Thrasher Magazine, skateboarding’s bible, turned 40 last month. The magazine is an adult now, but there are still no plans for it to act its age.
“Now that we’re 40, we definitely can’t wear cargo shorts anymore,” editor-in-chief Michael Burnett says, repeating a joke he made in the magazine, which still has a healthy print audience in these days of digital dominance. The family-owned monthly journal has a circulation of over 100,000, continuing to drive the youth to the streets to “skate and destroy.”
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the magazine bailed on holding in-person celebrations. If the Thrasher staff could, they’d probably host one of their Bust or Bail sessions, the antithesis of ESPN’s X-Games, where skaters compete for prize money by skating gnarly structures out in the wild — not professionally made ramps.
In many ways, celebrating Thrasher’s history is also recognizing the impact of San Francisco and the Bay Area on skateboarding. The city has been the magazine’s home for all of its 40 years, with offices in Hunters Point. Before he died, former editor-in-chief Jake Phelps called San Francisco “the center of skateboarding” — a strong opinion from someone known for making grand statements. But this is couched in truth, and Thrasher Magazine is a big reason why.
“We love San Francisco,” Thrasher webmaster and podcast host Greg “Schmitty” Smith says. “We take a lot of pride in the city, even with the Google kooks leaving and talking s—.”
Thrasher’s story begins with Fausto Vitello and Eric Swenson, who decided to start publishing a skateboarding magazine when everyone thought the “fad” was over. This was in 1980, when skate parks were closing all over and skateboards were stashed away in closets. Only the truly hard-core skaters stuck with it. Worst of all for those who still loved the sport was that Skateboarder, the biggest publication covering skating at that time, changed its name to Action Now and expanded its coverage to other outdoor activities like motocross and horseback riding.
“It sucked,” longtime Thrasher writer Chris “Wez” Laundry says. “There was some cool photography on stuff, but skateboarders don’t give a s— about horseback riding and roller disco.”
Vitello and Swenson needed skateboarding to stick around. Just two years earlier, the two longtime friends and former Harley-Davidson racing team mechanics had built their version of a skateboard truck — the metal part that connects the wheels to the wooden board. In 1976 they opened a foundry in Hunters Point called Ermico Enterprises Inc. and started making the Stroker Truck, a heavy chunk of metal that took its inspiration from an automobile suspension. It didn’t sell, so the crew moved onto a new model that was more like the other trucks of the day but more durable. The name they chose for their new product symbolized what they loved about skateboarding and life in general: Independent Trucks.
Vitello, the sport-obsessed Argentinian who moved to San Francisco at age 9 and learned English from listening to Giants games, discovered skateboarding in his 30s and fell in love with it. What really drew him to it, according to his son Tony, was the freedom it provided.
“There are no rules, and if there are any, it’s you and your buddies creating them,” Tony Vitello says.
Seeing that there was still a viable skateboarder market, the two pooled their resources to fill the void left by Skateboarder’s mutation and start their own magazine. They eschewed the hard-news style reporting on competitions that used to fill issues of Skateboarder and focused more on the culture surrounding skateboarding — the times when it was just a group of friends at a backyard ramp trading off on runs while punk rock played on the boombox.
Instead of recruiting publishing veterans, Vitello and Swenson tapped skaters to provide the vision and voice of Thrasher. The name came from punk rock pro skater Duane Peters. The magazine’s iconic logo was designed by its first editor-in-chief, former pro-skater Kevin Thatcher, using letterforms he bought at a store. The words and photographs originated from skateboarding artists like Craig Stecyk, a.k.a. Lowboy, and photo editor Mörizen Föche, known as MoFo, whose unfiltered take on skateboarding life made him a favorite of readers.
“Basically, the story is that they told MoFo, ‘Hey, read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and start writing like that,’” Smith says. “MoFo took that and ran.” (To hear MoFo’s side of the story, listen to his episode of the “Talkin’ Schmit” podcast).
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The first issue came out in January 1981, with the cover featuring an illustration of a skater riding up on the lip of an emptied swimming pool. Inside, there were photos of skate contests, downhill riding and a feature called “The Curbs of San Francisco” that praised the city’s designers for inadvertently creating curbs with perfect rails for “grinding” — sliding the board’s lip or trucks along something.
Skaters vibed with Thrasher’s attitude and the pictures of their favorite skaters doing the gnarliest tricks.
“When I was a kid, if you got a photo in Thrasher, you were doing something right,” San Francisco professional skateboarder Chico Brenes says.
But some parents did not like Thrasher. They hated the bad language in the magazine and its embrace of punk attitudes. Parents would tell them as much when they wrote letters to the magazine, which the staffers printed without shame. The criticism became serious after 1982, when the magazine ran the Stecyk-penned Skate and Destroy, a snotty diatribe calling out all those who wanted to bring down the magazine and skateboarding in general.
“To further keep those librarians fat, paranoid and happy, the obligatory teenage sex and denial music exposés will follow,” Stecyk wrote.
