Retired AF
Lee Yankou calls it a (great) career, thinking in an emergency, PSL debuts, The Legend of Phil Shao, 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.
Thinking in an emergency
Rank: 8(pm)
Mood: 🍫💻
On Monday evening, as I sat down to dinner and pressed play on The Legend of Phil Shao, the fire alarm in my apartment building went off. It wasn't a test forewarned by the building manager, which meant it was either the real thing or a false alarm. The long-tenured tenants in the building, myself included, know that the likelihood of the alarm getting set off by some malfunction or (in my working theory) the one older gentleman on the first floor who, for some reason, regularly smokes cigarettes in the lobby under the smoke detector, is higher than someone's supper going catastrophically alight on the stove. Every six months or so, the more seasoned residents greet each other in the hallways, casually checking for smoke or hot doors as we make our way toward the exits, as newer arrivals rush outside, wrapped in blankets, cats hastily shoved into carriers.
The latter is the smart approach, of course. Evacuate with haste, save yourself from what horrible fate could be. But for those of us who have been here and through this, we're ready. Calm. Prepared for what comes. In the lobby on Monday, we eventually converged on the older gentleman as he cursed and fiddled with an electrical panel, attempting to shut off the alarm while its steel bells rattled in our ears. The only smoke to smell was that of a cigarette. Thankfully, another false alarm.
This familiarity with the shape of disaster, and my and many of my fellow tenants' hum-drum quotidian response, might rightly be unsettling (and stupid) to some. It brought to mind how I felt a few days earlier, as I sat working away on my laptop at a neighbourhood cafe, and watched in horror as the young man seated beside me spilled an entire mug of hot chocolate onto his laptop. The brown liquid filled the hollows of his keyboard and covered the computer's surface with an eerie efficiency, and left it looking, for a brief moment, like the machine itself was made of chocolate.
The young man didn't panic; he just stood there, somewhat amused by life's curveball that had started to spread across the length of the table. "Oh no," said another regular a few seats over. To me, this would be an abject nightmare, but the young man coolly used a fistful of napkins and a rag brought over from the staff behind the counter and wiped up the mess like he had done this before. When he was finished, the laptop, whose screen had gone black during the initial spill, booted up with ease, and within a few minutes he was back, clacking away, a complimentary hot chocolate from a sympathetic barista steaming beside him.
You don't know how you'll respond to an emergency until you do. And once you do, you can get used to it. Comfortable. Too comfortable.
A total ATV
Rank: 1
Mood: 🤘📚🤘
For most skateboarders, it is a time-honoured tradition to sit around talking about how good someone is, or was, at skateboarding. Whether that's reminscing about an Old Head at your local who has Done Some Shit no one's been able to step to since the early aughts, giving flowers to a new kid on the scene coming up, or marvelling over a PRO who somehow, someway figured out how to skate a spot in your neighbourhood that seemed, up until it wasn't, impossible.
While skateboarding's cultural practices are primarily expressed through photo and video, this oral tradition might be just as powerful.
He was soooo good.
Man, she fucking rips.
Beyond gnarly.
Not just burly, but stylish, too.
A total ATV.
We've all said or heard those sentiments in some form, to the extent that they exist deep down in a sedimentary layer of cliché, but they still carry serious weight. The Legend of Phil Shao makes that abundantly clear.
The documentary, produced by Greg "Schmitty" Smith and published by Thrasher Magazine last week, celebrates the impact and life of the late Phil Shao in exactly that fashion.
Shao, who was killed in a drunk driving accident at just 24 years old in 1998, established himself as one of skateboarding's greats in a short amount of time. For those like myself, who started skateboarding around '98-'99 or later, that influence wasn't readily available or apparent. I knew of him, but I didn't experience or understand what his brief, hot flame of existence really meant. Years later, with the advent of YouTube and social media, Shao's skating became more accessible and immediately stood out. His skill set and its diversity a clear inspiration for the generations of skateboarders that followed, like Grant Taylor, one of the talking heads in the documentary.
