Professional skateboarders must be doing pretty well these days if you gauge success by the number of children one has. One glance around the skateboarding friends and family section and it looked more like a day care center than anything else. You almost have to expect that with southern California competitions everyone comes out to these events, even the many wives who have been home creating the professional skaters of the future.

Well, enough about the reproductive habits of skaters. Actually, if I may dwell on that for a second, imagine spinning that concept into a discovery channel style documentary and attacking the issue from a scientific angle.

"Here he is, a prime specimen of a male skateboarder. Look at the tattoos on that one - he's obviously been doing this for some time. Let's try to capture him and get a better look ..."

We would have to include an entire show just on Birdhouse skate legend Steve Berra who dominated yesterday's competition with his beautiful, Hollywood-female-anti-hero wife Juliette Lewis applauding. Not that they have any kids together; just based on the fact that she's really cute and kicked ass in Natural Born Killers.

Rune ruling.

Could it be true that the best skaters have the most kids? Would that be a product of winning a lot of money and being able to afford them, or simply that you have a lot of sex and are consequently a very happy man, and thus more relaxed for competition? One could justify Tony Hawk's success by the fact that he has two little stars-to-be riding around in his minivan (his oldest is already a better skater than I am and he's not even six yet). If that were the case Bucky Lasek would probably take second place and Bob Burnquist would end up somewhere in the top three. Young bucks like Anthony Furlong and Pierre Luc Gagnon would have to seriously get busy in order to even come close to making it in the biz. But you can't start at the top, can you? It takes years of practice.

Case in point: Rune Glifberg, with a kid on the way, managed to clean up the Vert competition today with a killer run in the second round. Rune, who usually isn't the most consistent skater during competition, must have woken up this morning and said to himself, "today I will lay an all-out beat-down on all of my friends in front of a lot of people," because that's exactly what he did.

That brings us to Mr. Pierre Luc Gagnon, who, according the theory that we're testing today, must have a whole bunch of French Canadian illegitimate children running around because he was killing it today and came in second place. Mr. Bucky Lasek rounded out the top three, weighing in at two children.

A Volcom kid and his trophy. Rune Glifberg.

The Brazilian contingent of Bob Burnquist and Lincoln Ueda rounded out the top five with some pretty amazing skating. Always smooth, Bob seemed to be going a little bigger than usual today and switched out some of his techy lip tricks for some big bold back-to-back 540s. Lincoln, on the other hand, who usually goes huge, seemed to be going even bigger and many feel he deserved better than a fifth place. After all, not everyone can throw down back-to-back kick-flip-to-double-grind reverts, which he seemed to be able to do with the greatest of ease. If Lincoln had a kid he probably would have placed top three.

Altogether, the rest of the skaters had a pretty decent showing and it was nice to see a few new faces on the ramp. Chris Gentry had a few really solid runs in the prelims and one in the finals but it didn't seem to be enough. Rumor is that Chris and his wife Ricca will be having a kid sometime in the future, which should allow him to easily break through the top three. Anthony Furlong had some noteable moves as well with a really nice frontside nose grind on the hump, which was a nice new addition to the ramp that Tim Payne and the boys were good enough to dream up.

Midgets on patrol.

Could the "more kids equals great skaters" theory have some merit? One school of thought is that vert skateboarders are the modern day prophets of this world, or at least Southern California, and need to spread their seed in order to insure the skateablilty of the future and one day maybe lead us to the Promised Land. Rita Marley, wife of Bob, always said that she really didn't care how many women her Natty husband slept with; she was more concerned in him spreading the seed.

Another school of thought is that Vert Skating is a dangerous sport and in order to compete you have to be a "loaded gun" of sorts. Of course, it could just be that kids aren't cheap and these guys are finally starting to make the kind of money they deserve after years of just getting by. If this theory is correct, Rune, Pierre-Luc, and Bucky's wives and girlfriends should be expecting in the very near future because they all made a whole bunch of money today.

Official Results
1. Rune Glifberg
2. Pierre Luc Gagnon
3. Bucky Lasek
4. Bob Burnquist
5. Lincoln Ueda
6. Andy Macdonald
7. Colin McKay
8. Chris Gentry
9. Anthony Furlong
10. Brian Howard

   Send to a friend  | Most sent  | Submit your photo or video