I really don’t understand skateboarding’s obsession with showing gruesome slams in a video part. It does the exact opposite of hype me up, its makes me want to quit skateboarding and stay on the couch.

If the clip is meant to show the hard work the person put in to get through recovery and back on the board to film this part than I would rather see footage of them learning to walk again, doing rehab on a bike, or sitting on the couch with ice.

Luckily the slam section that filled whole songs in the old Zero and Toy Machine videos have fallen out of style ( Thank God), but some people still insist on showing the brutal slams in their part. Depending on how bad a slam is I can see putting it into the rough cut. I saw a recent Jamie Foy Rough cut showed the aftermath of a bad slam that tore up his shoulder and face. It also showed the painful minutes after impact when they washed the wound and the adrenaline wore off.

I know I live on the squeamish side. I always look away in movies when someone gets shot, and if I anticipate someone getting hurt I will look begrudgingly from behind my hands.  To put me in the same position as the skater, where I think everything is going to go fine just to have my feet yanked out from under me and my face thrown straight to the ground is just plain mean.

I remember hearing that Diego Bucchieri broke his arm on this double set ollie to begin his part in Good & Evil. The slam doesn’t even look that bad, you cant see any clearly broken bones and he gets right back up and lands it next try. It is still enough to make me look away every time. When Jusef Nurkic of my Trailblazers broke his leg against the Nets this season, I avoided anything from that game. But just like skateboarders, people had the gall to include the horrific leg break in HIGHLIGHT videos, presumably for the clicks. This isn’t what anyone enjoys about their favorite sport. These are the moments we dread.

Injury is a part of skating. There is no way you can jump down stairs or even skate flat ground without ending up hurting yourself eventually. But so much of skating is confidence, it is knowing injury is a possibility and instead forcing that thought down so that you commit with full faith that you will land the trick. I don’t need a reminder that things may not go as planned, its already in my head. As Mike Carroll put so well

“I think about ‘what is this crack gonna do?’ ‘ok what if I don’t get my foot on in this position’ am I gonna hit my shin first or how am I gonna fall? Where am I gonna have to put my hand to break myself from the fall and what if I hit my tooth out on that corner? It’s a little bitch ass excuse but whatever.”

The chance of injury is always gonna be there. I don’t need to see first hand the worst case scenario. Those are worse than bloopers. Imagine if you had to see all the worst case scenarios that happen while filming porn in the middle of enjoying the fantasy of everything going right?

I once heard of a skater having a career ending head injury while filming and afterwards all the filmers agreed to delete the clips from their cameras. No one needs to see those clips put out into the world. Let’s keep skateboarding videos positive and keep the gore in the horror movies.