Most of the film is dedicated to Shao's good friends talking about how good Shao was at skateboarding. Generally, specifically, and downright granularly. Greg Carroll, Mark Whitely, Dan Drehobl, Wade Speyer, Jake Phelps, Mark Gonzales, and many more all repeat, ad nauseam, how Shao ripped transition and street, expound at length on the time he destroyed Jim's Ramp Jam, opened up another world of possibility with his tricks at China Banks and by grinding the top bar at Fort Miley — and never got a big head about any of it. In that way, The Legend of Phil Shao is told through the long-standing oral tradition of the skateboarder.
He was soooo good.
Man, he fucking ripped.
Beyond gnarly.
Not just burly, but stylish, too.
A total ATV.
And it's effective. When Drehobl says that everyone talks about John Cardiel being the greatest, but it was actually Shao, and the next scene is of Cardiel agreeing, you believe it.
While the film mostly focuses on Shao's skateboarding, it shines when it explores who he was beyond that: a thoughtful, smart, kind, and motivated person. A supportive older brother. A dynamic young man down to go on a Hellride despite not being particularly "Hellride." He had an English degree from UC Berkeley and was being groomed by Phelps to take over as Editor-in-Chief at Thrasher.
Shao packed a lot of living into just 24 years on earth. His legacy endures because of his skating, of course, but also for how he carried himself in the world, as this documentary and a comment on its YouTube page illustrate so well.
True story..
I had my 15th birthday at a skatepark in Fresno CA, a couple months before I wrote Phil a letter inviting Him (being He was my favorite skater)
I didn't know if He received the letter, and if He did, I definitely didn't think He'd show up.. But low and behold, Phil, Dan and about 3 others from the Think team showed up, singed autographs and put on a demo.
Phil talked with Me, showed His gratitude for me being a fan and gave me the best and most memorable birthday of my life.
He past about 3 months later.
Today Im 43 years old, and the board He gave me and autographed still hangs on my wall.
He was absolutely a Legend!
PSL debuts
Rank: 2
Mood: 🤔🙂
Nearly a year to the day of their trial-balloon exhibition match last February, which was later followed by a combine and draft, and one week after a still-mysterious delay to their original launch date, the Professional Skateboarding League held their season debut on Saturday.
There were some hiccups that should be noted, but are not wholly unexpected for an upstart "league" and broadcast product. To start, the team in "the truck" repeatedly struggled to cut to the camera(s) trained on the active skateboarders in time, outright missing tricks on several occasions and causing the broadcast team of Sean Malto and Clint Peterson to chastise them on air.
Speaking of the broadcast team, they are a work in progress. As a longtime fan of Clint Peterson's skateboarding, it pains me to say that his play-by-play was the lowlight of the event (for me). Stiff, stilted, rife with jumbled aphorisms, and a put-on "broadcaster" tone that sits in a neutered nether region between sincere and satirical, his performance was tough going. A regression from the exhibition matches. To be fair, that is an incredibly difficult role, especially to go in green as Peterson has. I once MC'd a youth skate contest and that was a challenge. Thankfully, he has more opportunities to practice in the weeks ahead.
What had the potential to be a much lowerlight was the PSL announcing last week that Nyjah Huston — who fractured his skull at the end of December and whose company Disorder recently started selling skateboards featuring an X-ray showing just how damaged Huston's skull really is — would be skating the contest, presumably with that still fractured skull.
January 18 PSL Instagram announcement | February 3 PSL Instagram announcement
On the day of the event, however, Huston shared on his Instagram Story that he wouldn't be skating after all because of a bruised knee — not the cracks spiderwebbing across the bony conch holding his brain in place. There's clearly no athletic commission or governing body overseeing these events, but if this is how they're going to govern themselves, maybe there should be!
Beyond all that, and the absurd PSL Fantasy League app, this was a generally enjoyable event. At least for me, a self-described sicko. While the first matchup was a bit of a slog and a blowout (17-8) for Felipe Gustavo's Los Santos team over Paul Rodriguez's SHS, the back-and-forth and eventual sudden-death matchup between Jamie Foy's Tropics and Chris Joslin's Wolverines was genuinely exciting. As was seeing lower-wattage, highly-talented names like Trevor Colden, Johnny Hernandez, and Christian Dufrene come in with clutch offensive and defensive showings.
