I'm exhausted. My arms hurt, legs hurt, lungs hurt, and I think grimly: What for?
Dylan Jaeb triples down, Enjoi Madness, two decades of Chima Ferguson, Rayssa Leal's a Rolling Stone, and more.
The definitive weekly ranking and analysis of all the skateboarding and other things online that I cannot stop consuming and how it makes me feel, personally.
Heated Rivalry
Rank: 1
Mood: 🔥😮💨🔥
Hey, who can blame a person, really? Sometimes it's fun to read a little too much into things. That's a significant part of any fandom, isn't it? Appreciating meaning, extrapolating on it, vaulting oneself to conclusions. As long as those interpretations stay in a healthy lane, of course.
Is it unhealthy to think that there was a deeper, pointier meaning behind Dylan Jaeb doing a switch-360-kickflip down the Santa Monica triple set at the latest Thrasher Magazine "Bust or Bail" event on Saturday? Paul Rodriguez famously did that trick for a Nike SB commercial in 2009. Rodriguez, now the owner and face of Primitive Skateboards, is Jaeb's recently former sponsor.
While that was likely just a friendly homage, as is part of the thrust of this event, with Jeremy Wray, Geoff Rowley, and many more on hand to witness talent like Ryan Decenzo and Frankie Spears recreate the iconic tricks they performed at that site decades previous (a frontside-360 and varial-heelflip, respectively), isn't it more fun to consider this real-time, full-contact historical celebration as an opportunity for Jaeb to send a not-so-subtle diss to his previous employer?
YES.
Strange defeat, strange victory
Rank: 3
Mood: 🐼🎭🌀
On February 14, 2023, Louie Barletta, longtime professional skateboarder and brand manager for Enjoi Skateboards, announced his departure from the company.
Goodbye enjoi…
Another broken heart on Valentine’s Day. I’m so sorry for leaving you. There were times I sacrificed everything for you. I loved you more than life, enjoi was my life. And what a life it has been. I wouldn’t trade what we had together for anything!
The message goes on in a typically (for Barletta and Enjoi) jocular way, but it does contain genuine anguish as he details what it's meant to dedicate the majority of his professional and personal life to a project like Enjoi only to lose it, by no fault of his own.
The demise of Enjoi, as well as the remaining stable of Dwindle's brands and their respective teams (Almost, Madness, Blind, and more), was due in various parts to a downswing in the industry, a failure to meet and maintain demand in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and mismangement on the part of Dwindle's owners, Bravo Sports, a portfolio company of the private equity firm Transom Capital Group. Transom purchased Dwindle in 2019 and bundled it with another action sports company, Highline Industries (the previous owner of Sector 9 and Pro-Tec, who sold off both brands in 2024).
Despite the April 2023 promise of former Dwindle and Highline VP of Skateboarding R.P. Bess to keep those hollowed Dwindle brands going (along with some boilerplate language around the necessity to layoff staff, without mentioning that many did not receive severance or backpay owed, and some whinging about the public backlash they received for doing so), it appears that Transom's efforts haven't paid off. Bess was out as VP of Skateboarding by December 2024, and as of writing this, the Dwindle and Bravo Sports websites have expired. It's unclear if either entity, including Highline, still exists.
Presumably, that's what led to Barletta's Valentine's Day 2026 announcement that he purchased Enjoi from Transom and will be bringing it into the fold of Sidewalk Distribution, the company he and former Dwindle mainstays Bill Weiss and Bod Boyle founded, along with a new suite of brands, including Jacuzzi Unlimited and Opera Skateboards.
On Instagram, Barletta celebrated the reunion.
We got enjoi back!! 4 words that took 3 years to post… but 4 words that mean so much more. I love enjoi. For me, enjoi is more than just a skateboard brand. It’s in my DNA. I don’t see the panda as merely a logo, it represents the blood, sweat, and memories of all my friends, still here and gone. It’s a reminder of the good times that became great times, and a beacon for fun. enjoi never went out of business, it was just simply stolen. Stolen by corporate greed.
According to Barletta, Transom was planning to sell Enjoi-branded "scooters, rollerskates, helmets, and rollerblades to Walmart," and he "couldn’t just sit around and let [them] cheapen something so special to all of us."
Bill Weiss made a similar announcement this week, having bought Madness, the board company he founded under Dwindle, from Transom to bring under Sidewalk's umbrella.
In an age where the endless pursuit of capital is as insatiable as it is unavoidable and stupid, especially when it comes to the scourge of private equity whose only concern is wringing everything it can from a company before discarding its bones to whoever is willing to pay for them (which appears to be what has happened here), these should still be considered victories of a sort.
There remain reasonable questions to ask, mind you, like what is the realistic promise of reanimating brands that weren't exactly popular before Dwindle was acquired in 2019? Is it not a concern that Jacuzzi Unlimited and Opera are essentially less polished market replacements of Enjoi and Madness, and that they'll now be competing with one another within the same company? And, perhaps most importantly, does any of that matter as long as Barletta and Weiss did what felt right to them, failure be damned?
