themostfunthing:

For all that we sing of upsets and comebacks, of unbelievable outcomes and endless excitement, the real value of sports lies not in surprise but in a game’s basic predictability. No audience relies like a sporting audience; whichever exact voids athletic contests fill, they fill them regularly, on tight and well-posted schedules.

I’m writing at 12:25 on a Thursday in Los Angeles while I wait to hear back from a professional skateboarder. Eventually today we will go out skating. I think. And pro-status notwithstanding, I bet you’ve been here. We’re not the most punctual motherfuckers, are we? For all that I’ve loved about skateboarders over the years, they’re not people on whose arrival and performance I rush to rely.

Yet these are the shoulders onto which Nike and Monster Energy and the so-called International Skateboarding Federation have loaded the task of stabilizing an otherwise rocky landscape. Direct competition is, after all, the one format proven to generate an audience beyond the niche of interested parties. While there are only so many skateboarders in this world, the human appetite for competition has proven endless. The essential brilliance of Street League is its timing: they waited for street skating to become reliable enough to spackle competition around it. It took skaters getting this good in order for it to work. 

The only question now is whether this contest format has achieved that plateau of predictability that fans will turn to it as a source for the exciting unpredictability of sport. So…has it?

Well, they sure don’t skimp on reminders of excitement, do they. From where I sat last weekend inside the USC’s Galen Center at the first exciting stop of this exciting sixth season of Street League, when the lights dimmed and the screens alit with portraits and highlights of our athletes, it sure felt exciting. I mean that truly: if there was one SLS-based surprise for me, it was how genuinely energized I was by the event’s (prompt, sudden) start, despite all of my cynicism and doubts.

Though, to be honest, I was more drawn to the hubbub around the course than the predictably insane skating on it. The timing of my beer runs happened to align with the Crailtap camp’s, so I met Rudy Johnson and Rick Howard, who were as friendly as I’d always sort of prayed. I was excited to watch big Nick Diamond extend one arm to shoot a goofy selfie like the thousand other goofy selfies in the arena. Shecks posed statue-like for a dozen photos featuring the same million-dollar smile. I was unsurprised but amused to see that the Monster girls can’t throw for shit, or that the other Huston brothers get stopped to sign their own names onto posters. That Christian Hosoi’s wife wears her husband’s rising sun Sk8-Hi’s wasn’t surprising, but did strike me as sweet and hilarious and sort of sad in a way that I’ll keep private because fuck, man. It’s skateboarding.

And, predictably, that principle challenge confronted by all such attempts to stabilize skateboarding was on full display. I mean the challenge of valuation, difficulty, style and taste. I mean scoring, which will never not be stupid.

“Nine is too much,” said the aging rasta to my left when Evan Smith so-called entered the so-called nine club. “It’s a vert trick. Street skate is about the flip.”

The entire rulebook for skateboarding in the wild boils down to one singular, unbreakable creed: don’t be a kook. That’s it. The Galen Center was crawling with the sort of non-skaters we’re sometimes inclined to call kooks. But that shouldn’t be surprising. SLS actively courts the most non-skaters it possibly can: parents and mall-grabbers and other half-interested parties, clingers and busters and endless variations of people I mostly do not want to drink beers with.

By 6:00 on that Saturday I had hit a unique kind of wall. The skating was incredible, just as predicted for this carnival of reliability. The media seats around me had filled with kids screaming Chris! or Matt!, screaming Shane! or Hurricane!, Dyrdek’s driver, because, as one told another, “That’s fucking dope that he got famous just for nothing.”

Like a lot of Street League stops, the Los Angeles winner was crowned on the final trick. Luan won and was cheered. Nyjah lost and was boo’d. I’ll leave up to you to decide which of these, if either, is surprising.

entertainingly cutting as ever my dude 😂 (without being harsh). you’ve staked a solid claim to being the Hunter S. Thompson of skate writing 🌀🎯