HARDflip.com

The problem with writing about skateboarding is, in order to do it well, one has to follow skateboarding. By skateboarding I mean the industry. From age 11 to 23 I followed skateboarding as much as the next guy. Why wouldn’t I? It consumed all aspects of my life. As happens all too often with skaters when they hit their mid twenties, they realize they are not going pro, they have no back up plan, no money, and injuries start lasting for weeks instead of days. Hopefully, this may sound familiar.

From about the age of 23 on, I gave up on following the industry. I rarely looked at magazines. I paid less attention to videos, and could not tell you who was pro for which team. At age 13 I did all these things and with good accuracy. It was possible to do in the 90’s because the industry just wasn’t that big. Videos were still on VHS tapes and magazines were the only media you could follow to know the current events of who was riding for what companies (who out there remembers Sal Barbier on 411?). This is what determined, to a large degree, what products you bought. If they had a good team or your favorite skater rode for that company, you were more likely to buy said product. Such is the logic of sponsorship.

Today, at age 30, it’s not even a reality to follow skateboarding like I did all those years ago. Could anyone tell me how many pros there are? I would estimate at least a thousand. Any data I look for to confirm this would not pass the most basic standards of a 100 level history or sociology course, so I’m left to guess. When you are left to guess, you will usually be wrong. If you have any data that could ballpark the number of pros, please send it over.

While you’re at it, if you find any info on how many board companies there are, send that over as well. Again, I would estimate at least a thousand board companies are out there. Which would mean there is one pro for every board company. This type of fuzzy math shows how, even if one wanted to argue that there are too many pros and too many board companies that hurt the industry more than it helps it, there is no way to say either. This is dangerous water for the author to tread, after all, I ride for one of these companies, and still have the dream to some day go pro for them.

Generally speaking, this problem has been solved by classifying someone as a local pro, or as a local board company, which again, there are probably a thousand of these pros and board companies. But we are mere months from the start of the second decade of the 21st century. The standards that helped define a pro in the last decade of the 20th century no longer apply. Videos, the hallmark to determine a skaters status, used to be purchased, today they are given away free online. In order to get sponsored, one used to make sponsor-me tapes on bad equipment, send off tapes to companies and never hear from the company. Today everyone who skates makes videos with good equipment with not as much focus on sponsorship, just having fun. When they are finished they can put it online and have more people view the video in a week than they could have by producing copies and selling them at the local over the course of a year. It doesn’t matter if the footage is average or some of the best you’ve seen, the price is hard to beat.

I had a friend send me a video of William Spencer, some dude I never heard of, yet more than a million people have watched his video on youtube. I tried to find out if he had a board sponsor, all I could find was a Denver Post article saying he rode for a local shop. The article also mentions he had a six page write up in Thrasher, if only I followed the industry, I would have known this. After watching this video, it’s hard to argue this guy is not a rad skater, even deserving of a pro title. I thought of Simon Woodstock when I watched this and remembered in the industry, there is only room for one kook at a time, Richie Jackson currently holds that position.

I guess the point is we are in the midst of a vacuum within the industry. One of the best videos of the past 5 years resulted in losing their star rider, acquired just a short time before. This could not have happened 15 years ago. We all know tons of skaters who are on par with 50% of “pros” who get tons of media coverage. Minneapolis alone has 20 to 40 skaters who could be called pro by someone, maybe 2 or 4 will one day be “pro”. Now multiply that by every city that is of similar size, thousands of good skaters, doing their own thing, making their own boards, expanding the industry to the point of there not even being a defined industry.

Good, bad, or ugly, we are living through a huge shift in the skateboarding world. That is always something to be interested in. People talk about the crash of the mid 70’s, the late 80’s, the death of vert, the birth of the X Games, the 900, what this will be reffered to is hard to say, I don’t think it will be the death of the video, I hope it’s the death of the industry. That will make writing about it a whole lot easier.