Smiles come easily to Jim Griffith. Yet, he is a man who fully understands the dangers inherent in what he likes to do. Summed up by a fellow skydiver, Jim believes “the closer you come to death, the more you appreciate life.”

Visual evidence of why BASE jumping is so dangerous is obvious as Jim gets ready to deploy his chute.

To better understand how this assistant professor of psychology reached his philosophy, it helps to go back to his college years where he wrestled on an athletic scholarship at Waynesburg College. A shoulder injury and subsequent surgeries ended his wrestling career and sent him searching.

“The absence of wrestling left a void in my life. So I started mountain biking and snowboarding, and then moved up to kayaking.” As practiced by Jim and his friends, these activities only grew in boldness and danger until BASE jumping, skydiving, and running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain headed his list.

Jim’s first run with the bulls was somewhat less than successful. He ended in a 50-man pileup. “So I was kicked, tramped on, and run over a fair number of times while the bulls ran by me…the people tend to be much more dangerous than the bulls.”

Battered and bruised, he assessed the situation and knew he had to give it another try. In typical Griffith fashion, he set out to learn more. To most people a successful run is taking off down the street in front of the bulls then ducking into a doorway as the bulls sweep by. But the “real” running of the bulls is “truly insane if one does it the right way,” Jim said.

The full-grown bulls come thundering down the street, chests heaving, nostrils flaring as the runner gets ready, matching their pace, and slips between two animals. When the moment is right, he lightly touches each shoulder – and that, smiles Jim, “is the real running with the bulls.”

The normally smiling Jim Griffith is serious about risk professionally as well as recreationally.

His introduction to skydiving was spur of the moment. “I was watching a Mountain Dew commercial and thought ‘Hey, I haven’t done that’ and off we went.” What intrigued Jim and kept him coming back was he had no recollection of the early part of the jump.

After jumping a few more times, he realized part of the attraction is the unique culture that springs up around skydivers. “It’s the only place where you can find a housewife, a businessman, a homeless guy, a college student, and a Vietnam vet all celebrating together. It is one of the most accepting cultures I have seen.” Jim believes this is due in part to the shared life and death situations they have in common.

Skydiving more than 2,200 times in the last nine years, Jim said, “Every time you jump, you save your own life. If you’re negligent during other activities, there’s no doubt you can get hurt, but when you jump out of a plane, thousands of feet in the air, you don’t get hurt, you die.”

Skydiving is not his most dangerous recreation. BASE jumping, the act of parachuting from fixed objects, provides a far greater risk.

BASE stands for the four types of objects high enough to be considered for jumping: buildings, antennas, spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs and other natural formations). The danger is multiplied by the short distance to the ground, the time in the air, the amount of room to maneuver in due to proximity of other objects, and having only one parachute.

Many BASE jumpers gain notoriety by jumping illegally. Jim has jumped legally from the Perrine Bridge in Idaho and the New River Gorge in West Virginia. New River is an annual October event where about 400 jumpers hone their skill.

All BASE jumpers begin as skydivers but they comprise a very small component of the skydiving community. In doing both activities Jim has noticed an interesting phenomenon: experienced BASE jumpers hesitate to jump when not at their best, rarely jumping when hurt or in pain. This is the opposite of most sports where more experienced participants play through the pain. And it suggests experienced jumpers have a greater awareness of the risk factors involved and a higher level of self-preservation.

Despite the overwhelming danger, most risk takers do not have a death wish. “In fact, I think it is quite the opposite,” Jim noted. “The people I know are very aware of what exactly they are risking and feel they have minimized that risk.”

Professionally, Jim has studied risk as related to skydiving and BASE jumping. The Journal of Sport Behavior (vol. 29, issue 3) just published his “Response to the Sports Inventory for Pain among BASE Jumpers.” And in 2004 the Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments published his article on human error as the cause of skydiving fatalities.

Currently he is researching the relation of risk and non-risk recreational activities in people age 60 and over. But his quest is to find some way of predicting a person’s abilities as a skydiver. As an instructor he observes firsthand the psychological motivations and effects of newcomers and veterans alike. “It makes the first jump with a new jumper extremely stressful,” he understates. “You could have two people, both do great in the classroom and both seem ready to jump. The first person might do everything right, stay calm, and have the perfect jump. And the other could just freak out.” Unfortunately, to date, there is no emerging pattern.

With his skydiving instructor duties generating so much stress, Jim is thankful for the relatively stress-free environment he enjoys in the psychology department. “I couldn’t ask for better colleagues,” he said smiling. “And I think the students are “the brightest and most involved” in the State System.

Jim returned to Pennsylvania after a sojourn in Texas that included earning his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Texas Christian University. “Although the people of Texas were very nice, I missed the geography of the East. West Texas was just flat, brown, and windy.”

The Somerset County native doesn’t have many hobbies outside the extreme. He enjoys brewing his own beer and each summer he and his father share a salsa garden.

Richard Pileggi ’07, an intern with the magazine, contributed to this article.