Mad Dog Buek Died!

I've been crying for almost the past four hours. No one in my family, animals included, has died, and my boyfriend didn't break up with me again. The cause of my sadness is a movie. It's the worst kind of movie where sadness occurs because it happened in real life pretty much the way it happened on screen.

The movie,   The Other Side of The Mountain, is the true story of Jill Kinmont, an American skier in the mid- 1950's who was almost a sure shot to make the 1956 Olympic slalom skiing team.  She was ultimate the victim  of what has come to be known as "The Sports Illustrated Cover Curse." It's become almost legendary that if an athlete's picture is featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated , the U. S.'s weekly preeminent sports news coverage and feature magazine, shortly before an important athletic event, having been pictured on the cover of the magazine will not bode well for the athlete.  Typical examples of the Sports Illustrated Cover Curse are of the nature of Sugar Ray Leonard's career-ending TKO  loss to Hector Camacho in his comeback bout the same week he appeared on the cover, the end of Pete Rose's 44-game hitting streak the same week he appeared on the cover, and Tim Tebow's appearance on the cover of the magazine after a six -game win streak of his team, The Denver Broncos, after which the Broncos immediately lost their next three games.  Jill Kinmont's encounter with the Sports Illustrated Cover Curse, however, was a bit more grim. Competing in The Snow Cup in Alta, Utah in 1955, in arguably unsafe conditions, Ms. Kinmont struck and icy bump and suffered a near-fatal accident that left her paralyzed from just beneath the shoulders.

Ms. Kinmont could have basically given up and watched soap operas and fixed game shows  for the rest of her life, but she didn't. She fought policy in different educational institutions for the right to enroll in programs and to earn a degree and a teaching credential. She was successful in both endeavors. She taught for somewhere around thirty years, mostly in and around Bishop, California, where she grew up.  She wrote an autobiography, A Long Way Up, on which The Other Side of the Mountain  was based.

For those who lived through and followed Jill Kinmont's career and life, the events of the movie came as no surprise. I think I saw a picture of her in a wheelchair somewhere on the DVD cover, so the skiing accident itself did not totally catch me by surprise. I had hopes that she would regain the ability to walk, though.  A particularly difficult-to-take scene in the movie came when her boyfriend at the time, Buddy Werner, also a champion skier, came to the hospital to visit her to see a surprise she had in store for him.  Expecting her to stand up from her wheelchair and walk across the room, he was shocked when the "surprise" was Jill's taking a potato chip from a bowl and eventually getting it into her mouth. Werner walked out, never to see her again.

That scene,  however, paled, in comparison to what was to come. Somehow Jill became hooked up with the wildly irreverent and politically-incorrect-long-before-the-term-was-ever-invented extreme athlete (again, before the term was invented) Dick "Mad Dog" Buek. He helped Jill through her rehabilitation and the two fell in love. One of my favorite scenes in the movie was his marriage proposal to Jill, where he tells her something to the effect that he's going to build a house with low sinks and other handicap-accessible features, and if she won't marry him, he'll find some other gimp (his word, not mine) to come live in it with him.

Buek was a pilot, and he flew frequently from his family's home in Colorado to Jill's home in  Bishop to visit her. On a planned visit not long before their marriage was to take place, his plane crashed and he was killed. This wasn't Hollywood. It was real life!  How could such a thing be allowed to happen? Why would anyone who controls our destiny allow such a thing to happen? And to Jill Kinmont, of all people, who had already been paralyzed and had her life as she knew it taken from her, and had her boyfriend Buddy Werner walk out on her because she ate a potato chip instead of walking across the room as he had anticipated.=?  And if it did have to happen, why in the world did my parents intentionally show me a movie about it?  Don't I see enough depressing sights in the world around me every day? Don't we all? Did they have to show me something from forty years ago that would make me this unhappy?

It's not as though I was sitting around, feeling sorry for myself, and in need of a cinematic kick in the pants to see that there was once someone else in the world who had it worse than I do. I know I've had my share of bad luck, but I get over it anytime it happens.  Furthermore, I've had my share of good luck as well. Myositis is nothing, and I know it. I'll be back in school in weeks. I'll be in law school or medical school in about eighteen months. I'm not feeling sorry for myself. In the grand scheme of things I have a great life. I was happy until about six hours ago when my parents put on this horrible movie.

For the record, Jill Kinmont went on to find another love of her life. She married him and was with him until she died last year of undisclosed causes. I'm happy that she found happiness with someone else and went on with her life, but in my Hollywood-jaded mind, her life with Mr. Boothe, the new guy, could never have  been what her life would have been with Mad Dog Buek. That's pure conjecture, I admit, but it's one more reason I did not need to watch this movie.

I know that tragedies of more epic proportions have occurred throughout history.  King Herod had babies killed. jesus dies on a cross.  I know all about the Titanic. There's even a movie about it, although if I watch it, I already know how the non-fictionalized parts will end. I know about the Holocaust and the Nazi death camps. I choose not to watch movies on the topic, but if I did watch them, I would know in advance that the ending would not be positive for the majority of the Jewish people incarcerated there. I know about the school shooting in Connecticut.  If anyone ever makes a movie about it, I won't watch it. But even if I did, if the movie were true to life, the tragic parts would not catch me by surprise.

Mad Dog Buek died, and I'm in absolute mourning. It happened about fifty years ago, and I don't care. It's like it happened this afternoon.