words :: Ben Osborne.
If you run the gamut of ski and snowboard tricks, most of them seem to make no sense. Take the roast beef, the crippler, and the screaming semen (probably the most non-sensical) to name a few. Most people don’t really know the roots of the names, and that’s probably O.K.
But, some hold a more important place in history—like the mute grab. Another name you’ve probably never thought of, a name that you may have never even questioned. But, the trick has deep roots.
Originally popularized in skateboarding but now used in surfing, snowboarding, and skiing, it’s one of the most common tricks in each sport. And it turns out, we’ve been calling it the wrong thing all along, and Tony Hawk himself is taking the reigns on renaming the trick.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CDy21PIJWBZ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
According to Hawk, the trick was first done by a prominent amateur skateboarder named Chris Weddle around 1981. It was around the time people were first starting to do grabs on their skateboards, and the Indy grab had just been named.
When people started to grab the front of the board, some argued it should be called the ‘tracker’ air, while others believed it should be named after Weddle—so, in what Hawk describes as his “naive youth”, him and the skateboard community dubbed it the “Mute’ air, an insensitive reference to the fact that Weddle is hearing impaired, and isn’t much of a talker.
Fast forward forty years, and it’s clear that “Mute” is not the way to honour a man who invented a revolutionary trick—so Hawk is taking it upon himself and renaming the trick the Weddle Grab in the upcoming re-release of his iconic video game, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
In the age of cancel culture, stories like this are a bright spot—Weddle, who still skates, get’s the respect he deserves, and we all just got a history lesson. Not bad for a Thursday morning. —ML
