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Speeding Up to Slow Down

IN RECESS

Ask your average Texan how they get down a powdery alpine mountain on a snowboard and youmight get a crooked stare. But ask Robert “Blake” Brunkenhoefer and he’ll have a quick answer foryou. “Speed is your friend,” says the 51-year-old trial lawyer from Corpus Christi, who describessnowboarding as simultaneously violent and exhilarating. Throughout the year, he carves throughthe slopes of his second home near South Lake Tahoe, California, with his family. For Brunkenhoe-fer, getting past the initial lumps from the sport lends itself to peace on the mountains.

A snowboarding attorney finds peace on the mountains.

IntervIew by erIc QuItugua

222 Texas Bar Journal • April 2018 texasbar.com

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Above: Robert “Blake” Brunkenhoefer spends most of his snowboarding trips at his favorite mountain in Kirkwood, California.

texasbar.com/tbj Vol. 81, No. 4 • Texas Bar Journal 223

Snowboarding and Texans aren’t exactly two thingsthat you put together.No, I got roped into it by a mentor of mine who practicedhere in Texas. Rick Eddington moved and opened an officein Corpus. His and my father’s firms were essentially com-petitors for the longest time. I didn’t know anything abouthim until we got involved in a maritime case in the late’90s. I discovered he was a good guy, and we becamefriends. He moved to his family’s second home in SteamboatSprings, Colorado, and when I would go see Rick, he sortof threw me into it. That’show I got into snowboard-ing—actually with a CorpusChristi attorney.

How did your first timeon a board go? Anysurprises?It was terrible. I was caughtbetween the embarrassmentof not knowing what I wasdoing and the pride ofwanting to be what myfriend thought I could be.And all I ended up doingwas injuring myself in theprocess. I discovered every-body does. Snowboarding isnot like skiing. Skiing has avery long learning curve.You kind of take it at babysteps: pizza, french fry.

Snowboarding is violent forabout two or three days.But at the end, you can rideany green and probably halfthe blues on the mountainand then you can getaccomplished pretty quickly.

Violent in what way?You have to imagine you’re strapped into a snowboardas opposed to having the flexibility to move your feetindependently of one another. If you want to cruise along,you don’t have to worry about things like boot fractures orspiral fractures of the femur—things that happen toskiers—but you have a bunch of concussive-type injuries.You’re strapped in, and if you don’t let the board kind ofrun down the mountain and gain some speed, you’ll catcha bunch of snow and fall forward over the front of theboard. There are injuries with you landing on your wristsand knees—things like that. And if you catch an edgegoing on the backside, then you might fall and sprain your

IN RECESS

back or sprain your neck. You do a lot of falling.

With snowboarding, the light doesn’t go on until you realizespeed is actually your friend. You really need to get movingand get down the mountain because that’s how you get toyour edges. It just makes it easier to make your turns. It’s alittle counterintuitive.

Have you ever snowboarded competitively or is itpurely just for fun?

Just for fun. And I wouldn’tcall myself that good. Forme it’s not even the rushanymore. I used to enjoyjust seeing how fast I cango; the flap flap flap of yourjacket hood on your neck.Now it’s more about goingoff to the side of a trail andsitting in the snow andenjoying the fact that there’sno noise.

How do you balanceyour life on the boardand life in the court-room?Snowboarding is a hobbyfor me. If duty calls and Ineed to be working, then Iwork. What I try to do isschedule maybe a half dozentrips between mid-Decemberand the end of March. Acouple of them will fallthrough invariably and if Iget in four trips, I get infour trips. If work calls—since we’re set for trialpretty much every week—and it just doesn’t work

out, well then it doesn’t work out. I understand that it’s nothow I make a living.

Would you say there’s any way that one crossesover into the other?I say crossover in terms of the fact that I’m a little bit of anadrenaline junkie like a lot of lawyers are. I like the rushthat snowboarding gives me when I’m going down a run asfast as I can just like I like the rush I get from trying a caseor doing something that I find fun in the law. However,they’re different in the sense that with snowboarding, I canslow down and sit off in the trees in the snow and gathermy thoughts and enjoy the peace and quiet. TBJ

The view from the top. Brunkenhoefer enjoys gathering his thoughts in thepeace and quiet of the mountains.

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