Butch Hoffman going into ski HOF as coach, athlete, innovator — and dad

Back in the day, when Ski Utah sponsored an annual media day ski race, the Deseret News would always try to cobble together a team. We had a few skiers who could negotiate a mogul field without dying. Ray Grass, the outdoor editor, was a good skier; if they didn’t have to carry 30 pounds of photo gear, photographers Tom Smart and Ravell Call could hurtle down mountains like they’d been liberated from a prisoner of war camp.

But if we wanted to really get serious, if we wanted to win the race, we’d recruit Heidi.

Heidi Hoffman Perry wasn’t a sports writer, she was a page designer. She managed the vis-ed (visual-edit) department. And if you thought she was very good at designing pages, which she was, you should have seen her ski.

There was no flailing involved, no edge of disaster careening — just knees moving like pistons in beautiful synchronization with ski edges carving down the fall line. She was so good she didn’t even look fast. Then you’d see the results and she’d beaten everyone on the page.

Now, with the announcement this month from the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame of its 2023 inductees, we know who to really thank.

The late Butch Hoffman is one of the three inductees: Heidi’s dad.

He will take his place in the winter sports pantheon alongside Sun Valley ski competitor and coach Ruff Patterson and the pride of Park City, Olympic gold medalist Ted Ligety. The ceremonies will take place Aug. 24 at Deer Valley.

“We’re so thrilled about this,” says Heidi, speaking for her mother, Linda, sister Kathy and brother Scott. Their husband and dad died in 2021, as the nomination Heidi put together was being considered by the Hall of Fame committee. “It would have been nice for him to see this (in person),” she says, “but then again, he was never about awards or articles or being in the paper.”

What he was about was skiing. From the time his father, Clyde, a World War II paratrooper, taught him as a little boy how to stand on skis right up to the age of 80, Butch Hoffman was an irresistible, unstoppable force. He was a racer himself in the beginning — first at Ogden High School, where he was teammates with Spence Eccles, followed by many years competing in the Intermountain Division, including winning a national giant slalom championship at the age of 27 in the 1965 U.S. National Veterans Alpine Championships.

After that he devoted his time to teaching, encouraging, cajoling and inspiring others to be great.

“He wanted everyone to love it as much as he did,” says Heidi, “and to excel at it.”

His own children were hardly exceptions. When the Hoffman kids were born, little did they realize they’d all won full ride scholarships to Butch’s Ski Academy. Two-a-day workouts were not unusual growing up, especially after Nordic Valley erected lights for night skiing. The word “soft” was not in the Hoffman vocabulary. Dryland training in the summer was sufficient to make one look forward to the winter.

Scott, Heidi and Kathy were all named all-American skiers in college — Scott at the University of Utah, Heidi and Kathy at BYU. Scott went on to race for the U.S. Ski Team, finishing second in the slalom to Phil Mahre in the 1980 national championships.

As a junior racer, at 16 Heidi won a national championship in the slalom at the U.S. Junior Olympics held on the Olympic runs at Squaw Valley.

She remembers that race because it was the first time she competed without her dad being there.

But he was with her just the same. “I felt him on my shoulder, talking to me, encouraging me,” she recalls. As soon as she crossed the finish line and discovered she’d overcome a two-second disadvantage to win, she ran to the ski patrol shack. “Can I borrow your phone?” she asked. She had to call her dad collect to tell him the news.

“I remember he said, ‘Are you sure?’” she says, still smiling about it. “That is my favorite, favorite memory, just on the phone, sharing that with my dad. All I ever wanted to do was please him.”

That theme ran through the thousands of young skiers he looked out for and coached for over half a century.

“With Butch, it was always about the kids. Everything he did, all his efforts and deeds, the countless commitments and sacrifices he made, were always about the young people he coached,” says one of his proteges, Kirk Langford. “He had so much charisma. You strove to do your best for him and get a pat on the back from him.”

Butch Hoffman spent a lifetime tirelessly supporting the sport he loved. He was a founder of the Utah Ski Racers Foundation, an organization dedicated to “Keep Utah skiers in Utah.” He helped form the Ogden Valley Winter Sports Foundation and the affiliated Ogden Valley Ski Team, organizations still going strong 40 years later. He coached Intermountain Division teams to considerable success.

Away from coaching, he was instrumental in bringing top national events to Utah. Once the events arrived, he wore all the hats: technical delegate, referee, chief of course, chief of race, competition official, timing and calculations official, homologating (certifying) official. At the 2002 Olympics, he volunteered to ski out on race day and help pack the downhill course at Snowbasin.

He finds himself in familiar company with his fellow Hall of Fame inductees. The Snowbasin Hoffmans and the Sun Valley Pattersons became lifelong friends back when everyone was racing across the Intermountain West (in Butch’s case quite literally; he got so many speeding tickets he turned the wheel over to Heidi when she’d barely gotten her license).

As for Ted Ligety, Butch was an ardent fan from the time the young Park City skier burst on the international scene on his way to becoming the best giant slalom skier in the world.

“He admired the way Ted Ligety skied, and even more the way he competed,” says Heidi. “He watched all his races, and then watched them again. I think the fact he’s going in with Ted Ligety, he’s beaming from ear to ear.”

All the Hoffman family will be at Deer Valley for the ceremony, telling stories, comparing knee surgeries, quoting what Langford calls “Butchisms” (“Straight and late,” “dive at the pole,” “Go fast!”) and generally burnishing the legacy of one of the best friends skiing ever had.

“Skiing is still my passion,” says Heidi, “it was his passion and it’s mine. Because of him.”