What Your Deck Says About You
‘Skateboarding isn’t a sport, its art - it’s a lifestyle,’ is something the worst person at the skatepark has told you before.
We are a shit lot, us skaters. Skating isn’t art or sport, it’s something you do to make you feel better and help you bond with those around you and get you to escape your shitty reality for a little while, like a chess club, or meth. It doesn’t need to be anything more than that. I hear people all the time saying, ‘man, skating saved my life,’ and by that they mean they simply made a couple of friends in the eighth grade. The bar is so low for people.
Anyway, we are a shit lot, and within the shot lot, you can tell a lot about the others in the lot with you by their equipment. What they choose to ride is as distinctive and telling as the sort of overpriced Jordan’s a moron wears is to a sneaker head. Like how people say a pet starts to look like their owner, a skater looks like their board. By observing and respecting these complex connections, one might be able to find quick associations and size up the spot. For those who aren’t in the lot with us or perhaps are too deep in it to see their own reflection, here’s a nifty guide to help you identify who is who based on the wood they choose.
An FA board.
FA is so hot right now. FA. So hot. It is the board company to ride for, and thus everyone does, including you. You’re not good enough to be sponsored but you saw Cherry and want desperately to be as sexy and stylish as a teenage Sean Pablo and will simply have to buy the decks themselves at a (Su)premium. Your fellow customers range from the incredibly talented low-key park locals to the Dylan Rieder sub-genre tribute-payers to the ‘I don’t know, man, I’ve been skating for decades, I just need a board that’ll last and I don’t know any of these other new brands, but I love Dill, the Alien video was so sick, I’ll just get the board that I see everyone else riding,’-ers. FA is a sort of catch-all that requires little thought beyond deciding exactly how hard you want to have to pretend to understand the graphic.
A Quasi board.
You rip. You’re weird. Your favorite color is green. You come from the midwest.
A Rassvet board.
You have a middle part and are European and listen to SoundCloud mixes. Also, your favorite color is blue.
A Frog board.
You’re just the zaniest little skater, huh? Who’s a good boy? You! Now roll those size 40 loose fit dickies up one more time and get at that wallie to handrail! Land or slam!
A board with rails.
You know your limits, you know your strength, and above all, you know your weight, and for this, I respect you. You want to slide, and for a very long time, but you also have a tendency to crack boards, and you are realistic about your limitations. Or you’re just a random vert skater who doesn’t want to fuck up their Cab graphic. Or you are Cab. Either way, I back a board with rails. Unless you only put one rail on and not both. Commit to the bit or fuck off.
A 5Boro or adjacent East Coast core board.
You were born in the kind of place that looks like something Springsteen is always ‘singing’ about, and you want everyone to know it. You wear five-panel hats and your best friend is your bodega guy and you have the skill of Suciu but the temper of a silverback gorilla. You have sized up Brooklyn Banks rail for the last couple of years and are over the age of 30, or you’re a kid who just saw The Static. Either way, you’re good at skating but confusingly, and five years ago.
A Polar board.
Either you take film photos, paint, wear glasses that you may or may not need, manipulate girls by pretending to be polyamorous or queer, do exclusively slappy’s and no-comply’s and impossibles, or, you are a disciple of Nick Boserio and Shin Sanbongi and Eloc_503 and are therefore the gnarliest, most versatile, and most stylish skateboarder (wearing high-top Cons) in your city.
A Hockey board.
Hockey is the board brand for people who have gravel permanently lodged in their elbow, for people who make mixtapes on tapes, for people who think that the indecipherable metal font is sick, for people who call people who ride FA pussy’s, for people who are white, for people who are flow for Vans, for people who throw elbows in the pit, for people who live in Los Angeles, for people who have a Replacements tattoo, for people who fucking rip but it costs them an arm and a leg, for people who worship at the temple of the 80’s hardcore scene.
A cruiser board.
You don’t skate. You didn’t even used to skate. You’re not even one of those daredevils who bomb mountains on longboards. You’re just insufferable. Stop telling people that you skate. You don’t, and neither does your girlfriend who lives at the beach and never wears shoes and whose parents are secretly rich and who you will accidentally impregnate (how the fuck does anyone ‘accidentally’ impregnate?) before she turns twenty one.
A Primitive board.
You wear backwards hats and bring a phone tripod to the park to film yourself do the least-slid, least-stylish, most-desperate, most-sketchy half cab flip nose slide regular there ever was. You are also a sweetheart and - much in the way that a board company born of the magical talents of P-Rod doesn’t deserve the hate - you don’t deserve people shit talking you behind your back. Then again, you did set up a fucking tripod right in the middle of the run up to everything else in the park, so fuck off, man. I’ll still double tap your edit, though.
A local shop board.
You are a G. Just chillin’. You’re the shop homie, you skate on the weekends, low-key got some tricks, whatevs, man. You don’t care. You just wanna skate. Shop local. Support local. Attaboy.