the underground was a position

Thrasher’s outlaw politics were a sales strategy, and the man who wrote them manufactured axles. I named Thrasher in this magazine’s mission statement. Here is what I think survives that.

Words: Pascale Arahia

Fausto Vitello owned Independent, a skateboard truck company, when he founded Thrasher in 1981. The magazine’s opening editorial position was that it would not sell out to corporate America. Some years later he explained the reasoning to Sports Illustrated with no apparent discomfort: the clean approach had not worked, so they went the other way and made themselves outlaws, because that was how they could see to promote the sport. George Powell of the Powell Corporation said the same thing in flatter language. Skateboarding had to go underground to survive, because “mystique was good for the sport.”

Both statements sit in Emily Chivers Yochim’s history of skateboarding’s mythologies, and I have not been able to put them down since I read them. Velvet Oracle’s mission statement names Thrasher as a benchmark. I wrote that line. I meant something like: a publication that belongs to the people it covers and answers to nobody standing above them. What I was pointing at was a magazine founded by a parts manufacturer who selected an editorial personality the way you select a shelf position.

The tempting move now is the betrayal story. Pure thing, ruined by money, the rest of us arriving too late to save it. Yochim’s book closes that exit. Her argument, assembled from five decades of mainstream press coverage, is that skateboarding has never had a moment outside the market and therefore never had a subcultural period to lose. It was a mass-produced toy and a homemade one simultaneously at the end of the 1950s. It was banned in twenty cities by 1965 and the subject of an Oscar-nominated short film in the same stretch of years. She calls it a corresponding culture: a practice that keeps a footing inside the mainstream and outside it at once, so its participants can experience themselves as resistant while holding entirely ordinary power.

The structure shows most clearly in Frank Nasworthy. Suspended from Virginia Polytechnic in 1970 for joining a political demonstration, he noticed that the polyurethane wheels being manufactured for roller skates would work under a skateboard, and he opened a company. The wheels restarted the sport. The Los Angeles Times called him a visionary. Rebel and entrepreneur, one body, no contradiction reported by anybody at the time. Yochim’s point is that this only reads as seamless in a country whose founding story is already about rebels walking away from an established power. American subcultures do not have to fight their way into the national narrative. They arrive pre-approved.

The photograph that did not become the origin

Thrasher’s own retrospective carries an image from 1952: a derby for anything with wheels, on New York’s East Side, outside the Children’s Aid Society. White girls in bloomers, mothers with prams, and both Black and white boys pushing milk crate scooters. Yochim notes that it turns up in industry retrospectives and almost nowhere else. The origin that took hold instead is Californian, suburban and white, and she makes the point that the American suburb was a space Black families were kept out of by redlining. The nostalgia skating runs on, safe streets and children out alone until dark, is nostalgia for a housing policy.

Dogtown and Z-Boys arrived in 2001, narrated by Sean Penn, and moved the origin again, to a run-down stretch of coast and a group of mostly white working-class boys. Kyle Kusz, whose critique Yochim carries into her chapter, reads the film as recentring whiteness by making it specific: give the boys poverty and a few ambiguous racial signals, and their whiteness stops being the thing anybody notices. The film won at Sundance. It was released at the exact moment the mainstream press had begun asking whether skating had been co-opted, and it works as a reminder, delivered at a useful time, that the practice was born in rebellion. A fashion buyer quoted that year described the appeal of the Dogtown look in terms of lifestyle and belonging. Yochim’s chapter takes its title from the end of that sentence.

The story is not that skateboarding was stolen. It is that skateboarding was never anyone’s to steal.

We imported the myth, not just the boards

Australia enters Yochim’s record once, as a line item. A New York Times list of places that opened skate parks in 1975 and 1976 places the town and shire of Albany, Western Australia, between Maryland and Chiba Beach. We appear in the history as an entry in an American inventory, which is more or less how we have written about skating ever since.

I do not think that is harmless. When a kid in Western Sydney inherits the Dogtown story, she inherits a frontier narrative constructed to make white American men legible as their country’s rebels, and the silences come attached to it. Australia has its own silences and they are not the same ones. We borrowed someone else’s national epic and have spent decades doing literary criticism on it instead of describing what is in front of us: the council bureaucracy, the car park behind the leagues club, the community-built bowl and who poured the concrete, the specific set of people security moves along and the specific set it does not.

You can argue against me here. Local scenes may have built their own mythology while I was not looking, and there are programs in this country running on nothing that resembles Dogtown. Fair enough. But open any Australian skate publication, this one included, and count how many reference points are American.

What survives

One detail from Yochim’s chapter has stayed useful to me. In board sports, authenticity came to be defined by distribution. An industry figure at a trade show explained the marker plainly: exclusive supply to small board shops rather than large retailers. Not motive, and not sales volume. Where the object was sold, and whose hands moved it. Nike failed in the skate market in 1995 with an award-winning campaign, and succeeded a decade later by putting shoes in board shops and sponsoring small contests.

So here is my position, stated so that it can be wrong. Independence in publishing is a fact about ownership and distribution, not a quality of character. Velvet Oracle is not more honest than a masthead with an advertising department. It is smaller and slower, and it answers to fewer people, and those are checkable facts about who pays and who decides. Any publication selling its independence as virtue rather than as structure is running Vitello’s play, and I have run it myself on the days I was tired.

The obvious objection is that a myth with a commercial birth certificate still produces real culture. Kids built ramps on the strength of a story a truck company sold them, and the ramps were real, and the friendships made on them were real, and a magazine you can hold is real whatever the reason it was founded. I grant all of that. My worry is narrower. A myth that produces culture is fine. A myth that produces exemption is not, and an outlaw slogan repeated for four decades became a licence to skip the audit.

I keep returning to that 1952 photograph. Nobody in it knows they are standing at the beginning of anything. There are girls in the frame. There are Black kids in the frame. It sits in a retrospective, and the origin we received instead is an empty pool in Santa Monica, shot beautifully, arriving precisely when the market needed it to.

Thrasher stays in the mission statement. I have changed what I mean by it.