Last week I received a letter from a regular reader of my column. The letter was from Suzy Blackmore, who has a son participating in the sport of skateboarding. Suzy goes on to describe her high school athletic prowess in both track and field and cheerleading. The letter concludes with Ms. Blackmore's Go Ask Your Dad question: Why is skateboarding not a recognized high school athletic sport? If her son could only get a letter jacket for skateboarding he would be justified as a true athlete, as she was in her younger days, and focus more on his athleticism and the love of his sport.
As the fine line between sports and hobbies have been blurred in our society as of late, I have felt compelled to further shed light on this subject.
When I was younger I was a skater. I had a Tony Hawk skateboard that a friend of mine in high school helped me build by buying all the parts separately, then spending weeks putting it together. This was the way that real skaters back in the late 80's customized their boards. Connecting the wheels to the board actually only took a few minutes, it was applying the hundreds of Dead Kennedy and Black Flag stickers and the 15 gallons of Sex Wax that took up the most amount of time. It would have been too easy to buy a skateboard that already had the wheels installed by professional skateboard manufacturers, though this may have been a little bit safer.
One afternoon my wheels were finally on the board and the metal bearings actually rolled around inside the wheel cover as it turned making a very cool sound that resembled metal bearings rolling around inside the wheel cover. This was a huge step up from putting a Joker card in the back spoke of my BMX dirt bike wheel.
That summer we spent every day riding our boards and perfecting our tricks, like jumping over laid down trash cans and sliding effortlessly along the street curbs. Occasionally our boards even stayed under our feet. But above all we learned how to fall gracefully and 101 applications for Neo-Sporin.
But my reminiscence takes me away from the subject at hand. Even though we spent day after day on our boards, falling in some amazingly athletic ways, skateboarding was never looked upon by any adult, or even ourselves, as a sport. It was more of something that perhaps we did to aggravate our parents in our all black attire, or just to pass the long hot August days before school started back up when we could play soccer or baseball; real organized sports.
To get back to Ms. Blackmore's question, the answer is simply that skateboarding is not a sport, it is a hobby, much like shooting pool, playing poker, throwing darts, and crawdad grabbing. If all hobbies were sports, what would the play-by-play color commentary be like Saturday afternoon on ABC?
TV commentator: (in a whispered voice similar to PGA championships) "Billy Bob has been motionless for 47 minutes as he watches the crawdads. Now he is ready to grab one in this breathtaking new sport of crawdad grabbing."
TV commentator: (in an shouting and enthusiastic voice) "He's got it. Billy Bob has the King Daddy Crawdad!... No, wait, he's bleeding, it's not the King Daddy Crawdad, it's a, it's a broken Budweiser longneck that has lodged itself into his palm between his thumb and forefinger. Oh my goodness, the pain, the angst, the agony!"
I know that Billy Bob would have a tough time explaining that story to the nurses in the ER. I know I did.
And remember, when you want the right answer, Go Ask Your Dad Michael lives in Jonesborough, TN, with wife Heather, and children,
Ashley, Dylan, Hannah, Emily, and Anthony, and is currently completing
his first book of fatherly parental advice, The Great All-American Dad
Misconceptions. "Go Ask Your Dad" is a syndicated column that tackles
the difficult sports related issues that have been asked of a father of
5 over the years through a humorous perspective. There are always sage
(even if not completely practical) answers when you "Go Ask Your Dad".
Any comments and questions can be sent to Michael Vaughn at
, and other sports articles can be read at www.tricitiessports.com
