The easy path for Jeremy Bloom would have been to concentrate on football and leave skiing and the Olympics behind. Football is, after all, America's favorite sport - a place where stars can be born and millions can be made. Becoming a freestyle skiing "star," on the other hand, can make a guy famous for a day, a month, maybe a year or two if he's really lucky. And yes, it can make a guy rich, too.
Yet for all the hype and glamour of the Olympics, everyone knows - even Bloom - that once the games are over, they are over. Sure, skiing is much more popular in Europe and elsewhere overseas, even during non-Olympic years. But football is always on America's mind. And Bloom's.
"I'm very happy to make the Olympic team and that's my focus now," Bloom said in late December when he qualified for the Turin Games. "But whenever someone brings up football, I get a big smile on my face."
His big Olympic shot comes Feb. 15, on the mountain in Sauze d'Oulx in the men's moguls competition. After that, it's back to Los Angeles to train and try to get into some semblance of football shape. And then, off to the NFL scouting combine, where the 23-year-old's future as a pro football player will begin to be decided.
"I represent a lot of players and, by far, I've got more people coming up to me asking me what's going on with Jeremy than anyone else," said his agent, Gary Wichard, who has been overwhelmed this week as he walks around in Mobile, Ala., the home of the Senior Bowl.
Bloom could be at the Senior Bowl this week, running and catching passes for pro scouts, improving his draft position. In two seasons as a receiver and kick returner at Colorado, he scored five touchdowns on plays of 75 yards or longer.
But while everyone knows Bloom has the speed and playmaking ability, there's no denying the fact that he hasn't played football in 26 months. That surely won't help his status in the draft - where the difference between being chosen in the first and third rounds is millions of dollars.
"I can literally see Jeremy almost start to laugh at that whole idea," said Joel Klatt, the quarterback, an ex-teammate and a good friend of Bloom's at CU. "He's always kind of defied, not necessarily logic, but the norm. He's going to do what his heart tells him to do and what's best for him and those around him."
_ A drawn out and eventually unsuccessful legal fight against the NCAA, which ruled he couldn't play college football and accept endorsement money for skiing.
_ A passel of tortured Saturdays standing on the Colorado sideline, or sitting at home, watching his former teammates play. "There's something about the team dynamic he loves, and really misses, when he's skiing," Wichard said.
_ Skiing in relative obscurity in Europe, risking his football career with every jump and bump on the moguls course. OK, so maybe it wasn't torture, but it wasn't the path of least resistance, either.
"The fact that he ended up skiing, not playing football, was a choice that was forced upon him," said Bloom's father, Larry. "It's more a statement of belief on his part that led him to go the route he went."
"I know if he'd won a gold medal in 2002, things might have been different," said Andy Carroll, the agent who handles Bloom's endorsements. "But there's a sense of unfinished business, and Jeremy has a tendency to very much go with his heart."
The NCAA said Bloom shouldn't be able to accept endorsement money and still keep his eligibility. Never mind that the NCAA had let athletes in similar situations slide before and that it had cleared pro baseball players to keep their eligibility in football. And never mind that freestyle skiing isn't an NCAA-sanctioned sport and that Bloom's skiing endorsements would have had nothing to do with his status as a football player at CU.
"He was faced with choices he had to make, and he has made those choices," Erik Christianson of the NCAA said, citing bylaws stating that "student athletes cannot trade on their reputation to then receive money to endorse products."
Bloom made the best of it for a while in a very expensive sport, and did it pretty much on his own dime. He paid his way to Europe to ski during the football offseason. He hired trainers and physical therapists, bought state-of-the-art equipment and scraped by.
He took his case to court, but didn't win. Though he doesn't rule out taking up the cause in the future for some athlete who is put in the same position, he quickly realized there was no sense in pushing that issue.
"The NCAA sits there and says, `Hey, you can't make any money,'" Carroll said. "And then it's, `Oh, by the way, good luck trying to sue us because we'll drag you down on the legal expenses.' That's how much money they've got. At that point, Jeremy got himself into a hole."
He does magazine covers - Wichard met him at a "Sports Illustrated For Women" photo shoot of the sexiest men in sports - and has a Website that plays up his image as a successful two-sport sex symbol.
Still, there's something very down to earth about this wildly successful millionaire, a man whose face will be seen countless times on TV between now and Feb. 15.
Last year, he won an unprecedented six straight World Cup events, establishing himself as clearly the best in the world and the guy to beat at the Olympics.
Nobody in his circle seems to worry much about what might happen if he gets hurt in Turin, only a few days away from starting the second, and potentially most lucrative, part of his sporting life.
"I wouldn't change anything I did," he said in an interview about 18 months ago. "That's the most sobering fact of looking back at all this. I feel good about myself for fighting for what I believe is right. A big reason I'm not playing football right now is because of principle, and I wouldn't change that."
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