The Eternal Variable

When considering what to write about for the Monday's post, part of me wanted to assume that there were going to be hoards of skate bloggers out there who were no doubt going to recap this weekend's X-Games, and that perhaps ESPN's annual Hawk and pony show would, by the time this post goes live, be flogged to death worse than crailslides were in the mid 2000s. Then, of course, the thought occurred to me that "wait a minute, this is the X-Games... No one is going to blog about them because no one cares enough to watch them anymore!" To be fair, I stopped watching the X-Games on TV probably about five or six years ago. When I was younger, I remember being upset because TSN (Canada's equivalent to ESPN, for those of you not living here) would never show the street contests on TV. I mean, yes, vert was cool to watch, but at that point I didn't skate transitions, and street was my deal. Eventually, I got tired of being disappointed by one of the two or three Canadian simulcasts of the contest being motocross, BMX, or Rally Racing, and truth be

"Street" Obstacle, 2010.

told, even if I had the opportunity to watch skating, I found the vert and big air contests had become formulaic (whoever does the most rotations wins), and the street contests were predicable and boring, with horrendous layouts that looked like neither street nor skatepark, but rather some manner of oversized modern art gallery. Like most skaters, I scoffed at the redundancy of the contest, and if I really wanted to watch the footage, I knew it would be online in a matter of days.

Street obstacle, 2011.

Oddly enough, something broke me this year. Something within me compelled me to set me PVR to record whatever X-Games coverage was being simulcast up north, without having any knowledge of what said coverage would be, and proceed to watch it at my nearest possible convenience. Truth be told, I think a large part of it had to do with this year's frankly astonishing street course, though I believe a lot of it could be attributed to the fact that in the last few years, someone slapped ESPN good and hard. Perhaps it was on account of the whole cancelling vert debacle a few years back, though I can only really speculate. Point is, it seems as if the coordinators of the X-Games may have finally realized that, in spite of their admittedly impressive seventeen year tenure as an annual multi-discipline contest, and in spite of making for a good payday for the competitors, the contest had become the butt of ninety-eight percent of the jokes told by its bread and butter, skateboarders (the other two percent consisting of Jeremey Rogers jokes).

Of the four days and plethora of different events that made up this year's contest, for some reason TSN only allotted two hours of coverage on Friday and two on Sunday, meaning that of the four days and plethora of events, Canadian TV coverage was made up of two hours of skate street preliminaries, and two hours of rally racing finals. Needless to say I forwent the rally cars. The street prelims were held on the Friday, though in a house with six people and fewer TVs, the PVR proved to be a godsend.

Saturday morning I made a point to wake up early enough to watch the street prelims before the TV would be commandeered in the name of sports to which I hold no interest, only to have something very interesting happen. As I was in the midst of watching the end of the third of four heats, my dad walks into the room to take care of a few things for work. As I was preparing myself to turn over the remote control, I hear a comment from my dad about Ryan Decenzo:

"Hey, he looks kinda like you!"

"Yeah, I guess. Maybe it's because he's Canadian. He's in first right now."

"No kidding! Good for him!"

As the fourth and final heat carried out on TV, I found my dad making more and more comments about what he saw:

"Aw, man, that was cool." (In response to a number of David Gravette's more unconventional tricks).

"Huh. So he is human." (After seeing Nyjah Huston miss a trick).

Being the only person in my immediate family to ever have any real interest in skateboarding, it was strange to be sitting, having that kind of a moment with the same man who, as I was a young teenager, assured me that I would eventually stop skating. I talked about the whole experience with Deanna over the weekend, and it got me thinking; maybe there's a reason that, even though the X-Games have had a history of being maligned by skateboarders, they have managed to persevere for nearly two decades now. Maybe the secret to the X-Games' success lies in their ability to make the sports it covers relative to those who don't actually participate in them.

Tony Hawk RIDE tried, but couldn't hack it...

I can understand why most skaters would rally against such a thing, and I may take a modicum of flack for saying this, but I, for one, see no problem in being able to try and share skateboarding with non-skaters. If the coordinators of the X-Games have somehow figured out a way to make a televised skateboarding event that people who don't skate can watch, and relate to, than I, for one, am all for the idea of skaters being able to sit down in front of the TV for four days in July with their families, friends, and significant others, and have a moment in which the joys of the activity they love can, to a degree, be shared with the people around them. Provided the contest coordinators continue their recent trend of listening to actual skateboarders before making decisions (cancellation of women's vert notwithstanding), the future looks surprisingly bright, and I will set my PVR to record the contest next year, in the hopes that I will be treated to some more actual skateboarding, anyway.