TH: No, and he doesn't, either. His training is skating, but he does approach the whole thing like it is about competition and doing well in the rankings.
PB: Is that your attitude?
TH: No. I always just took it event by event. My goal was to just do the best I could.
PB: Was there ever a competition where you really went after a competitor with the intent of burying them?
TH: No, but there were always rivalries created in the magazines and media. They chose to focus on that, but I never fell into that and internalized it.
PB: Skateboarders generally avoid the mainstream media, yet all of the top pros participated in ESPN's X Games when it launched in 1995. Some critics claim it was because the prize money was more than they could earn anywhere else.
TH: I don't think that was it. There really weren't too many events at that time because people couldn't afford to do them. So any event that was put on, people were excited about it. Plus, it was cool because it was televised. The only difference now is that these shows are doing really well and have a lot of viewers, but the prize money hasn't increased significantly. If you take, for example, the sports that the X Games is broadcast at the same time as -- like Nascar, golf and basketball -- our prize money is a joke in comparison.
PB: At the 2000 Gravity Games in Philadelphia, pro skateboarder Bob Burnquist complained that the judging was unfairly slanted toward flashier tricks, while the more difficult technical tricks were ignored. He even threw his second-place medal into the crowd. Is unfair judging a concern during these mainstream events?
TH: Last year I felt the Gravity Games had the most skewed judging of any event.
PB: Any event?
TH: Any event. And the reason for that is the World Cup Skateboarding Association sanctions all of the ESPN events and any other major event throughout the year. They supply the judges, criteria and organization. They weren't allowed to do the Gravity Games, so there is a whole different crew every time. There is someone who is organizing it, but it isn't someone who has been doing it for very long. They are just learning, and that isn't really the venue to test new ground.
The sad part is that the Gravity Games has more money behind it than X Games because it's on a major network. Their big claim was that they were offering the most prize money ever, but it wasn't that much more. It was just enough so that they could make that claim.
PB: Yet it airs against Sunday Night Football.
