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Dear Board members:
First of all, I would like to welcome Mr. Dann Lee to the BASE Board and thank him for all he has tried to do over the last couple of years to promote BASE jumping in in order to make himself rich in the extreme sports arena.
This is a laudable goal and a visionary one, and for that I salute the efforts he made and the success he and his charming sister Jasmina Jacinta Lee Abdullah had in successfully clearing the way for the best parachuting demo jump in history: The Transmillennium World Record Xtreme Skydive.
That effort was a success for three main reasons:
1)Mr. Lee and his sister deferred to my judgment in picking the jumpers and handling the jump side of the event. They did their job – securing permission and getting insurance – and they let me do my job.
2)The event was a two-day practice/exhibition, not a seven-day competition.
3)Everybody paid their own way, and not only was I not paid for my professional services, I partially financed the effort myself.
Whatever happened afterward, this remains a great achievement, and all jumpers owe Mr. Lee and Jasmina compliments, thanks and great appreciation for their vision and drive in getting this great event off the ground and into the history books.
However, that doesn’t mean they get a free ride on this “world championships” that is no such thing – even Mr. Lee has now dropped all pretense and now calls it “Xtreme Skydive 2001.”
This in and of itself shows how far this proposed first-class event has degenerated from what the Malaysian government and Petronas agreed to support and what is has truly become: A private party for Mark and Dwain and their buddies.
Second, I refer everyone once more to two fundamental REALITY CHECKS:
FUNDAMENTAL REALITY CHECK #1: The ONE-DAY Bridge Day event happens this year on October 20.
Registration closed a month ago, about 90 days before the event.
The event has gone on for 20 years.
The people of West Virginia know what to expect.
The jumpers know how to act.
IT'S A 900-FOOT-HIGH BRIDGE WITH AIR BEHIND TI AND WATER AT THE BOTTOM.
The SEVEN-DAY “Xtreme Skydive 2001” happens in 13 days.
Registration is still open.
This event has never been tried or attempted anywhere before in the world.
The people of Malaysia don’t know what to expect.
The jumpers don’t know how to act.
IT'S A 980-1150-FOOT-HIGH LAUNCH POINT WITH STEEL AND GLASS BEHIND IT, STEEL, CONCRETE, GLASS OBSTACLES AT THE BOTTOM.
FUNDAMENTAL REALITY CHECK #2: Instead of the 50-60 people I collected from 30 countries with the help and guidance of the world’s most experienced and MATURE jumpers OVER a ONE-YEAR PERIOD, it’s become a private boogie for the friends of two technically talented but ethically misguided and monumentally immature jumpers who have sold out their BASE brothers and their sport for, respectively: a) a free surfing trip to Indonesia; and b) the chance to become “world chump” and theoretically take home a few grand in prize money.
Those are the basic TECHNICAL REALITIES faced by the people supposedly in charge of this “world championships” that even its own creator now says is just a boogie, just a demonstration, just the VERY THING I told him was all we could do this year without the time and money to put on a proper world-class competition.
Except that, instead of making maximum use of the organization I carefully created with the wisdom and support and knowledge of so many of you, Mr. Lee chose to destroy that organization because, in his own words, he likes spending a huge amount of money on everybody except the jumpers on the PROFESSIONAL STAFF who make his entire project possible in the first place.
And now here are some more Basic Reality Checks for my good friend Mr. Lee, with whom I had a very cordial telephone conversation the other night.
Basic Reality Check #1: Mr. Lee’s 10 AUG 01 BASE Board bewilderment: “We planned it for almost 2 years and if that is not enough time, I wonder how long a time Robin Heid need.”
Well, as the old saying goes, “if you have to ask the question, you obviously won't understand the answer.”
"How long a time Robin Heid need" is based on fact, physics and fundamental business practices and timing, to wit:
A) Mr. Lee and I have indeed worked this project for almost two years, but WRITTEN APPROVAL for it did not come until 14 MAY 2001 – just three months and ten days before the proposed beginning of the event – not enough time by any professional standard to do it right, even with a lot of money to throw at time-related problems.
B) This date was the perfect approval date to host a true world championships in 2002 because not only would it give us time to go through the sponsorship money procurement process (which begins in the summer and culminates in the late fall of the year BEFORE the scheduled event), it would give the jumpers time to get better organized, to include national championships and/or regional qualifying events so we could dispense with the political-no-matter-how-fair-you-try-to-be invitational process and go strictly on performance, backed up by the admin time necessary to make sure all the top technical performers also had the good manners and good sense necessary to be good ambassadors for their countries and sport too.