Weiss has already answered that last one. "Having something that I created and loved so much taken away by a bunch of private equity fuckheads has been brutal, so fuck those dudes."
"I'm exhausted. My arms hurt, legs hurt, lungs hurt, and I think grimly: What for?"
Rank: 20
Mood: 🥂
In author and artist Leanne Shapton's memoir Swimming Studies, which recounts her youth as a high-level competitive swimmer, she recalls the moment she realized that "I was not going to make it to the Olympics."
"I am fourteen, it is five-thirty a.m., a quarter of the way into practice. I'm swimming sloppily, staring hard at the stripe on the bottom of the pool. Though we're still warming up, I'm exhausted. My arms hurt, legs hurt, lungs hurt, and I think grimly: What for?"
That's a hard reality to confront as a teenager, especially having lived such short a life, much of it dedicated to that single thing, a single goal in mind. While not anywhere near the same level of athletic achievement, when I was around twelve, watching Flip Skateboard's Sorry for the umpteenth time on a small TV/VCR combo, my stepmother walked past as I rewound and replayed tricks in Bastien Salabanzi's section, trying to figure out exactly how he was doing all that. I told her that I planned to be as good as him by the time I was his age, fifteen or so. Becoming a professional skateboarder was high on my to-do list alongside beating Majora's Mask. She scoffed, told me what amounted to "good luck," and I stewed. Angry at the lack of faith. Three years was more than enough time to catch up.
At fifteen, I was not as good at skateboarding as Bastien Salabanzi. The gulf between us remained comically vast. That didn't stop me from having fun or trying to progress, but there were notable roadblocks: I was scared of handrails and wasn't very good at jumping down stair sets. I also wasn't very good at skateboarding in general, which, you know, in retrospect, was the biggest hurdle between PRO-dom and me. What cemented that goal as not just distant but an empty prayer to a cruel, unfeeling god was coming across Chima Ferguson's video part in Jaime Fazackerley and Su Young Choi's Killself (2005).
Pretty sure I first watched this on Google Video.
Here was a kid, a complete unknown, roughly my age, who could kickflip seventeen stairs (first try!), among a deep repertoire of high-level maneuvers. Merely considering attempting what Ferguson was capable of was enough to make me feel like Shapton: I'm exhausted. My arms hurt, legs hurt, lungs hurt, and I think grimly: What for?
That's fine. Not everyone can be that good at a thing. It would be terrible if that were the case — astounding skill becomes homogenized. Boring. What that disparity in ability means is that we've all been lucky enough to witness Ferguson's remarkable career, to watch it evolve and progress over all these years. So long, in fact, that he celebrated his twentieth anniversary with sponsor REAL Skateboards this week.
What hasn't changed is that two decades on, Ferguson is still flying.
A measure of superstardom
Rank: 1
Mood: 🌟!
Rayssa Leal has been a star since the skateboarding world first took notice of her. Since then, she's become one of the most winningest competitive skateboarders in history, claimed multiple Olympic medals, earned the rank of professional, has been a regular guest at various Fashion Weeks, and continues to refine her skillset as one of the world's best skateboarders, whether on the course or in the streets.
So, it makes complete sense that she'd grace the cover of Rolling Stone Brasil, presumably with a feature in the issue.
Is it weird, in a Maxim Magazine kind of way, that the cover leads with Leal having turned eighteen? Yep. It's also strange that it notes her as a four-time Super Crown champion, assuming that readers of Rolling Stone Brasil know what Street League Skateboarding is, as opposed to, say, the Olympics. That aside, it's just more proof that Leal has become much more than a bright spot in the skateboarding world — she's a bona fide superstar outside of it.
Some things to consider: The CSEF scholarship applications are now open.
Also, Skate Shop Day is tomorrow. Support your local. Hell, bring them some donuts or something, too.
Good thing:
The Canadian Press
Another good thing:
Nobo
Good thing about a terrible thing:
A good pod round-up:
Posted by
Templeton
A good gaming and skating thing:
Flowers from the Fissures
New Ted:
New Ryan:
Good sports writing thing:
Petesy Carroll
Good sports pod thing:
A friend has a new novel available for preorder thing:
An aggressive reminder:
Emanuel Maiberg
Until next week… what are these guys up to?
Laser Quit Smoking Massage
NEWEST PRESS
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A collection of essays that I think you might like. The Edmonton Journal called it a "local book set to make a mark in 2024," The CBC said it's "quirky yet insightful" (lol), and it won Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2025 Alberta Book Publishing Awards.
Book cover by Hiller Goodspeed.
Right, Down + Circle
ECW PRESS
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I wrote a book about the history and cultural impact of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that you can find at your local bookshop or order online now. I think you might like this one, too.
Photo via The Palomino.
