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Phelps usually annoyed the shit out of me when I watched or heard him speak. There I said it. It's not like I hated him or anything. I know he was great for skating overall too. It's just the tough guy/cool guy bravado signaling shit was lame as fuck. RIP though. Honestly
I've always been pretty vocal about my disdain for Phelps and his shtick.
The shit he said about Van Wastell was really the moment that my lack of tolerance for his bullshit went into overdrive.
Oh yeah RIP and all that.
what did Phelps say about Van Wastell?
This tension was on display during our first day together, when we went to DLX, a skate shop on Market Street. Phelps bought a new board, and as he was setting it up, a young man named Alex walked in, his head tilted back in awe at the boards on the wall. He seemed to be cripplingly stoned. Out of nowhere, he asked Phelps if he knew Van Wastell.
“He’s hella dead,” said Phelps. This is true. Wastell was a rising star on Krooked skateboards, a company started by Mark Gonzales, or “the Gonz,” perhaps the most influential skateboarder of all time. Wastell went pro in 2008 and was found dead in an alleyway behind a Berlin hotel soon after. It was a curious enough story that The New York Times picked it up, but the circumstances of his death — whether it was a suicide or drunken accident or something else — were kept under wraps.
Alex pulled down his shirt collar, revealing a tattoo of a crudely drawn monster on a skateboard, the Krooked mascot. Wastell had inked it, he said. (Actually, he said: “He hella tattooed my chest, though.”)
Skateboarding probably has more in common with pornography: talented people are paid to be filmed doing something they’re good at, or at least insane enough to try.
“That’s tight,” Phelps said, somewhat dismissively. He smelled a mark — a kooky stoned kid from out of town — and it seemed he couldn’t resist. He launched into his version of Wastell’s death. Wastell was on tour with his shoe sponsor, and, Phelps explained, he was an opiate addict. His teammates decided to confiscate his stash, hoping it would help him recover. But that was dumb, Phelps said. Usually, addicts bring just enough dope on the road to get them through. When his buddies took his stash, Wastell couldn’t deal, so he jumped. His teammates were down at the hotel bar talking about how they were going to fix him up when they heard the sirens.
Alex, I later learned, was close with Wastell, who taught him how to kickflip. But if he was upset or even surprised by Phelps’s unsentimental account of his hero’s final minutes, he didn’t show it. All he offered was this: “He was the gnarliest skater, though.”
“He was pretty good,” Phelps said, peering over his glasses, preparing to adjust, in the chiropractic sense of the word, Alex’s understanding of the skateboarding canon. “He’s no Gonz. He’s no Eric Koston. He’s hella dead.
Topic: 2022 unpopular opinion thread (Read 186304 times)