Basic Reality Check #2: Petronas Corporation declined to be the “title sponsor” and provide us with the money necessary to throw at all the time-related problems we could solve with money, thereby dooming the event (as proposed) from the outset.
Basic Reality Check #3. I told my good friend Mr. Lee back in June that Basic Reality Checks #1 and #2 meant we had to scale down the event to an exhibition event of what we could do NEXT YEAR with proper planning – and with money provided by sponsors eager to “get on board” after seeing that demonstration (which would be spectacular, of course).
The scaled-down version was meant to include the event cadre I had assembled during that two-year period, and a few other highly skilled jumpers so that we could not only put on a spectacular exhibition but create the corporate working group process common to all such business collaborations to make sure our organization was properly set up and tuned to make everything work right for everybody – which absolutely includes Petronas because if the $30 billion-a-year corporation isn’t happy with the way the $1-a-year-corporation does business, then you get exactly what SkyVenture employees Mark Hewitt and Dwain Weston have given us now: “This maybe the only time Petronas is legal, you snooze you lose!” as Mr. Hewitt reported August 9 to this Board.
Basic Reality Check #4. Mr. Lee continues to claim that he has spent “a huge amount of money” on this event, yet not one dollar did he pay to the person who spent 1,000 hours developing this project for him, and who provided him with all the contacts he is now using so irresponsibly. Neither would he provide $20,000 USD in a U.S. bank escrow account by the end of June for me to draw on to pay for the expenses and modest fees of judges, staff and other technical support people needed to actually put on even a bare-bones first-class event.
“Ridiculous,” was the term Mr. Lee used in response to my request that he actually pay the JUMPERS for everything he was getting from them for his business project. Mr. Lee spends a lot of time talking about how much money he spent, but no time actually writing any checks to any JUMPERS except maybe to his surfing director.
Neither has he told any of these jumpers (including the immensely talented but frightfully immature Dwain Weston) that a good deal of that alleged prize money that’s available will stay in Malaysia as TAXES paid by those jumpers to the government.
Reality Check #5. Mr. Lee has repeatedly told people the same thing he posted yesterday on this Board: “I have a fax from Robin demanding for USD 250,000 for himself. I can send this fax to anybody that need to see this fax.”
Well, Mr. Lee, send one to ME for starters, which is something you and your surfing director have steadfastly refused to do.
Mr. Lee and I did discuss it during our cordial conversation the other night, wherein I told him any such figure was obviously and clearly a typographical error, as in every single post or message to any jumpers and in all my dealings with Mr. Lee, I have: a) routinely made typos; and b) never asked for more than $10,000 for myself ($7000 in expenses, $3 per hour for my work), or $20,000 to cover the basic expenses and costs associated with assembling, sending and fielding a competition staff in a very remote location.
In fact, the only time I can even remember the $250,000 (USD) figure coming up was in a letter to a Malaysian government official saying that RM 1,000,000 (a little more than $250,000 USD) was needed to put on a short-notice, BARE BONES event of world-class quality. This was NOT in any way, shape, or form for me alone, as my fee, but for the entire project, 50 percent of which would go directly to Mr. Lee for his end (and fees).
To refresh Mr. Lee’s memory, the project was originally budgeted by him at RM 5,000,000 -- $1.3 million USD. My asking for $250k in government money to do the event RIGHT was asking for 1/5th of what Mr. Lee himself budgeted...
There are many other key Reality Checks at issue here, but these are the big ones, and they all add up to one thing: This show must stop until we can do it right.
That is why I now publicly ask Mr. Lee to please consider what’s best for the long-term future of our sport’s relationship with your wonderful country and not just your short-term financial outlook.
If Mr. Lee was a BASE jumper, he would know what all of us have already learned either the easy way or the hard way: No matter how great the site is, or how much time and money you’ve spent getting to the launch point, you walk down if conditions aren’t right because this sport is way too dangerous to do it any other way.
But Mr. Lee doesn’t jump, and that’s why, in addition to the letters several of us have already sent to Petronas and the Malaysian government asking them to please stop this thing before it becomes a bigger mess, we should all start “counseling” our friend Dann Lee and his wonderful sister Jasmina to join with us instead of fighting with us on this and let’s do it right next year.
Robin Heid