Apparently the article was a step too far for one mom, Peggy Cozens, and she could do something about it. Cozens and Larry Balma owned Independent Trucks’ biggest competitor, Tracker Trucks. Together they began publishing Transworld Skateboarding in May of 1985, and in the first issue Cozens railed against negative behavior in an essay titled Skate and Create. For the font of the headline, Cozens used a lettering similar to what Thrasher used for its logo, sending a clear signal about who she was addressing.
“Destruction requires no creativity, intelligence, sensitivity or skill. Anyone can grab a can of spray paint and screw up the walls,” Cozens wrote, under the name “Tracker Peggy.”
The battle that followed established Thrasher as the bad boys. and they embraced their role. While Thrasher trashed Transworld and embraced miscreant behavior, Transworld focused on positivity and the beauty of the sport, opening them up to advertisers that would never approach Thrasher, such as children’s summer camps.
“I put Tracker jokes in the magazine to this day even though the kids probably don’t know what Tracker is anymore because we buried them,” says editor-in-chief Burnett.
Thrasher had an advantage in the magazine wars because the future of skateboarding was in its backyard. In the mid-’80s, after all the skate parks closed down, skaters took to the streets. San Francisco proved to be a perfect playground for street skating with its hilly terrain and abundance of skateable areas.
“Everyone thought of it as the mecca at one point for street skating,” San Francisco musician, artist and professional skater Tommy Guerrero says. “Geographically, with all the hills, it’s unbeatable.”
Videos of street skating in San Francisco — like Guerrero’s part in 1985’s “Bones Brigade — Future Primitive,” the first street skating footage ever released, and Mike Carroll’s session at the Embarcadero for Plan B Skateboards’ “The Questionable Video” — established the city’s reputation for skating and fueled the flames for the street-skating trend that sustained skateboarding through the 1990s and into the 2000s.
It’s also ironic because the city considered banning skateboarding in 1986 over concerns that it was hurting tourism. Then again, if city leaders had gone through with the ban, there still would’ve been skateboarding. “I would’ve been fine,” Guerrero says about the ban. “Skateboarding is better when it’s illegal.”
The streets kept skating alive and former editor Phelps kept Thrasher relevant. After working his way up from shipping to writing product reviews, Phelps took over the editor-in-chief position in 1993 and proceeded to do little of what an editor does. Instead of spending his days in meetings or staring at a computer answering emails, Phelps hung out with the skaters and “filmers” (what skaters call videographers). He was in his element during a big skate session, cheering on whoever volunteered to attempt a big trick for a magazine shoot.
“Jake was the fire. Jake was the guy that lit the fire under your ass and motivated you to a level you didn’t know you could get to,” says Thrasher webmaster Smith.
When Phelps died of unknown causes in 2019 at the age of 56, Burnett, his protege, stepped into the editor-in-chief role. Burnett was already doing much of the work anyway.
“Turns out Phelps wasn’t particularly detail-oriented,” Burnett says. It was a job Burnett was destined for since he’d started working for the magazine in 1994. Like Phelps, he had an almost photographic memory when it came to the magazine, but he also had great ideas like King of the Road, the magazine’s chaotic road-trip skateboarding contest where teams of skaters drive to notable U.S. skate spots and attempt a long list of tricks for points.
“The idea is to pack in all the adventures of a skateboard road trip,” Burnett says. “All the little fun things that you encounter on the road, forcing that stuff to happen.”
Today, Thrasher still focuses on the magazine first, but it also rules online with a popular website, a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers and an Instagram account carrying 6.5 million followers. Burnett said the magazine adopted the internet early, setting up a BBS board — an early version of an online forum — in 1987. The magazine continued to jump on all the major developments in media early because the magazine’s goal was always to reach as many skaters as possible, wherever they were.
“It’s always been the publication of the actual skater, not necessarily of the company, or the advertiser,” Burnett says. “We never shunned any aspect of skateboarding, except for lame corporate content.”
Unlike other industries, skateboarding has flourished during the pandemic. It wasn’t suffering beforehand, having moved past the boom and bust cycles of the ’80s and ’90s. But the coronavirus lockdowns have been a boon for outdoor activities and skateboarding has seen the benefits.
“I talk to skate shops all the time and they’re like, ‘Honestly, kind of the best year we’ve ever had. We couldn’t keep hard goods in the store,’” Smith says. “Boards are just flying off the shelves.”
Even without the boost from the pandemic, skateboarding was thriving. Social media is jam-packed with skate footage from all over the world, and there are popular podcasts about skateboarding. More importantly, skateboarding is no longer defined by the accomplishment of tricks as longboards and cruisers have opened up a new world for those who just want to roll.
But the heroes of skateboarding are still those who can pull off the sickest tricks, like Mason Silva, who Thrasher crowned the 2020 Skater of the Year. The skills of mastering those tricks are why the sport is headed to the Olympics, which will debut skateboarding as a medaled sport when the games return.
While many are excited to see the sport receive “legitimacy,” Thrasher already made it clear that it refuses to cover skateboarding in the Olympics. If that makes Thrasher a negative influence in the world of skateboarding, that’s OK with them.
“It makes our job so much easier,” Burnett says. “We don’t have to make the Olympics cool. We can say the Olympics sucks. And you know what? It’s probably going to suck.”
Kevin L. Jones is a Bay Area freelance writer and audio producer. Email: culture@sfchronicle.com
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