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I was listening to The Jason Ellis Show (which, frankly, has become the only thing worth listening to on Satellite Radio) the other day and Rob Dyrdek was on.  It appears that Dyrdek is trying to put together a new skateboarding league for street skaters called, uh, the Street League.  Here’s all you need to know.

1. Invite only and you need a signature shoe to even qualify.
2. First place pays out six figures.
3. Last place gets five grand
4. Dyrdek owns your ass.

It’s that last bit that piqued my interest.  One of the rules of the Street League is that it’s exclusive.  If you skate the SL you can’t skate the X-Games or Dew Tour.  I thought “wow, that’s pretty jacked up,” but apparently it was the skaters’ idea.  Nobody likes the X-Games and this was as good an excuse as any to screw them.  So, assuming that Dyrdek gets this off the ground what you’ll see at the X-Games is Chaz Ortiz and Nyjah Houston as the marquee names in street skating.

What does this have to do with BMX?  Well, a couple of things to remember. 1. When it started the X-Games was a 10 day, 40+ hour television extravaganza.  It’s, really, a shadow of its former self and the Dew Tour is barely better.  Remember the Gravity Games were a solid month of prime, major network sports coverage, but this year the Dew Tour was mostly relegated to super late night on USA coverage.  Which is to say, the networks’ dedication to the events is, at best, waning. Secondly, remember how their used to be downhill BMX in the X-Games, then Travis Pastrana wanted to go rallying and, boom, substitution?  Also remember how vert was dropped from the X-Games until Shaun White said superpark was dumb?  See how Danny Way was able to get an entire new event created based on his own fever dream? BMX in the X-Games is, more than most other sports it seems, subject to the whims of non-BMX atheletes.

So, what happens if all of the big names in skateboarding take their balls and go home?  Well, it’s possible that the X/Dew people will attempt to play the role of kingmakers and push the next generation (see: Sheckler, Ryan/Ortiz, Chaz/Houston, Nyjah) but they put so much press into being “the superbowl of action sports” that that’s unlikely.  They could try to push some other sport, but what other sport has that kind of penetration?  To put it another way (and rip off Chris Rock) if Ryan Sheckler woke up with Jamie Bestwick money he’d slit his own throat and jump out a window.

Yeah, you’ll never get the part of your life devoted to “double pits to chesty” back, but Sheckler probably bought a new Mercedes with the money he made off this web vid.

If I were a betting man (and I’m not, because I’m lousy at it) I’d say that the X/Dew people will do the most logical thing and step up the skateboarding purses…by cutting other crap.  I mean, Dyrdek’s got a lot of money, but he can’t outspend The Great Satan Comcast.  That being said, Disney and NBC/Universal aren’t trying to throw good money after bad.  X-Games have already killed dirt and they tried to kill vert once.  I’m pretty sure that the street luge guys thought they were safe when the sky surfers got the axe.  I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen, or that BMX will be the first thing to get stuff cut, just that that seems to be the most logical way this thing’ll play out.

Of course, it won’t because I think it will.  Still, it might be time for Mirra to get to work on the Park League.

Seriously, dude knocked himself out in the middle of his third run and was so far ahead of everyone else that he won, anyway.  He can’t even remember his runs.

Greatest
of
All
Time

Daniel Dhers doesn’t advance to the finals.  I don’t know how good or bad his runs were since they decided to televise FMX instead for most of it.  Diogo Canina is the number 1 qualifier.  Still, does anyoneone remember lip tricks?  Chase Hawk’s footjams and a single double peg is all I saw by way of moves at coping.

So, the X-Games are this weekend.  I’ve watched most of them so far.

Lacking any stomach churning crashes from the Mega Ramp this year they just kept replaying Jake Brown and Danny Way’s mishaps from previous years.  So, it’s good to know that ESPN is still happy to feed the bottom, even if there’s no actual food.

This year’s X-Games medals are little sculptures of hands throwing up the “LA” hand sign.  Because nothing says street more than a bunch of middle class kids competing in niche athletics.

Speaking of which, Travis Pastrana showed up to try to rock a 360 flip.  No one could seem to grasp the concept of a 360 flip so it was called a “Rodeo Flip” a “corked out 720″ and “The Toilet Paper Roll.”  The last one is what Pastrana actually called it, which is dumb.  It’s a trick that already has a name, doing it on a motorcycle doesn’t make it a different trick.  Steve Caballero, a fakie to 360 is a Full Cab, I don’t care that you “can’t ollie a bicycle”.  I think Cary Hart is the only one that gets it, he’s always held that the Hart Attack should just be called a Superman Seatgrab.

Anyway ESPN hyped the living hell out of Pastrana’s return, at Mirra’s urging, to FMX best trick.  Boy, they must have felt like douchenuggets when he crashed his first try and decided to pack it in.

He did better than Willie Watts.  Watts is from Broken Arrow, OK, which is the hometown of one of my best friends.  I only say this because I know that they don’t put fail into the water in BA, but, Watts hyped up a crazy backflip body varial and then…two dead sailors.  So awesome.

In a break from typical X-Games over hyping/under delivering/manufactured drama, the Adaptive Motocross race was actually a very cool thing.

Over in BMX Big Air Kevin Robinson regained his title in a last minute rally against Chad Kagy and Dave Mirra.  Mirra tried to do a no-handed 3 across the 70 footer and, instead, gave a master class on how to eject from a trick gone wrong.  Anthony Napolitan pulled the first double front flip in competition, much of the crowd thought he should have won.  He shouldn’t have won.  The competition is “Big Air” not “big trick to not even big air if it was on a regular vert ramp.”  Not taking anything away from the double front, that was awesome, but what Anthony did was the equivalent of Jay Miron devoting his entire last X-Games park appearance to landing a 360 double whip across a box.

I missed the Big Air Rail Jam, which honestly seems like a contest created so Danny Way could win a gold medal. Danny way got a gold medal.

Apparently BMX Park is this afternoon.  W00t. And by “W00t” I mean, “Daniel Dhers is going to do 70 consecutive 720s and a handfull of flairs to win, because park – theoretically the most diverse of all BMX disciplines – has been reduced to a box jump competition.”

Oh, by the way, they threw BMX “street” on during “X-Center” the hour before the X-Games was listed to start.  Really?  Why the hell wouldn’t you just start the X-Games an hour earlier?  What since did that make?  None, just like the street contest, which had a format that I found hard to understand (8 tries at each obstical) and which just seemed to kill momentum.