Uncs at the end of the world
An all-time meeting of the mind (noses?), PSL draft dodgers, Polar swipes at Heroin, writing about some bullshit at a time like this, 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.
First, look at this
Rank: 1
Mood: 🐢🐴
Okay, onwards then.
The slow, sloppy process of sportification
Rank: ...2?
Mood: ⚽🏈🏒🏀
The pull of professional, organized sports is a powerful thing. To put the highest levels of human physical achievement on a regular, televised schedule, where moments of awe are gifted to us night after night by recurring casts of highly paid heroes, is an easy way for audiences to get swept up in the magic of what becomes an entertainment machine. One that churns out lifelong memories, creates fandoms that span generations, and is easy to sell ads against and, increasingly, bet on.
That pull is different, in many ways, from skateboarding, which has professionals and is somewhat organized, but in very distant ways. There is a robust competitive side to skateboarding, but it is neither as regular nor as lucrative as the ball-and-stick sports that command billion-dollar broadcast deals with network TV and streaming services.
Competitive skateboarding can be immensely entertaining and deliver those moments of awe, but the formula for its success, in the business sense, the one sense that matters in the continuation of any high-overhead venture, hasn't been figured out, despite its inclusion as an Olympic sport. People are trying, though. And lately, that means slapping elements of traditional competitive sports onto skateboarding.
Take the Professional Skateboarding League's "First-ever Skateboard Draft."
Uploaded on December 22, ahead of the PSL's inaugural six-week season that kicks off on January 31, the canned YouTube feature is a gesture toward "drafts" in traditional sports. Here, team captains Jamie Foy, Nyjah Huston, Chris Joslin, Felipe Gustavo, Paul Rodriguez, and Zach Saraceno participated in a "snake draft," choosing five skaters to fill out their line-ups, the captains serving as the sixth members of each team.
Those teams are named, respectively, the Tropics, Soldiers, Wolverines, Los Santos, SHS, and Lithium. Curious about what Lithium's logo looks like?
If you want a first-edition Lithium Alex Midler PSL jersey, it'll only cost you $69.95. Nice.
Overall, the draft felt akin to kids picking their kickball teams over Zoom. However, it was still relatively enjoyable, despite a surprising lack of production value given the PSL's recent backing from Red Bull (in particular, the team captains picked from a list of "ranked" skateboarders that weren't shown on screen, that talent pool and their rankings a mystery to those watching at home).
The hosts of the event, Sean Malto, PSL head honcho Mike Mo Capaldi, and Cephas Benson, did a decent job throughout and were surprisingly candid in their criticisms of team formations and the potential and limitations of individual skaters' abilities, which in that role has to be done if they want to push skateboarding through that lens of traditional sports. A world where fans get a deeper hold on the competition and its competitors, often through statistical analysis, which fuels that style of debate. Here, that dynamic still needs some tonal adjustment. Was it funny when the trio clowned on Huston for picking his pal Sinner for his squad? Sure. Was it funny the fifth and sixth time they did it? Not so much.
As for what the competition itself will look like, the original iteration of PSL was a relatively dry affair — essentially a game of S.K.A.T.E. down a set of stairs with "innings" and points tallied instead of getting out on "E" — that stretched on far too long. The hosts acknowledged as much and announced several tweaks to the event format, including tightening up match lengths and the inclusion of a handrail.
The handrail, which can only be attempted three times per team per match, is meant to add an additional strategic wrinkle. The limit on the rail, as explained by Capaldi, makes sense: some skaters have really unique and difficult arsenals of rail maneuvers and could easily run the floor. There is more parity with jumping down things.
Will those changes make PSL a more entertaining watch? We'll see. Well, some of us will (sickos like me). It's unclear what the appetite for events like this is. Dressing skateboarding in the structure and language of traditional sports and hoping for success is a tall order, but between PSL, the X Games League, and the Skate Board Association, the answer will arrive sooner than later.
Egg on face
Rank: -'90
Mood: 🥚🤦
Sideswipe, cheap shot, sucker punch — whatever you want to call it, it's not unusual for one skateboarding company to take an unexpected swing at another. From Powell Peralta's famous flamewar with World Industries, which played out through monthly magazine ad buys, to the more innocuous but still pointed Independent Trucks tagline "Ride The Best, Fuck The Rest," there is certainly a precedent.
