Skate Culture and the Silver Screen

If there are two things in this world I take seriously, they are sports and cinema. Occasionally, these two passions coalesce in epic form, as in the epics Point Break and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. More often, however, they do not.

Recently, I was watching TV—excuse me, HBO—and I came across a little movie called Grind. This movie is about a group—no, a crew—of wild and crazy skateboarders with dreams too big for their small town, so they decide to embark on a quest. The goal: to get sponsored or to go on tour with a skate team (I’m not really sure).

Now, I’ve seen Blue Crush and my share of cool, teen, MTV-generation movies, but this one hit me real hard. It’s one thing to see other cultures and pastimes get exploited by Hollywood, but when the culture is one that you at one time were a part of (or at least thought you were a part of), it’s painful. Here’s yet another story of old age and disillusionment from yours truly.

After hate-watching (I owe this term to Ted Eckert III ... thanks, Ted-O) Grind to its completion, I finally realized that skating—a seemingly impenetrable, guerilla activity—is not immune to the forces of spectacle and entertainment. Despite its transgressive, rebellious roots, skating has, as many have noted, gone completely corporate.

Just look at Tony Hawk. This guy has almost single-handedly transformed skating from a weapon against the establishment, a weapon that sought to retake public space, to a tool of the establishment. Of course, skating always brought in money, but only now has it become a spectator sport, one that has been completely ripped out of its original setting and placed on the TV screen. I believe the sport died years ago—at the moment it left the street and entered the park contest. Call me a purist.

I remember the days when skating inspired fear—fear from those in charge. Back in fifth grade, I remember Principal Reynolds’ strong-arm, Scottie the janitor, yelling at my friends and me for skating on his benches. I remember store owners asking me to leave because my presence disrupted their business. Urban planners and designers even came up with ways to kick skaters out of their space. (Have you ever seen those pegs on hand rails?)

Now, it may seem like I’m speaking rather hypocritically, seeing as how earlier I mentioned Point Break as one of my favorite films. There is a clear difference in my mind, however, between the Swayze masterpiece and this more recent travesty. For one, the Swayze film does not take itself seriously. I mean, how can you take a clan of bank-robbing surfers whose leader is named Bodhisattva seriously? In Grind, however, there seems to be a real effort to try to capture something essential about the culture of skateboarding. There is a sense that, despite the film’s constant attempts at silly humor, this movie actually says something real about skaters’ lives and dreams. It says that their ultimate goal is to get sponsored by a large skating company, get on a tour bus, and make loads of cash skating in contests.

When I skated, however, I never dreamed or even thought about becoming a professional skater. I, along with most of the kids I skated with, just wanted a new kind of experience of our environment—our schools, streets, and neighborhoods.

Of course, I won’t deny that making money has not been a goal of top skaters since the ’80s. But the kind of story that Grind tells eclipses the more radical side of the sport—a sport that resists the urge to be put on a stage or enclosed in a stadium. Skating, at its purest, is a desire to be seen re-inventing public space. In Grind, the protagonist also conveys a desire to be seen, but for him, it is a desire to be seen by and impress the leader of a skate team and, in turn, win himself fame and fortune.

Indeed, skateboarding has also always been about publicity—that is, about being a public, disruptive activity—but nowadays it has focused on being publicized in a different, more privatized sense. It is that old sense of the word that we need to resurrect.

I guess that this is just the natural trajectory of sport, to become a profitable industry. But maybe sports like skateboarding need to stay in the hands of the young—those 12-year-olds who know nothing about advertising. When the grown-ups get a hold of things, they always go to shit.