Last week we posted a self-congratulatory item when we discovered that one of the chief authors of the ESPN Freeskiing blog, the curiously anonymous ESPN Freeskiing (Megan Michelson?), posted a web story doling out awards to their favorite freeski websites.  Newschoolers, one of freeskiing’s two most robust online communities (along with the TGR forums for bitter crusty old dudes), was not mentioned for its strength of content or community, but rather was awarded a measly second place for “Best Humor Site” behind yours truly, BroBomb.com.

“And BroBomb won ye the crown, and yea, there was much rejoicing in Germantown, Philadelphia.”

Newschoolers’s Doug Bishop (who seemed to miss that his site had won SECOND place) was extraordinarily pissed at this miffing of one of skiing’s great home-grown web successes, and his life’s work.  Mr. Bishop, as he is known widely across the industry, then made his feelings known both on his own website as well as ESPN Freeskiing’s comment field, hinting at some possible censorship by ESPN, saying “….OK, my comment keeps not getting posted.”

Humbug, I say!

And to top it off, who won the award for “Best Freeskiing News Site”?  If you wouldn’t have guessed it would be Freeskier.com, you’re apparently not alone.  The Newschoolers community, which I can only imagine to be the majority of Freeskier’s subscription base anyway, had nothing but contempt for the assumed illegitimate champion of the web.  Yelsel$, a veteran of NS’s forums with a karma score of 60084 and over 9,600 posts, had only this to say, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”  CasiusClay put it more delicately: “Not a big issue. If Newschoolers ran awards like this, the only thing Freeskier would win is generally having shitty ski reviews….”

 Yea, give the gentleman from Freeskier a tarring and a new asshole, I say!

Freeskier and ESPN are not alone in the village stocks, as the mob hurled tomatoes and moldy onions at Jon Olsson for his win in the Best Athlete Blog category and at the X Games for scoring Shaun White a perfect 100.  However, several members expressed more light-hearted feelings about the matter:

And, of course, skiing’s unavoidable population of nerds had to weigh in on an unrelated issue:

With emotions already charged given the trying ski season, we expect the flurry of ridicule and public gallowing to continue through the month.  What say, ye readers, ’bout this struggle of the bloggings?

 BUT after careful consideration of the evidence before me- Do NOT boycott. In fact, go buy that Warren Miller movie that you have ignored every time you pass it in the Walmart DVD section. You see, boycotts don’t work in the skiing world. We are all too materialistic. When we’re told we shouldn’t buy something, we actually end up buying more than we would have before.

 Where am I getting this asinine bullshit? Well most of you are too young to remember it, but it all began in a year we called 2004. Matchstick Productions was trying to push Poorboyz and Level 1 out of the market. They saw their edge as the only major freeski filmmaker fading, and they engaged in all sorts of sordid business practices to try and keep their place. There were battles over riders, distributors, and magazine/catalog covers. Oh it was a NS shit storm like no other. Boycotts of varying magnitudes were declared, and one ambitious Newschoolers actually theorized that if MSP were forced to close, Seth Morrison would switch film companies and all would be set right with the world.

Guess what? It didn’t work. Nobody actually boycotted MSP. In fact, they’re bigger and badder than ever. If anyone was going to boycott them, don’t you think it would be because they’ve made the exact same movie for the past 5-10 years? Or because of the cheesy dramatic monologues they keep granting to skiers with no wit or self awareness?

The same is true for WM films. If people armed with the knowledge that they have been screwing over their namesake and using his prerecorded voiceovers are still buying the films, are they really going to stop because they sued Level 1? No.

Happy hating.

So ANYHOW, one of the blogger’s points was that skiers copy snowboarders on pretty much everything, just two years late. Well in the interest of filling up some space on my own blog I would like to propose an experiment to get to the bottom of this issue. Here’s how this works:

I choose one relatively new snowboard style: For our purposes I will be using the flipped-up hat a la beach volleyball. Seems to me like something that’s about to get bit like bandanas and tall T’s.

And now we wait. I’ll keep my eyes open and you keep yours glued to every fashionista in your home park and wait for a skier to show up looking like this dude:

Or just get proactive and bite this style in its infancy and claim “I ride with tons of snowboarders, we all influence each other.”

Happy hunting.