Dear Mayor,
I’m one of those people that say they’ve been “saved”. There are a lot of us now, 32 million worldwide and the numbers are climbing rapidly. Although still relatively small in comparison with other clans, our institution has been the driving force behind popular fashions, cutting-edge music, film, and most modern art since the day our culture spawned 60 years ago. Whether alone, or in large groups, our place of worship is never limited to a church, temple or mosque, as we’re free to practice anywhere we like. Though seen in some ways as a cult, what binds us as a whole is not Jesus Christ, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha or even Hello Kitty. In fact our “fundamentalists” are no more than professional athletes, and our scholars produce what become our “bibles” in the form of magazines and DVD’s.
Never sure of whether to call itself a sport, an art, or even a new religion; skateboarding has always been in a league of its own. Together we skateboarders are a secure and unified nation. We share the same joy, the same pain, the same culture, all without needing a single leader to lead us, or boarders to fence us in. We are multinational, and within each of the countless counties we occupy we have no trouble being multicultural. All ages included, our way of life is physically and mentally healthy. A vast majority of us are staying out of trouble and away from a life of videogames while our games are often seen as a vast improvement over others. In the past decade, according to the American NSGA (National Sporting Goods Association) our relatively young sport has been replacing older sports such as Badminton, Billiards, Golf, Soccer, Baseball and Softball, Tennis and Table Tennis, Mountain Biking, and even Basketball, both on the Play Station and in the real world.
It was 17 years ago I started skateboarding. Since then it’s been without a doubt the most positive element in my life, and like so many guilt-ridden Catholics I feel indebt to its existence. Though great for everyone, skateboarding is a perfect outlet for “at risk” kids especially. Personally, any time my life started to go downhill, or if I got into trouble, it was always skateboarding that brought me back to life. Skateboarding’s secret societal healing power is in how it naturally fosters a need to be different and allows those who do it to progress and develop a healthy sense of independence, giving them improved confidence in all walks of life. It provides kids one more opportunity to get outside and actually do something instead of get bored and into trouble. Skateboarding continues to support life long after childhood as well. Being closely connected with the skateboard industry grants an array of highly satisfying job opportunities. I personally make a harmonious living instructing skateboarding, shooting photography and video of professionals, writing stories for skateboard magazines and even designing parks and plazas to skate in.
As one of many grateful skateboarders in existence, I sense a strong need to introduce skateboarding to others, protect what has made it great and keep alive the things that attracted me to it in the first place. It’s my desire to “keep it real", to keep the roots or fundamental characteristics functioning and in intact. Like a farmer I make sure it has plenty regular waterings, enough fertile soil to root in, and as much light as it can get. Being from the west I’ve witnessed skateboarding in its mature form and feasted on its much larger fruit. Taiwan planted the seed just 10 years ago and it, like many of Taiwan’s borrowed culture or sports, is still a slow growing, vulnerable seedling, in need of special care and nurturing, and must first be grown tall and strong before any type of fruit can be had.
CURRENT ISSUES
In a land lacking translated magazines and subtitled DVDs from the western world, and no strong local history, the skateboard scene here is like an empty shell. Without a clear idea of specific origins, skateboarding and its surrounding economy suffers from the same thing the “Hip Hop”, “Punk” or other borrowed western “youth cultures” suffer from in Taiwan. It quickly becomes a short lived fashion show if not enough new fans know what makes those western scenes shine so bright to begin with, what spawned them, or how they grew so big as to notice them halfway around the world.
In what looks like proof of this theory, over the few years I’ve been in the Taiwanese skateboarding scene, the Taiwanese participation in skateboarding seems as though it has stalled at a modest midway point, odd for a sport that’s #2 next to Snowboarding in a list of the fastest growing sports on the planet. “Faddism” has indeed set in as too many have treated it as meaningless fashion, doing little or nothing to sustain a push forward or to help Taiwan’s skateboarding evolve and grow into the kind of scene one would and should have seen by now.
Not helping the situation also, is the fact that in Taiwan, and in much of the surrounding countries in Asia, skateboarding and its appeal to young people have been used by official “outside” organizations and their corporate associates mainly as a way to help promote the next cell phone, or products that have very little, if anything, to do with actual skateboarding. At the same time, skateboarding and its high potential for boosting tourism and its many profound social health benefits are being ignored and thus not cared for or utilized to the full extent they could be. Official decisions and planning that are said to aid in the promotion of the sport of skateboarding in Taiwan are currently being made by those who would not dare step on a skateboard themselves, and since they don’t skate they naturally know very little about skateboarding. Unfortunately for the Taiwanese tax payers, these “outsider associations” and there confused ideas on skateboarding have been approved by the Taiwan government to promote skateboarding since it first appeared in Taiwan barley 10 years ago. The Chinese Extreme Sports Association (CXA), to name a major example, is officially approved by the federal government to build “skateparks” and put on promotional events in name of something called the “X-Games”. It is quite apparent to whom the facilitation is supposedly for, that these planners and organizers lack the essential skills, experience, and cultural knowledge needed to help produce a strong, long-lasting skateboard scene in Taiwan. In fact, most of the local skaters I’ve talked to believe very strongly that in the C.X.A.’s “misdeeds”, they and their fantasies about us, our scene and industry, may actually be doing more harm than good. It is becoming ever more obvious that what they lack is the involvement of proper expert talent, and in this case they need not search any further than the skaters themselves.
