Gershon Mosley #9.

Overlap.

Gershon does a switch Smith grind on a handrail. Based on his Transworld interview from December 1995, he was into hip hop and The Sundays for music. Some of his favorite skaters were Marc Johnson, Jamie Thomas, and Mike Vallely. He was stoked on skating vert and felt it was a natural progression from mini ramps. GMOS rode for Simple before Etnies/Emerica.

This is the ender on the look back at the transition from Etnies to Emerica. It was interesting to see how the changes happened. There was some team shuffling and riders departed for other sponsors as skateboarding grew in popularity in the later half of the 1990s. For instance, Gershon moved on to Osiris by November of 1997 and then switched to Globe by the end of 1998. Another fun one is Rune Glifberg. He was on Airwalk after Emerica and possibly departed Airwalk after his October 1998 Slap cover where he was wearing Vans. He belonged on Axion anyway. It's cool that Emerica is still going today, even with all the up and downs that go with skateboarding.

Vert Is Dead is taking a fall break.

I'll fire this thing up again on Monday, October 12th.

I might end up only doing two weeks of stuff this month. I've got something dark planned for Halloween and could opt to take it easy. I'll see how it goes. I've been skateboarding a little after work since the weather has been still been warm. Have a good one!

Thrasher - January 1997 Volume 17 Number 1

Chris Senn #16.

Overground.

It somehow made sense that Chris won Thrasher's SOTY for 1995. I can't really explain it, but it seemed like the correct choice at the time. This is perhaps because SOTY was a tad more low key back then and not the all out marketing campaign it has become in the last 15 years. The March 1996 issue that announced Chris had won featured Ron Whaley on the cover with only a blurb proclaiming the Senn Dog as the top skater of 1995. He did have a full interview. The award was an important thing, yet it was also treated with less reverence. When Eric Koston won for 1996, he cool guy'd an interview and the mag ran two pages of photos, which included a sequence from the X-Games. It's interesting how things change over time and to note the differences between different eras.

Thrasher - November 1996 Volume 16 Number 11