Rick Meister is a certified rock climbing guidance counselor, but think of him more as your buddy or your bro, the one with those cool jeans, the sport jacket, and that thick black mustache. Whatever you do, don't call him Mr. Meister--he's . . .The Guidance Meister.
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With the release of Dead Point's debutante ball of everything folks do right to garner photo and video buzz, it behooves us to consider everything we could do wrong to get noticed. (By "we," I mean our little group of broha-stroha's-HOLLERING!
Woops-I mean, HOLL-ER! And by "behoove" I mean... I don't have any idea what I mean.) Lots of climbers warp my stately mahogany desk with sob stories of self-promotion gone awry. There's no denying tragedy in their precipitous, ultimately irreversible descent into decimated self-esteem, and while it suddenly strikes me that as a guidance counselor I could maybe spin that better, irregardless we can learn something from them about respectable methods of getting into mags, vids, and the hearts of those most heartless of all no-hearty no-hearts: the sponsors. To preserve the anonymity of my "patients cum only friends" and to maintain coherence, I'll tell their tales of woe as if from a single person's vantage; let's call this composite figure: "I."
When I was 16 and even more desperate to make it into the mags than I was to kiss someone besides the inside of my own elbow, I proposed a chair-bouldering challenge at a climbing comp iso-well-aware of this outlandish contest's photogenic appeal. Sho'nuff, some months later, I was splashing across a Big Boy black-and-white quarter-pager, hugging the bottom of a folding chair, sporting my best constipation face, and kicking a pointed toe skyward in a manner describable only as "immaculately effeminate." Afterward, I endured interchanges like this:
"Wow, was that you bouldering that chair in that magazine? Did you win?"
"Yes, it was I, and yes, I won."
"Cool! Your leg positions made me completely uncomfortable with my own body. Can you show me your magic?"
And then I would start gracelessly groveling through chair legs, hopelessly trying to avoid scraping carpet, knowing that the clock ticked steadily onward toward my big reveal: I hadn't won the contest-in fact, shame of all shames, I had never successfully bouldered a chair.
Lesson #1: Always speak truth about chair-bouldering, starting with the fact that it's the ultimate climber cliché. A friend once offered to write a mag report of a first ascent I'd done. Too image conscious to let anyone else but I write the piece, I meticulously sprayed away on the lonesome. A few weeks later, a well-known maggie-let's call him Shmills Shmoung-came a-calling:
"So who exactly wrote the report?" asked Shmills.
"Oh, well, I did," I admitted.
"Interesting," continued Shmills with renowned Shmoungian tact. "Well, we'll probably run the story, but maybe not the whole thing exactly as you wrote it."
"Great! Hey, could you leave that stuff in about how I did the route when those big-namers didn't? That really gives the narrative some texture."
"Uh, well, like I said, we may not run it exactly as you wrote it . . ."
For months, I "casually" led people by the route and "let it slip" that I was hearing rumors of media blitz. "Who did the route?" they'd ask. "Oh I don't know," I'd respond. "I think some guy named I."
Lesson #2: Loosen the death grip on your carefully-crafted public persona; just give your spray-buddies the go-ahead. I once tried to capitalize on a modest tick list to score some sponsors: "I did this and this, and in the future I, without a doubt, will do that and the other." After I nowhered around for a bit, a SLC climbing legend-let's call him Shmeven Shmefferies-took pity on a young gloryhound and led the way to Shmefferies' own sponsors-we'll call them Shmack Shmiamond. I whistled away as Shmefferies convinced the rep to cut the gloryhound some shwag. A couple months later, I called up the would-be sponsors and impudently rattled off a booty-refill order: "A 700-meter rope, custom-fitted shoes, and 150 of those new carabiners, whaddyacallem? Shmotwires. 150 Shmotwires, STAT!" To which said sponsor responded calmly, "Who are you, we've never heard of you, don't ever call here again."
My Final Lesson, Kiddos: You aren't sponsored just because you think you are. Even if you really, really think you are and tell almost everyone that you are.
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