The Colour Yellow, or Nice Guys Finish on the Podium

Ever since I was young, I was aware of skateboards, and of the act of skateboarding. In the late '80s and early '90s, I had a pig board-shaped Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles skateboard, replete with copers, lappers, rails, and nose and tail bones.

 I can't believe I found an image of this first try - I put this exact board through the wall of my old basement....

Any knowledge I had of skateboarding came from that board, the Ninja Turtles, and an old copy of Skate or Die; Tour de Thrash my older brother had for his Gameboy. I didn't even know what tricks existed until 1992, when that same brother exclaimed to me that skateboarding was back (we had assumed in our youthful innocence that it was a fad of the 80s), that now boards had two kicktails, and there were new tricks like the ollie, and the kickflip. Aside from this newly acquired knowledge, however, I was still more or less clueless.

It wasn't until around 1996 or so that I discovered that there was such a thing as a professional skateboarder. I can remember simply stumbling onto a televised vert contest. I had no idea what any of the maeuvers being performed were called, or for that matter who most of the pros riding were...this was about two years before I started trying to pay attention to skateboarding, and four years before I actually started skating. The one part of the contest I most vividly recall, though, was a slow-motion replay of a skater doing a trick that, in hearing the commentator exclaim the names of both, my ten-year-old mind assumed was said skater's signature move, though I would come to learn otherwise. The trick was a McTwist, and the skater was Andy MacDonald.

It would be inherently difficult to argue that Andy Mac is well-liked among the majority of skateboarding's most key demographic, that is to say, teenage boys. In a subculture that celebrates aggression, rebellion, and oftentimes being at-odds with authority, Andy stands as a paragon of virtue, the kind of white knight archetype with a winning smile that you'd expect to see on a box of Wheaties holding a baseball bat, the kind of person that nine-and-a-half out of ten kids on the SLAP message boards wouldn't think twice about unloading a carton of eggs onto. He does anti-drug PSAs, is sponsored by a licorice company, and is pictured on the cover of his 2003 autobiography Dropping In with Andy Mac doing a benihanna. In short, Andy MacDonald is a dork, the type of guy who probably got called a poseur by the more "hardcore" skaters at school growing up.

Few things would have helped a skater's popularity in 2003 like doing the most hated-on trick on vert in full pads and a canary-yellow t-shirt.


When push comes to shove, however, one can see that, not only has the skate world been a bit harder on Andy than he ever deserved, but that skateboarding needs pros like Andy around. For one thing, he is an undeniably talented skater; many may argue that Andy's skating is jockish, or devoid of style, and to that I offer this rebuttal:

Secondly, yes he is a dork. He was probably as close to a model son to his mother as he could be, and is likely one of those dads that makes lame jokes that cause his son to roll his eyes incredulously. What this does not make him, however, is any less of a skater. One of the beautiful things about skateboarding is that it is meant to attract anybody who feels that they don't fit in elsewhere, not just thirteen to eighteen year old boys whose judgmental gazes and words make them bigger jocks than their schools' football teams. I, for one, can vouch for the fact that I tried to be a model son growing up, and I'll probably be a dad that tells lame jokes to his kids, and I'll always skate, which is more than I can say for all the "hardcore" skaters at my old high school that always called me a poseur. Finally, I can vouch for the fact that I'm glad that there are pros like Andy MacDonald, helping all those dorky kids out there feel a bit more at home.