Jamie Foy Is The 90-10 King

These days, tricks need to do more. Executing barrel rolls, 180-degree denominated rotations and combinations thereof long ago ceased to be enough. In our bristly and perspirating time, tricks are called upon to be vehicles — grinding, sliding platforms upon which a body can place other tricks, greater distance, more kinks, personal brands, and, for those heedful of Rob Dyrdek’s sensible advice, luxury automobile lease payments.

Such is the role for certain tricks that years ago became too basic to regularly inspire on their own — the boardslide, the 50-50 grind, the backside noseslide. The recent dad trick renaissance aside, these maneuveurs now occupy a building-block role similar to the wide and flat Lego pieces upon which any number of castles, moon bases or Disney-licensed models can and must be constructed. While the noseslide has segued into a nostalgia piece and the boardslide has undergone some brutal grafting-on of other tricks to ‘stay relevant,’ their forms by and large have remained the same. Less so with the 50-50, which as we shall see has gradually mutated into nearly an entirely different trick altogether, so as to go deeper, farther and sometimes, to a different time/space entirely.

The year was 1992, Instagram had yet to be innovated, and Pat Duffy was the Terminator in plaid flannel; upon initial viewing, his double-kink 50-50 grind down the handrail towards the end initially struck some as unbelievable camera trickery. But upon chin-strokeful lookings back, the trick is fairly textbook in its execution, a hint of toe-side pinch on the mount, leveled out between the trucks for the rest of the descent. Jamie Thomas, top street-style skateboarder and late-1990s inheritor of the House 50-50, made them truly so in ‘Welcome to Hell’ — sailing one down the big Brooklyn Banks rail, the noted tail-tap ride-out on the long flat bar, and leaning slightly backside through the final 20-stair. But similar to the industry empire-building that was to come, Jamie Thomas also hints toward the utilitarian evolution the 50-50 itself would undergo over the next decades, skewing the rail between the toe-side of his front truck and the heel side of his rear truck in the bump-to-bar 50-50 transfer.

Twenty something years later, robots drive our semi trucks, the biggest Nas in the music biz is a country-western singer, and the 50-50 is a different creature. You can still find the ‘classic editions,’ but it’s just as common to find the post-Y2K, hybrid-ready variant: the 90/10, or 10/90, in which the rail is jammed nearly crossways between the front and back trucks for improved positioning for the next kink, or the flip trick out, or the final 20 feet. In our bionic age, the main requirement no longer is just getting to the bottom, the people require more.

It should come as no surprise that the lead 90-10 practitioner is Jamie Foy, the ‘pinch god’ knowed for popping out of frontside crooked grinds higher than lesser ones can ollie. For Jamie Foy, the 90-10 is the preferred landing position for once-unthinkables like kickflipping onto a round and ‘skateproofed’ bar. With the 90-10, he can hop onto a round kinker and very soon pop a shove-it out, relax atop a cutty triple set while eyeing the sidewalk ride-off to come, or navigate the gentleman’s curve of yet another overlong and kinked round rail.

Like all worthwhile paydirt in skateboarding’s great intellectual property pile, the 90-10 rapidly has drawn eager prospectors well on their way toward mining it out. The skate industry’s little bro made good Kader Sylla is a convert, as is Creature’s heathen warlord Kevin Baekkel. Jamie Foy’s SOTY predecessor Kyle Walker uses a long 90-10 to reposition at the tail end of his ‘Spinning Away’ helicopter factory before riding away clean.

Will the 90-10, practical but aesthetically sort of off-putting, clear the way for a renaissance of ‘true’ 50-50s, similar to what Brian Wenning’s mid-block pop-outs did for the backside nosegrind? Is the 90-10 made easier through truck wear on similarly pinch-ready tricks, such as the crooked grinds that dig out what Ted Barrow has termed the ‘crook nook’? Is the increasingly technical nature and rising danger quotient of modern 90-10-related tricks antithetical to the more mellow, soul-carving world envisioned by the probable Ipath-skating hippies whose loose trucks style opened the way for first the pinch and then the 90-10 itself?

