For those who don't read Powder, I retyped it here. It's a very good editorial, and definitely needs some coverage on here. And it's another excuse to not do anything for finals. I'm going to fail out of school, allright!
Powder Magazine, Dec. 2006, Vol.35 No.4.
Tricked Out: By Stealing Skate and Snowboard Names, Skiers Look Like Dorks.
To be frank, I find it a little embarassing. Skiers these days, in an attempt to hang with the "cool" sports, are clamping onto skateboarding and snowboarding, puppy-dogging around behind them like the kid wearing the Winger shirt on Bevis and Butthead. It's straight up lame! We're trying so friggen hard to be hip that we're revealing ourselves as geeks.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in modern trick names, especially the whole cab/switch/fakie phenomenon. As my skateboarding friends like to point out, it's technically impossible even for snowboarders to truly ride "switch." Skiers can do it, they like to tell me, only if we click out and put our skis back on tails first. Fakie is a little more appropriate, but could someone please tell me what skiing ass-first has in common with skateboarding legend Steve Caballero doing a fakie 360?
Very little. For one, we have two boards, and we face forward -not sideways- much more like an ice skater than a vert skater. So why do we pick on poor Steve? Because we're trying too hard to be as cool as skateboarders, plain and simple. That, or we lack creativity.
Why not rip off a name that is more appropriate? Instead of a Cab 9, why not a Salchow 9? The reason: figure skaters like Ulrich Salchow are such fruitcakes that skiers don't want to be associated with them.
The truth is, in a global scheme, figure skating has always been more popular than snowboarding, so why not glom onto that sport? Knock on any door in middle America and ask who Morgan Lafonte is, and you're as likely to hear "the Premiere of Canada" as "the snowboarder who used to jump wearing just a bra on MTV." Yet everyone will know who Dorothy Hammill is, 30 years after she did anything in her sport. (I mean, she still has a haircut named after her.) Shaun White? To most of America, he's that kid who looks like Carrot Top.
Even the kids from South Park, born and raised near snowboard-crazy Breckenridge. Do you hear them singing "What would Marc-Frank Montoya do?" No, you don't, and I'll tell what Brian Boitano wouldn't do- a fakie 5-4-anything!
Skiers used to be the pioneers. We invented the action sports movie, and were the first atheletes to wear the unfortunate moniker "extreme." We use to name our own tricks, and they made sense. Spread eagle? You know what that's going to look like before you even see it. What's daffier than a daffy? I'm not even going to start on the screamin' seamen. We used to honor our own heroes, like Eddie Lincoln.
If we, as a sport, ever want to command the kind of respect we deserve, we need to stop trying to be what we aren't. We should start by ditching the whole switch/fakie/cab thing. Let's get back to our roots and pick names that fit the tricks. Look at a skier riding backward. What's he leading with, the first thing down the hill? You guessed it, that little circle of stink we call the "brown eye." So next time you're boasting to your friends about the backward trick you threw down that afternoon, call it what it is: Brown Eye First. Then raise your mug and clink glasses to your first BiF 9.
Second to last sentance made me laugh so damn hard.
I completely and fully agree, though. You want to be legit and not have to describe what you do as "Snowboarding, but with skis that have tips on both ends"? Then stop jocking snowboarders. I for one will be referring to backwards skiing/tricks as brown eye first from here on out, because not only does it make sense, but its funnier than all hell.
