What A High Flying Time To Do A Boardslide — On ‘Hockey IV’ & The Boardslide As The Trick Of Our Moment

We live in stressful times.

Last year, 49% of Americans reported “frequently” feeling stressed, a 16% rise over the past twenty years, with 45% of respondents saying they felt stressed for “most of the day.”

As we stare into the abyss, we react in predictable ways. Sales of ultra processed comfort foods spike during times of stress, as do alcohol and tobacco revenues. And it makes sense: spinning over the world’s problems feels better after you’ve housed a box of Cheez-It’s and chased it with a few Jack and Cokes.

Skateboarders are not immune to what ails our planet, but skaters gotta skate. And how do we react to troubled times — on top of a murky forecast for our own industry, at that?

We do some goddamn boardslides, buddy.

Ten years ago, we were struck by the omnipresence of noseslides in Vans’ first-ever video. It seemed that after a decade-plus of the tech skateboarding arms race, the pros arrived at a reset. After all, the noseslide has been called the Building Block of Modern Skateboarding™.

However, if a noseslide is a scalpel, a boardslide is shovel.

Elegance is not a term that often lends itself to the boardslide. It is utilitarian. You are throwing the widest available space of a skateboard (and thus your highest odds of locking in) onto an obstacle and holding on for dear life — whether it’s on your first local parking block, or around the curve of a total non-spot next to Popeye’s Ledge while the friend who filmed your breakout part twelve years ago gets the fisheye angle.

Boardslides may be inelegant, that does not mean they are not beautiful. And with Hockey IV, we have arrived at a case for us living in the age of the boardslide.

It must be understood that rail skating as a genre never goes out of fashion. Skating rails alone is not a response to the abyss like the boardslides at hand are. A Foy-esque front crook or a Berle-ian nosegrind do not exactly lend themselves to the no-tomorrow mindset that rises during periods of high stress. They are exhibits of confidence; a man frontside crooked grinding a 20-set has a vision for his tomorrow. (Namely, a front crook down a 30-set.)

But Cruise Mosberg boardsliding a borderline vertical curved rail and landing into a hill, John Fitzgerald gambling his groin above a sack factory, or Ben Kadow sliding down a thirteen that is followed by another seven he needs to negotiate how to not faceplant down? Now we’re starting to see some signs of the times. Mozzarella sticks for dinner must not seem so fucking insane once you’ve logged one of those under your belt.

This age of anxiety may compound our taste for hyperbolic discounting — overindulging our worst impulses because their effects won’t be felt until the abstract future — but Hockey IV does not let us off the hook easy. It wouldn’t be the potentially era-defining video we suspect it will become if it just left us on a note of nihilism.

Like a Surgeon General’s warning on a pack of Marlboro Reds, or being facedown in the toilet after that one Cheez-It box turns into two while the whiskey bottle hits the halfway mark, some of the boardslides in Hockey IV shine a harsh light on this risky living. Get too crazy, and that Hockey board under your feet is going to snap in half as it sends you back to contend with reality.

But it’s all a reminder of the trick’s great power. We don’t boardslide to feel nothing.

We boardslide to feel something. To feel alive.