DAMON WAY - DC SHOES

Do you still find the time to ride?
Skateboards? Not as much as I would like to. Time and injury tend to get in the way these days.

Were you a wild kid?
Relative to my own social group I guess I might have been, mostly because my brother Danny and I spent most of the time trying to outdo each other… Danny ultimately won.

Yeah I bet he did! Did you ever feel skateboarding was rebellious?
I never thought of it in those terms mainly because as a teen/kid my life was skateboarding and aside from music it was all I really thought and cared about. The thought of it being a rebellious pastime was probably the farthest thing from my mind.

Well we still got folks here who think that a skate park breeds violence, druggiess and satanic abuse of chickens. Will skating ever be unilaterally accepted as a legitimate sport?
In many ways I think the sport has transcended these stigmas and prejudices over the past decade… At least here in the States it seems to have become accepted in the mainstream without the negative criticism it once had. But the trade-off with this has been that the rebellious nature, spirit and attitude of the sport and culture has become partially marginalized and commercialised by mainstream dollars and the outsider corporations that strive to position themselves within the sport for nothing more than to associate themselves with what youth culture abroad considers cool. This is evident with brands like Nike, Reebok and Mountain Dew that had nothing to do with the support of the industry until it became popular and most likely started surfacing within their focus groups in the late ‘90s. I feel that similar things have happened in the music industry with a variety of genres, most notably the Punk Rock movement.  The sad thing is, is that the industry only has itself to blame for this. There used to be this feeling that the culture would preserve itself by acting as the gatekeepers for entry into it, and would act by shunning the brands that were not true and authentic to it. That has been lost in many ways.