As Steve Rocco told Transworld Business in 2000, those swings can also be a pretty good marketing gimmick.
...There was the Dear George letter, and when Mike Vallely left the company there was an ad about him. Was that something that seemed to get a good response as far as sales went? Or was that just a reaction?
Rocco: The George thing was a phenomenal sales success. I don’t think we ever sold boards faster than those three boards when they came out. But you gotta understand that everyone just sees the ad, but we never did anything unprovoked. George also did an ad that ran before where he made fun of small companies. We were the only small skater-owned company, and it was aimed so blatantly at us that I just got pissed.
The myopic takeaway there would be that picking fights, warranted or not, is great for brand awareness and business. Unfortunately, that's by and large the takeaway that has stuck with society in general. Beefs are proven to build audiences. Feuds become ladder-climbing opportunities. Aggrieved is now a natural, accepted state of being.
As illustrated above, the skateboarding industry has a storied history of partaking in that type of vacuous, pubic infighting, but it has been relatively quiet in recent years. So much so that it seemed especially odd that in promotion of their new "eyeball" shaped board, Polar Skateboards, took a swing at Heroin Skateboards' "egg" shaped board.
The caption of the post ends with "Inspired by the fun and golden times of 90s skateboarding... Let’s make it fun again 💋," so the potshot is probably an homage to the acrimonious era of the '90s, when feuds between the George Powells and Steve Roccos of the World were commonplace.
However, in this instance, there is no recognizable heat, no obvious there there besides both companies making shaped boards, so it's confusing rather than damaging (or "fun"). The post did garner some attention in the comments, but it was primarily negative toward Polar's tactics and supportive of Heroin and its owner and creative director, Fos, who issued a classy response.
For real though, I think it’s great that brands are starting to design their own shapes and have fun with that, that all contributes to the space of skateboarding much more in the end. Much better than just copying our shapes and calling them eggs. I’m all for innovation and pushing things in your own original way. We should be bouncing ideas off of each other. We’re all in it for skating at the end of the day. Oh, and we’ve always been having fun.
That's the risk of this style of marketing: swing hard and miss, you might wind up hitting yourself.
Uncs at the end of the world
Rank: N/A
Mood: N/A
In what you might call the "outro" of the adidas Skateboarding and Thrasher Magazine tour video feature "Red Brick Run," Nikolai Piombo watches Silas Baxter-Neal tailslide a significant length of waxed-up concrete and, upon his successful landing, declares, "That's right, unc."
That's right. Unc. Right. It really doesn't feel right, though, does it? Not Piombo calling Baxter-Neal "unc." That is correct, in the most complimentary sense. Nor do I mean whatever undercooked commentary I was going drag out of this piece of "online content" — something about unc Baxter-Neal and unc Dennis Busenitz being neither chopped nor washed, no doubt. What feels off is writing about skateboarding at all right now. What feels off, in a way that is both obvious and inextricable from the happenings of the last two and change years, is the gravity.
The present moment presses down. Each new horror stacks on the other and the top of the pile stretches out of view: genocide, war, civil unrest, climate collapse. Unaccountable paramilitary groups murdering people on and disappearing people off of American streets. A rabidly white nationalist American superpower that threatens its allies and wantonly attacks its perceived enemies.
What is there to say about a skate video at a time like this? Or the point of writing about those horrors in a skateboarding-related newsletter. It's a feeling Matthew Miranda captured in a blog from earlier this week, aptly titled, "I dunno how to write about the Knicks when the government is killing people":
Why write about this here at Posting & Toasting? Isn’t this your sanctum sanctorum? Your safe space? Your escape? I dunno, man. If you’re in a warm, fluffy bed, I don’t think you get to gripe about your sleep being interrupted by the sound of people being ripped outta theirs.
