Zaturdays: Is Vert Cool Again?

In the late 1980s, names like Gator, Hawk, Hosoi, Grosso, Mountain, and Cab were the biggest in skateboarding. They were vert skaters, and vert skating was cool. The bowl scene had recently died a harsh death so they’d all been forced to transition (pun!) over to the pipe. But then around 1990 that whole Rocco thing happened. All of a sudden it was Koston, Jovantae, Carroll, and vert followed in bowls’ footsteps and shuffled out the door. A 1993 Slap magazine cover said “Vert? really!” It had become that rare. Things happened to keep vert hanging around skating’s periphery: Xgames, the 900, portable Red Bull halfpipes. But in terms of the bigger picture, it was a corpse that no one was clamoring to revive. For a lot of the guys who’d grown up skating vert and turned it into a career (hello!) there were limited options to keep doing it for a living. A lot of them included accepting less than desirable sponsorship offers from companies that made things like raver pants, chocolaty drinks, salted meat snacks, sub par footwear, and credit cards (that last one I know from personal experience). So with the hope of getting a Thrasher interview or the cover of TWS no longer on the table, vert dudes turned to high school demos and multi sport arena tours. Also during this time, pads came to be viewed as very uncool, and do I even need to talk about helmets? None of these things helped vert’s long-term prospects. But as we’ve seen before, things change. The first of these changes came in the early 2000s, as skating grew up a little and was suddenly being embraced by cities that decided to actually invest in skateboarding. Due to input from the new pioneers of laying ‘crete [like the Oregon dudes responsible for Burnside], the new parks that were built didn’t cater as much to what was happening in the streets as much as they did to what the builders thought should be happening in the streets, which ironically was lots of tranny. Although it took a while for skateboarding as a whole to warm up to the idea, here we are 15 years into the movement and skating has carved the corner. Tranny chomping is everywhere you look, the industry is supporting it, and people like Grant Taylor, Ronnie Sandoval, and Lizzie Armanto are in the money. In a full circle type of move, the bowl skaters have been embracing the pipe more and more as of late [albeit padless and in a slightly more handplant-centric manner than the OG vert dogs] and in doing so have helped to shift skateboarding’s focus [ever so slightly] back in the halfpipe’s direction. Rumble in Ramona, Session In the Abyss, Super Session; all important vertical pipe festivals that are gathering more momentum with each passing year. This very weekend in Malmo Sweden, the vert dudes, Bob Burnquist, Mike Frazier, Jimmy Wilkins, etc., are skating side by side with the bowl dudes, Willis Kimball, Chris Russell, etc., at Vert Attack 9. And just like that those fully padded and logo crazy Xgamers, toiling in relative obscurity [outside of the rosy glow of Xgames and Dew tour television coverage] for these many long years, are suddenly being made relevant again. Because if you’re standing on the ramp next to Ben Raybourn or Grayson Fletcher, or Grant, or Ronnie Sandoval, and you’re doing some things they can’t even do? Well then hey, maybe you might be kind of cool too. -Paul Zitzer