The Road Less Traveled
Illustration by Richard Marks
Until Michael Johnston came along, the only way off the mean, Tyrolean-tinged streets of the Vail Valley was through sports.
Things were bad when I first came to town as a cub sports reporter in the early 90s. A kid’s only hope of escaping the perils of paradise was on a pair of skis.
But I soon came to realize that for every World Cup ski racer like Mike Brown, Chad Fleischer, Sarah Schleper or Lindsey Kildow (now Vonn), big-mountain film star like Chris Anthony or Seth Morrison or Olympic medalist mogul skier like Toby Dawson, there were ten local kids forced into a life of drudgery as a lawyer, doctor, engineer or pilot.
I first encountered Johnston on the perilous pitch of the private Vail Mountain School, where I could tell right away he had few things going for him. The son of Sally and Paul Johnston, a former Vail mayor and the owner of the Christiana Lodge, Michael’s only ticket out was soccer. And he punched it on a tiny, ragtag VMS squad that regularly made the state playoffs back then.
Covering high school sports back then, I was frequently accused of playing favorites by chronicling the exploits of Battle Mountain’s Jeff Campbell, who escaped via the NFL, where he “only” played six seasons for the Lions and Broncos.
My mother-in-law, Gladys Kenney, to this day storms away from the dinner table if record-shattering Battle Mountain quarterback Jeff Rohlwing’s name comes up. She claims the gallons of ink I spent covering his dizzying bursts of gridiron brilliance that led to him walking on at CU came at the expense of her record-shattering track star daughter, Kyle Nelson (formerly Kenney).
Kyle, my wife’s little sister, fled the valley as fast as she could to run track at Colgate, and now, years later, is slinking back to the state this summer as a “mere” professor of sociology at the University of Northern Colorado, where she’ll no doubt mold young, impressionable minds, or some other such nonsensical pastime.
There Gladys, that was 115 words (pass the peas).
No, it was clear to me that kids from this brutally beautiful Venus flytrap of a valley could either break through and make it as a world-class athlete or fail miserably as a high-end homebuilder, filmmaker, surgeon or software engineer. Racked with fear for the fate of my own three sons, I’ve been pushing them with relentless, Great Santini-like abusiveness toward my own unfulfilled dreams of athletic glory.
Plan B is they all earn Ivy League degrees and change the world … or return home to wait tables or load chairlifts.
Clearly possessed of a Rocky Mountain-sized chip on his shoulder, Michael Johnston double dipped on his Ivy League diplomas — a Master’s in education from Harvard and a law degree in Yale – taught at a poor rural high school in the deep South, wrote a critically acclaimed book entitled In the Deep Heart’s Core, then returned to Colorado to help found the Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts (MESA) in Thornton.
Graduating all 44 seniors at that inner-city school in 2008 and placing them all in four-year colleges cemented Johnston in the inner advisory circle of then Senator Barack Obama’s education team and brought the future president to the school on the campaign trail, where he lauded Johnston ’s groundbreaking work.
So as an encore, all Johnston did was get named to a vacant state Senate seat in Northeast Denver last spring to in part take the MESA model statewide.
All by the age of 34. Not bad, I guess, but it leads me to two concluding questions: Couldn’t he make it as a ski racer? And doesn’t he know that’s how you get on the cover of this magazine?
David O. Williams is a former newspaper reporter and editor and is a regular contributor to Vail-Beaver Creek Magazine. He, wife Kristen and their three children live in Vail.
