The Kareem Campbell Pager Mystery Has Been Solved

If you follow the comments section of this website, you may have noticed a slight hubbub under our “Chillest Lines” study. A commenter insisted with surefire certainty that Kareem Campbell did not check his pager in Trilogy, and had checked it only during his opening line in 20 Shot Sequence. We called an emergency weekend meeting to study both of these clips, wondering how the error had made it past the eyes of some of the internet’s most esteemed skate nerds and was only being brought to light 36 hours after the post went live. (You’ll notice multiple parties helped in compiling the list via the thank yous at the bottom.) Do we issue a correction? An apology? Hold our first-ever press conference to remedy this crucial reporting error?

Following an admission of the believed-to-be error, we replaced the Trilogy screencaps with 20 Shot Sequence ones in utter shame. But then, Frozen in Carbonite, the Jim Garrison of our day and as astute of a Menace scholar as any (he was the one who contributed Billy Valdez’s “Cafe Line” to the list) came to the rescue with a conclusion after some meticulous research:

See for yourself:

20 Shot Sequence (1995)

Trilogy (1996)

The camera cutting off the torso makes it more difficult to spot, but there is clearly a waistline shuffle and return after the nollie 180, similar to the instance 20 Shot.

So many emotions. First, a sense of validation. “See, we *were* right!” Then, more questions emerged. “Why was he getting paged so much? Was it the same person on both occasions? Was Kareem really the only skateboarder in history who was ever *that* popular — how are dudes not checking texts and Instagram notifications five times in each line they film nowadays?”

The skateboard-internet works in strange ways, because yesterday, some guys from New Zealand (of all places) published the interview that even skateboarding’s hardest-working biographer couldn’t get.

Now, we finally know who paged him and why it happened so often, ending nearly two decades of speculation.

Now the line in the school — where legend has it that you check your pager mid run. Please tell me that is true, that is so fucking cool. Who was it by the way? An important page?

My girlfriend was pregnant at the time with Kareem Jr. I had to make sure that I check it [the pager] at all times, you never know if she could be going into labour. But it [the page] was just a homie.

Not only that — these New Zealanders asked a hard hitting question that O’Dell understandably would have preferred to avoid…if given the chance. (“Patrick tried a million and one times and I kept flaking, plus my travels and different things I had going on in my life, basically I fucked up.”)

Staying with Menace for a while, I always loved everything that you guys put out. Although by their own admission the team was not technically the best out there, they were just amazing, the whole vibe was. Did you know it was going make such a big impact?

Menace wasn’t about having the illest kid that’s going out and killing himself to be what the company was, it was about real core skaters.

He’s not as talkative or nostalgic as one would hope, but he does address varying topics from the KCKs, to City Stars, to what he did with the $100 after landing his ender in New World Order. Also, he claims there’s a part on the horizon when it’s “least expected.” Considering most abandoned wishful expectations of another Kareem part after Street Cinema came out and was largely Kareem-less, we’ll take anything at this point.

Read the whole thing on Muckmouth.com, and a big kudos to those guys for their work in getting that out there.