Ross Rebagliati

While his team is playing in Japan, Paul Kariya works out on his own, far away. Haven't we been through this before? We're right back to where the hockey season began, when the Mighty Ducks and Vancouver Canucks made a promotional trip to Tokyo and Kariya, stuck in a contract stalemate, stayed home in Canada. Only this time Kariya isn't at fault. Not one bit. Blame the NHL, which lets goons take free shots at its superstars with only minor repercussions.

Utah Coach Rick Majerus guarded his game plan as if it were a free pizza coupon. "It it doesn't work, I'm going to say we didn't do it so there's no accountability," he said Friday. The other reason, Majerus confessed after his Utes' stunning 76-51 upset of Arizona in the NCAA West Regional final 24 hours later, was that he wasn't sure he would do it until minutes before the game at the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim.

I'm stoked. Wearing my baggy, deep-hanging pants, my wraparound sunglasses and my toque, thinking about getting some part of my body pierced, I'm ready to let this column rip. How could you not be excited about sitting at the top of Mt. Yakebitai on a cold, foggy, snowy Sunday afternoon, watching the world's fastest shredders race in the first snowboarding competition ever in the Winter Olympics?

Top three jokes making the rounds here about Ross Rebagliati, the smokin', tokin', busted snowboarder from Canada: "O Cannabis!" "He was going for the gold, the Acapulco Gold." "Welcome to Fast Times at Nagano City." Of course, drug usage in sports, of any kind, is very serious business, not to be taken lightly, no laughing matter. And did you hear the one about Rebagliati getting caught because they found crumpled Ding Dong and Doritos wrappers stuffed inside his snow boots?

What a wild week it has been, with snow as low as 2,000 feet, prompting resort owners to boast--yet again--that skiing and snowboarding in the Southland has never been better. This might be true, again, but for a group of promising young boarders, there is no better time than this to head for the Rocky Mountains. They are being called the magnificent seven by folks in the small community of Wrightwood, and for a pretty good reason. All seven members of Team Mountain High qualified for the U.S.

News item: Terje Haakonsen will not be present during the Winter Olympics at Turin, Italy. Reaction: Terje who? To some it seems like ages ago when the world's greatest snowboarder said those nasty things about those who run the world's greatest sports festival. Specifically, he compared then-International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch to mobster Al Capone and referred to IOC members as "ski-Nazis."

It was hardly the Olympic ideal. On a sunny day at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, Danny Kass stood above the halfpipe, inching his snowboard toward the edge, with dark hair down to his shoulders and earphones pumping Metallica. Had an athlete ever gone for the gold while plugged into heavy metal?

For veteran snow-thrasher Bill DeBenedictis, there's a classic generation gap being played out atop mountain resorts across the land: an older conservative skiing culture turning its nose up at a younger, wilder, often out-of-control snowboarder nation. Once even banned from many resorts, accused of ruining the runs with their slashing styles, boarders like DeBenedictis have had to ignore the sniffy disdain of the once-dominant skiing crowd to take their place on the mountain.

The XVIII Winter Olympics, just concluded in Japan, had their glory moments and a few less so. The debut of snowboarding as an Olympic sport was marred when the gold medal was taken from Canadian Ross Rebagliati after he tested positive for traces of marijuana. Rebagliati claimed he had been exposed to secondhand marijuana smoke and his medal was later reinstated. Also, the U.S.

No longer can there be doubt about where Joe DiMaggio has gone. Dude has pulled on some gloves, tugged at a warm hat, strapped his feet onto a snowboard and is now shredding on a powder-laced mountain. In a sign of the mainstreaming of snowboarding, which only a few years ago was a sport seemingly restricted to teenage lunatics who reveled in a buzz-off attitude, Chris Klug, 30, the U.S.