SHAUN WHITE, SNOWBOARDING'S HOTTEST STAR, IS SET TO BLOW UP IN SKATEBOARDING, TOO

Shaun White wants to go to the prom. He doesn't have a date or a tuxedo. He doesn't even really attend high school, at least not when he's traveling, which is most of the year. Even so, Shaun has this idea that the prom is something he should do, that he needs to immerse himself in the whole cheeseball, heartbreaking, hunch-punch, cover band wonder of it all, just to be like every other 16-year-old suburban kid for a night - the kids who aren't world-class professional snowboarders living in a Carlsbad, Calif., seaside house that they own; the kids who dont win cars in Japan on the weekends or have a garage full of free sneakers and enough money to make work optional for life. Shaun White wants to go to the prom simply because thats what young American kids do, and Shaun White could not be more the young American if he tried.

He doesn't try, which, of course, makes him even more ideal.

Shaun is modest and accomplished: He won gold in both the Superpipe and the Slopestyle at this years Winter X Games, and he will ride for the U.S. in Snowboard Superpipe at the X Games Global Championship. He is clean-living and straightforward. He has good manners. He is tidy. He enjoys milk. He has a mop of curly red hair that falls over his eyes and the gangly body of a teenager on the verge of growing out of his shoes. He doesnt drink - not even soda - or swear. He has not as yet, or so it seems, had sex. "I'd like to date, but I'm not really in a position to meet girls," says Shaun, who stays busy globe-trotting amid packs of twentysomething men in his role as the world's best pro snowboarder. "Plus, I don't have my driver's license yet."

If you have never heard of Shaun White, you will soon. Millions of dollars have been invested in Shaun White becoming a household name, and when companies as diverse as Target, Volcom (the skate-rats uniform) and IMG (the mother of all sports agencies) want to introduce you to someone, they generally do it. There were moments at the Winter X Games that were Beatlesque, Mark Ervin, White's agent, says, referring to his client's undeniable magnetism. There are companies interested in him in virtually every category: beverage, car, phone. It's not just because White dominates every event he enters, which he does, but because he has redefined riding style, introducing unprecedented levels of smoothness, landing each trick as if he were stepping off an escalator. "Shaun's a new breed," says Richard Woolcott, president and CEO of Volcom Clothing. "He's like Kobe Bryant. He stays so cool and humble under all that pressure. And he's just about unbeatable. It's been that way pretty much from the beginning."

"As soon as he started snowboarding, he started jumping," says Cathy White, Shaun's mother, who doubles as his manager. "He took off. We couldn't believe it." He was 6. A year later, White won the race and halfpipe events at the Southern California Conference finals, in the 12-and-under category. Spurred on by his success, he entered more comps. He was unlike most of the other racer kids, with their coaches and their wax and their $100 ski suits. Shaun wore baggy clothes and long underwear. He hiked up the halfpipe because he couldn't afford tickets. At events, his family slept in a van. "I just do stuff," says Shaun, when asked how it was that he defeated seasoned pros when he was only a few years out of potty training, and how it is that he continues to punish them now. "I can kind of picture what I want to do and my body just does it. You feel your way through a trick. I close my eyes sometimes."

His consistency - he won nearly every major title this winter after narrowly failing to make the U.S. Olympic team in 2002 - and his agreeable personality have combined to make White a hot property beyond the insular action sports world. He's trying to book time on Letterman. He will be a character in the cartoon Rocket Power. He will soon be traveling that well-worn path to eminence: starring in his own video game. Shaun is already huge in Japan. He gets mobbed. Girls swoon and try to tear off pieces of his clothing. They ask him to sign things, like their faces. The Japanese are making him an action figure. And he's started a fashion trend there. "I put this bandanna over my nose at the Winter X Games because I ran out of sunscreen," he says. "It was like this pirate thing, and I was making aargghhh noises, being goofy." Now kids in Tokyo who saw Winter X on TV wear the pirate bandanna to be fly. Back in the States, Shaun is also adored, USA-style. He gets recognized in malls. Strangers wave to him at traffic lights. He is flashed at Ozzy Osbourne concerts by grown women who are made wild by the very proximity of Shaun and his affable aw-shucks goodness. "I get e-mails from mothers asking me to call their daughters for a date," he says, shaking his head. "I have a great life."

HERE IS what you will find in Shaun White's bedroom: photographs of his best friends, a Xerox of an Axl Rose picture, four snowboards, a sombrero, a pair of Viking horns, canned kangaroo, Godzilla, stacks of Japanimation videos, a stuffed dog in a skate helmet, a PS2 autographed by Ozzy Osbourne, a wall-mounted CD player with 50 Cent cued to play, a snapshot of Yanni, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and a closet full of T-shirts, all hung neatly side by side. "I used to be way into soccer," Shaun says, lounging on his bed. "But I couldn't handle the moms. They'd yell at me because I got to play and their kid didn't." He gives a can-you-believe-it look, then smiles. "That's why I'm the happiest when I'm skating. Parents aren't even allowed in the park, and there's no coach telling you how to do something. It's just up to you."

