I hate Skaters. Skateboarders are the dumb jocks of the 21st century. I was a skateboarder from roughly 1990-1999, an era which included some of the best and worst years of my life(1990, 1993, 1997 being the good ones.) My first real board was a Blind, Jason Lee model…the one with the grinch on it. Ah, far away times….

Skateboarding just isn’t cool anymore. The clothing styles are horrible and have not evolved from the late 90’s. It’s not a fashion snob thing, but rather an observation that the imagination is gone from the skateboard world(and those involved in it.) It’s become just a bunch of jock assholes and doofuses like the kind from Jackass…who still think the same 1995 “end of skateboard video” antics are where it’s at. They still have the same stupid sense of humor. Paging through a skate mag now is almost no different than any typical sports magazine. I couldn’t help notice how lame and dumb a lot of the pro skaters look now, even ones that at one time I looked up to and thought were cool.

Ed Templeton conveys similar sentiments about the current skateboard scene in this interview with Vice from a while back:

Yeah. (Silence) There’s a lot of jocks now. Typical athletic adolescent boys, you know the kind? And homophobes. But the core is still there. People who are really different: Artistic, creative, I could name a lot of professional skaters who have an amazing amount of talent. There’s just more jocks around the core compared to the early days. I’m lucky to have been skateboarding in the early nineties.

I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve had this feeling since around the year 2001, which is when I discussed it with a good friend who remarked how the younger skaters would essentially continue on being considered the cool people.

“Well when we were in high school the skaters were the cool kids.”

“Yeah but that sort of thing changes. I don’t think skateboarders are fashionable now. Since it’s become so mainstream there’s probably some other unidentified group that we’re not even aware of yet that will turn out to be the cool kids”

“Who do you think it will be?”

“I guess time will tell.”

There are those who would say that all that matters are the tricks these dudes are performing, but in reality skateboarding was never exclusively about that. As an old acquaintance Tim Kulas used to say, “You don’t know what skateboarding is about until you go somewhere and skate by yourself for 4 hours.”

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Filed under: Uncategorized - @ October 14, 2010 5:54 am

Tags: blind, ed templeton, i hate skaters, jason lee, skateboarders suck, skateboarding, skater, skaters