Visual Minority

Better Than Baseball – Front Row productions- 2006

SKATING
This video shows West Coast Canadian skaters: mainly Todd McInerney, Joey McGarry and Mason Ouellette, Dayna and Joel Beaver – Kamloops, BC’s Sol Crew. Steve Eising, Brian Baxter, Josh Silver, Dallas Kurtz, Garrett McGillvary, Dustin “Alf” Werbeski and Devon Hanofski are also in it, among others. Leon Basin, of Shop Task fame, has a trick in it, and a couple in a bonus edit.

It’s not like a typical skate video in the sense that these guys really don’t take themselves seriously, and put a much wider variety of tricks in their videos than your typical handrails, handicaps, kinks and ledges. If you remember their BMCC2 or 3 sections, it’s probably similar to those. A few clips irritated me, and made me think “what was that? Was that a trick?” On the flip side, there’s a lot of never-before-seen, really creative stuff, like Joey McGarry does a fastplant up to air, then stairbumps to fakie- craziness, it’s hard to explain. Another memorable trick is Mason rolling this skinny-as-hell kinked dropoff ledge. If you’re buying it, looking for the newest, most amazing switchup or “hammer”, you’ll probably be disappointed- as far as traditional “street grind” skating goes, it’s not on the same level as Accidental Machines and such. The thing is, Joey McGarry does a better job than any other editor of making rollerblading look fun. After watching a few minutes of the bonus disc, I was already more amped on skating than I had been in about six months. You can just tell that everyone enjoys the hell out of skating, and it’s contagious.

There are a lot more non-skating clips than other videos. These are often hilarious- especially Todd’s freestyle in the bonus footage. There is some excessive footage of pretty average stuff- shots of the Sol Crew eating, and sleeping. This footage does bring back good memories of road trips to Montreal though, staying at the Taj Mahal with buddies who have all stopped skating, practically getting boners whenever we saw pros, good times. There is some retrospective footage which is pretty cool- I could really relate to the screaming Todd McInerney does when he royales this handrail, it just shows you how fun this shit can be, and how good it can feel when you do something you were scared of, or wanted to do for a while.

MUSIC
The music is pretty diverse, like all of Joey’s videos. I definitely liked the music better in the other Sol videos, but it still goes well to the clips, and it’s good to have variety- Joey’s probably the only guy who puts techno in skate videos. I think the music is actually better in the Park Killaz video and bonus edits, but that’s just me. I love that rap shit, and the Ghostface and Styles Of Beyond sections are illl

BOTTOM LINE
There are videos with higher levels of “standard” “traditional” skating. I’ve seen a ton of these online and in DVDs, and a lot of them feel the same: random dudes who look as serious as Lloyd Banks, doing ridiculous tricks that I couldn’t do if my life depended on it. As amazing as it is, I’ve gotten kind of numb to it after so long and don’t appreciate it as much as before. Well, I can always appreciate fun, and that’s what Better Than Baseball is all about. It has another video of all-park (Park Killaz) and then two hours on another disc of bonus footage and edits. BUY IT, it’s a sweet CANADIAN video, within the three hours of footage you’re bound to like a lot of it, or not. Whatever, it got me amped to go skating. Amped as f**k.

P.S. Cirque Duh Sol Eh is sick too, and comes with OK Buddy Fuck Whatever, buy it if you can.

- Brendan Shaughnessy