Taiwanese skaters have had next to zero say and with the experts shut out, the parks they steam ahead to build for us, using strange partnerships and at costs that are strangely much too high, lack the necessary user-input and are inappropriately designed. To this day there are over 20 caged-in “X-Games” parks in Taiwan (about one in every major town), all cookie-cutter in nature, and not a single one made with expert skateboarder input. Instead they merely copy what they’ve seen on ESPN (another “outsider institution” wanting in). Up until recently, Taiwanese skateboarders (most of them merely high school aged) were not able, and in some cases too lazy or even unwilling to organize to attain official status and proper government support. But now with worse and worse parks going up, and more and more corporations taking us for granted in these contests, and with less and less respect to our culture, we’ve had no choice but to take matters into our own hands. Even skaters as young as 13 are slowly starting to realize a few things, things that have led to something called the Taichung Skateboarders Association. To become a recognizable and respected group in our community, autonomous in our direction, less vulnerable to exploitation and in charge of what we need to sustain natural growth; we needed to form the TSA. With careful long-term planning, we believe Taiwan’s skateboard scene and its surrounding industry can attain the kind of greatness and exposure it normally attains in every other country it exists in once skaters themselves are in the driver’s seat.
WHY THE OUTSIDERS WANT IN…
The Big Money in Skateboarding
l There are an estimated 32 million skateboarders in the world, 12 million of whom are in the U.S.
l Skateboards and skateboard-related products, from about 300 manufacturers of professional-level equipment, generate approximately $5.2 billion in annual retail sales around the world.
l “Tony Hawk Pro Skater” video game captured the #1 ranking in both sales and revenue for video game sales in 2000, and has continued to achieve top spot each year since.
l The 2001 Nickelodeon TV Kid’s Choice Awards placed Tony Hawk as “Favorite Male Athlete” in front of Tiger Woods, KobeBryant, and Shaqille O’Neal.
l Tony Hawk is the 9th most searched for Athlete on yahoo.
l Skateboarding is growing faster than mountain biking, golfing and 50 other sports tracked by the National Sporting Goods Association.
l “More Americans rode skateboards last year than played Baseball, according to the Sporting Goods Association.” –USA Today, Aug. 17, 2001
l Since 1987 the growth rate for skateboarding has been 7.2 percent per year, while baseball declined 27.9 percent and basketball grew only 5.1 percent in that same period. (From the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association’s January 2001 "Sports Participation Topline Report")
PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING
Visions for the future:
Taiwan’s first real skater-designed skate parks and multi-use plazas
Skateparks should be much more than just a place to skate; they should be powerful generators. They should generate more skateboarders and keep them skateboarding forever after they start.
Involving the youth and those with greater experience has been proven to work in Canada, the United States, Australia, and all over Europe. In Canada I was one of the founding members of the Vancouver Skate Park Coalition (VSPC), a coalition of skateboarders and BMX riders fighting for a place of our own, something our government had refused to grant us for well over 20 years.
We first sought a single indoor facility for the long Canadian winters 9 years ago., When we finally got approval to build a, “for skateboarders - by skateboarders” park, it was a huge success. Since then we’ve managed to help construct over 50 (cost-effective) other ones, each better than the last. They’ve been labeled the best in the world by professionals and skateboard magazines for being the most “modern”, “creative” and “technically advanced” concrete skate parks in North America for years and years. They have been hailed by parents, teachers, the police and the government for providing a sustained positive outlet to practice challenging skills and spend one’s time in a safe, social environment.
Because of an organized and highly passionate, self-motivated group like the VSPC, Vancouver is now discovering the benefits of some of the first “multi-use parks and plazas” in the world. The parks are a place where the skaters and the public co-exist comfortably in the same area, livening up parts of the city in the process.
“X”tremely Misunderstood
Last but not least, we as a skateboarding society want to inform the rest of society (especially the one that watches far too much TV), that skateboarding is not all about rings of fire or daredevil freak shows. What we do is about personal growth and our own individual successes. To 99% of us, skateboarding is not “X-treme”. In fact most of us are offended by mere use of it. Some even detest the word extreme or any cute use of the letter “X” in relation to us, since it has literally come to symbolize the corporate exploits of our talent, image and positive energy. At the very least, the word “X”-treme“ reminds us of the overly used marketing propaganda that all too often bears a dorky picture of a phony skateboarder, serving only to further confuse the public.
Style or technique, it doesn’t matter, skateboarding is completely free and self-paced. To the average skater a televised corporate contest seems a lot like a cheap corny circus act, devoid of meaning or soul. The corporate sponsored contests in Taiwan are rarely judged by skaters and the courses that we are enticed to perform on are made even worse than the “X” parks. Attendance by skaters in the televised “X-Games” have gone down over the years as they begin to see the events are mere jokes. Skaters in Taiwan’s young emerging skateboard scene are now finally old enough, or awake enough to suspect a certain form of meddling and many are becoming increasingly disappointed or annoyed with them generally.
A park of our very own making (events included)… can change all that and do a much better job of promoting skateboarding and the positive roll it naturally plays in any modern society.
Our plan is to eventually build (and take care of) a skater-designed, multi-use plaza and park, as well as an indoor facility for skateboarding, art and music. I like to think of the idea as a “Stock 20” for skateboarders.
Your campaigns have always caught my attention as they often emphasize support for the youth and nurturing the diverse cultures that come to Taichung, as well as the quintessential importance of tourism. It seems you have a clear vision of what it will take to make Taichung a truly modern and international city, especially as it relates to your young people, the ones bringing new life and culture to the city.
The TSA would like to pull you away from your busy schedule and invite you to one of our monthly meetings to show you what we’re currently working on and discuss these issues in more detail.
As everyone knows, your young people truly are the future of Taiwan! ….Let’s help make it both a healthy and thriving one.
In sincere respect to you, your island, and all your people,
Vaughan Neville
TSA Interim Coordinator /
VSPC Foreign Affairs
