Not a lot to say here, other than that this was one of those photos where you’re flipping through the magazine (TSM, Jaws cover) and you stop and say “damn.”* Marc Johnson has nearly a Mumford eagle-is-landing thing going on with his arms here and I like his hat. White tee, blue jeans and a kickflip backside tail, these components could have equated to a photo 20 years ago.
*Another one from the same issue is Jon Dickson’s nollie backside flip
Looking at the Skateboard Mag the other day, this little Donovan Piscopo interview, and got to fantasizing about tricks. As you do. Folks like Jake Johnson and Wes Kremer recently have been out there taking the wallride to strange new places — what if you were to take Donovan’s grind here, lose the bank underlying the ledge, and a dude just did a wallride into this trick*? Sort of like a pool coping scratcher maybe, but you’d think a body could put their mind to it and lock both 58′s atop the corner for a little bit anyway. Thinking it over a while I started to wonder if I’d actually seen somebody do a trick like this at some point, in a photo or video. Unfortunately due to severely limited capacity and general neglect, my brain is never going to have the cataloging capabilities of a Police Informer or a Chrome Ball or a Vert-Is-Dead. Instead I cast myself upon the mercy of yall. Can anybody recall somebody wallriding up into a ‘vert’ scratcher grind like this, without a bank to start from?
*with or without the grab
As the inventor of Craig Kilborn and the Espy award, ESPN has made its bones in the world of mainstream sport, often heard bragging to other media outlets in the locker room about how much the network and its affiliated websites and publishing divisions can bench-press. In recent days ESPN.com, a web portal operated by ESPN, has flexed its own muscles in the arena of digital journalism, publishing an online exclusive breaking story that Nick Dompierre is in the hospital recovering from a coma induced by a drug overdose sources say.
Now, any discussion of this type of topic ought to be prefaced with a note to the effect that we at Boil the Ocean Rims & Chrome Pipes plc hope the best for Nick Dompierre and his family, and that we sat up a bit straighter on the sofa when we seen the 360 flip at the end of his section in “Roll Forever.” As to whether or not the world needs to know of such things as celebrity/public figure drug overdoses is a matter for TMZ’s legal squadron, and the ethics of running an unbylined article based on anonymous sources is a matter we shall assume was debated hotly by those furry mascots that run the ESPN network, or so I understand from seeing some of their television ads. One can only guess that with the glare of the Olympics generally blotting out all other sporting at the moment, ESPN’s attention will be trained on non-skating athletes that make choices to imbibe intoxicants in and around competitive events, such as that skier bro who bummed out portions of the country a few years ago due to his lackadaisical partying ways.
On our messageboards and emails though the Dompierre item on ESPN has ruffled some feathers, though you may wonder why — we slurp up legends of pro-level debauchery like so many melting chipwiches when they’re related via Big Brother scans, Epicly Later’d confessionals or the odd magazine interview, relishing these partly because dudes like to think this is the type of heady, irresponsible freedom that your major-league baseball bat swinger or Olympic shot-putter isn’t able to discuss as openly, much less talk about the other pros there, what the cops said when they showed up and how much it cost to bail Antwuan Dixon out the next day. So even in the big four magazines nowadays it’s no big whoop to discuss weed smoking, beer guzzling, ecstasy and assorted psychedelics, and though powders and various injectables remain dicey, for those dudes that come out the other side the cautionary tales and recovery scars have become generally accepted gravitas.
In some ways it’s a little rich to get all high and mighty about this ESPN.com blurb, what when the online bulletin board system derives much of its perpetual motion from a volatile fuel composed partly of pro shenanigans, which alongside rumors of tricks recorded provides a grittier base to the constant froth over who is or ain’t keeping it real. In other ways though it smarts to see mainstream media outlets providing the type of juicy celeb-culture natterings that we’re used to looking down our collective noses toward when they are circulated on Slap. This is a raw and reddened zone, at a time when multinationals are outmaneuvering home-grown concerns to capture shrinking market share in the shoe biz, for instance, with Es and DVS on the ropes as Nike adds roster members as rapidly as Godzilla hangs the heads of lesser monsters as trophies on the wall of the undersea cave where he lies in repose until another atom bomb awakens him.