SCOTUS, FAWWEnt, And The Supreme Trials of Jason Dill

Jason Dill is in the news again, preparing to open a new, Hollywood-located retail outlet location for physically vending Fucking Awesome and Hockey gear to queue-friendly currencyholders, in an arid desert climate. Elsewhere, the FA squad girds for possible Olympic podium representation via Louie Lopez’s at-last confirmed jump from a Flip team that’s suddenly looking weirdly middle-aged, in skate years. And Jason Dill hisself, celebrated and dissected in a recent glossy magazine profile that presents a relatively domesticated chapter in a tumultuous and well-worn life, provided he’s not sweating beneath the galactically-sized expectations laid upon him by GQ:

He is a titan of influence in skateboarding. Every trick he’s done, every outfit he’s worn, and all of the crazy stories that make up the Jason Dill mythology are crucial entries in the skate canon. That influence began when he was just a kid in Huntington Beach, California, and extends soundly, unwaveringly into 2019. Dill’s style—his tricks, his attitude, his clothes, hell, his visage—is foundational to what skateboarding is today.

Were it an ‘Epicly Later’d’ or ‘Nine Club,’ the tension might be cut here with a wet belch or other affectation emanated bodily by Jason Dill. But this is a world of legal sawmills and customized financial derivatives, where each strategic step is more precarious than the last and could end in a volcano’s fiery maw. The pressure is tangible because it’s real: 3,000 miles to the east, the fate of Jason Dill’s holdings may rest inside the rich mahogany chambers of the highest court in tha land.

You see, it turns out that Fuct, the alternative t-shirt supplier known for spreading silkscreened exhortations such as ‘RAVERS SUCK’ during a certain portion of the early 1990s, for years has been lowkey locked in a legal tussle with Uncle Sam, who so far has refused to extend his sturdy cobblestone walls of federal intellectual property protections around the barony of Fuct. This has created any number of problems for the Fuct group managers and equityholders, specifically in the form of 100% cotton-wielding pirates focused on knocking off Fuct merchandise for their own illicit profits and pleasures. While carefully dancing around audibly pronunciating the company’s name, lettered lawmen for both Fuct and the US last month sparred over whether federal trademark protections shall be applied to a brand name that Justice Dept lawyers have determined to be scandalous and unworthy of protective legal shields afforded to more buttoned-down clothiers such as Ocean Pacific and Bugle Boy and Big Johnson. The government argues that, while having extended trademark protection to PG-13 brandings including ‘FUBAR’ and various ‘crap’ iterations, the f-bomb is a bridge too far; Fuct’s lawyers counter that they’re not trying to put up Fuct billboards and hardly anybody considers ‘fuck’ truly offensive these days anyways.

While Supreme Justices ponder these arguments, it is this shifty patch of regulatory sand upon which Jason Dill has staked Fucking Awesome’s fortunes. Though American IP defenders may strike a more confident pose around the more prime-time network friendly FA Worldwide Ent varietal, it is the Hulked-out, admittedly ‘dumbest,’ glaringly profane moniker to which Jason Dill and AVE hitched their uncertain sojourn from Dayton, OH what already seems like so many years ago, and which continues to sell $40 t-shirts and graphically decorated premium sweatpants. For Jason Dill, reared in the World camps of the 1990s, Fuct’s travails in the USA legal system is a path he ought to know well: Trademark missteps forced Kareem Campbell to abandon Menace and MNC before briefly stopping off at All City prior to City Stars. Bitch skateboards’ earlier, briefer run and vanishment may or may not have had much to do with trademark challenges, but these probably ensure that Sal Rocco Jr isn’t getting paid off the remarkably resilient Japanese knock-offs. And widespread bootlegging may help to explain why Girl was never able to fully capitalize off its VHS stereo-ready ‘SHT Sound’ innovations.

Is Jason Dill’s high-stakes devotion to a difficult-to-trademark brand name a keep-it-skate act of defiance, a subconscious act of self-sabotage, or some rich and creamy mixture of both? Might fat boxes of reseller-ready Supreme judicial robes help sway a critical SCOTUS majority in FA’s favor? Could an FA/Hockey/Supreme teamrider, well-trained by Fat Bill’s lens in steely stare-downs, make a wordless, slightly intimidating and ultimately victorious argument in defense of the FA intellectual property portfolio to skeptical justices?