Robert Brink - Writer

Festivus: YBAm / Damn Am Awards

March 25, 2009 | Skip To The Comments (0)

Festivus: YBAm / Damn Am Awards
By Rob Brink
The Skateboard Mag, May 2009

Skateboarders totally deserve awards.

I mean, after all, we’re the best, right? Plus, winning is utterly important. You’re cool if you win stuff. When you win, kids (and even adults in some cases) all over the world want to be like you. Chicks want you to penetrate them. People throw money and free crap at you. You don’t have to wait in line to get into cool parties, and then, once you’re in the party, everyone will buy you free drinks and stare at you and want to stand by you… the possibilities are endless when you’re a winner in this world.

Don’t ever be a loser or your life will suck. You will fail at everything and get pimples and girls will ignore you and your friends and total strangers will ostracize you until you cry and there will be YouTube videos of you doing embarrassing stuff and you’ll want to Elliot Smith yourself. Just ask someone you know who’s a loser. They’ll tell you it sucks. Not every loser is cool and triumphant like Napoleon Dynamite. He’s a romanticized and idealized utopian loser. Real losers don’t come out on top of the world and catch a delicious bass to give to their girl in the end like he did. Real losers are miserable and have the worst luck ever and would never catch a delicious bass. They’d end up reeling in an old shoe or a tire and just as they are doing that, some winner will run up behind them and push them into the mucky, brackish lake.

You usually have to be really good at skateboarding to win an award these days. Or have a good video part or a really cool contest run or the best outfit. No fair! But there’s more to skateboarding than that!

The Skateboard Mag, along with the Skatepark of Tampa wanted to make more winners out of skateboarders and add to the amount of opportunity there is to be a winner every year. But rather than hold some ego-stroking awards ceremony that mimics the Oscars or the Country Music Awards, TSM and SPoT decided to do an awards show at ASR in January that was fun and different and honored some of the lesser-celebrated things in our little skateboarding bubble.

And these awards are powerful. For example, Chris Troy winning the “Most Annoying” award will automatically make him cool, and probably less annoying in the eyes of anyone who knows he won an award. An instant winner! As for runners up Tyler Adams Hawkins and Nick Merlino… well, they might have to keep being annoying in 2009 and gun for next year’s Most Annoying award to make it to un-annoying winner status.

Rumor has it a few new awards will be added next year so stay tuned. They include: “Hottest MILF,” “Largest Weight Gain,” “Welcome to Puberty,” “Come Out of the Closet Already,” “Oldest Virgin,” “Please Leave Skateboarding Now,” “Best Image Makeover,” “Skates Like a Girl,” “Your Agent/Skoach/Manager/Skate Dad Sucks,” “Drinking and Smoking Pot Doesn’t Make You That Cool So Stop Bragging About it” and “The Dude Most Likely to Never Win an Award” award.