This article is also interesting in that Nick Dompierre’s “big” sponsor, a soda company, is presented as one authority on how he’s doing next to his mom, raising the prospect that big-money sponsors may have to answer in a public forum for transgressions and pitfalls confronted by the dudes they put on. If ESPN.com is enriched with flash-ad revenue from hits generated by this story, you could imagine a scenario where more such items follow suit, perhaps gathering momentum as the energy drink and footwear and sunglass purveyors nibble at their collective fingernails in the event a marketable talent is discovered in a compromising position (perhaps via grainy video shot in the privacy of Godzilla’s undersea lair), and resulting in some such talented bro ultimately getting the boot due to public pressure. If bros sign up for the soda company paycheque, are they signing up for a higher level of personal scrutiny? Is the real problem here somebody else airing our dirty laundry for us? Would the internet be catching feelings if TWS reported this on their website, or if it appeared in a hearsay-friendlier venue such as the beloved “Trash” column in Thrasher? Is Godzilla really “that bad of a dude?”
The mildest U.S. winter in decades has helped reduce reliance on private indoor facilities rented for the purposes to safeguarding 360 flips from rust and cobwebs in recent months, and probably also helped to nurture the “Occupy” movement such that occupiers across the country were able to blow out half a candle in recent days, situated atop a free-range cake and served family-style at a sanctioned local park/streetcorner. But deeper strife may yet lay ahead.
Zered Bassett, raised in the shadow of a failed Dukakis presidential bid and a onetime beneficiary of Mitt Romney’s health programme, suggests in the Appleyard TSM that skateboarding may be watching the rise of its own so-called 1%, and an inevitable widening of the income and performance gap between two increasingly disparate camps:
The Skateboard Mag: To go back to Street League, why don’t you compete in that contest?
Zered Bassett: Why are we talking about Street League? I’m not a contest skater, man.
TSM: I think you’re capable of doing really well in contests.
ZB: I don’t have a skatepark that I can skate and learn tricks at to take to a contest and feel confident enough to skate the contest well. If I had a skatepark that I could skate with my homies every day and learn shit, not in the public eye, I’d feel way more confident.
It’s a well-worn chestnut that for every Mark Appleyard, switch backside flipping in finely tuned leathers and pushing a Jaguar, there are a half-dozen Rob Welshes manning liquor-store tills and Wade Speyers filling large dump trucks full of debris and then dumping them at a dirty dump. Even Heath Kirchart, receiver of several signature shoe payment deals, was reduced to delivering pizzas and servicing snack machines upon his self-directed retirement. Things are tough all over out there and keep in mind this isn’t some fly-by-night youtube hot-shoe we’re discussing here, this is Zered Bassett, who’s either awash in Red Bull energy beverage endorsement fees or a consistently poor chooser of hatwear.
Yet Zered Bassett goes wanting when it comes to private parkdom, ensuring he will never develop the machinelike consistency that makes Nyjah Huston, Chaz Ortiz and Ryan Sheckler such riveting competitors to watch amass those hard-to-follow Street League points, and bring home the big moneybags (or at least get the chance to fall victim to high-profile jewelry heists). While Paul Rodriguez parlays his Fuel TV heroics into lucrative sponsorship arrangements with Target Corp., that in turn provides branded obstacles with which to expand his personal training ground, Zered Bassett moves to Brooklyn and farms his beard.
While Nyjah Huston blows tens of thousands of American dollars on hot cars, Ricky Oyola spends his winter driving a truck in Philadelphia. And as Rob Dyrdek lays peacefully asleep on his yacht off the shores of Key West, the bullet-riddled body of Danny Renaud, stone dead, is borne ashore by friends and well-wishers in the still of night after a lifetime of hard choices and short chances finally caught up with him on that one last run back from Cuba.
