Naming debate gets extensively reported by famous bourgeoise media house!

Don’t you love a little of what a small-town boy might call legitimacy?

Earlier today, The NY Times, that elitist and bourgeoise, but generally above-board, digital-and-print newspaper, ran a comprehensive story on the debate surrounding the naming of Albee Layer’s backside alley-oop 540.

Called, “When a surfer lands a skateboard trick, who gets to name it?” reporter Matt Ruby gets into it with Todd Richards (whose evangelising on the subject sold me good, read that here), Albee, Tony Hawke, Kelly Slater and so on.

Excerpts:

Slater’s frustration with the situation is palpable. “We’ve got snowboarders trying to tell us how to name surf maneuvers,” he said. “I don’t know a single surfer trying to do the opposite and name snowboard maneuvers. We should all know enough to know we should stay in our lane.”

“It’s more about progressing and sticking things cleanly in sections that make sense for those maneuvers. If you force something and it looks bad it doesn’t really matter how much you rotated unless it’s a full 180+ more than anything that has been landed.” — Kelly Slater, on the importance of calculating degrees of rotation.

“The cultures are different and surfers might not know what skaters have called something or maybe each sport wants ownership on some level of their respective maneuvers. Also, in surfing something we all agree is done on the forehand can be regarded as a backhand maneuver in skate or snow because they have a stagnant surface.” — Kelly Slater on the importance of parity between sports.

In the End, Who Gets to Decide?

“It’s up to them, and for sure because they’re speaking to their tribe that’s gonna translate better and then you know as skateboarders we just kind of sit back and snicker … it’s kind of like how snowboarding they coined the term frontside indy which doesn’t exist in skateboarding and it’s sort of a taboo to say but I understand how that came to be.” — Tony Hawk on the who gets to decide in the end.

“Surfers are going to look ridiculous calling something that has been done in a different sport by a different name,” Richards said. “It is about paying respect to the people who came first and pioneered the tricks. They killed themselves to put their names on tricks.”

Read it all here.