Skateboarding is an escape, and a good one at that, but, like all of us, it is subject to the present and the future this moment portends. Do you like the hard-rock Canadian maple in your 7-ply skateboards? The United States, with its campaign of tariffing itself to death, is destroying the Canadian lumber industry along the way. Do you like watching up-and-coming talent from around the world make a name for themselves in the centre of skateboarding's universe? The U.S. is poised to "pause all immigrant visa issuances for applicants from 75 different countries."
Slowly but surely, if it's allowed, this weight crushes everything. Even the seemingly trivial things, like a piece of wood with wheels. What is there to do about it?
I guess I write this for reasons similar to why people in Sacramento protested something that happened in Minnesota. “We are a community,” a 39-year-old Sacramentan said. “Even though ([Renee] Good’s killing) didn’t happen here, we’re all connected . . . what I’m hoping [is] that the power of our community and warmth and togetherness can overcome the darkness.”
We are a community. But only if we look out for one another. Only if enough of us choose to love our neighbors as ourselves. If silence is the voice of complicity, let us make making our voices heard the new normal.
Miranda's right, but this is also a point where, depending on where you are, it's going to take more than just words, as Episcopalian Bishop Rob Hirschfeld acknowledged during a vigil for Renee Good, who was murdered by ICE last week.
I have told the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire that we may be entering into that same witness. And I've asked them to get their affairs in order—to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.
That's the reality of the situation. Of throwing a boomerang. The ingrained cruelties and indignities of imperialism, the brutal levers of Israeli apartheid, have returned to their progenitor and primary benefactor. Up here in Canada, who is not an innocent actor by any means, we watch the pot boil over, waiting for the scalding to start.
It's hard to see around all of this. That's where sports can be helpful, as something else to look at for a time, or a salve, and even inspiration, as Hanif Abdurraqib wrote in Basketball Feelings a few years back.
It is childlike to believe that everything will work out in your favor, to hope for it even though reality suggests otherwise, and I believe sports is a place to sink into a childlike exuberance, held together by obvious falsehoods, but still fun to cling to, even as they unravel.
Belief, effort, and each other are what we have to work with, and that's proven more than worthy in the past. Mike Davis said as much in the last interview he gave before his passing in 2022, to Lois Beckett of The Guardian.
"I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resisters, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless."
"I’ve always been influenced by the poems Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the second world war, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, well, it’s a new dark ages … how do people resist in the dark ages?"
"What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight."
If you need a pick-me-up, read the obituary of Renfew Christie, who died this week at 76. Renfrew was a South African scholar who dedicated his life to the anti-apartheid movement in that country. His efforts, which landed him in prison for seven years, contributed to the successful sabotage and "hobbling" of the apartheid regime's nuclear weapons program.
An ordinary person doing heroic things. Through our phones, we've witnessed Palestinians fight through over two years of abject hell. Now we see people on the ground in Minneapolis doing everything they can to keep their neighbours safe from masked agents of the state. Those are very different scales of horror, but one begat and informs the other.
We need to remember — to believe — that they can be stopped.
David Roth
Can sports do anything here? What about writing about sports? Those feel like exceptionally stupid questions to ask right now, but, if anything, they are things to rally around. A reminder of what a person is fighting for: community, friendship, passion, the freedom to move, love, to express, and to be yourself.
And, of course, most importantly, they're a place to opine about some uncs who are not chopped or washed.
Something I can't stop watching: Ryan Lay's YouTube channel.
Good thing: The latest issue of Plank is available to order now. Or subscribe. It looks so damn good.
Another good thing: "A long, strange trip: Veteran Sask. reporter Dan Zakreski looks back as retirement begins" via CBC.
Yes, another good thing:
Village Psychic
Yes, yes, another good thing:
Yes, yes, yes, another good thing:
The Skateboarder’s Companion
Yes, yes, yes, yes, another good thing: Zach Harris talked to Dashawn Jordan for Sole Retriever.
A couple of good Jenkem things:
Ben Komins
A good year-end Top Five thing: Be forewarned, Walker says some exceptionally nice things about this newsletter.
Walker Ryan
Good thing about some bad people:
Reeves Wiedeman
Until next week… the sun is shining. If you can, get outside. The air is crisp. It feels good on the skin. You can see your breath. Watch as it slips back into the world in front of you.
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.
