The paranoid style of American skateboarding
People came to California for gold or agriculture or loansharking or, later, to get famous, and by late 1962 it was the most populous state in the country. And it was there, around that time, on the blacktop schoolyards of coastal suburbs, that a sport and pastime uniquely suited to the American ethos blossomed: skateboarding. The frontier sought by so many was gone, it’s true, but the frontierist’s mindset remained. What business of yours is it if my friends and I want to grind on the painted curb behind the grocery store? Leave us alone. The curb became, for the skater, a fancifully deregulated zone imbued with limitless possibilities—and therefore a kind of freedom, so long as he could be left alone in his pursuits.
Which is to say that skaters have always taken a perverse pride in being outsiders and misfits, bonding over stories of jocks who bullied them and sedans that drove by yelling “KICKFLIP!” It’s a sui generis sport typically without spectators, time limits, written rules, or even competitors—an activity so smitten with its own exceptionalism that, even today, at the height of its popularity, many skateboarders deny the “sport” label entirely. As professional skater Braydon Szafranski recently told Rolling Stone—in reference to its introduction into the 2020 Olympic Games—“Skateboarding is a crime, not a sport.” (...)
However absurd it may sound, skateboarding’s first years were clearly bound up with America’s burgeoning paranoiac libertarianism. It may have been that the blithe surfiness of early skateboarding masked its suspicion of outsiders—of anyone, that is, who doesn’t skate—as well as its predilection for clique formation against a sometimes (though not always) invisible regulatory bogeyman. Take, for example, John Severson’s editorial from the first issue of The Quarterly Skateboarder, which jumbles cheeriness with frontier psychology and an oddly preemptive suspicion of “opponents”:
Perhaps skating’s libertarian streak means that it can be curiously and sadly hostile to social life. Even a cursory glance at the skate video canon reveals encounters between skaters and security guards, cops, and civilians who want them off their property. These clips can bear a close similarity to YouTube videos of sovereign citizens telling police they don’t recognize their authority. As filmer and crew look on, a skater will alternately beg and scream at the person to let them just try the trick one more time. Often the angry authority figure will grab the skater’s board, at which point an all-out scramble occurs. Arguing with cops is one thing, but it’s a sad affair watching teenage skateboarders brawl with aging apartment superintendents.
The Lesson of the Master
Worryingly, these young skaters have a new champion in Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic whose 2018 book 12 Rules for Life became a surprise best seller on the back of his popular YouTube channel. Plenty has been written about his noxious blend of misogyny, neo-fascism, and self-help, but I was struck to learn that Peterson’s eleventh commandment is “Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding.” Peterson is a pseudo-intellectual reactionary, but he basically gets skateboarding right. (He even wields the term “boardslide” correctly, which is impressive in a climate where most mainstream sources tend to consider Tony Hawk’s 900 as the alpha and omega of skateboarding achievement.) The chapter begins with Peterson talking about how, while he was working at the University of Toronto, he would sometimes watch young skateboarders hurl themselves down a set of stairs:
Peterson is pandering to a general audience; he’s especially popular among millennials, a demographic young enough to have experienced the suffocating effects of helicopter parenting and largely too poor now to have children themselves—thus his readers have not yet had to resist the (presumably overwhelming) pull to become helicopter parents. But even though he doesn’t care about skateboarding beyond using it to publicly denounce coddled children, Peterson has nonetheless stumbled over skateboarding’s bulging libertarian roots. (...)
A Faustian Economy
The caliber of tricks that can be done in quick succession and on demand pales in comparison to what can be achieved over hours and dozens of attempts in an empty parking lot, and so contests are looked at askance in the world of skateboarding—they’re seen as minor divertissements of corporatism that foster boring skating. And while events like Street League and the X Games are popular with younger fans, there has never been an appetite for a widely recognized central governing body in the manner of the NFL or MLB. When skateboarding makes its Olympic debut, it will be represented by the International Roller Sports Federation—the group responsible for rollerblading, skateboarding’s traditional punching bag—with the more credible International Skateboarding Federation playing merely an advisory role.
