I get irked by how vague teams are these days. You're never really sure who rides for any given company at any given moment. Skateboarding is loose enough that there are always going to be ams that don't work out and fickle pros who jump ship often, but it isn't that hard to update the company website. Or you'll have a general sense of who rides for a company and then they'll run a 14 person group photo without credits. You can pick out the pros and a couple of the ams, but the other five riders remain a mystery. It doesn't help much when a brand will turn an amateur you haven't fully heard of pro with a cool video and then you never see them again until you find out later on that they're also the warehouse manager at the company. We're fully living in the Acme world of no pro models, except we have too many pro models to pick from. I'm all for keeping skateboarding quasi shady as that is part of the appeal, but I'd like a little more clarity on who officially rides for each company. It might even be time for another of those Transworld or Big Brother articles about what it means to be a professional skateboarder.
Thrasher - September 1996 Volume 16 Number 9
4 comments:
Bo Turner listed as a pro for Girl?
It's a typo. It's not the only typo in that list either. So many forgotten skaters and companies, too.
Similar to this, Airway had a full page ad listing all of their team riders. I think it'd be cool just to see some of the names, and think, "Oh yeah, I remember him." I think it was in Transworld around '91 or '92.
A lot of companies did the huge team list ads back then. Vans and Gullwing each did one, too.
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