Extreme Business
Op’s King of Skate Joined Unlikely Bedfellows
By JENNIFER BELLANTONIO
Tom Crane, a partner at Costa Mesa-based law firm Rutan & Tucker LLC, tensed up as he watched professional skateboarder Mike Vallely get pulled by a chord behind a motorcycle at 40 mph, launch off a ramp some 20 feet into the air and soar over two school buses and a live punk band playing below.
“The first thing that came to mind is, ‘I hope the release has been signed,'” Crane said.
The buttoned-down lawyer learned a thing or two about skateboarding when he was hired to help the makers of the Op King of Skate event dot their I’s and cross their T’s.
Above all, Crane, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Georgetown University’s law school, said he learned to realize when to back off.
“I was asking something that I thought was necessary from a legal standpoint,” he said. “The reply: ‘Welcome to the world of skateboarding.’ Understood. You’ve got to be willing to be accommodating and flexible, or the show won’t go on.”
Created by Santa Ana-based Cynic Youth + Alternative Marketing and Munson Industries in Santa Monica, and sponsored by Irvine-based Ocean Pacific Apparel Corp., the Op King of Skate event is set to air on June 28 on satellite and cable TV.
It’s a 90-minute pay-per-view event,a first in the action sports industry, according to Doug Palladini, director of Cynic, the youth marketing arm of Santa Ana’s DGWB Advertising.
“It’s really difficult to get young men ages 12 to 24 to remember when a TV show is going to be on,” Palladini said. “You have to treat it more like a concert. (With) pay-per-view, we take that kind of strategy.”
The draw: six of the world’s best skateboarders,Bob Burnquist, Tony Hawk, Eric Koston, Geoff Rowley, Mike Vallely and Danny Way,doing stunts they’ve never before performed, with hopes of winning a $25,000 cash prize.
That includes watching Hawk, defending doubles X-Games champion, sliding across a flaming bar suspended between two vertical ramps. And then there’s Way setting two world records for the longest jump and highest air on a skateboard.
“It’s an Evel Knievel docudrama for skateboarding,” Palladini said.
And, just like Knievel, who’s planning on making a comeback at 63, these guys don’t stop until they get it right.
Skaters were given a $35,000 budget to create their stunts, Palladini said. They oversaw set construction and decided who was going to build them, even if it meant flying crews in.
“As long as they were involved in the process there’s a lot less risk,” Palladini said.
The athletes also scouted out their locations, which got tricky when cities got cold feet.
They said, “Yes, yes, yes” and then heard it was for “skateboarding” and changed their minds, Palladini said.
“We had several permits denied,” he said. “There’s definitely a negative bias against skateboarding when you go to produce something like this. A lot of the stunts were done in the middle of nowhere. It’s just easier that way.”
Hawk did his stunt at his own facility in Oceanside. Some picked spots in the desert. Vallely’s was done at the shuttered Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino.
San Juan Capistrano-based 900 Films, a company founded by Hawk, filmed and directed the event.
Palladini said he and the others wanted viewers to get to know the athletes while demystifying those jaw-dropping cover shots.
“The reality in skateboarding is that it took 40 tries and the guy was in a massive amount of pain to be able to land that one trick” for a magazine cover, he said. “They’re used to having to risk their limbs in order to do things to take it to the next level.”
One skater warned Palladini that if he missed a few times, he might not be able to walk for a week.
“He said we would have to wait and come back to it,” Palladini said.
Not a warm and fuzzy for Rutan’s Crane.
He says there was an “elegant tension” between the skaters, artistic types that consider themselves counter cultural,and the old school, tried-and-true legal formalities represented by Rutan & Tucker.
“(It’s) the very culture they seem to be rebelling against at times,” he said. “Yet when you get down to the bottom line, it’s an entertainment endeavor that we’re perfectly used to promoting and writing up as legal documents.”
Plus, Crane says it was the most fun he’s had in his 20-something years as an attorney.
“I had two worries: would they hurt themselves and would they hurt others,” Crane said. “As it turns out these guys are consummate pros at what they do.”
The unique nature of the event also hooked Op.
“We’re really interested in creating unique and compelling ways to entertain our marketplace,” said Michael Marckx, Op’s vice president of marketing and advertising.
The apparel maker already walks on the wild side with other events, such as the Op Pro Mentawai Islands 2001, which has surfers riding never-before-surfed waves for big money.
Marckx said companies typically go in and buy successful events or movies and attach their name to it.
“But that’s not the cannibalistic Starbucks approach we want to take,” he added.
To do something meaningful, he said, it can’t be some cheesy attempt by a corporation to buy some credibility.
“You have to do it right and you have to have the best people in the market embrace it,” he said.
Marckx said he’s hoping that will make the Op King of Skate a hot sell, he says.
Still, Cynic and its sponsors, which paid anywhere from $75,000 to $250,000 to get involved, are rolling the dice on this one.
The event, which cost more than $500,000 to put together, is a first of its kind. If all goes well there will be a “King Of” series for other sports, like surf, snow and BMX, Palladini said.
“Because it’s the first one we don’t know” how it will sell, Palladini said. “We’re doing everything on God’s green earth to promote this thing.
“There’s 11 million skateboarders in the U.S. alone. Even if we only get skateboarders it’s a big population to pull from,” he said.
Even Crane sees the potential,and irony.
“It’s kind of reached the stage of development that the skateboarding culture would never want to be in,in a way they don’t want to be part of the mainstream culture,” Crane said. “But from a business standpoint it’s a big business. It’s got a lot of exciting potential.”
