There's Only One Hubba

 Yesterday I started to watch an episode of the skateboarding podcast The Nine Club, before realizing that if I was going to watch TV focused telling the stories of skateboarders, and casting YouTube videos does seem to count as TV now, that I should just watch Epicly Later'd, the pinnacle of the form, rather than a sometimes boring meandering conversation taped in a studio.

I watched the multi-part edition of the show on Guy Mariano, focused on him conquering an intense drug problem and re-emerging as one of history's all-time great street skaters with the release of Fully Flared, and that promptly went into another episode of the show as soon as it ended, since I've been watching them in a huge YouTube playlist.

The thing is, every skateboarder knows Guy Mariano. He's headlined several landmark videos, Video Days, Fully Flared, Pretty Sweet, and is up there as one of the strongest influence on tech street skating that exists today (how Guy still manages to do tech with an extreme amount of style is a topic for another time). After his series on Epicly Later'd ended, the autoplay led me to watch one on someone who I had never heard of before, James Kelch.

I find that these episodes, which tell the stories of skaters who fell through the cracks and weren't in the limelight, are often my favourite ones. It's fun to get the stories of the people you know, of course I want to hear Eric Koston's lifestory, but really those episodes just serve to fill in the areas in between what you've already seen. With episodes like this one on Kelch, Epicly Later'd gives you a much fuller picture of the world of skateboarding. There's so many small moments in this that equally hilarious, due to Kelch's natural charisma, and heartbreaking. We learn about what happens around the pros. 

Much like the rest of the world, everything in skateboarding isn't ideal. For every Nyjah making tonnes of money from Street League and Nike, there are those who could never make it happen, despite devoting themselves to it fully. They were still in the right place at the right time, but it didn't matter. Of course, those stories still deserve to be told.