KLA
Jocke Olson
achieve some likeness of skateboarding but not the
true form. So when the skiers say "mute" and the
bladers say "grind" or "switch" it's really just a mistake
on their part.
The confusing intrusion of all these strap-in sports
into the realm of skating is largely the result of cor-
porate America's neverending, frantic stabbing in the
dark for some way to get at the young, "hip" market
that has a full lifetime of spending money and con-
suming products and services in front of it. The dumb
luck of the ESPN employees who stumbled onto the
X-treme Games as a way to water down, package and
mass-market the exhilarating escape that we, the
skateboarders, have spent decades living for, culti-
vating and paying for in blood has turned out to be
quite profitable. But for us, the indiscriminate lump-
ing together of skateboarding with all these other
"extreme street sports," while in keeping with
America's "melting pot" ideals, has by association
diluted the rush of skateboarding's nature of sepa-
ratist solitude so much that "more 12 to 17 [year old
Sam Hitz
Jason Massey
70 THRASHER
Max Schaaf
Dustin Dollin