The fourth McClung's three-peat
Plus: José Vadi on big dunks, more All-Star stuff, silly and/or serious stuff, a low-effort travel blog, a beautiful 360p Canadian Flyout, and more.
The definitive weekly ranking and analysis of all the skateboarding and other things online that I cannot stop consuming and how it makes me feel, personally.
The fourth McClung's* three-peat
A special correspondence by José Vadi
Ball is life and so is skateboarding. This weekend proved as much as the Bay Area hosted the NBA's All-Star Weekend.
Many Venn diagrams were at play in the Bay, pulling skater, hooper, Nike shoe peddler and hypebeasts together last weekend – even a Jadakiss and Fabo cameo at the new Deluxe store – but I want to talk about another intersection that forces hoopers and skaters alike to bear witness: jumping over a car for competitive sport in this year’s installment of the annual slam dunk competition.
As a childhood Transworld-ass skater, I really miss the Euro contests of yore, when Kareem Campbell would switch frontside flip off jump ramps over a car before cradling Ed Templeton’s battered and bloodied skull with his shirt. That’s the type of comps I need in a post-Combi Contest society.
When now three-time NBA dunk champion Mac McClung jumped over a Kia K5, grabbing a ball mid-flight before doing a late 180 to reverse dunk and body splat, his foot clipping the hood of the car just slightly, images of previous Munster comps and even street hoops competitions at Harlem’s infamous Rucker Park, flashed before my eyes.
This dude McClung, shorter than Bryan Herman riding a pony, wears a headband that shapes a childlike middle-parted blonde tuft of hair. He’s not a household name and not a starting player, currently on a two-way contract between the Orlando Magic and their G-League affiliate. Instead, McClung is an opportunistic mercenary who shows up to ASW and makes TV announcers call out prominent professionals known for their dunks — notably, LeBron James and Zion Williamson — as fearing losing to an occasional professional.
At least Ja and the Greek Freak are intrigued at the challenge and hype of this seemingly reluctant jam session:
The All-Star competition is one of the few times when professional sports resembles a skate session. Everyone slowly crowding onto the court in thousand dollar outfits, jewelry, endorsement adjacent phones and cameras, trying to get the best angle of the sickest, most innovative dunks/tricks while holding onto each other out of anxious anticipation and communal delight, the dunk competition is always the Saturday night feature of ASW.
If McClung were a skater, he would win The Skateboard Mag’s AM of the Year by a landslide three years in a row if only judged by his dunks, those rim-jarring hammers that haven’t translated into long-term tick for NBA teams. Yet his annual showcase proves what skaters know painfully well: someone will always have more pop than you. And that the youth are restless and need opportunities to shine.
McClung’s slam-dunk dominance spoke of a larger out with the old in with the new undercurrent. The league was fanning flames of suspicion under their aging superstars’ feet, risking in the eyes of Draymond Green the soul of ASW by including first- and second-year players in Sunday’s game — singular — not the micro-tournament situation we received over the weekend.
McClung’s body demonstrates a gifted vertical. Who willingly ollies over a wall, let alone a car, from flat? Probably not a multi-ring NBA champion but McClung has zero to lose. McClung’s spread eagle leap was just the first astonishing installment of his dunk before his body’s late 180, perfectly timed after clearing the tallest peak of Kia Mountain, really elevated this AM leap to a PRO-level nail in a demo’s coffin. This, his first of multiple dunks that were all made first try.
I love the chaotic yard sale of McClung’s baker maker, his body spinning towards the baseline, almost hitting the hoop’s pylon. Announcers and former NBA greats Vince Carter and Reggie Miller immediately debated McClung’s foot clipping the car as detrimental to the dunk, reminding me of similar “Did TJ go over the can?” debates that fill a pro skater’s IG comments.
The late-trick energy continued throughout McClung’s subsequent dunks: tapping the ball against the rim gently before doing a bar-less pull-up over the rim and completing the dunk. He immediately waved his finger in the air, demanding viewers to run back the footy, peep the slo-mo, and witness the genius that unfolded so quickly as to merit immediate rewatching. McClung isn’t The Chief asking for one more make; he’s demanding the world to peep game on his make in the moment, like asking a filmer not just “Lemme see that” but rather “Lemme project that shit to a ten-story LED panel in Times Square.”
From dunks to Kasso, is ASW going to resemble Tony Hawk’s Boom Boom Huck Jam tour in the future? Will Marshawn Lynch ghost ride a golf cart inside a new skate plaza in Oakland? The future’s wide open, and, as McClung and his pop proved yet again, the sky’s the limit.
All-Star Weakend
Rank: eh
Mood: 🏀🏒🎢
The last week and change saw various sports attempting to celebrate their respective sports and attendant cultures by doing them a little differently. First, the NHL revamped their annual All-Star festivities by swapping the traditional All-Star Game with its 4 Nations Face-Off mini-tournament, which featured top players from Canada, Sweden, Finland, and the United States. The games were fast-paced and action-oriented from the jump, and it felt like there were real stakes to each match-up. Especially in a geo-political sense as Team Canada and USA opened their first match-up with the Montreal fans booing the American national anthem and a series of scraps in the opening seconds because, well, wouldn't you if the leader of the opposing team's country was threatening not just your economy with brutal tariffs but your sovereignty as a whole?
The NBA, also in the midst of its All-Star Week in the Bay Area, attempted a mini-tournament of its own that fell flat with fans, players, and pundits alike. This was accompanied by a skills and dunk competition that had its moments (see above) but was still sorely lacking. Sure, we are seeing some of the best players on the planet, but if those players don't care, why should the audience?
The real bright spot of the NBA's All-Star Week had nothing to do with basketball at all. The adjacent Jordan Fam Fest put on by the Jordan Brand featured a bite-sized North American Kasso event supported by Nike SB and Deluxe.
