Funny how things change. Like how you can move from the ski resort town you’ve known all your life to a desert county pocked with country clubs, and immediately enjoy the exchange of windburn for sunburn. How gripping a golf club can suddenly feel as natural as clicking a ski boot into its binding and how the crack of a fairway wood meeting a ball can be just as satisfying — often more satisfying — than landing a 360-degree aerial after a jaunt through the moguls.

Funny how Toby Dawson’s life has taken on a completely new form in less than a pocketful of years.

Of course, he’s had a great amount of control over the vast changes. It was he who decided after winning that bronze medal at Torino last year to retire from freestyle skiing. Having finally achieved at the most elite level after more than a decade in the sport, he turned in his chips without the slightest sense of regret. “I can’t say that freestyle has been bad to me — I mean I’ve gotten the world from it — but at the same time … it’s so political,” he says about the scoring system that relies heavily on a panel of judges. “It’s nice to step away and not have to deal with that stuff anymore.”

Stepping away meant heading west to pursue a sport with more longevity. Which is why last October he left his role as a celebrated local athlete in his hometown of Vail, Colo., and entered the senior citizen haven of Rancho Mirage, Calif., settling in a gated community down the block from the reputed Mission Hills Country Club. Golf, he had resolved, would be his new vocation.

Trading in leaps off powder-packed cliffs for putts on a green may have been the transition of Toby’s life. Except that a development even more substantial — at times, downright unbelievable — occurred not too long ago — this one orchestrated entirely out of his hands and with a number of confusing particulars.

After all, how do you comprehend the sudden entrance of a man in your life you barely know, whose language you do not understand, but who you refer to as Appa — “father” in Korean? What does it mean to have rock star status overseas, partly due to your Olympic exploits, but mostly because of a story that began when you got lost in a market at 3 years old? And what do you owe a family and country that suddenly want to claim you after 25 years?

Says Toby, “I’m still kind of thinking, is this real?”

 

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The story of Toby’s 28 years of life is the stuff of made-for-TV movies. It’s not hard to imagine maudlin instrumentals scoring the tale of a shy boy found wandering the streets of Pusan, South Korea, who is adopted by two ski instructors from Vail and becomes an Olympic medalist.