Serial New Jerseyan and IRS scofflaw Fred Gall long ago cemented his status as one of the most compelling magazine featurees with his legendary interview in Strength. There, he discussed courting police brutality at Ozzfest, fighting in Ohio, going to jail abroad and Lenny Kirk. Fred Gall has been an odds-on favorite to pile out at any given moment for more than a decade now and he continues to surprise us, so maybe it shouldn’t have caught me so off guard when flipping through the new Skateboard Mag there is an account of Fred Gall applying his classic dunderhead approach to what sounds like it would be one of the more jaw-dropping tricks all year and maybe of all time.
When we got to the “spot” the first evening, it became apparent that traffic was moving way too fast for him to … Oh my god! He just jumped on that bus. Well, with the first attempt out of the way and the bus going 30 or so, Fred, who was spun around in the gutter laughing and slightly spooked, looked up and said, “I think that’s too fast, ha ha!” He is a maniac. Everyone was thinking, “We’re going to watch Fred die here and now. Wonderful.” He dusted himself off, grabbed his board, and set up for the next one. You see you have to wait for the right bus with the smooth back end. Maybe one out of every five was the right kind and maybe one out of every twelve was the right speed (anywhere from ten to twenty miles an hour). Needless to say, for the next two nights we spent a lot of time at this spot.
The full-bleed photo on the opposite side is pretty ridiculous, not only for what Fred Gall’s aiming to do, but also that there is a dude A. about two decades deep into his career B. willing to work several nights straight trying this particular move C. at risk of significant bodily harm D. and arrest E. in a foreign country and F. laugh about it. After mulling it over a while I was reminded of the opening seconds of this part where Fred Gall had a brief cameo and pondered the tribute angle, but I’m guessing this was all weighted more toward for the fuck of it. Or fully paying off the federales.
When I got my first apartment after moving out of my parents’ I went full-on junior high with wall-to-wall magazine page paneling that pulled heavily from the old TWS photo issues with lots of full-bleeds, “Sightings” and now-vintage DCSHOECOUSA ads. Jim Greco’s switch kickflip down the old Med Choice gap in the Nirvana shirt was featured, and I think a Neal Mims roof gap 360 flip. This is one of several reasons I could not run a scans blog, alongside a fuzzboxed memory bank when it comes to who had ads in what issue and generally being shitty at scanning I think. But on top of the Cory Kennedy sequence from the Transworld below there were at least four pages I’d tear out of the new Skateboard Mag if I was doing up a new wall, starting with this Ryan Lay 5-0 — the perilously close-to-the-wall switch b/s lipslide a few pages later is another one* and so is Anthony Schultz’s bump-to-fence blaster on page 112. Anybody care to guess what the fourth one is?
*They’d have to be on different sides of the room though because I’m not about to put two photos of the same dude right next to one another, bad form etc
Haters in time
An uproar burst forth upon the seas of gentlemanly internet discourse this week when a SkateboardMag blog revealed a photo sequence of Anthony Pappalardo, known professional, plying his trade with a couple of ollies. “Foul” cried thousands, claiming that not only could they ollie themselves, but that neither ollie was particularly big or dangerous. Both of these statements are true, but uncovering the deeper, more long-winded truth requires a trip through time.
It was once the year 2000. Flying cars were commonplace, personal credit was freely available and Anthony Pappalardo was executing nollie heelflip frontside noseslides while making “urban” pants choices. But today the clock has rolled back, erasing years of economic growth and trick progression. Ollies are back. Cruising on a 70s-inspired skateboard is the choice of dreaded granolas and professional shoe endorsers alike and the most popular show on television wallows in the hair-grease and flop-sweat of philandering 1960s ad executives.