With paying contests relegated to minor status, and without a functioning umbrella organization, skateboarding is best understood as a full-time freelance economy funded through endorsement deals. Pro skaters are contract employees, paid to be jumping-and-grinding advertisements for half a dozen or so sponsors—makers of boards, shoes, wheels, trucks, clothing, and energy drinks. (In recent years, too, maintaining a social media presence has become another of companies’ demands.) After spending countless man-hours indentured to such companies, the gamest pros find themselves able to branch out and pursue the skater’s dream: they start their own skate brands and sign younger skaters, at which point the cycle spins forward.
Yet as skateboarding has grown in popularity over the last two decades, large corporations have more and more sought their cut. In the same way that libertarians decry the government while thirsting for its handouts, the skate industry has begun to depend on the bankrolls of the very (enormous) “carpetbaggers” it once disparaged: Vans, Adidas, and, especially, Nike. Though Vans has long been associated with skating, Nike and Adidas were mocked when they first tried to enter the market in the nineties. But when streetwear boomed in the 2000s, alongside a decline in board sales, the big two wormed their way into the market, offering top-tier pros contracts they couldn’t refuse. Now that these cherished pros ride for Nike, even riders on other teams hesitate to criticize the brand.
Meanwhile, this capricious, industry-wide shift presages darker days of the too-big-to-fail shade. Skateboarding is now ascendant, but what if these companies find that post-Olympics profits aren’t what they expected? A decision by Nike or Adidas to leave the market could be devastating; not only could the top skaters find themselves without their corporate bargains, but the cash-and-capital drought could blight out board and clothing companies, many of which are owned by the very skaters sponsored by Nike and Adidas.
The house-of-cards structure of the industry, glued together as it is by the mercurial fealty of corporate sponsorship, is masked by skateboarding’s libertarian delusion that it functions as a meritocracy. There are only a handful of famous staircases, after all, down which skateboarders can leap into prominence, provided they land a sufficiently difficult trick. But the meritocracy falls apart as soon as you realize that there is no agreed upon rubric for merit, and no worn path for the would-be sponsored skater. What’s more, there are multiple levels of sponsored skateboarders, which crisscross in both hierarchical and nonhierarchical ways: flow riders, who get products for free; amateurs, who ride for teams in exchange for product and (sometimes) stipends or travel costs; and pros, who can make serious cash through shoe deals, adjacent endorsements, and contests. To further blur the distinction, both amateurs and pros appear in ads and brand videos. And, anyway, there is no set formula for becoming a professional skater; board companies turn amateurs into professionals by way of a black box determination that factors a mix of popularity, marketability, age, and time spent as an amateur. As it turns out, amateurs are often as talented (and usually way more productive) than professionals. If they don’t get injured, if they can slog it out for a few years, amateurs might be lucky enough to earn a pro slot. It’s a system almost comparable to academia, with its adjunct and tenured professors, if, well, more disorganized and libertarian.
by Hanson O’Haver , The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Saiman Chow
People came to California for gold or agriculture or loansharking or, later, to get famous, and by late 1962 it was the most populous state in the country. And it was there, around that time, on the blacktop schoolyards of coastal suburbs, that a sport and pastime uniquely suited to the American ethos blossomed: skateboarding. The frontier sought by so many was gone, it’s true, but the frontierist’s mindset remained. What business of yours is it if my friends and I want to grind on the painted curb behind the grocery store? Leave us alone. The curb became, for the skater, a fancifully deregulated zone imbued with limitless possibilities—and therefore a kind of freedom, so long as he could be left alone in his pursuits.
