Unreliable science tells us that gingers are destined to be extinct within the next 100 years. So when that last ginger dies, he’ll be taking all of ginger kind with him. Or her. Someday down the line future humans will look back at Chet3000 as a novelty from a bygone era, although I suppose that would be true of Chet3000 with or without his gingerness. But the point is that things are always changing, for better or worse, and over the course of my 30+ years on the board, along with deck shapes, trick trends, outfit fads, media consumption habits, and the amount of free public parks at our disposal, there has been another significant shift in skateboarding, and it relates to the names we call our maneuvers.
Chet3000, Hair today…gone tomorrow.
I try to keep up with it all, to you know, stay relevant. But if you were at Tampa Am you might have heard me getting called out on the mic by my fellow MC, Andrew Cannon regarding Yoshi Tanenbaum’s frontside varial heelflip on the quarterpipe. At least that’s what I called it. Andrew said, “That’s a big heel.” I insisted on frontside varial heel, so he put it to the crowd for a vote. And well, big heel got mad cheers while frontside varial heel got crickets (boos actually). Go figure. In my defense, when someone does a frontside ollie late shove it on a quarterpipe, do we call that a late frontside big spin? Who knows, at this point maybe we do.
How could this guy be wrong?
Other examples of trick name evolution include the fakie frontside flip, which used to be known as a frontside half cab flip, and frontside 5-0 grinds which were always just called frontside grinds. Ask Jeff Grosso if you don’t believe me. And the then there’s the fakie full cab, formerly known as a Caballerial.
You call that a Caballerial? I don’t think so, buddy.
Caballero made up his namesake move in 1980. It’s been around long enough for us to know what to call it. The original Cab was done on tranny, coming up backwards, spinning backside 360 with no hands, and coming in forward. So the way I see it, a Caballerial is fakie by definition. If you do it going forward it’s a nollie Cab. A Caballerial is also 360 by definition. If you only go 180 it’s a half Cab. So calling a Cab a fakie full Cab is redundancy squared. Whether I’m right or wrong is almost irrelevant though, because the name changed and it’s not going back on account of me. But how soon before the Cab part gets taken out of the equation too? Calling it a fakie back 360 makes more sense than fakie full Cab. I’m just saying. Some day maybe when all of us are long gone, I’m picturing a lone ginger out there who still calls it a Caballerial. You know how that story ends.
- Paul Zitzer