Christopher Colombus, in an apocryphal story that dates back even further, once strutted into a state dinner when a hater (of some description) stopped him, perchance to hate. The gist of it was that CC was not that hot of an explorer, and that the West Indies would’ve been inevitably found by anybody who pointed their boat far west enough, et cetera. Colombus famously ice-grilled the guy and then told them that he bet anybody he could make an egg stand on its end. After others tried and failed, Colombus squished in one end of the egg and stood it up, declaring “now that you’ve seen me do it, it would be easy for anyone.”
So too with Pappalardo? Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that Brooklyn woodshop. Someone on the Slap board said something to the effect that after watching the bonus footage on the “Prevent This Tragedy” DVD they were pissed at the blatant lack of effort APO seems to be putting forth, and after about 10 minutes of fast-forwarding, I saw the point (don’t ask me the time stamp, but he makes a couple half-hearted ollies onto a slanted plank on a hill, and bails an ollie).
You could make the argument though that there’s plenty of pro-types who’ve made their bones and sailed into their sunset years on a raft of coping slashes, frontside rocks and more recently switch 360 flips. Pappalardo may be pushing it as he retains a youthful look despite his hospital-patient pallor, and a pro model shoe may be kind of gratuitous, but I think he could still turn it on if he wanted to (citing the nollie 360 flip recently spun on Epicly Laterd). Does the fact that it’s a conscious decision make it more gratuitous? Or simply boost the level of his hustle?
I guess what I took away most from Tyler Bledsoe’s interview feature in the recent Skate Board Mag, where he is crowned with that less-established but perhaps harder-working magazine award of “YBAM,” is that he likes the color teal. More than that, he employs it tastefully. It is most pronounced in the above pic, detailing a bossy backside tailslide where he had to launch past the handrail, and could alternately be a case of Bledsoe looking to expand his internet fan base, where teal was recently voted the most favorite shade of blue, or perhaps a show of Pacific Northwestern solidarity toward the Seattle Mariners.
Funny story: years back I dialogued with a bro on the DNA payroll as to the then-recent additions of Tyler Bledsoe and Grant Taylor, both of whom at the time were stubby gap-flippers of a (seemingly) run-of-the-mill persuasion. Bummed on ad space that could’ve instead shed light on the doings of AVE, for instance, I expressed reservations but “trust in Hill and Carter” was the top-line response, and although it took a few years, damn if he wasn’t right in the end. The question remains though whether there was some flickering spark or if budding greatness can be rubbed-off upon, kind of a nature/nurture type of debate for the Slap boards.
For a second I thought about titling this “Hey Mr Tambornino Man” and now I’m sorta thinking about it again
With getting a signature model shoe now the dividing line between the men and the boys occupying the pro ranks*, and sponsored amateur status splattered across various distributor/factory/direct programs, there are more rungs than ever for today’s hungry young am to traverse on his way toward that gold-plated Honda Civic in the sky. Theoretically I guess it’s possible to still get over on a blazing Tampa run or sheer hype but it seems more and more like dudes need a stack of Youtube-accessible DIY video parts to even get in the door, and you better have another stack to feed the internet footage monster so you can squeak past and claim the princess/treasure/golden Honda. Crazy tricks help but the Tweet-addled public’s attention span has shriveled to miliseconds and they’re gonna forget that triple-set switch frontside heelflip in a matter of weeks, if not days.**
And so, from the land of ice and snow comes CJ Tambornino, ravenous and bearing some brain-scraping new footage at The Skateboard Mag website. Despite being dubbed King of Chicago last weekend Tambornino is of the same Minnesota scene that birthed Davis Torgerson’s nollie frontside hurricane grind and this clip sees the dude looking to up some antes as far as concocting several what-the-fuck combos that I personally have never seen before: switch backside tailslide inward heelflip bigspin out, nollie 360 inward heelflip, switch hardflip frontside crooked grind. And then, switch 360 flipping a triple-set. Sleep, crazy footage monster…
What Tambornino does, or is able to do, with his newfound “Best Week Evar” status remains to be seen but his general topic is trending to the max just now all across this internet, prompting widespread disbelief, miscellaneous style critiques and this amusing anecdote from Slap board user “liver knees”:
I saw this guy skating in Barca back in March, I’d never heard of him then but have since seen a couple of clips on Platinum Seagulls. At MACBA, he was doing this line at the top ledge near enough every go: nollie heel/nollie flip noseslide (whichevery he felt like I guess), nollie 360 inward heel, switch flip tailslide/switch tail flip out (again, whichever he felt like) then switch tre off the ledge. I was dumbfounded, a guy I’d never heard of doing a trick I’d never seen in my life, every try, in the middle of a line. That’s why you shouldn’t go skate in Barca unless you’re comfortable being sucky at skateboarding.
