Eric Bork pinches good

After a Skype conversation with skater Eric Bork,

Eric Bork is a professional skater who regularly uploads to YouTube to share his love of the sport.  Recently, I reached out to Bork and we Skyped about the changes in the skating industry.

Bork’s introduction to the sport was happenstance.  When he was younger, Bork lived in Santa Cruz and was looking around at the local flea market.  He found a board and thought it looked cool, so he started skating.

Like so many others involved in skating, Bork skated with a group of kids in his neighborhood.  Everyone was somewhat trying to stand on a board at the time.  As they got older, some kept at it and some stopped.  Obviously Bork continued to skate, even until this day.

Nowadays he skates with his best friend, Mikey Taylor, and some other big names like P-Rod, Brandon Biebel, and whoever is at Biebel’s park.

When Bork first discovered YouTube, he realized there is a whole other part of the industry going on he never knew about.  He found out about Revive, Chris Chann, and saw how big the skating industry is.  Bork is not sponsored but he does receive boards and supplies from the contacts he has made.

According to Bork, a lot of skaters are uploading videos to YouTube.  Some say that it helps skaters get noticed, but others believe that it makes companies stray away from those on YouTube videos.  Either way, Bork thinks that “anybody could make it in skateboarding, and put out YouTube videos.”  This makes the industry much more vibrant than it has been in the past.

Where Bork thinks a lot of people go wrong is when they get “all weird and crazy” in their videos.  That brings a weird and goofy stigma into YouTube.  That is why he tries to keep his videos normal.

He says people should just “be themselves in their videos, and if you’re normally like that, great.”  A big part, probably the only part, that will help skaters get known is the street part.  A street part is a video where all of the best skating clips for a particular skater are edited together with a song in the background.  The clip is then sent to companies, possible sponsors, and uploaded to YouTube.

His current setup consists of Spitfire wheels, Thunder trucks, Andale bearings, and a Revive deck. Bork’s favorite skate shoes are the Mikey Taylor 1’s from DC.  He doesn’t only skate them because they are best friends, but he really likes them. He wants to learn a trick called a lazer flip, which is a mix of a heelflip and a frontside 360 shove it.

One of Bork’s goals is to have four or five tricks that he can do well and every try.  He wants to be like Andrew Reynolds where he is known for his bag of tricks, that means he has a few tricks that he becomes known for.  Bork also has plans for a company, but will not release any information on it until he launches it in about 6 months.

With today’s use of social media and YouTube, skateboarding has become increasingly visible and accessible.  Eric Bork is on example of someone who is making it on his own.