On a June afternoon three years ago at Mylan Park, the hills were alive … with the sound of toothpicks.
Toothpicks in the making, anyway.
It was a regional qualifying timbersports competition presented by STIHL, the company that makes chain saws.
A host of lumberjacks – and lumberjills – from across the country had taken over the confines of the Hazel and J.W. Ruby Community Center for the celebration in sawdust.
Timbersports are a sanctioned, timed, competitive staging of what loggers still do on the job with stands of trees.
Such as generations of the Lentz family did in their native Oregon, as they felled that state’s towering pines for their take home pay.
Another Lentz from that lineage, this one a resident of a town called Diana in Webster County, has been on the world stage of timbersports for the past decade-plus.
Today, in Little Rock, Ark., he wants to continue growing his reputation – by chopping down the competition.
“I have to represent,” Jason Lentz said with a chuckle, as he spoke on the phone from Little Rock. “I have to defend my title.”
The 37-year-old is a STIHL national champion and a STIHL world champion, too.
Cutting a swath across the world
Lentz, in fact, narrowly missed taking home a second top trophy in international competition last month in Vienna, Austria, losing to another lumberjack from New Zealand in the last rounds.
STIHL is live-streaming all the action at Simmons Bank Arena starting at noon today on its Facebook page and YouTube channel.
Lentz isn’t the only Mountaineer to join the field of competitors from New York State to California.
Morgantown’s Josh Wilson is also firing up the chainsaw today. So are Matt Cogar, of Grafton, and Arden Cogar Jr., of Charleston.
And yes, they’re related. Distant cousins.
Arden Cogar, an attorney who graduated law school at WVU, is a bit of a fan favorite in Morgantown, owing to an outsized personality that matches his weightlifter’s bulk.
Going with the grain
Lentz is long-accustomed to being a fan favorite in the arena. It’s in the genes. And the saw.
His father, Mel Lentz, is a six-time world champion in timbersports. The elder Lentz was born and raised in Oregon, where the family worked in the logging industry.
Jason’s great-grandfather was winning ribbons and trophies at lumberjack competitions in the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s.
Timbersports took Mel Lentz from Oregon to Australia and Appalachia.
The guy who fells trees fell in love with a woman from Webster County he met during a competition in West Virginia.
They married and settled down in her home county, as Mel continued to compete nationally and internationally. Jason was born in Elkins in 1985.
Swinging an axe and wielding a saw became second nature for their son, and he won the first tournament he ever competed in, at the age of 13.
After playing basketball on scholarship at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, Lentz, the younger, came back home to throw his 6-foot-5 frame into the family business, as it were.
It didn’t take long for Mel Lentz’s kid to make a sawtooth impression in timbersports.
He began winning on the circuit. He lined up corporate sponsors and homegrown ones, also, including Custard Stand Chili, the hot dog sauce from the hills of West Virginia.
His sport isn’t strange to these climes. Before coal, logging was the dominant industry.
A pursuit with teeth
Like his dad before him, Jason Lentz has traveled the world, and once spent two years in China conducting clinics in timbersports at a theme park there.
“The travel has been really enjoyable and interesting,” he said.
“It’s fun to compete in the sport – and it is a sport. We’re athletes out here.”
Athletes who chop through calories like they do tree trunks. Competitors can burn to 500 calories an hour.
There are the underhand and standing block chops, which simulates the felling of trees such as how the Lentz family did it to put food on the table back in Oregon all those years ago.
And the single buck event, with the giant, crosscut saw that most people picture when they think of loggers.
Don’t forget “hot saw,” which features a hot-rodded, souped-up STIHL chainsaw too fast for firewood.
The only thing Lentz can’t chop down he said, is the sense of community that has grown around the sport like ivy on a wall.
Deep roots, he said.
“You see families in this sport,” he said.
“You have a lot of camaraderie. I’ve made a lot of great friends, and they’re all from everywhere.”
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