Inventor groomed the path for snowboarding
On Christmas morning 1965, Sherm Poppen bound together a pair of discount-store skis and created what became known as the Snurfer, combining elements of skateboarding, surfing and slalom water skiing to invent a smooth-riding precursor to the snowboard.
“I lived on the shore of Lake Michigan, and I’d always wished I could surf,” Poppen later told Snow magazine. That day, “I looked at the snow on the dunes behind my house and it dawned on me that we had a permanent wave right there.”
Over the next decade and a half, more than 750,000 Snurfers — a portmanteau of snow and surf, with no relation to the blue, mushroom-dwelling Smurfs — were sold nationwide. Historians credit Poppen’s invention with spurring the development of snowboarding, a sport that nets hundreds of millions of dollars in annual merchandise sales and is featured at the Winter X Games and Olympics.
Poppen, who never became wealthy from the invention, had little interest in launching a sport or business empire when he used a piece of floor moulding to screw skis together in his garage.
Instead, his work was driven by a desire to entertain his 5- and 10-year-old daughters — and to keep them out of their house in Muskegon, Mich., while Poppen’s pregnant wife rested inside.
“When I saw how much fun the kids had Christmas Day,” he later told the journal Skiing Heritage in 2008, “I spent the next week in Goodwill and everywhere else buying up every water ski I could find.”
Poppen was 89 when he died July 31 at his home in Griffin, Ga., where he had lived for about a decade, since declining health forced him off the slopes. The cause was complications of a stroke, his family said.
“I saw it as a children’s toy, really — something to play in the backyard and replace the sled,” Poppen told the FNRad Snowboarding Podcast in 2015. “Because every year a few people died on sleds by running into trees headfirst. This way they could stand up, jump off and jump back on, and save their head.”
In a phone interview, his family recalled that Poppen named the toy at the suggestion of his wife and continued to update it with help from his father, who proposed adding a rope to the front to help riders steer and hold on to the board after falls.
“He’s not known for following directions,” his daughter Julie Poppen said. “He always drilled a million unnecessary holes in everything.”
By March1966, Poppen had applied for a patent for his “surf-type snow ski,” which featured a board that was wider and shorter than a normal snow ski, topped with “antiskid foot treads” to prevent riders’ boots from slipping. The toy was licensed to the Brunswick, an Illinois-based bowling company that placed it in the Sears catalogue in time for Christmas. Early models sold for $6.88 (U.S.).
Three Chicago-area friends, Vern Wicklund and brothers Harvey and Gunnar Burgeson, had patented another proto-snowboard, a modified sled known as a “bunker,” in the 1930s. Poppen’s Snurfer was the first to be mass-produced, although the marketing campaign was such a failure it inspired a Harvard University business school case study. Advertisements declared “Snurf’s the word!” But it was unclear whether “Snurfing” was a sport or a children’s game, like twirling with a hula hoop.
Still, the Snurfer made its way to future snowboard innovators, including Jeff Grell, Chris Sanders and Bob Weber, and Poppen helped organize Snurfing competitions in Muskegon. Tinkerers such as Tom Sims and Dimitrije Milovich developed hands-free models in the wake of Poppen’s creation. And Jake Burton Carpenter, who received a Snurfer at 14 and soon launched his own company, Burton Snowboards, helped popularize the modern snowboard and bring it to mountains across the country.
“I always felt there was an opportunity for it to be better marketed, for serious technology to be applied to it, so Snurfing could become a legitimate sport instead of a cheap toy,” Burton told Sports Illustrated in 1997. “I knew there was an opportunity there. I couldn’t believe Brunswick never took advantage of it.”
Poppen, who devoted most of his career to running an industrial-gas-supply company, generally seemed unbothered that his creation became successful only after others developed it further.