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Haha this place is such a salt mine.
It's really easy to be soooo above repping Monster when you're a nobody who Monster will never know exists let alone approach for sponsorship.
I know you would totally turn down a huge payday and medical benefits in the name of "keeping it real".
We're all so very proud of you and your super, extra smart hypothetical decision you'll never confront.
Skateboarding can be such a lobster bucket. "wait what? you can actually make enough money to live a decent life and maybe provide for your family? Fuck you poser!"
I think it's kinda awesome that Braydon was like "aight I'll rep your logo but I'm wearing a Dylan shirt, if you wanna put your logo on the sleeve of my Bob Dylan shirt we can do that I guess".
If a pro skater can live a much better quality of life by have a little logo on their shirt sleeve that's sick. Sometimes though it's a drag when a pro starts wearing the energy drink gear and looking like a Nascar driver that it can fuck up the aesthetic ability to appreciate the skating.
Anyways it would be rad if Hoban could get a little Monster logo on one of Leo Romero's hand sharpied tee shirts.
I can say with confidence that Jamie Foy wearing a Red Bull hat never took away from my appreciation for a badass, 10ft frontside crook shuv out. Now if skaters started wearing full blown uniforms for contests, yeah, it'd be a bummer for me and I might even stop watching contests.
But I maintain I wouldn't be mad at the skaters themselves for jumping on an opportunity and I wouldn't be salty that skateboarding hit that level.
Let's face facts, it probably won't be our personal social club forever. At least not consistently.
I've watched skateboarding wax and wane in popularity over and over these past few decades, and to my eyes it's never really been a private social club to begin with.
It's a lot like music, but it's not music. A specific music scene has a lot of people with a relatively unified idea of the sound they want, but skateboarding doesn't. We all enjoy skateboarding differently. A skateboard is more like a guitar than a music genre, it's an instrument you can use in wildly different and unrelated ways.
I can go to a park and see people in punk rock battle vests doing wallrides and bonelesses on shaped boards, people in sports jerseys and gold chains bumping Lil Durk on a bluetooth speaker skating the funbox, kids with broccoli-head haircuts, supreme hoodies and nike dunks trying dolphin flips on the flat, people dressed more like they're on their way to the golf course than the skatepark hitting up the manny pad, and just normal looking family men who you'd never even know were skaters doing...well...whatever they feel like.
We're not a monolith. Skateboarding isn't as different from basketball, football, etc as some people want to think.
EDIT - To add a funny, semi-ironic anecdote, I'd be willing to bet at least a handful of the people on here mad about corporate sponsors and hate every company except There and Polar (or whatever the newest hipster companies are now) started skating because of THPS.
Guess what? We used to make fun of you! We used to fume about all these stupid fucking kids who don't know shit about "real" skating and are now tourists in our beloved scene because of some cheesedick mass-market video game.
Topic: Bad Sponsor Choices - Hall of Fame (Read 18482 times)