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Something had to happen. You don't just go from pro shoe/clothing line on a huge company and a pro board on a well respected board co. to nothing. Look how many guys hang around in the industry for five plus years, "Not producing." Love his skating, but would like to hear some other prospective. At least Vans has his back.
His Vans footage was pretty old actually. He wasn't skating at all, or doing anything. You can only milk that for so long. He had been talked to several times from both Vans and Toy according to a friend of mine who worked at Tum Yeto. Your name and past legacy is only worth so much, you gotta keep pushing and getting your shit done, in most cases. J Lay unfortunately couldn't PJ-it. Seems like he fell into a rut of not skating and just let it run for too long.
The whole being a husband and father excuse thing is bullshit really. Being a professional skateboarder, you forget about "work" pretty quickly. You have so much free time. If I had a kid right now, I'd be expected to show up to work every day, and work 9 or so hours. If a pro baseball player had a kid, he'd still have to show up to games, or show up to practice. You can't take a year off skateboarding because you had a kid.
Respect to J Lay. One of my favorite skaters of all time. His part in Good&Evil changed the way I looked at skating as an impressionable youngn.
This.
This is so spot on, pro skateboarders are such babies when it comes to this kind of thing.
It is indeed a fair point. As a pro I wonder how much you really *need* to skate each day? Like I leave my house at 7:45 and get home at around 6:30 in the evening on a normal work day. Is there really any pro skaters out there that are putting in 8 hour days? Realistically you could skate like 4 hours a day and still be home in time for lunch if you wanted to. Maybe chuck in a few 6 hour days when you've got to travel to spots etc. Business trips (i.e. skate tours) could still be feasible too imho
To add, there is a little bit of wiggle room as far as specific job duties are concerned, that's what so dangerous for the undisciplined pro. You are a contractor. You are your own boss, and you have clients that use you to help sell their product. That's really what your work is. Your work is whatever is outlined by your client as what they are paying you to do. In the pro skaters case, some of these things include:
- being good at skateboarding in general
- turning in photos for ads
- filming for promotional videos
- going on team trips
- skating (well) at demos and in general getting young kids excited about you and the brand
- attending random events (element make it count, no board left behind, for examples)
- updating social media in some cases. Posting team clips they ask you to post, sometimes posting product.
- having a sticker on your board for photo incentives.
- representing the brand in a positive light.
Plus more or less depending on the sponsor. You may even be required to wear certain things.
These are things that you don't punch in an 8 hour day to do. They take self discipline and motivation. When you don't have a boss it can be easy to slack off. But when you start missing those ads, not skating the demo, or just missing your job duties then shit comes down to.. I'm paying you each month to do all these things and I've gotten nothing. It's like if you contracted someone out to build your patio and they just stopped building it, you'd fire them.
In some ways, a professional skateboarder is a lazy job. But when you have 4,5 or 6 sponsors and they all require all these things, it would be easy to just say "fuck it" for awhile if there was no immediate consequence.