That Dude Is Gonna Die. Cool

By Joel Stein

There is a fine line between sports and stupidity. The X-Games are designed to erase that line, not by showing athletes doing what you can't do, but what you're not willing to do. And while the objective of these sports is not always clear (What does make the best stunt biker?), the appeal is unmistakable: these people are wacked. You don't have to know the intricacies of sky surfing to appreciate people free-falling from a plane with a skateboard strapped to their feet. It translates just fine.

When ESPN first staged the X-Games four years ago, its goal was to hold the attention of 12- to 34-year-old male viewers, who are increasingly bored by baseball, football and just about everything else that doesn't involve nudity. This month, along with such traditional contests as street luge, skateboarding and in-line skating, the Olympics-style event at San Diego's placid Mission Bay Park includes barefoot waterskiing, sky surfing and big-air snowboarding (yes, it's a summer event). More than 450 athletes from 27 countries will compete for gold medals in 28 events that NASA wouldn't let a monkey try. Last year 14 million amped kids watched, and more are expected to tune in this time to the 11-day event. Sponsors counting on this include Adidas, AT&T, Chevrolet and the U.S. Marines, who couldn't invent a better gimmick to amass potential recruits.

The X-Games legitimize the pursuits of disaffected suburban youth. But not the truly disenfranchised. You have to be pretty tight with someone who owns a boat to learn to barefoot-waterski-jump, or have some serious spare cash to go up in a plane to sky-surf. These are the kinds of recreational activities that spring up when a nation hasn't been off to war in a long time.

Still, the largely white punk athletes have an attitude that is as infectious as it is intimidating. There is none of Michael Jordan's focused intensity. Instead, street lugers smirk and greet the camera as they prepare to peel down a hay-bale-lined hill at 63 m.p.h., just 5/16 of an inch from the ground. Like the cartoon version of Jordan's flu-plagued 1997 playoff performance, Lee Dansie rides with two broken ribs, qualifies for the finals and then jumps into the camera lens: "Hope I didn't hurt your ankles, cameraman dude."

The athletes, and the hard-core fans, have been resistant to embrace the X-Games and all their cheesy mainstream marketing; these guys prefer their own cheesy marketing. The games have been rechristened from the original Extreme Games, because extreme has come to signify "desperate marketing tool." Now they gently allude to Generation X, which also means "desperate marketing tool." And even though the skateboard faithful loathe the mainstream hype, they have grudgingly accepted the event. It is, after all, the only venue where skateboarders, banned from their towns' streets, can watch their heroes sign autographs on ABC's Wide World of Sports (ABC, like ESPN, is owned by Disney). "Now when I tell people I'm a professional skateboarder, they don't say, 'There's no such thing.' Instead they say, 'Oh, are you in the X-Games?'" says Tony Hawk, 30, the world's best skateboarder.

Even those not as famous as Hawk inspire intense reactions. On Friday, the first day of competition, a young woman in a tight tank top that reads I DIG YOUR BOYFRIEND stands with several hundred fans cheering on a 13-year-old female Japanese in-line skater flying off a giant wooden ramp. "Go bigger!" she keeps yelling. "Go bigger!" Translation: the objective of the competitions isn't to be the most graceful or the most strategic, but to be the one doing the most foolhardy thing possible. "The Olympics are kind of old," says spectator Leo Szumel, 19, from Santa Cruz, Calif. "These are more dangerous, more exciting to watch."

It is not always easy to appreciate the excitement. There are no team sports and few ways of objectively measuring results. And while these are amazing athletes, that doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as it does in other athletic endeavors. Sure, they're the best sky surfers on the planet, but how many people want to be sky surfers?

In the final analysis, that's not what these events are about. Sure, sometimes there are moments of true, gravity-defying beauty, but more often it's the rush of watching Evel Knievel, the chance that someone will blow it completely. Wide World of Sports, which learned the value of a good spill from the classic ski-jumping crash it used in its opening credits, has been highlighting the great spills. Sweet.

--Reported by Jeff Galbraith/San Diego

With reporting by Jeff Galbraith/San Diego