Who Do the Dew?

 Something called the Dew Tour is in Chicago this weekend.  Ordinarily, I’d dismiss it as a bunch of idiots on skateboards.  You reach this point in life after coming close to hitting too many too-cool-to-care skateboarders in the street.  But actually the whole phenomenon is way more depressing than that.

This Dew stuff dates to when I was young and we had a little downtime from hunting mastodons.  Okay, maybe not that long ago.  Let’s start in the 1960s, when some flower-power types charged that all organized sports were fascist.  To a certain mindset, balls were bad, Frisbee good.  Then came hacky sack and for those rebels without a surfboard, skateboarding; the more artistic types took to “tagging,” as in graffiti art.  Nearly fifty years later, that hippie protest has morphed into all sorts of Xtreme Games. 

Here’s the thing—what started out as rebellion is now a corporate enterprise.  Hence “Dew” and the Olympics (half-pipe, anyone?).  So, the joke’s on those clowns breaking bones in the name of doing their own thing; they’re not, not if they’re also drinking or wearing sponsor stuff.  But the joke’s on us geezers, too.

We’ve allowed generations of adolescents to treat public property as their personal playground.  Curbs and handrails shouldn’t belong to skateboarders any more than walls and subway cars to taggers.  I’m pretty sure Dew and Xtreme would have driven John Locke crawling back to the king.  That said, I also believe Dew et al is in part as a reasonable rejection of organized sports, from travel to school to pros.  We’ve turned athletes into gods while denying a human connection.  This encourages some of the more normal-sized among us to find their own games, ones that aren’t connected to a combine or madness on the calendar.  Only those games have become so popular in their own right so as to be worth co-opting.

I guess that means the joke’s on all of us, baseball fan and Dew’fus alike.