December 8, 2011

Wagging the Dog

I watched the video above to see what Moorhead's Luke Hampton did (run starts at 12:30) to get second place down in Tampa and by the end of it I was pretty sure the dude got ripped off. Sure, Trevor Colden is this moment's It Kid as he snatches up cool sponsorships and does incredible shit (this dude abides), but really, that was the winning run? Colden did a considerable number of tricks that I'd have a stab at in a contest run and that's not really a good thing for him. Also, he did a total of seven tricks to Hampton's 10 (Luke missed the ender, so he tried 11). I've judged contests, peaking with a Damn Am a few years ago (I was terrible at it, it was a one-time deal). My feeling from that experience is that rapid fire tricks have almost more value than middling difficult stuff and I wouldn't say Colden surpassed "middling" at all. Do the two skaters have greatly divergent looks on a board? Sure. Colden has that "precocious little kid in a beanie" thing going and Hampton is all "moat-race." If looking rad on a skateboard won contests, Evan Smith had that shit in the bag. If only to end the digression, using the style argument to put Colden on top of Hampton is moot. Barring all the industry politics and cool-guy-ness and other bullshit in skateboarding, Hampton would have won, but then again he didn't. Moving on.

Having just blasted out a fairly stream of consciousness riff, I'll now link to very, very good writing about skateboarding. Kyle Beachy's essay about the Nyjah 11/11/11 part is fantastic. It stands as sports writing that could exist outside of the skateboard world and having read it, I'm glad I didn't try to attempt to write my own post about the part. To point out the "brutality" of Nyjah's skating is absolutely spot on. I can't wait to read more from Beachy. (I'm also so pleased with this quote from the piece, Reynolds on Herman: "[He] [l]ooks the coolest and looks the coolest doing it." It's true. I should go off on that kind of "coolness" sometime.)

Rick Kamla just announced, from the other room, that the NBA lockout is officially over. I'm not ashamed to say that I watched this video of the Twolves scrimmaging. Twice.

4 comments:

Leibman said...

That Beachy dude is great

Nate said...

Not to mention Luke skates about 5 mph faster than Trevor Molden

Mighty Roll said...

Luke is a beast! Fuck that! he won in my book

peep:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fur2pSByTm0

and for good measure:
http://themostninjablog.com/

Anonymous said...

Luke Hampton got robbed. Skateboarding doesn't need another Beanie wearing twerp.

I heard Ipath(Timberland) let their entire team go(with the exception of Nesser, M. Rodriguez, and K. Reed.)again. Is there any validity to that? Steve? You reading this?