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WATERSKI MagazineBrody Reid was watching Tiger Woods' runaway finish at the Masters golf tournament in April when he turned to his mother. “Isn't it funny how his father controls him?” he asked. Mom, who has tasted as much success as anyone who ever touched a ski handle, thought about the irony.
“I realized Tiger's life parallels mine,” says Liz Allan Reid. “Nobody can understand him better than me. It took 35 years for me to realize that my father was controlling me. My son already sees that happening to Tiger, and [Brody's] only 11 years old.”
What the public saw in Liz Allan's glory years from the mid-1960s to mid-'70s were those sparkling eyes. They came to characterize the most dominant skier, man or woman, of her era. But those eyes shielded her true motivation.
“It wasn't the joy of winning that pushed me,” she says. “I feared losing.”
Ordered to be perfect on the water by a father who was an Army colonel, Liz Allan refused to lose. From 1967-69 she trained every single day. Winning – not schooling or dating – was her life from the time she was 10 years old until her first retirement and first marriage (to George Shetter) in 1971. By that time, she had won seven world titles. In 1969 she became the first and only skier to sweep all three events at the U.S. Masters, U.S. Nationals and World Championships. She came back for one more run until officially calling it a career in 1975 with an astounding 42 national championships and four more world titles on her resumi.
“When Liz was skiing, everyone else was skiing for second,” remarked one Greatest Skier judge.
But all her medals, trophies and pictures never saw the light of day. They remain packed in boxes inside the home Liz recently helped build with her husband of 13 years, Bruce Reid, in Jerseyville, Illinois.
“I had nothing else in life at that time,” she says. “The only thing of importance I had was winning. There might have been so many other things I could have been good at. But I never got beyond the winning.”
During her skiing career and for the next 20 years, Allan Reid distanced herself from the Liz that girls emulated and boys fawned over. Until a year ago, she never took any time to appreciate the indelible marks she's left on the sport.
“For all those years it was like my imaginary twin was winning all those titles,” she says. “It was never me. But now I can finally say, 'Great. That was me. I did all the work and it really was me who accomplished so much.' It feels good for the first time.”
- Robert Stephens
