Kevin Staab #3.

He sells sanctuary.

After riding for Sims up until the early 1990s, Kevin currently has a board out on Birdhouse. He rode for Shine, Hollywood and a bad version of Vision during the in-between time.

There was an interview with Kevin in a recent issue of the Skateboard Mag that talked mostly about the tricks that he had come up with over the years, which included the blunt and the fakie ollie. There was a full version of the interview that appeared on the Mag's website that included a whole lot more on what he has been up to since the Sims days. The conversation on tricks was good, yet it would have been nice to have a longer interview in print that actually covered Kevin's history to provide a little context as to who he is. I know space is limited and editorial decisions have to be made based on what will sell magazines, which means twenty pages on a forty year old vert skater is probably out of the question. However, it wouldn't hurt to run longer interviews with people that actually have stuff to say versus a sixteen year old talking about how fast his car goes. I fully acknowledge that not everybody is going to have interesting things to say or give the best interview or even connect with the interviewer and that's how things are. Staab would certainly fall into the category of having more to say as he has been in and out of the skateboarding spotlight since the vert glory days of the 80s. And I bet crusty old dudes who see a Kevin Staab interview would like to know what he's been up to.

Even though I'm basically singling out the Skateboard Mag with this particular example, I'm not doing it out of malice, but rather as constructive criticism. For the most part, their interviews are good stuff, although I wish they had more developed stories like when they first started. Two paragraphs by a photographer about how awesome a trip was does not constitute anything that resembles an article. That goes for anybody in skateboarding journalism.

Has anybody noticed how unusual the Birdhouse pro team is? I'm not saying that as a putdown either, but as an observation about the four guys they make models for. You've got two forty something vert skaters with Tony Hawk and Staab, a street legend in his mid 30s with Willy Santos and the new kid, Aaron "Jaws" Homoki.

Grant Brittain was the camera operator.

Transworld - September 1989 Volume 7 Number 5