star. He reached national ranking in the U.S. Open, went on to finish third and fourth in the 1995 half pipe and then achieved an overall second half pipe champion placement during the 1997 U.S. Pro Snowboard Tour. It was also during those late 1990s while in Breckenridge, Colorado, that he met his future wife, Shannon. Yes, JJ was living his dream, a dream first inspired by 007 when he was only 14. But wait! There’s more. Since his youth, JJ had a talent for drawing and pulling design ideas together with an original twist. He also had a keen eye for well-tailored, superfunctional fashion, a knack inspired by his mom and dad. “I credit my parents
