Backcountry.com Newsletter Articles

Muscle Milk sponsored the 2010 Ride Shakedown. The Men’s halfpipe gold-medalist says he can’t be friends with the people he competes against. The military regularly advertises in leading snowboard magazines. Olympic snowboarding TV ratings were second only to figure skating, yet snowboarders are still banned from three resorts in the US.

What happened? How did winning, money and being a jock take over? To me, this isn’t snowboarding—and I think the kids are tired of it. Snowboarding is not a sport, it is a culture. On the sport side we have this mainstream world of media and sponsors focused on the dollars. On the culture side we have what snowboarding has traditionally been all about, people who just love to ride. Most of us are drifting somewhere between the two. I make a living off of snowboarding and wouldn’t want to work in any other industry, but it’s when the motivation is solely about money and not about snowboarding that I start to question people and intentions.

A great example of this is the current state of snowboard mags. Total page numbers are dropping while ad pages are rising. There are even rumors of adding sections on freestyle skiers to the mix with the hope of raising readership. Do the editors think we are too stupid to notice, or that we don’t care? Where is the focus? It is the magazines that concentrate on the smaller diehard snowboard markets that we should support, and they are the ones that are going to survive this tough time.

So should we give up? Too much doom and gloom? Hell no! This is a prime time to take snowboarding back. Currently there are some awesome new, young and true snowboard companies that we can support. Crews are creating their own zines, films and blogs that anyone can access, thanks to the Internet. DIY still exists! We do not have to support the ridiculous façade of a media that thinks the wonder ginger kid invented the double cork. This is the point of Mr. Robson’s Neighborhood. It is to discuss and highlight the good and bad in snowboarding; a ‘neighborhood watch’, if you will. Let’s make sure we are helping take snowboarding in the right direction.

Do you disagree with me, think I am a jackass, or think you know who threw the first double cork? Then email me at neighbor@dogfunk.com and stay tuned. You might even get your email posted in Mr. Robson’s Neighborhood.

The Neighborhood Watch

Good Neighbors:

• Jimmy Kimmel, for backing up real snowboarding
• Volcom, for running an ad for Kevin

The neighbor who ran over your skateboard to prove “a point”:

• Bob Costas, no explanation needed
• Shakedown Comp, there is no need for jock-juice in snowboarding!