“why not / the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won / and in a sense we’re all winning / we’re alive” – Frank O’Hara, “Steps”
Remember the Leap of Faith? That trick from the “School II” level of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2? 27-stair, I think it was? Posers might describe it as “two flights of stairs for students to use” or “an 18’8” drop that’ll shatter your legs if you try it.” If you haven’t thought about it in a while, here’s the spoiler: no one has ever landed it.
And no one ever will! They put an elevator there.
Now, this happened way back in 2005, which shows you how unplugged I am from skateboarding news. I watch Skateline from time to time and sorta nod along like I’m not 35. Recently, Jenkem revisited the Leap of Faith with Jamie Thomas (who broke his board making the gap famous) and Richard King (who broke his leg).
There’s no reason for Point Loma High not to build that elevator—accessibility is important. Five minutes of Googling doesn’t immediately reveal whether they built it for accessibility reasons or “end the scourge of skateboarders” reasons, and who cares? The elevator needed to go there. Yet I’m left feeling like Max Brod must’ve felt when Kafka told him to burn The Trial unpublished.
One of my earlier columns for Cracked talked about skateboarders fixing city infrastructure for free, like when Nyjah Huston and his crew fixed up Clipper Ledge. In that column, I said that skateboarders—specifically street skaters, the ones who annoy pedestrians—infuse a sense of life into cities, the same way buskers and other street performers do. The same way murals do. The same way strikes do. The same way any interruption from the capitalist grind of commute-work-shop-drink-eat-commute injects life into public spaces. Yes, I recognize these intrusions can be very annoying, but I really want us to think about them differently.
This blog is very on the record in the “sports are art” camp, and that’s perhaps more true in sports where objective scores aren’t the goal. Skateboarding shows us exhilarating, exciting things human beings can do with their bodies; it is, no matter how stuffily the squares huff, rad.
Sports have flashpoint moments as necessary parts of their mythology, something for future generations to one-up. Magic won five titles with the Lakers, so Michael won six with the Bulls in the next decade. The Z-Boys skated empty pools in Dogtown, so Tony Hawk landed a 900.
It’s bummer we only have wistful “what could have been” retrospectives on the Leap of Faith instead of nostalgic YouTube remixes of Jaime Thomas landing it and rolling away. No matter how stupid it is to jump 18’8” on wheels.
I live in the United States, where the response to people being in public is usually hostility. There are no bathrooms anywhere—not in most retail stories, not at public transit stations, not at the playgrounds where my four-year-old jumps off stuff. Cops are called on Bucket Boys. Homeless encampments are met over and over again with police violence. Unhoused people on a street corner aren’t a failure of society, they’re “bad for property values.” Don’t press play on this video if you’re not strong enough to stomach three minutes of the most insidious menace 2 society:
Speaking of public transit, when I worked in the Campus Transportation Department at Loyola, the amount of “is the CTA safe” questions I got from scared parents of incoming freshmen probably outnumbered the CTA’s annual budget. If you’re not familiar with the term “hostile architecture,” you won’t be able to stop seeing it once you learn about it.
There’s probably no way for city governments to embrace skateboarders without rendering skating completely uncool. Lori Lightfoot rolling municipal maintenance budget increases in the name of MORE HEELFLIPS is U2 on the iPhone 6. But I want to live in a society where skateboarding isn’t viewed as some irritating blight, where the smell of grilling street food swims through the windows of every corporate office building, where a little overflow live music from a bar isn’t a cop call. We’re all dying, and every day, powerful people are trying to expedite the process. Let’s make life cool before we go.
RIP Leap of Faith (17 years late, I guess). Good on you for never being conquered.
One more Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater memory-poke: The Carlsbad Gap from the “School II” level? It’s also been demolished. Turned into a parking lot. Joni Mitchell never learned to skateboard, to my knowledge, neither did Cassandra.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris