By Sarah Sotoodeh
After a summer of rehab, snowboarder Pat Moore is ready to leave sunny Southern California and head to the cold, snow capped mountains of Saas Fee, Switzerland. This will be the first time Moore is able to snowboard since a shoulder injury sidelined him in May. Five months after surgery at DISC Sports & Spine, I spoke to him about his injury, his travel plans and his most memorable moments.
Q: Talk about your shoulder injury?
Moore: Basically I dislocated my shoulder snowboarding and I ended up tearing my labrum, which is a surgery I already had on the other shoulder three years ago, so I knew what I was getting into.
Q: How did your shoulder get injured?
Moore: I was up in Alaska with Travis Rice and we were filming for our X Games video. I fell through some bad snow and my arm just got caught and yanked. It was in the Tordrillo Mountain range in Alaska.
Q: Have often are you doing rehab?
Moore: I had the surgery at the end of May and then pretty much as soon as I was ready to get started I’ve been in the Soft Tissue Center three days a week doing all my physical therapy.
Q: Where will you be based after spending the summer in LA?
Moore: I’ll go to Tahoe. I just decided to move down here for the whole summer and to be committed to doing all the surgery and all the work afterwards here at DISC so it was seamless.
Q: Is your trip to Switzerland the first time you get to snowboard since the surgery?
Moore: I’ve been surfing and doing a little skating but mostly trying to get through all my exercises so this trip to Europe is kind of like my first trial to see how everything is feeling.
Q: How often do you surf?
Moore: I go a few times a week—getting in the water is awesome. I would go a lot more but the rehab and everything takes up a lot more time.
Q: Besides what you’re doing at the Soft Tissue Center, what are some things you are doing for training?
Moore: I’m here three times a week and I’m at Red Bull for five or six days a week. I work with them to get the rest of my body healthy and then I come here to get work specifically on my shoulder.
Q: What is it about snowboarding that makes you want to continue doing the sport?
Moore: I think it’s just going up to the mountains and getting away from real life. You just go up and you forget about everything, you’re with your friends and it creates a really good opportunity to just be in the moment. In our life we are constantly thinking, oh what’s next, what happened or whatever and when we’re snowboarding, we’re just enjoying the time, having fun with our friends.
Q: What got you started into snowboarding?
Moore: Well my mom was a marketing director at a ski resort my whole life. I went up every day with her back in New Hampshire and she would work all day and I would snowboard all day.
Q: Most memorable moment in your career so far?
Moore: Probably the best thing so far is doing the LA X Games—my filmer and I won the online voting contest for the video contest that I was in. It was called the real snow backcountry. It’s ten grand for first place for the online vote so we committed that money to my friend’s cancer bills. It was a really cool experience, the whole couple of weeks of voting—had a ton of help from all sorts of different athletes and celebrities. It was a really cool way to help my friend out and we were able to do something good with snowboarding.
Q: What’s your favorite moment from the film The Art of Flight?
Moore: There’s this one shot where I do a 720—I spin twice around in the air. I hit the jump in the right way where there’s a big tree right next to it, so as I’m coming through the 360 into the next rotation, I tapped it. I just kind of brushed by it and then finished the trick and landed and in the air I remember just being ‘Oh God this is going to suck,’ like I’m going to crash right now, but it just came around right to my feet. The shot is awesome. It’s probably one of my favorite shots I’ve ever gotten and it made it into the film.
