MENTION E.J. TO OTHER KAYAKERS and you'll get a mix of admiration and grumbling—often out of the same mouth. From one perspective, E.J.'s living a charmed life that most of us only dream about: He travels the world with his family, winning nearly every event he enters. From another, he's a competitive showboat who's constantly hogging the spotlight.

"E.J. is way too intense," says Patrick Camblin, 25, an accomplished pro paddler. "That's not fun, but he pretends it is. Dude, get over it!" But when I ask if E.J.'s passion for the sport seems genuine, Camblin softens. "Fair enough," he replies. "If someone is content with who they are and what they do, good on them. I guess that's happiness."

"There is an arrogant cockiness about him," says Ken Hoeve, field-marketing manager for rival brand Dagger Kayaks. "But it ain't braggin' if it's true. People who diss him are just jealous."

E.J. seems proud of his reputation. "I don't ever sacrifice for anything," he told me one night about a month before the freestyle championships. It was after 10 p.m., and he was sprawled sideways across an armchair in the Jacksons' 3,500-square-foot log home near the Caney Fork River in Rock Island, Tennessee, about 100 miles southeast of Nashville and just a mile from one of the best playboating holes in the Southeast. The house, finished late last year, was a stretch for them financially, but it gave Emily her own room—a luxury after six years of living in the 31-foot RV, which the Jacksons drove to rivers around the country so E.J. could paddle full-time.

"I live the life I want to live," E.J. said, practically hollering into the echoey house. He speaks loudly and reads lips to compensate for the 50 percent hearing loss he's had since childhood. "I do what I want. I run the business the way I want. I go kayaking when I want. People who compromise aren't creative."

Or maybe they're just less driven. E.J. has spent the past decade designing his perfect life, systematically ranking his top priorities and jettisoning anything that threatens his goals. Of course, he's gotten plenty of flak for cramming his wife (number one on his list) and kids (number two) into a motor home in order to devote himself to paddling (supposedly number three). "Any way you look at it, what I do is super-selfish," he admitted. "But I also get to spend tons of time with my family and give them great opportunities."

Kristine, the only Jackson who doesn't kayak, is more realistic about her place in the peculiar calculus of E.J.'s life. "You have to embrace your spouse's passions or you're doomed," she says. "I've always understood that kayaking was first. I've never competed with it—not in 20 years—because I'd lose."

E.J.'s whitewater obsession dates back to 1979, when he was 15 and a state-champion swimmer in New Hampshire. His dad bought him a kayak, and E.J. taught himself to paddle on a river near their home. At the time, whitewater kayaking was a little-known sport that involved slalom racing downriver between gates. "I got really good really fast, and I liked that," he recalls. "Nobody ever showed up who was any better."

In 1984, at 19, E.J. transferred from the University of Maine to the University of Maryland to try out for the U.S. Canoe and Kayak Team, which was centered in Potomac. It took him five years to make the cut, and in the meantime he ran out of cash and dropped out of college. He met Kristine in 1987, when she happened to attend a race in Vermont; the following year they married. By 1990, when Emily was born, E.J. was competing full-time, and they were constantly broke. He pawned his camping gear to buy diapers and trolled pizza parlors near their rented Bethesda home for unclaimed pies. "Kristine hated the whole concept," E.J. says, "but she never stopped me."

The next few years were iffy for E.J. He finished 13th in slalom at the '92 Olympics, in Barcelona, then failed to make the U.S. team the next May, just weeks after being reprimanded by U.S. Canoe and Kayak authorities for panhandling—while wearing his Olympic warm-up uniform—on a busy Washington, D.C., street. At the same time, he was making his name in freestyle, or playboating, which took off in the early nineties. E.J. seemed better suited to this acrobatic style of kayaking, in which paddlers perform tricks on waves and swirling whitewater hydraulics, or holes. A member of the first U.S. freestyle team, he won the 1993 world title in October—a welcome break, especially since it came just weeks after Dane was born three months premature, weighing one pound ten ounces, with 70 percent hearing loss. "He was born into pain," says E.J.

E.J. continued playboating, but he didn't quit slalom racing entirely. There's never been much profit in kayaking—a top paddler today might bring home $2,500 a year in prize money, plus $20,000 or so in sponsorship earnings—but what little there was in the early days could be found in slalom. Unlike freestyle kayaking, slalom also offered the potential for Olympic glory. But things hit bottom in 1996, when E.J. failed to qualify for the Atlanta Games. "I was supposed to win the Olympics; forget not even qualifying," he says. "I would have done things differently had I known I wasn't going to make the team. The lesson was, all those sacrifices weren't worth it."

"It was the worst time for us," Kristine says. "Eric was away so much, and I was doing what I thought you did to run a happy house—doing the laundry, mowing the lawn—but he couldn't have cared less. We had this major conflict going on, and there was no way around it."

In early 1997, Kristine called a family meeting. "We figured out that we should each get to have one really important thing," she says. "Mine was being with the kids 100 percent, and E.J.'s was paddling." It was her idea to give up the house and move full-time into an RV so the family could be together while E.J. competed on the nascent freestyle tour. E.J. had been working for freestyle pioneer Wavesport, designing some of the first modern playboats—shorter than slalom kayaks, with flatter bottoms styled for surfing—and the company agreed to let him work, and paddle, on the road.

"It was all fixed," E.J. says. "Immediately we were the happiest couple. It took the pressure off, and I started to win again. Family life was perfect."