U.S. skier Bode Miller thinks factual errors shouldn't get in the way of a good story -- his

By KEN STEPHENS
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"Bode: Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun" by Bode Miller with Jack McEnany (Villard, $24.95)
Bode Miller is the United States' best Alpine skier in 20 years, but he and co-author Jack McEnany stumble out of the start house in "Bode: Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun."
There's a quote from Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, stating "the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle."
It's the Olympic oath, the authors say. Only it's not. Mr. de Coubertin did indeed say it, but the Olympic oath, which de Coubertin wrote, speaks about "abiding by the rules," the "spirit of sportsmanship" and the "honor of our teams."
The mistake is understandable, given that Miller admits two paragraphs later, "I can't say I thought much about the oath. ... I never memorized it, of course." But the spirit is there.
Because the story's good
Miller also tells us that "reading about myself seems like a waste of time. I'm not even going to read this book."
So why should we, especially since he has acknowledged in interviews that the book contains quotes that aren't exactly quotes and a number of small factual errors?
Miller says that stuff shouldn't get in the way of a good story. The book, he says, achieves a higher truth, an accurate portrait of what he's all about.
It is an entertaining story of a guy who likes to ski fast and party hard. A guy who doesn't like rules. A guy who has always been at war -- with teachers, coaches, the media and the people who run FIS, the international ski federation.
His way
He's a guy from "humble hippie beginnings." He grew up in a house without modern conveniences in the mountains near Franconia, N.H.
Many kids are a little embarrassed by their parents. Miller is proud of his.
"Any success I enjoy is largely the result of the boneheaded perseverance I inherited from my grandfather, the skiing genes I got from my grandmother, my mother's fearlessness and my father's ninja-like calm on the field of play," he writes. "Other than that, I did a lot of skiing. I mean a lot. And that was because of my mom's approach to home schooling. Some people call it no-schooling."
Eventually, Miller had to go to a normal public school (but he brags that he cut class as much as he could to go skiing or whatever else struck his fancy) before he settled, though not without some difficulty, in a ski academy.
He never got along with his coaches and is defiantly proud of the fact that he's achieved everything he has, including a couple of silver medals at the 2002 Olympics and the World Cup overall championship in 2005, by doing it his way, which is high risk but also fast. "It's better to dump and hike than finish 10th on purpose for lack of courage of imagination," he says.
Freedom fighter or just brat?
Habitually "at odds with conformity," Miller likes to take a stand on principle. He declined an invitation to visit the White House because of his opposition to the war in Iraq. He also doesn't like Olympic drug testing: "We can have a free society or we can have a drug-free society, but we can't have both."
If you're a fellow rebel, you'll love Miller for fighting battles when others of his stature in sports would display the controversy-free vanilla persona their commercial sponsors prefer. But one man's freedom fighter is another man's contra, and you may just think he's a spoiled brat whose parents should have given him more discipline.
XStephens writes for The Dallas Morning News