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Tom Ross' column appears Tuesdays and Saturdays in Steamboat Today. Contact him at 871-4205 or e-mail tross@steamboatpilot.com.

Steamboat Springs — Forty-seven years ago this summer, Santino Antonucci decided it was time take up a more respectable sport. Reluctantly, he gave up the beach for the mountains. He sold his surfboard to buy a pair of long black Head Competition racing skis.

"My buddies and I surfed near Ocean City, N.J.," Antonucci said, "but were always getting chased off the beach. I got tired of being chased by the cops, so I sold the board and took up a sport where I could be like a regular adult."

I'm not absolutely certain that skiers are regular adults. And if you're thinking it's a little early in the 2009-10 season to be writing ski pieces, you're right.

We could leave the stories about great old skis of yesteryear until November. However, the end of June is prime time for middle-aged guys scouting around for a replacement pair of their first serious boards at garage and estate sales throughout snow country.

Antonucci let his original skis slip away a long time ago. And he already had a pair of surrogates in his Steamboat home when he stumbled on Lee Stroncek's 205 cm beauties at an estate sale on Aspen Street on Friday. So why purchase another pair?

"I'm buying these for my buddy," Antonucci said with conviction.

He picked up Stroncek's well-used skis (sorry, bindings not included) for five bucks. Score!

It was 1962 when Antonucci first made the switch from surf to frozen turf.

He was going to school at Wagner College on Staten Island. The Verrazano Bridge hadn't been built yet, so Antonucci used to shuttle to and from campus from Brooklyn via the ferry.

During one memorable commute he demonstrated the adventurous personality needed to become a strong skier. In the midst of the ferry trip, he hopped in a lifeboat and took the oars to assist the crew in rescuing a woman who had gone overboard.

Antonucci quickly fell in love with his new sport, spending many weekends at Hunter Mountain about two hours north of campus. Later, he became a ski instructor at Bromley (1964-65) in southern Vermont.

The Head Competition skis were inventor Howard Head's response to serious racers who wanted something more stable than the original Head Standards that had caused Americans to give up their old hickory skis.

By the time Antonucci began teaching other people to ski, the best skiers in the world were winning World Cup races on Head Competition skis.

Despite their somber black top skins, the skis were the hottest thing on the mountain.

"They had these yellow bases," Antonucci said, pointing to Stroncek's old skis. "That yellow was really flash in those days."

The Head skis were made out of a sandwich of aircraft aluminum, a plywood core, and a plastic sheet and incorporated a continuous metal edge.

The torsional stiffness of the skis was like nothing expert skiers had ever experienced. The racing skis added a neoprene damping layer that made them less prone to chattering at high speeds.

Stroncek and Antonucci agreed that one of the disadvantages of ski equipment in the mid-1960s was the long-thong bindings that kept them connected to the skis even when they released. There were no safety brakes in those days, and a long strip of leather wrapped repeatedly around the ankle kept the ski from streaking away after a bad fall. The bad news was that they wind-milled at the end of the thong, sometimes injuring the skier attached to them.

Quaint safety straps or not, Head Standards and Head Competitions were the skis to rip on in the early to mid-1960s, before fiberglass overtook Howard Head.

Some guys mourn for the 1965 Mustang they foolishly traded in. They spend years trying to find one like it, if not the exact car.

Other guys are content to preserve valiant old warriors like the Head Competition giant slalom skis that changed hands from Stroncek to Antonucci last week.