WAVE OF THE FUTURE

It's time to get tweaked, slip into a hyper-lite and do some butter slides and hoochie glides out on Havasu. We're talking wakeboarding here, dude, the sport that is becoming to water skiing what snowboarding has become to downhill. A relatively new development, wakeboards account for 20% of the water-ski market, a sizable chunk considering that there are 30 million water skiers worldwide. Most regard Arizona as the Alps of water skiing. In a recent survey of WaterSki magazine readers, the Grand Canyon State claimed three of the top five destinations: Lakes Powell, Mead and Havasu.

It was 75 years ago--on July 2, 1922, to be precise--that pioneer Ralph Samuelson strapped on the first pair of water skis on Lake Pipen in Minnesota. In 1985 a surfer aptly named Tony Finn developed a hybrid between a water ski and a surfboard called the Skurfer. But that skiboard was so narrow and buoyant that only the most experienced skiers could work it. Before skiboarding sank like a stone, water-ski manufacturer Herb O'Brien came up with the Hyperlite, a carbon-graphite board of neutral buoyancy with large dimples on the bottom (phasers, to those in the know) that gave it a looser feel and made for softer landings from wake jumps. Skiboarders became wakeboarders, and the sport took off.

Now wakeboarding has its own magazine, a pro circuit and enough converts to proclaim itself among the fastest-growing sports in the country. It even has its own Tiger Woods: Parks Bonifay, 15, of Lake Alfred, Fla. As his mother dried him off after he won the wakeboarding gold medal at the 1996 X Games sponsored by ESPN, Bonifay declared his victory "the best moment of my life." The kid, like his sport, has still bigger things ahead. He defends his title in June.