We here at BTO kicked up our feet some time ago, which makes it far easier to sit back and let something like a switch backside tailslide inward heelflip bigspin wash over you. It also makes weekends less stressful, makes peanut butter sandwiches taste better and also helps to avoid internet footage monsters.
*unless we’re counting TV show money I guess
**PS, what happened to that little kid who had that amazing kickflip to b/s wallride over the gap, to a dumpster/electrical box? Anybody?
“Yeah, whatever. I masturbate.”
Mystique is an amorphous, squishy thing, much like a color-changing cuttlefish or the nature of life itself. Yet if you can only attain it, the door stands open to early retirement, coasting on lifestyle ads and occasional blog photo appearances, minimal footage obligations if any and the giddy thrill of knowing that somewhere out there, an internet forum post is being crafted: “when is ___ gonna put out another part” translates to higher board sales than “does anybody know what’s up with ___ lately?” with both ranking above “anybody remember ___?” or the dreaded “___ denied parole again LOL”
Of course it is easier to establish said mystique if you’re some typa well-known 90s-bred style wizard (Iannucci, Stranger), a flagrant breaker of state or federal laws (Roy, Case) or generalized misfit weirdo (Martin, Alv). Far tougher if you’re some middling front-blunt-to-5-0er in black shoes w/white soles without bulimia or a nose tattoo.
Worse yet, you are a young flow-bro on the come-up in an age of instant judgment and sentencing via YouTube: message boards pore over the minutiae of park footage trick selection, SPoT profiles are tracked for sponsor switches and the Berrics transforms today’s pre-fab park hero into tomorrow’s factory-direct wunderkind. So basically by the time kids “go am”* they’re generally vets by the internet exposure benchmark.
Emerica’s Marquis Preston is one of these increasingly rare exceptions**, with a relatively small number of photos prior to this month’s Paul Rodriguez TSM appearance and paltry seconds’ worth of footage scattered across contest, demo and “Stay Gold” clips – the intro to his magazine interview directs people to this six-second clip as a starting point and it’s a slog from there, but indications are that some of the anticipation may be justified. Foot swag through the roof, as the fella says, there’s a few more tricks here on the off chance you haven’t seen all this shit already.
He gives a fairly good interview too:
So everybody had this funny idea to get porno mags from the liquor store. I got myself a mag and seen this hot-ass woman in it. She was seriously stuck in my head for hours. Like, I couldn’t even skate around without thinking about doing her or just being with her. So I decided to go rub one off in the van while everybody was skating. And it did the trick.
Jeff said you soiled one of Braydon’s mags?
Braydon had his own mag and I had mine. He seen my mag and he was like “oh, who got this one?” I was like “Oh shit.” I didn’t say it out loud but I already knew it was mine. I knew I fucking jacked off in it. I busted on her. I just wanted to wait for him to see for himself. So he was just looking through it and was like “What the fuck? No!” I was like “Hell yeah.”
*an actual expression I guess
**Ishod Wair may be nominated as another
