Sick shot!
I completely agree that he didn't invent it himself, what I'm saying is that he had the avenue (olympics, national tv) to bring it to people who had never seen or heard of spinning and grabbing skis. Like seriously how many people bought, or even saw, 'State of Mind' besides Johnny D, his friends and the atheletes in the movie, probably not very many, no one knew about it. But everyone saw Jonny Mo do the 360 mute in Nagano and argue if you want, but it was absolutely one of the very first catalysts that propelled freestyle skiing into something bigger and exposed it to an larger audience.
Also, I'm not talking about freestyle from the 70's, I'm talking about 'newschool freestyle' with twin tip skis, etc. I agree it is untrue to say Jonny invented the sport, but he is the guy who brought it to the masses, and made people realize what was happening on skis, a new type of skiing, he took it from obscurity and made people aware of it. Believe me, I know all about the NCAF and all that, but a huge reason of why anyone found out about what they were doing was because of Jonny's 360 mute at the olympics, it caused people (like me) to look into it further and find out what was going on.
Hopefully the Olympics in Sochi can expose freestyle (pipe, slopestyle) to a whole new generation of kids, just like they did for me in '98, but I guess most kids watch x-games these days anyway.