Skate Team Classifieds- Part 1

To put it simply, I think oversimplification is probably the easiest way to change the
way you think about something. Physicists use this tactic of simplification in virtually everything they do to make calculations more feasible, which is why many of you may have been wondering why your teacher in high school physics was always talking about spherical objects moving in a vacuum, strings always being thin with no mass, all surfaces being smooth (unless you talking about friction specifically) and bars always being perfectly rigid.

So lately, I've been applying this to other things that are hard to understand. Brand images, for example, are often nebulous and difficult to exactly describe. I mean, how do you describe Real's image?

 Minimalist, I guess? What about Plan B?

... Minimalist, I guess?

The point is, it's hard to pinpoint all of the distinctions that make a skateboarding brand special. Somehow, though, there usually seems to be a very set idea about what skaters fit well on what teams, despite the overall complexity involved in trying to explain what a brand is all about. Therefore, in the spirit of simplification, I decided that it would be both fun and beneficial to play out the following scenario:

If every professional and amateur skateboarder suddenly went on strike, and newspapers were still a thing, what would each company post as a classified ad in order to recruit skaters?

These are my best efforts. Feel free to add your own in the comments:

Weekly "Why Haven't I Seen This?" -19

With the plethora of skate footage that's out there, it can be easy to overlook things. And yet, so often we stumble upon a video that we've never heard of and find ourselves asking why we hadn't seen it before. Each week, I plan to post another lesser-known video that deserves more recognition, for your viewing pleasure.


Since I missed last week, I decided to go ahead and do a 2-for-1 deal on videos this week. Both of these videos come from the new video Ruff Ryderz 3 (Have you picked up on my increasing laziness yet?). I wasn't able to figure out too much about these guys, but I'm pretty sure they're a crew from Michigan and they seem to be shredding pretty consistently. For the first video, we've got Alex Knox. It would be weird for me to talk about this video part without mentioning the fact that Alex made the odd decision to do two of every trick in this part. Two kickflip backside boardslides on handrails, two bigspin backside boardslides on handrails, at least two hardflips down gaps, and two hardflip backside lipslides down handrails. I suppose he was hoping that his tricks would breed with each other to make more tricks, thereby giving him a bigger bag of tricks. Tricks don't work that way, Alex. Regardless, he did all of those tricks with great style and the fact that he did all of them multiple times shows me that he's really quite good at them- it's not as if he spent 10 hours trying each one. In any case, I don't mean to sound like I'm trash talking this part, I genuinely did enjoy it and I hope you guys do too.


This next one is David Engerer from the same video, and the best way I know how to entice you to watch it is to simply ask: Did you ever wonder what would happen if Dylan Reider and Austyn Gillette had a baby? Because now you don't have to! Just watch this video (which, even though I mock it, I also liked a lot)

Weekly "Why Haven't I Seen This?" - 18

With the plethora of skate footage that's out there, it can be easy to overlook things. And yet, so often we stumble upon a video that we've never heard of and find ourselves asking why we hadn't seen it before. Each week, I plan to post another lesser-known video that deserves more recognition, for your viewing pleasure.

This week we have a really impressive part from J. Miguel in the independent Brazilian video, "Original Expresso". In the process of watching a string of conceptually next level tricks, like his forward flip to revert that kicks things off, or the fakie tre flip noseslide that he does, one can't help but notice how bizarrely effortless every trick that he does is. His feet are confident and don't even hint at unintentional twitches or waivers, and he has excellent board control. You've done it again, Brazil.

The Real Reason Culture is so Important to Skateboarding

A lot of skateboarders are very protective of their culture. The funny thing is, skateboarding has become so big and so varied that it's impossible to actually define what 'skateboarding culture' is. If I were to paraphrase what Rodney Mullen has said about skateboarding in various interviews, for example, it would probably result in a sentence like, "Skateboarding is an outlet to create something new and contribute to something larger than yourself." By contrast, one of my first memories of someone explaining what skateboarding was to them was in this clip featured in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (Hey, remember when you weren't a weirdo for liking those games?) in which Chad Muska basically says that skateboarding is interesting because it doesn't have any rules and the only goal is to have fun.


