X-Games Follow a Different Beat

Thursday, August 15, 2002

 

BY GREG BISHOP
Star-Ledger Staff

 

The athletes will take one glance around the First Union Center Complex in Philadelphia and realize how far action sports have come. No more makeshift courses on City Hall steps, no more skating away from local police enforcement.

They'll be surrounded by an emerging culture, thousands of kids in baggy pants who buy their skateboarding videos and clothing lines while bobbing their heads to the same music. They'll compete in huge arenas modified into giant playgrounds. And all for the X Games VIII, beginning today and ending Monday, complete with seven competitions, 300 athletes and more than $1 million in prize money.

Some will be excited about the growth. Others will cringe as anti-establishment becomes part of the mainstream. But because of the magnitude of the competition, all of them will be there, along with an expected 200,000-plus people.

To put it in X Games-speak, action sports have come a long way, dude. Athletes' bank accounts are proof. So are the skate parks in a neighborhood near you. Or the kids in the baggy pants and baseball caps -- turned backward -- who are trading bats for skateboards or basketballs for BMX bikes.

"This is really a trend instead of a fad," said Ron Semiao, director of the X Games and the man who convinced cable TV it was ready for action sports. "'This is not the Hula-Hoop. It's about choices. It's about excitement. And believe me, it's growing."

 

 

THE RISE IN POPULARITY

 

Most people trace action sports to the 1970s, when groups of Southern California teenagers got high, listened to rock 'n' roll and skated along the bottoms of pools without water.

Fast-forward to 1993, when Semiao stood in front of the Newport, R.I., city council and succeeded in selling the notion that 200 action-sports athletes would be good for the city.

Then fast-forward to last week, when three friends from West Orange -- Peter Sleva, 14; Chris Lopez, 13; and Nogui Gonzalez, 16 -- spent their day cruising all over the ramps at JT's Skatepark in West Orange.

They are part of an emerging statistical body that has seen tremendous growth in action sports and Semiao's once-farfetched vision come to fruition. Don't believe? Consider this:

 

• A Harris Interactive Survey, conducted in 2000, found the X Games were the second-most appealing event to kids 6-17, behind only the Olympics.

   

   

• The 2001 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards selected Tony Hawk as the Favorite Male Sports Star, ahead of Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal.

   

   

• The National Sporting Goods Association shows that from 1995-2000, three sports achieved growth in participation for boys 7-17: skateboarding (129.6 percent), snowboarding (119.3) and golf (31.8).

   

  Which is why Semiao calls skate parks the "ballfields of the 21st century" and movies such as "XXX" -- which critics describe as the X Games meet James Bond -- made $46 million in its first week at the box office, while traditional sports see a decline in participation. And why X Games sports such as snowboarding are now part of the Olympics, and three former X Games medalists -- Ross Powers, Danny Kass and J.J. Thomas -- took home Olympic medals this year.

  "Extreme sports, that's what kids like today," said Clayton Keeler, the president for a proposed XArena in Trenton, who is banking on just that. "Who the heck wants to go to a baseball field, get two minutes of action and sit there for two hours at a time? A lot of sports I grew up with just aren't popular anymore."

  The West Orange trio agrees wholeheartedly. Save soccer, they don't care for any other traditional sports. They buy skateboards and rollerblades and videos with their favorite action sports stars. And they started skating because "it was fun" and "all my friends are doing it."

  "(Traditional sports) are not for me," Gonzalez said. "What does basketball have, you know? What's the whole point? They're just jumping and throwing the ball around. Skating, you have more freedom, you have no rules and people are just thinking, 'Wow. I might as well try this. It looks pretty cool.'"

   

   

  A CULTURE EMERGES

   

  Peter Roby, the director for the Center of Sport in Society at Northeastern University, studies sports for a living. And he has seen a trend in action sports move its way into a cycle more associated with sports now labeled traditional.

  "It's just like any sort of conventional sport," Roby said. "You see someone else doing it, and you're intrigued by it. You pursue it, you're pretty good at it and you commit to it in a major way. Next thing you know, you're pretty proficient in it. It's a cycle kids go through. And action sports is now a part of that cycle."

  Is it ever. Skaters make more money than their fathers these days, with Hawk, the Godfather of skating, the prime example. Products he puts his name on sell for more than $250 million annually, and he earns more than $10 million a year.

  There's also his video game, produced by EA Sports, which is the No. 2 seller behind John Madden's football game. And that, Roby says, is the pinnacle for action sports athletes, even more so than mainstream media coverage. Because kids play video games and buy music and clothes with deep pockets filled continually by their parents. And in the case of action sports, the three blend together to construct a culture kids can live in -- and a culture kids can pay to be a part of.

  "It's being an individual as opposed to being a team thing," said Ed Nussbaum, an X Games athlete and Rutgers graduate from Somerville. "It's individual expression. And that goes along with music that's popular today, different trends like clothing and fashion. Kids don't just want to skate. They want to look like skaters, listen to the same music. Half the appeal is the clothing that goes along with it or the music guys are listening to."

  People who capitalize on action sports hear this loud and clear. They know X Games programming has a median viewer age of 20, compared with 49 for baseball, 43 for football and 57 for the PGA Tour, according to ESPN.

  That's why Tom Briede, owner of Victory Bike, Board & Ski in Union, stocks his store with skateboards and rollerblades from action stars and why those goods keep flying off the rack. And it's why people such as Keeler will go to the Trenton City Council and ask to put in a 230,000-square-foot XArena, which will have motocross events and a wind tunnel to simulate skydiving. In fact, Keeler says his group already has gotten commitments for the $25 million necessary to get started and wants to host a future X Games event.

  "It's the culture that kids are growing up in," Roby said. "The proliferation of alternative sports and increasing popularity of it. We're talking everything -- from clothing, to the sports, to video games, right on down the line."

  And the future? How about 45-year-old dudes riding skateboards around the suburbs, skate parks in every mall and some calling action sports traditional?

   

   

  HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?

   

  While stars such as Hawk, Dave Mirra and Tevor Hoffman become household names, star in enough video games to buy small countries and bring action sports into the mainstream, some old-school constituents can be heard grumbling in the background.

  "Some of the top personalities, the top riders, they don't want to be mainstream, they don't want the exposure," Nussbaum said. "They feel they'll speak through their artistry, which is why some of the best riders might not be the best spokespersons for the sport."

  And this is where action sports reaches its crossroad: Selling out can make someone lose his street cred, but it can also make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. And, in the end, being mainstream means exposure, which means dollars in his bank account.

  "The exposure and the publicity is the best thing that can happen to the sport," Nussbaum said. "When the right riders come in contact with the mainstream media, there's going to be an explosion. I can promise you that."

  The catch is maintaining or increasing interest at the grassroots level, Roby said, where action sports took off strictly to veer away from the mainstream. It's a delicate balance, a how-much-is-too-much scenario, between growth and making action sports into something they were never supposed to become.

  Semiao is banking on continued growth, as is Keeler and his XArena project and the kids who skateboard in West Orange. They know the past, live in the present and can see the future of action sports.

  "The question is: Does that take away from the attitude and culture that surround these sports?" Roby said. "Does it become too antiseptic for them? I guess we'll have to find out."

  Copyright 2002 The Star-Ledger. Used by NJ.com with permission.