Zaturdays With Zitzer: The First Rule of Skateboarding is... Article at Skatepark of Tampa

Zaturdays With Zitzer: The First Rule of Skateboarding is...

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2015 by Paul

I want you to picture a skateboarder showing up at the plaza in a car full of rollerbladers, then strapping on his helmet, pushing mongo over to where you’re skating and trying to hard flip the stairs right after you bailed one. Nothing is considered cool about this scenario. Now, I have yet to see an actual rulebook about skateboarding, but despite our best efforts to pretend otherwise, we’ve laid down enough rules to fill volumes. And it’s okay, even Fight Club had rules and those dudes were anarchy personified. Granted, the rules we have aren’t officially sanctioned by anyone or anything, but try breaking them and see where you end up. No mongo, no one upping, no Instagramming a poached angle of the ender your friend just filmed, no ABDs at famous spots, no mall grabbing, no benihanas unless you’re laughing about it, no telling Phelps you landed a trick that you didn’t. And on and on.


The key difference is that we talk about skateboarding a LOT.

The new issue of The Skateboard Mag struck me as a rule breaker. No hammer on the cover, also a 22 page article about the Berrics’ In Transition contest from a couple months back, which includes a bunch of photos of tricks we already saw on video. Has not the rule always been that the photo hits BEFORE the video? Or coordinated to drop at the same time at least? So is it wrong to do it the other way around? Should we call the commissioner of skate? Write The Mag an angry letter?


Wait…where’s the triple kink ender pic?

Let’s think about it for a minute. Why has it always been the case that photos come out first, and then the video? Probably because the magazines used to dictate coverage, and video was the red headed stepchild of photography. Back in the day, Hi8 video was often pretty terrible looking, so first you wanted to see a really good looking photo, and then later you’d want to see the video somewhere for a hazy view of how the trick actually went down. Videos didn’t come out that often either, so if the mags had to sit on photos while they waited for the video, they’d have been sitting on a LOT of photos. But now, with really high quality video coming out nearly instantaneously, and magazines being forced to take more and more of a back seat, I’m here to say that maybe it’s time for a new rule, or no rule at all. The same might apply to benihanas. Just saying.


You saw the video of this months ago, what’re you going to do about it?

- Paul Zitzer

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