This year Shaun hopes to give snowboarding a rest and hone his skateboarding skills: "I get paid a lot to snowboard, so it's my main sport. But I've always wanted to take some time off and skate. I'm having so much fun with it, so why not?" Yes, why not, when in your first pro outing, at the 2003 Vans Slam City Jam, you finish fourth in vert. "He blew everyone away," says Ervin.

That win qualifies him for both the X Games and Gravity Games in skateboarding, which is amazing considering how little time he had to get ready. Now White will become the first athlete to compete in one sport at the Winter X Games and another at Summer X. His mom tries not to think about what a skating career might mean. The stunts worry her - Shaun's worst fall came from a collision on the vert ramp. "I was skating doubles with Bob Burnquist at the 1997 MTV Sports and Music Festival," says White. "Our lines got messed up and we hit midair." Burnquist walked away. White, 11 at the time, broke his right hand and right foot, fractured his skull and was knocked out.

"It was gnarly. Everyone in the crowd thought I was dead." White laughs. There are those times when you don't go fast enough or the wind hits you, and you crash. Some guys love that stuff. They're not happy unless they scare the heck out of themselves, unless their hearts are, like, shaking. When asked if he's one of those guys, White pauses a minute before saying, "Mostly when I'm up there, I don't take anything too seriously."

If there's anything that pisses the other guys off, it would be that. Shaun inherited his ambivalence from his family. Everybody in the snowboarding and skate worlds knows that the White family - Cathy, dad Roger, Shaun, brother Jesse, 23, and sister Kari, 18 - is the cool family, the family all the kids want to hang with, the family with the parents who won't freak if you spill beer on the carpet, the family whose grandparents were in the Roller Derby, the family that uses the same slang and shares the same hobbies and was somehow spared any whisper of neurosis. They're the Partridges, with better clothes. At the White house is a welcome mat that says Happy Inside. And, by God, they are. There are reasons for this.

Chief among them is the fact that the Whites have not had an easy time of life. Cathy was a waitress before Shaun's ascension. Roger still works at the San Clemente Water Dept. Money was tight and became even tighter when Shaun needed open-heart surgery for a genetic defect when he was 6 months old; doctors didn't think his heart would beat on its own. At 18 months, his heart needed another surgery. "It was hard because my daughter had to have brain surgery at the same time," Cathy says, calmly reliving every parents worst nightmare, squared. "Both could have died. It made us realize how short life is, how precious your children are. We don't take anything for granted."

Shaun doesn't. He is the rare professional athlete (and rarer teenager) who has the presence of mind to appreciate his blessings. He does not preen or boast or trash-talk or vibrate with insecurity. He just does his thing, heaps grace upon ability, marries ballet and altitude, wins the trophy, pops the nonalcoholic cider and goes home. "I have no doubt that Shaun is the future of the action sports world," says Woolcott. "He's the whole package." White feels no anxiety about his given role. Perhaps it's his family, or his genes, but regardless of the expectations and impending footwear deals, Shaun stays Shaun, which is to say, unruffled and solid, a man among boys. "I think I'd be fine if I didn't skate or snowboard," he says. "The thing about me is that sure, riding is amazing and it's a really great sport, but there's so much more to life than snowboarding."

AT THE Encinitas YMCA Skate Park, home to most of the pros, Shaun works the vert ramp late on an April afternoon. "I was 8 when I first dropped into a ramp," he says. "I had dreams that I was going to drop and keep falling." On a bench near the ramp, four longhaired girls sit and watch. One of them eats a bag of chips. When Shaun falls, skidding to a stop at the bottom, the chip-eater laughs. Shaun hams it up, uses his skateboard like an air guitar. The girls lose interest and leave. Soon, boys show up to watch. They stay longer. One takes pictures of Shaun through the fence. Another pushes his face into the chain rail for a closer look. When Shaun falls now, they don't laugh. They say, "Awesome!" And they are correct. Shaun's falls are awesome. They are unexpected flashes of poise. The other skaters crash and roll like lettuce heads. Shaun falls and slides to a stop on his kneepads like he's the principle dancer in Skateboarder: The Musical, the only sound a tiny Aw, when he realizes midair that he is about to plummet a dozen feet to the wood. And there's another difference. When he falls, you feel his power. The impact is greater. The momentum is faster. The slide is longer. Everything Shaun does contains more force, more energy. When he arcs through the air, making greater and greater circles into the blue, you fear that someday he will disappear over the fence, the ramp too small to contain him.

"You know the best thing about competition?" Shaun asks, pausing at the top of the ramp, his skateboard perched on the edge, his chest heaving beneath his T-shirt. "There's this whole strategy game, and when it all works out its like solving that hard math equation. You finally get the answer and you're so happy. Whenever I'm at the top of the hill and I know I only have one more run, I don't back off, I get stoked by it. When some guy does a really hard trick and my run is right after, you know I'm going to go bigger."

And with that, White drops down the ramp, shooting up the other side like a bullet on rails. Two hours north and a world away from the skate park, on LA's congested Sunset Strip, there are two huge, 80-foot-high walls that tower over the town. It's a landmark. People use it to give directions. Turn left at the tall walls. In August, the walls will be overtaken by two images of Shaun White, Young American Ideal, hung compliments of Target. There he'll be, a reedy, 16-year-old redhead, freckled and full of promise, playing in the endless California sky while the rest of us, stuck on the ground, look up to him.

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