by Board Retailers Association | Apr 1, 2020 | Industry, News, Rest In Peace, Retail History, Skateboard
Today, legendary ’80s vert skater and host of Vans’ ” Loveletters To Skateboarding” Jeff Grosso passed away at his home (1968-2020). We don’t have any details right now, but our deepest condolences go out to his family, close friends, and all his fans around the world during this heavy time. Jeff was a unique, funny, opinionated motherfucker that loved skateboarding and always kept the true spirit of it alive. His Love Letters show was a way for him to educate the youth and future generations of where that spirit and attitude came from so that it could carry on in some fashion and not be forgotten, and we loved him for that. He always spoke for the outcast, misfits, weirdos that made skateboarding so great and special. He was the people’s champ! Man, this one hurts. Here are some words from around the industry: “Jeff was a true skateboarder at his core, and a great wealth of entertainment, insight and valuable philosophy to a younger generation. I was lucky enough to skate with him over the last four decades and occasionally featured on his Vans “Love Letters” series. Jeff had a genuine love of skateboarding and a renegade attitude. One of the last times we spoke, we talked about how ridiculous it is that we still get to do this for a living and that anyone even cares what we do or think in terms of skateboarding at our age. I believe Jeff is a big reason that anyone truly cares, and skateboarding was lucky to have him as an ambassador and gatekeeper to its history. He was also a great...
by Board Retailers Association | Nov 21, 2019 | Industry, News, Rest In Peace, Snowboard, Sustainability
Eddie Pells, Associated Press and Dan D’Ambrosio, Burlington Free Press Whether you had a gold medal hanging from your neck, were just learning how to stand on a snowboard, or were one of those flustered skiers wondering where all the kids in the baggy pants were coming from, you knew the name “Burton.” Jake Burton Carpenter, the man who changed the game on the mountain by fulfilling a grand vision of what a snowboard could be, died Wednesday night of complications stemming from a relapse of testicular cancer. He was 65. In an email sent to the staff at Burton, CEO John Lacy called Burton “our founder, the soul of snowboarding, the one who gave us the sport we love so much.” Carpenter was not the inventor of the snowboard, but 12 years after Sherman Poppen tied together a pair of skis with a rope to create what was then called a “Snurfer,” the 23-year-old entrepreneur, then known only as Jake Burton, quit his job in Manhattan, moved back to Vermont and went about dreaming of how far a snowboard might take him. “I had a vision there was a sport there, that it was more than just a sledding thing, which is all it was then,” Burton said in a 2010 interview with The Associated Press. For years, Burton’s snowboards were largely snubbed at resorts — its dimensions too untested, its riders too unrefined, its danger all too real — and many wouldn’t allow them to share the slopes with the cultured ski elite in Colorado or California or, heaven forbid, the Swiss Alps. Read the Burlington Free...