In a parking lot in Alameda, a handful of the world's best skateboarders attempted to make it through a wild, winding, and wet obstacle course. Even catching the scraps of it online via a smattering of Instagram Stories was more enjoyable than the rest of the NBA's ASW offerings.
So, what's the key to making a one-off product like this successful? As I've argued previously when writing about Kasso, silliness. Silliness provides a refuge from the overly prescriptive. But, the other component that needs to be present is, somewhat paradoxically, seriousness. There needs to be a reason to take the silliness seriously. With the NBA's All-Star game and challenges, the titles and scoring records have lost their lustre. Their tournament was silly but not in a way that made it appointment viewing — the stakes just aren't there.
With 4 Nations Face-Off, there are legitimate bragging rights on the line. Invoking nationalism as a selling point probably isn't great in the long term as the world and its relations continue to fracture and crumble, but the players on those teams clearly wanted to earn the title of best-of-the-best, which showed in the product — and I would be lying if I said I didn't yell let's fucking go when I walked into the Yucca Tap Room in Tempe, Arizona last night and saw the final score up on the television.
With Kasso, the silliness is presented in the extreme, as each challenge is hilariously, bafflingly difficult, even the imported version in Alameda. Grinding a rail over a body of water is no joke; just ask the skaters who fell in, which appeared to be all of them except Louie Lopez and Kasci Woolf.
I'd proffer that taking silliness seriously is not just key to an enjoyable entertainment product but an enjoyable life. No nationalism needed.
Serious, silly, both?
Rank: 3
Mood: 🤖
Okay, genuine question: is Levi Löffelberger being silly or serious? To have such incredible control of one's skateboard, as Löffelberger does, means a seriousness is at play, but the tricks in his Never Been Done video for kape Skateboards live in an inarticulable space between the two. These are undeniably silly tricks. They're almost grotesque in their silliness. But to achieve any of them demands a seriousness that only Löffelberger and perhaps a few more people on this planet possess.
What makes it difficult to parse is that these tricks do not look fun. The silliness comes from their absurdity. The absurd level of technicality. The absurd realization of the hours spent honing one's craft to be able to land them. For Löffelberger to get satisfaction from them is both seriously sick and, well, silly. Perhaps the most serious that silliness has ever been taken on a skateboard. Besides this, of course:
Low-effort travel blog: Slow Impact edition
Rank: 1
Mood: 🥟
Posting into the void (positive)
Rank: 1
Mood: 🕊️
It's easy to feel lost in history. History as it happens, as in the present. Ourselves, once our own universes, have become increasingly fixed, component-like. There was once work, home, and our social lives — places to exist and pass through with varying degrees of authenticity and at our own pace. Now, there is work and work projected through social media, home and home projected through social media, and our social lives, again, projected through social media. Screens on screens on screens.
Connected living is now more easily accessible as a series of digital inputs and interfaces. Creative expression lives the same fate. To share our work and offer proof of life and productivity, we must post ourselves. I'm doing it right now. Everyone is. There's so much of everyone that it's almost impossible to comprehend. There are 500 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute. Every day on Instagram, its two billion "monthly active users" make 67,305,600 posts.
Is this inherently bad? I'm not sure. If we weren't being used as raw material for the owners of these companies to amass their ungodly fortunes and achieve their increasingly fascistic aims, it would likely feel different because there is beauty in the digital self. Not as a stand-in for the flesh and its fleshy encounters as it's commonly used now, but as a document. A timestamp. Maybe that's also changed as technology and culture have evolved, resolutions became hyper-real, and the content they capture figuratively and literally ephemeral, because the other day, when I came across a horribly pixellated 360p YouTube clip of some kid doing "Canadian Flyouts" from 2004, it felt like stumbling across a shoebox full of faded polaroids.
There's an earnestness in it that feels of another time. When posting was an act of throwing yourself into a void with no real thought of an "audience" besides you and your friends. You simply shook the film until an image appeared.
Something to consider: The amazing covers of the new issue of Closer.
Good thing:
Village Psychic
Another good thing:
Slow Impacting: The weekend is upon us. If you're in Tempe, there's lots of good skateboarding stuff to take in.
On Saturday, I'll be a part of the "Does skateboarding need journalism panel?" Hosted and organized by Max Harrison-Caldwell and Mike Munzenrider, and featuring esteemed panellists Natalie Porter, Templeton Elliott, Willy Staley, Jessie Van Roechoudt, and Joa Field (Gifted Hater).
Should be fun. Come by and say hi if you're around :)
Until next week… please pick up after yourself. I mean, pick yourself up. You can't just lie there. For too long, at least. It's good to lie down sometimes.
*Tug McClung isn't real...?
Laser Quit Smoking Massage
NEWEST PRESS
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My new collection of essays is available now. I think you might like it. The Edmonton Journal thinks it's a "local book set to make a mark in 2024." The CBC called it "quirky yet insightful." lol.
Book cover by Hiller Goodspeed.
Right, Down + Circle
ECW PRESS
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I wrote a book about the history and cultural impact of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that you can find at your local bookshop or order online now. I think you might like this one, too.
Here’s what Michael Christie, Giller Prize-nominated author of the novels Greenwood and If I Fall, If I Die, had to say about the thing.
“With incisive and heartfelt writing, Cole Nowicki unlocks the source code of the massively influential cultural phenomenon that is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and finds wonderful Easter-eggs of meaning within. Even non-skaters will be wowed by this examination of youth, community, risk, and authenticity and gain a new appreciation of skateboarding’s massive influence upon our larger culture. This is my new favorite book about skateboarding, which isn’t really about skateboarding — it’s about everything.”
Photo via The Palomino.