Which is to say that skaters have always taken a perverse pride in being outsiders and misfits, bonding over stories of jocks who bullied them and sedans that drove by yelling “KICKFLIP!” It’s a sui generis sport typically without spectators, time limits, written rules, or even competitors—an activity so smitten with its own exceptionalism that, even today, at the height of its popularity, many skateboarders deny the “sport” label entirely. As professional skater Braydon Szafranski recently told Rolling Stone—in reference to its introduction into the 2020 Olympic Games—“Skateboarding is a crime, not a sport.” (...)However absurd it may sound, skateboarding’s first years were clearly bound up with America’s burgeoning paranoiac libertarianism. It may have been that the blithe surfiness of early skateboarding masked its suspicion of outsiders—of anyone, that is, who doesn’t skate—as well as its predilection for clique formation against a sometimes (though not always) invisible regulatory bogeyman. Take, for example, John Severson’s editorial from the first issue of The Quarterly Skateboarder, which jumbles cheeriness with frontier psychology and an oddly preemptive suspicion of “opponents”:
Today’s skateboarders are founders in this sport—they’re pioneers—they are the first. There is no history in Skateboarding—its being made now—by you. The sport is being molded and we believe that doing the right thing now will lead to a bright future for the sport. Already there are storm clouds on the horizon with opponents of the sport talking about ban and restriction.Whatever his good intentions (which he had in spades), Severson’s “storm cloud” prophecy against regulation haunts a sport that today proves unable to provide healthcare for its practitioners, even as it courts global reach, massive corporate sponsorship, and elite brand status. And despite Severson’s excitable projection for the sport’s “bright future,” it should be admitted that skating’s do-it-alone pioneerism has given way to a solipsistic, even paranoid culture that is dispiriting in its susceptibility to conspiratorial thinking—just consider revered skate brand Alien Workshop’s deck collaboration with Infowars.
Perhaps skating’s libertarian streak means that it can be curiously and sadly hostile to social life. Even a cursory glance at the skate video canon reveals encounters between skaters and security guards, cops, and civilians who want them off their property. These clips can bear a close similarity to YouTube videos of sovereign citizens telling police they don’t recognize their authority. As filmer and crew look on, a skater will alternately beg and scream at the person to let them just try the trick one more time. Often the angry authority figure will grab the skater’s board, at which point an all-out scramble occurs. Arguing with cops is one thing, but it’s a sad affair watching teenage skateboarders brawl with aging apartment superintendents.
The Lesson of the Master
Worryingly, these young skaters have a new champion in Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic whose 2018 book 12 Rules for Life became a surprise best seller on the back of his popular YouTube channel. Plenty has been written about his noxious blend of misogyny, neo-fascism, and self-help, but I was struck to learn that Peterson’s eleventh commandment is “Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding.” Peterson is a pseudo-intellectual reactionary, but he basically gets skateboarding right. (He even wields the term “boardslide” correctly, which is impressive in a climate where most mainstream sources tend to consider Tony Hawk’s 900 as the alpha and omega of skateboarding achievement.) The chapter begins with Peterson talking about how, while he was working at the University of Toronto, he would sometimes watch young skateboarders hurl themselves down a set of stairs:
Some might call that stupid. Maybe it was. But it was brave, too. I thought those kids were amazing. I thought they deserved a pat on the back and some honest admiration. Of course it was dangerous. Danger was the point. They wanted to triumph over danger. They would have been safer in protective equipment, but that would have ruined it. They weren’t trying to be safe. They were trying to become competent—and it’s competence that makes people as safe as they can truly be.He goes on to bemoan the installation of skatestoppers, treacherous blocks mounted on rails and ledges for reasons made evident in the name:
The skatestoppers are unattractive. The surround of the nearby sculpture would have to have been badly damaged by diligent boardsliders before it would look as mean as it does now, studded with metal like a pit bull’s collar.And later:
Beneath the production of rules stopping the skateboarders from doing highly skilled, courageous and dangerous things I see the operation of an insidious and profoundly anti-human spirit.You cannot create a perfectly safe world, Peterson argues, and efforts to do so are actively harmful. Kids need to familiarize themselves with risk. “We feel invigorated and excited when we work to optimize our future performance, while playing in the present,” he writes. “Otherwise we lumber around, sloth-like, unconscious, unformed and careless. Overprotected, we will fail when something dangerous, unexpected and full of opportunity suddenly makes its appearance, as it inevitably will.”