Then others, like Mike Vallely, won't stop talking about how skateboarding is all about creativity and individuality, while others simply stick with saying, "Skateboarding's rad."

So if skateboarding means a bunch of different things to a bunch of different people, and nobody can agree  on what exactly it means to be a true 'skateboarder', then is it even a cohesive culture? And if it's not, then why are so many people so protective and defensive about their particular viewpoint on skateboarding?

Weekly "Why Haven't I Seen This?" - 17

With the plethora of skate footage that's out there, it can be easy to overlook things. And yet, so often we stumble upon a video that we've never heard of and find ourselves asking why we hadn't seen it before. Each week, I plan to post another lesser-known video that deserves more recognition, for your viewing pleasure.

This one's pretty simple: Woody Woelfel is gnarly. I don't know if he even has any sponsors, much less which ones they are. If you put yourself in the same category as JAWS by hucking yourself down a set that he ollied (at 3:45, although JAWS stepped it up and ollied off the wall at the top as well) then you, sir, have earned my respect.

Skate Team Fantasy Draft 2014

EDIT: Jeeeeez the original post had a lot of mistakes in it. I probably wrote it at 4 in the morning and then just haphazardly scheduled the post without thinking about it. I went through and fixed most of them, I think. My apologies to those who read the last one before I fixed it.

Alright, so I somehow wound up playing Fantasy Football this year, although I don't spend NEARLY enough time watching football to competently do so (I'm usually spending an inane amount of time watching skate videos instead). Now that the football season is over, though (and fantasy football is long gone) the combination of all these new companies forming and my brain being in fantasy mode got me to thinking about what my fantasy skate team would be. I know this seems like a really jock-dickish thing to do, but this isn't the Street League Fantasy draft-I just think there's a certain class of skateboarders who are really rad, but are really being under-used by their sponsors.

The concept is that I'm starting a new board company and signing whatever guys I want to skate for me. We can assume that I have the money to make it work and the company's image, product quality and board graphics are just so sweet that pretty much anyone would want to skate for me. Think of it like being the Independent Trucks of skateboard decks. Of course, certain picks would be silly to do, so I am laying down four ground rules:

1) The pick has to be a person in their current state. It would be kind of dumb if this fantasy spanned across all space-time, so if I were to pick Eric Koston, it has to be Eric Koston now and not 'Chomp On This' Koston. Similarly, if I wanted Keenan Milton, I would have to find some way to put his corpse on the team.

2) I'm not allowed to choose a person who owns a stake in their current company beyond just being a professional for it. I know Mike Carroll has good style, but he's not leaving Girl any time soon.

3) No downgrading. It would be pretty silly to say, "Yea, I really like Chad Tim Tim, but only enough to make him an amateur." Stranger things have happened, but it's pretty unlikely that someone will downgrade themselves from Pro to Am or Am to Flow just to ride for your company, no matter how awesome. The skater either has to stay where they are or be upgraded.

4) I'm assuming that I'm picking a team for a new company, so it can't be huge. The team will have 4 Pros, 4 Ams, and 4 Flow guys.

So here it goes:

Weekly "Why Haven't I Seen This?" - 16

Aaand we're back! After a long hiatus that I had to take, I finally found some time to get back to writing this blog. I of course missed a lot in the last few months- SOTY, some great video parts, whatevs. The point is, while taking some time away from writing, I had some time to rethink what this blog should be all about. At times it seems almost as though I set out to simply report on what was going on in the world of skateboarding. The problem with that is that this is the internet, and so all of you have the same access to skateboarding that I do. With that in mind, I'm changing the format a little bit back to it's original intent, which is to express opinions and predictions about skateboarding in an amusing way.

So you, the reader, will be happy to know that this still includes showing you all video parts that most people missed or even glossed over. This week, we have a guy that simply goes by "Sneep" from the video Bombaklats, a European video that you should absolutely watch in its entirety. For now though, prepare to be mesmerized by one of the filmer's parts. The slappy noseslide variations that he does defy all logic.


Bombaklats also features parts by Tim Zom, Nassim Guammaz, and Remco Stolze, all of whom rip. There's really not a dull part in the whole video though, so please, just go watch it