Ginwoo Onodera was the obvious MVP of the night, landing 11/12 offensive trick attempts and 7/7 on the defensive end, which is part of what I find most enjoyable about PSL so far: the stats. While the data pool is small, given that each team has only played one match, and the stat categories themselves are pretty rudimentary, I personally love this shit.
PSL even put together some decent pre-game promos, including one on Julian Christianson, who talked about being inspired by Rodriguez growing up, what it meant to get drafted by P-Rod's PSL team at 36 years old, and what his life has looked like as a young father trying to make it in skateboarding while juggling multiple jobs, including one as an Uber driver.
It's schlocky as these pieces tend to be, but I also learned a lot about Christianson and was actively rooting for him afterwards: desired effect achieved.
If there's a primary takeaway from PSL's debut event, it's that this won't be for everyone, and they've got some wrinkles to iron out production-wise, but I'm interested to see how the rest of their season unfolds.
Retired AF
Rank: 1
Mood: ⌚
If we are to silo off people and their talents by the national borders they happen to exist within, Lee Yankou is one of the greatest skateboarders Canada has ever known. That would also be true wherever he happened to lay his sweaty, sweaty toque.
From red and purple pants, to Transworld covers and video parts, extensive coverage across skate media, a still gobsmacking closing section of Think Skateboard's underappreciated 2012 classic Business As Usual (where Yankou also grinds the top bar at Fort Miley), a solid appearance in Osiris Footwear's (!) Never Gets Old (2012), astounding efforts given for independent projects like Jon Sherman and Mark Webber's Sus Monts (2009), Blue Tile Lounge's Baby Blue (2018), and James Morley's GOD BLESS (2022), to name a few, Yankou has had a significant and significantly impressive career. That's without even mentioning his full decade as a professional for Heroin Skateboards and the handful of video parts that came with it.
That's without even touching on the way Yankou skates, which is difficult to describe as describing skateboarding (or any sporting endeavour) can be, but moreso with this man who flies, flips, and smashes into things with what appears to be abandon but is something else entirely. Maybe it's best to paint it thusly: Yankou's skateboarding is like a rubber ball whipped against the side of a building, every bounce as surprising and gratifying as the next. Eh, that's close, but doesn't quite capture his technical nuance, how he makes expectation's turning radius spin on a pinprick, in the way Louise Glück can take a poem from pure anguish to uproarious in the small incision or large leap of a line break.
See, it's not easy. That's why we love to let these rip:
He was soooo good.
Man, he fucking ripped.
Beyond gnarly.
Not just burly, but stylish, too.
A total ATV.
Past tense, not because Yankou has passed on or stopped skating, but because he has stopped skating as a professional, opting to retire his board with Heroin. In skateboarding, "retire" feels like it needs to be in those scare quotes because a PRO usually just fades away into the rest of their life. "Retirement" an odd way to say getting a job.
But Yankou has earned it; his career is one to be proud of, and choosing to bow out gracefully is a fitting capper. He even nailed another NBD on the way out the door in a career full of them: the surprise Retired AF party, appropriately held at an indoor golf simulator in Toronto.
Something to consider: A verified GoFundMe for the families affected by the Tumbler Ridge tragedy.
Good thing:
Katie Heindl
Another good thing:
Farran Golding
This is now the dedicated Ryan Lay thing section:
Subscribe to Ted Barrow's Patreon to listen to some good vlog on vlog commentary on Ryan's videos.
Some very good Stella Aiha things:
A good thing from earlier this week:
Brian Glenney
Good pod with George:
Posted by
Templeton
Some not good news about books:
Damon Krukowski
Becca Rothfeld
Until next week… it is a weekend for love, but so are all of the other days, too.
Laser Quit Smoking Massage
NEWEST PRESS
--------------------------------
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
--------------------------------
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.
