There was a time when young boys and girls played neighborhood football games and organized giant H-O-R-S-E competitions in the driveway.
Little Johnny played soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter and tee-ball in the spring. Organized sports dominated most children’s extracurricular lives.
Parents shelled out 60 bucks for football cleats, drove the runts to practice four days a week and spread out their lawn chairs every Saturday afternoon to watch Johnny and Sally run around a field after a soccer ball in a disorganized herd.
At some point, a few years back, a great shift in influence occurred. By some miraculous, unexplainable phenomenon, Tony Hawk turned every suburb into a skate park, seemingly overnight.
Kids ditched sneakers for skateboards and 10-speeds for BMX bikes. Extreme sports were suddenly a force to be reckoned with.
The warmer months weren’t the only ones to be tampered with. Soon enough, Shawn White emerged, and Johnny laid down his hockey stick to strap on his snowboard. Extreme sports, naturally, know no boundaries.
Now, John Madden is pressured by Hawk in video game sales, and American Express has levied American debt on White.
These two, along with many others, are becoming financial moguls in the midst of the extreme sports craze.
Forty-dollar cleats and $25 soccer team fees evolved into $400 snowboards and $500 ski resort passes.
The boom has hardly hit.
ESPN’s X Games are 13 years running and stronger than ever. Once just a summer event, winter joined in a couple years after conception. Television channels dedicated to these renegade athletes have been born, such as FuelTV.
Kids rock Bam Margera shoes instead of Jordans. They practice back-flips instead of free throws. They construct ramps out of wood and PVC pipes instead of baseball diamonds out of tires and trees.
What’s so bad about embracing alternatives? Not every kid should be weighed down with shoulder pads or stuffed into a leotard.
Nevertheless, rivalries develop in high schools between the “jocks” and the “skaters” (a label that, oddly enough, seems to encompass anyone in any extreme sport).
Extreme athletes carry the reputation of troublemakers. Parents try to divert kids into school-sponsored athletics and away from unrecognized extracurricular activities.
Although parents can make the argument that they don’t want their children acting like Margera or sporting tattoos like motocross star Carey Hart, would they rather their children smoke pot like Ricky Williams or get in on-court brawls like Ron Artest?
Either path kids go down these days — be it conventional sports or extreme sports — they have their share of good and bad role models to emulate.
It is important that people realize that extreme sport involvement doesn’t always reflect criminal activity involvement. In fact, sometimes it’s just the opposite. This is especially important in Utah where the extreme sports boom is in full bloom.
Since the Olympics stopped by in 2002, extreme sports are a mainstay. The Dew Tour dropped in this summer to appease the masses.
The revolution is in effect.
