One heck of a read!
''I think the goal for kids now is to sell out''
“When the money came rolling back in and they started having arena contests, people were team jumping,” Grosso explains.
“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.”
“The thing is, Nike won,” Templeton says. “There are Nike and Vans as far as big money goes in skateboarding shoes, and everyone else lost. Everyone else is hanging by a thread, if you’re not one of the big companies like New Balance or adidas that subsidizes skateboarding through a global running shoe or basketball shoe business. Skateboarding as a whole never stood up to that, and the concept is that in the long-term, Nike doesn’t care about skateboarding. It’s just a bottom line, whereas the skater-owned companies do care about skateboarding. There’s probably more of a chance Emerica’s going to go out of business than Nike will.”
Full article here:
http://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2017/05/22/selling-tony-hawk-jeff-grosso-ed-templeton/