Peterson is pandering to a general audience; he’s especially popular among millennials, a demographic young enough to have experienced the suffocating effects of helicopter parenting and largely too poor now to have children themselves—thus his readers have not yet had to resist the (presumably overwhelming) pull to become helicopter parents. But even though he doesn’t care about skateboarding beyond using it to publicly denounce coddled children, Peterson has nonetheless stumbled over skateboarding’s bulging libertarian roots. (...)
A Faustian Economy
The caliber of tricks that can be done in quick succession and on demand pales in comparison to what can be achieved over hours and dozens of attempts in an empty parking lot, and so contests are looked at askance in the world of skateboarding—they’re seen as minor divertissements of corporatism that foster boring skating. And while events like Street League and the X Games are popular with younger fans, there has never been an appetite for a widely recognized central governing body in the manner of the NFL or MLB. When skateboarding makes its Olympic debut, it will be represented by the International Roller Sports Federation—the group responsible for rollerblading, skateboarding’s traditional punching bag—with the more credible International Skateboarding Federation playing merely an advisory role.
With paying contests relegated to minor status, and without a functioning umbrella organization, skateboarding is best understood as a full-time freelance economy funded through endorsement deals. Pro skaters are contract employees, paid to be jumping-and-grinding advertisements for half a dozen or so sponsors—makers of boards, shoes, wheels, trucks, clothing, and energy drinks. (In recent years, too, maintaining a social media presence has become another of companies’ demands.) After spending countless man-hours indentured to such companies, the gamest pros find themselves able to branch out and pursue the skater’s dream: they start their own skate brands and sign younger skaters, at which point the cycle spins forward.
Yet as skateboarding has grown in popularity over the last two decades, large corporations have more and more sought their cut. In the same way that libertarians decry the government while thirsting for its handouts, the skate industry has begun to depend on the bankrolls of the very (enormous) “carpetbaggers” it once disparaged: Vans, Adidas, and, especially, Nike. Though Vans has long been associated with skating, Nike and Adidas were mocked when they first tried to enter the market in the nineties. But when streetwear boomed in the 2000s, alongside a decline in board sales, the big two wormed their way into the market, offering top-tier pros contracts they couldn’t refuse. Now that these cherished pros ride for Nike, even riders on other teams hesitate to criticize the brand.
Meanwhile, this capricious, industry-wide shift presages darker days of the too-big-to-fail shade. Skateboarding is now ascendant, but what if these companies find that post-Olympics profits aren’t what they expected? A decision by Nike or Adidas to leave the market could be devastating; not only could the top skaters find themselves without their corporate bargains, but the cash-and-capital drought could blight out board and clothing companies, many of which are owned by the very skaters sponsored by Nike and Adidas.
The house-of-cards structure of the industry, glued together as it is by the mercurial fealty of corporate sponsorship, is masked by skateboarding’s libertarian delusion that it functions as a meritocracy. There are only a handful of famous staircases, after all, down which skateboarders can leap into prominence, provided they land a sufficiently difficult trick. But the meritocracy falls apart as soon as you realize that there is no agreed upon rubric for merit, and no worn path for the would-be sponsored skater. What’s more, there are multiple levels of sponsored skateboarders, which crisscross in both hierarchical and nonhierarchical ways: flow riders, who get products for free; amateurs, who ride for teams in exchange for product and (sometimes) stipends or travel costs; and pros, who can make serious cash through shoe deals, adjacent endorsements, and contests. To further blur the distinction, both amateurs and pros appear in ads and brand videos. And, anyway, there is no set formula for becoming a professional skater; board companies turn amateurs into professionals by way of a black box determination that factors a mix of popularity, marketability, age, and time spent as an amateur. As it turns out, amateurs are often as talented (and usually way more productive) than professionals. If they don’t get injured, if they can slog it out for a few years, amateurs might be lucky enough to earn a pro slot. It’s a system almost comparable to academia, with its adjunct and tenured professors, if, well, more disorganized and libertarian.
by Hanson O’Haver , The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Saiman Chow
