EDITORIAL: “Selling Out” with Tony Hawk, Jeff Grosso, & Ed Templeton
Selling out. Cashing in. Turning your back on your once held beliefs in exchange for money or better life options. As skateboarders, selling out is a concept we’re all familiar with, but it’s one that is as vague as it is intriguingly pervasive.
Ed Templeton, Jeff Grosso, and Tony Hawk all come from generations where selling out was an ongoing dialogue in the skateboarding community. Along with their peers, they experienced the ups and downs of skateboarding’s popularity and saw the effects of what kind of people entered the picture when there was money to be made, and who left when that door closed. Witnessing the rise and fall of the skateboarding industry and remaining for its resurgence bolstered loyalty amongst skateboarders and, coupled with mainstream society’s general distaste and misunderstanding of skateboarding, created a wariness to outside influence.
Hawk is obviously no stranger to corporate sponsorships. In the late ’90s and early aughts, there was Got Milk?, Apple, his own video game franchise, and even Club Med. Early on, however, Hawk got burned repeatedly due to his young age and lack of business experience and morals, which is why he did so much better in the ’90s in terms of handling himself professionally with corporate suitors.
“I think what happened was the whole attitude of selling out, or almost the concept of selling out came from the ’90s with bands,” Hawk told me. “Nirvana was this underground, cool punk band and then suddenly they’re huge, so they sold out. Yeah, the arenas are selling out, but the music is the same. I think that’s when that attitude really came into play.” Yes, Hawk made his fair share, and maybe a little more, but there was a distinct trickle down that afforded a lot of opportunities to a lot of other people outside his inner circle. He’s put a lot of his money back into skateboarding.
Jeff Grosso argues that the concept of selling out in skateboarding goes back as far as the Dogtown days, long before Hawk’s timeline. This would make sense given that that group is largely responsible for creating the primordial identity of modern skateboarding. In Grosso’s speculating words, “I’m sure people cried wolf in the ’70s. Jay Adams was still alive and it’s pretty well documented that he wasn’t stoked on what was happening to him and all his friends. They all wanted to ride for Dogtown, yadda yadda yadda… and then they all blew apart and went other places. But that’s a little before my time.”
Grosso remembers back to the first time he thinks he’d ever heard someone yell “Sellout!” in skateboarding. It was around 1987 when skateboarding experienced a boom in popularity with arena contests and “The Big 5” of Powell, Santa Cruz, Vision, Thrasher, and Transworld pretty much running the industry. In ’87, CCS was just two years old and expanding, and large companies like Gatorade were starting to target skaters in their advertisements. READ FULL ARTICLE HERE
