A History of Skateboarding

Skateboarding magazines, at least the blatantly commercial ones, have always seemed to me eerily comparable to credit card scams. The people running those mags basically seek to give the skateboarders they cover credit so as to create interest in the magazine. That's how they make their profits. Sometimes the skaters are permanently indebted to those rags. The misguided impression taken from all this is that the industry and the magazines are actually the driving forces behind skating rather than the skaters themselves. With some notable exceptions, skateboard mags really only exist to make money off skating. Put another way, they are parasitic leeches. So, their so called "histories" of skating are, to me at least, awfully suspect.

In fact, this whole "skateboarding history" side show is a pretty recent spin-off industry. The worst of this, in my opinion, surfaced around the whole "Dogtown Chronicles" heresy a few years back that fucked up Juice Magazine. The articles' hell spawn, the rash of video "skate documentaries," soon followed. They were all pathetically formulaic and seemed to moralize skateboarding is some disturbing ways. According to Stacey Peralta, apparently everyone who ever rode a skateboard in Venice is owed a damned government pension. That is, so long as they didn't do drugs. I mean, do these people really take themselves that seriously?

Let me be the first to tell you, I'm a big Tony Alva fan. I grew up in New Mexico, for god's sake. If you don't know, there's some old school ass connected shit there. But I don't believe for a minute that Tony Alva did the first frontside air in a pool, nor do I give a god damn mother fuck who did. That type of "origin myth" pseudo-history can have only one agenda, which is obviously to profit off something that I hold dear. I don't like people who try to do that, and that's why I don't like many magazine or industry types. I mean, what other motivation could someone possibly have to make that type of claim, either about one's own self or someone else?

The official story of skating cultivated by the industry claims to be the history when it is really a history. Anyone who's been around skating knows damn well that there were people who lived pretty much everywhere (insert your town here) who were doing the same assed shit as the "magazine" guys but who weren't looking to make a buck off it and thus didn't make the official story. The magazine version was a gimmick used to sell product and now it's pushing the retro and collectors markets. Where did it all start? Who did what first? All of this inane slop can tell us what? Who's owed what, I'd guess. But skateboarding doesn't owe anybody shit.

See that pool there? There's an authentic history of skateboarding written on its walls too, and it doesn't cost you shit to add right to it. All those wheel marks are something like the unofficial ink of the unofficial histories of skateboarding that happen for all the right reasons all over the world every damn day. Those wheel marks tell a story about anonymity, about dedication and desire that doesn't need a soundtrack or editing to get the point across. If you actually skate, you're just as much a part of skating's history as anyone showing up in the puppet pages of whatever industry rag. Yeah, I could insert names here: Bam Bam Branch, GI Joe, and a thousand other people who contributed to whatever skating's supposed to "be" these days, as if it were that simple. But those dudes wouldn't care.

Not to mention that I'm not naive enough to think I can write some bullshit and change skateboarding history. Are you concerned about where skating's headed? Not quite sure things are meshing with skating's "history?" Simple: Go find something, go build something, and go skate something. No matter how much respect you claim to have for skateboarding's alleged past, skating's about what you're doing right now. If you claim to be a skateboarder, there's only one historical question of any real importance anyway. That is, "did you skate today?" If so, then, and only then, you can say you're part of the real story. Just don't be so obnoxious as to claim that you were the first, or the most innovative, or the only one doing it. Or worse, that you were the only one doing it right. On the other hand, if you do, don't expect me to buy it.