Skateboarding Takes More Talent Than Other Sports

Admit it, if you’ve ever been one of those people to put down skateboarding it’s because you don’t understand it. Now that’s a bit foolish, isn’t it? You wouldn’t say that algebra is stupid just because you didn’t get good grades in it, would you? Well, maybe you would, if you’re the type of person who would rip on skaters. There may be some correlation there we should study…but I digress.

I considered calling the title of this post “Skateboarding is the best sport” but I didn’t feel I could back that up with evidence because “best” is such a subjective term that it could never be proven one way or the other. Then I thought about all the people who refuse to call skateboarding a sport, and they say it with a smirk as though anyone who does call it a sport must be an idiot because a skateboard is just a toy, you know, like an action figure. Then I thought about how I’m not sure I like calling skateboarding a sport, because after all, I wouldn’t want skateboarding to be in the Olympics or be associated with things like tennis or football, not that there’s anything wrong with those activities, but skateboarding is on a whole different level.

So the title is what it is because I felt it was adequately inflamatory, and because it lends itself to being proven by evidence.

With no further ado, here are my reasons why skateboarding obviously takes more talent than other sports, and is therefore superior.

1. People can’t just do it. How hard is it to play basketball? You can train a two-year old to do it. Give him a ball, tell him to throw it through a hoop, and he can pretty much do it. Take a player from the NBA and put him on a skateboard and he’ll probably break his hip. Just learning the basics of skateboarding generally take hundreds of hours of practice, compared to a few hours for any other sport.

2. More options. There is more variety in skateboarding than any other sport, hobby, or physical activity. There are literally hundreds of tricks, and each trick can be done regular or switch, on flatground, a bank, a mini-ramp, on vert, onto a handrail or flatbar, down stairs, or on ledges. That gives you a few thousand tricks, and that’s before you start talking about combining tricks. How many options do you have as a baseball player when you go to hit the ball? Yeah, you could say that the game gets complex because you have to think about who’s on base, who’s pitching, etc., but you see, we haven’t even had to get close to that with skateboarding yet because it’s interesting without going that far. Which leads to the next point.

3. Progression. Skateboarding keeps on progressing. Sure, every sport has a record broken now and then. In skateboarding we hardly track records because they’re being broken every day, and it’s been that way for 20 or 30 years. Every time someone invents a new trick that’s something that has never been done before. Then someone does it on a ledge. Then down a handrail. Then down a 15-stair handrail. And there are still thousands of things that haven’t been done, and there’s no limit. In football no one will ever throw a 200-yard touchdown pass, but with skateboarding just because someone does something doesn’t mean someone can’t go farther. Daewon does a nice fakie 360-flip manual to kickflip out, but I haven’t seen anyone do it down a handrail yet, let alone a 15-stair. But someone probably will someday.

4. Physical danger and mental challenges. The basic tricks in skateboarding involve overcoming fear. Being able to perform a technical trick in spite of your fear takes more talent than doing something technical when there is no fear. When’s the last time a basketball or baseball player felt fear? There’s almost nothing to be afraid of whatsoever. In football that’s a little different, but it still doesn’t compare to skateboarding. The fear of trying a new handrail, dropping into a huge bowl, or doing a flip trick down some stairs creates a mental block that has to be pushed through at every stage of the trick, from pushing to landing. It requires a level of mental commitment that doesn’t exist in many other sports. Maybe gymnastics and diving, but they lose for all the other reasons. Gymnastics is what you get when you put a skater on a flat mat with no skateboard and make him wear tights.

5. Combination of strength and skill. Some sports are all about strength, like biking. Some are all about skill, like ping-pong, although I guess there’s some strength involved there too. But obviously it’s 99% skill cause a fat guy in a wheelchair could play ping-pong. But skateboarding requires a lot of both. I’ve got a bit of skill, but I’m out of shape and weak so I have a hard time doing a lot of tricks I used to be able to do. But just because somebody is a bodybuilder doesn’t mean they can learn how to skateboard any faster than a skinny 12-year old. While skateboarding may not require more strength than any other sport, I believe it requires the highest combination of strength and skill compared to any other sport. I guess that’s because it requires more skill than any other to begin with. Oh yeah.

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Well, I’m lazy, so I could only come up with five reasons off the top of my head. If you’ve got any more I’d like to hear them. And to anyone who got riled reading this I’d be interested to hear your comments too. Excelsior!