Should skateboarding be sketchy? Hear me out. Early skate videos had lots of sketchy tricks, tictacs, and other imperfections that disappeared as time went on. The emphasis moved more and more toward clean perfection. Are we missing out on creativity and boundary pushing?
If you ever watch skate videos from the 90s, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Pros in their video parts would barely roll away from a trick, and it was good enough to keep. Fast forward about 15 years and you had guys like P Rod who only put out clips of tricks that are completely perfect. Are we missing out?
Back in the 90s, that sketchy trick you saw might have been the first one ever done.
Let’s look at Sean Sheffy from Questionable, for example. He’s got a kinked 50-50 that he has to take a foot off on the rollaway. He also has a half cab late shove that probably doesn’t even count. I hadn’t seen this before, or even after, this one clip.
Let’s say we edited out the tricks that are too sketchy by today’s standards. Does it make the video better or worse? It seems like we’re leaving some skateboard entertainment on the table here.
Let’s look at some case studies.
First, obviously, is Rodney Mullen. His early parts were sketchy as hell, but they very frequently debuted tricks that nobody had ever thought of before. Like this impossible late varial flip. He probably couldn’t have gotten this one any cleaner, and I’m glad to have seen it.
That kickturn in his 720 shove it in Future Primitive? Sorry, that’s throwaway. Now it’ll take years before somebody else shows the world that that’s possible. First triple flip on video? Cut that too.
In some cases, he could have re-filmed these, but a lot of times, he probably couldn’t.
Next, how about PJ Ladd?
His part in Wonderful Horrible Life is full of new combos and it’s almost entirely perfectly clean. But then there’s this toeflip line. The part would have still been a classic without this clip, but I learned that this trick existed because of this clip. If it had to be perfect in a line, the trick might have died out. He resurrected it for a new generation of skaters.
In the same vein, there’s a bail in his part, which is this noseslide nollie late flip. It was such a good trick that they put it in even though he never actually landed it. Did that inspire somebody else?
But with the rest of his part being so clean and perfect, what did we miss out on? What trick or line did he get not quite perfect enough? Did he get a flip out of this blunt to fakie 5-0 that he had to throw away?
In this case, one of the things that makes this part such a classic is how he so perfectly does so many different things. He pushed boundaries in that way. If there were sketchy tricks thrown in here too, it might not have had the same impact, even if there were some ‘better’ tricks here and there.
We’ve got one more example, but I want to thank Keric Oston, which is probably a totally real name, who submitted this question on radratvideo.com. There’s a form right there on the homepage. You can also submit questions on Patreon and get a guaranteed answer, and early access to certain videos, like the gameplay series, which usually go up all in one chunk.
Lastly, Andy Anderson.
His part, Crazy Wisdom, has a lot of new tricks in it, including new stuff that nobody has ever seen before. It’s very innovative.
But I saw a video by Dan Corrigan (I’m pretty sure), who said he was there during the filming of one of the tricks, and he did it over and over and over until it was perfect. What if, instead of landing the same trick 100 times, he made it a little bit harder? Added in a bigspin out of the darkslide, but never got it perfect? Or more importantly, did something completely new instead of a harder variation of what we got?
It’s a tough call. In all honesty, I started by thinking that skating would actually be better if skaters weren’t so intent on having everything be perfect. But in rewatching PJ Ladd’s part, especially, I think having the tricks be a little tougher and a little sketchier would actually be a downgrade. A couple sketchy tricks here and there wouldn’t ruin it if they were really mind-blowing, but for the most part, I prefer things the way things are, with everything being clean and fast. What about you? Do you disagree? Let me know in the comments.