https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/a-crime-and-a-pastime-ohaver"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."
"Despite the mounting power of corporate brands, most of the individuals who control the skate industry—even those in charge of the brands’ programs—are skaters themselves. This is helpful insofar as they’re more likely to have skating’s best interests at heart. But this autonomy has also incubated an unfortunate industry tendency to think of everyone—riders, team managers, owners, and the skate publications who cover them—as likeminded bros instead of arbiters of a multibillion dollar business.
Nowhere is this more evident than with the skateboarding press. Never exactly robust, these outlets have been sideswiped (like everyone else) by the turn to digital media; only a handful of magazines remain. The websites that survive acquit themselves honorably of the tasks of hosting videos and interviewing pros, but they rarely become more than trade publications, beholden to the unquestioned values and unmitigated financial success of their industry.
This insularity can have dark consequences. In 2017, Cory Kennedy, a pro for Nike and Girl Skateboards, was arrested on suspicion of vehicular homicide and driving under the influence in a fatal crash that killed prominent Thrasher videographer and personality Preston “P-Stone” Maigetter. In the wake of the accident, there was an immediate outpouring of grief and remembrance for P-Stone posted on sites like Thrasher and Transworld Skateboarding, and by pro skaters on Instagram, but scant mention that Cory Kennedy had driven the car that killed him. An analogous situation in another sport is unimaginable. If, say, Kevin Love killed Bill Simmons in a possible drunk driving accident, the story would dominate sports coverage for days. And if outlets like ESPN and Sports Illustrated refused to report it, they would rightly be seen as negligent.
This bro-ish groupthink has just as easily declined into reactionary childishness. When Dogtown skate pioneer Jay Adams died in 2014, Vice’s Jonathan Smith wrote a thoughtful piece titled “Maybe We Shouldn’t Be So Quick to Idolize a Gay-Bashing Skateboarder.” Smith (who, full disclosure, is my editor at Vice), acknowledged Adams’s influence in skateboarding, but criticized both skate publications and mainstream outlets like BuzzFeed and the New York Times for failing to mention in their obituaries his role in the 1982 murder of a gay black man. (Adams was charged with murder but convicted of felony assault, for which he served six months in prison.) Commenters pilloried Smith for speaking ill of the dead. As one put it, “Knowing that Jay Adams just died, it’s kind of whack for a writer to just write an article to discredit the guy and just to do it to be a douche.” These horrors are compounded by others—rumors of sexual assault, stories of violence, skaters who have turned alt-right—that circulate widely among skateboarders but are never written about, except on the Slap Magazine message board, a Reddit-esque forum that fields puerile jokes and suspiciously accurate gossip."
This is who we are.
Anyone blaming anyone or anything other than themselves is a hypocrite.
This exists because of us.
And the funniest thing is that it isn't even that bad in terms of advertising.
Aren't most of skateboarding big ads? Especially Thrasher Magazine? This is nothing more than a product of the industry. It's ok to get pissed off but this stuff was already condemned by many before it even premiered in 1980s, mainly because of its subject matter. But it's not worse than some of advertising these days. The vitriol spewed toward this move is as predictable as it is unwarranted.
But hey, to each his own.
Topic: The scummiest of all sell outs (Read 24224 times)