Hot Off the Shelf: The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life by Kyle Beachy
[image description: The book cover of The Most Fun Thing, which is a black and white photo of a skateboard broken in half with the title in bright yellow.]
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review and I honestly loved it. Post contains an affiliate link.
When I heard about The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life, I immediately thought, This guy gets it. Yes, skateboarding is a serious sport done by serious athletes and is worthy of respect, but more than anything, skateboarding (and I’d argue skating in general) is fun.
Some might argue that other sports, like baseball or basketball or football, are fun and I don’t doubt that, but skating is fun in a different way. As far as I’m aware, no one is getting scholarships to college to play skateboarding and no one makes blood sacrifices to the concrete because they’re worried about letting their teammates down––teammates who rely on every part of the field or court being filled, otherwise, they can’t play like they’re supposed to. Skating is deeply individual and therefore requires a drive from within. I believe, as Kyle Beachy does, that drive is fueled by fun. When people ask me why I roller skate at skateparks, my answer is simple: “It’s the most fucking fun I’ve ever had.”
I think, too, The Most Fun Thing is part of a kind of reckoning in the writing world: a further acknowledgment that sports writing can be literary. Beachy’s book isn’t the first time a sport has been written about in an artistic way. I heard a story once about Howell Raines, a good ol’ boy from Alabama who became editor of the New York Times, who wrote so beautifully about a football game for his college paper that it moved his editor to tears and although the style was highly unusual, it ran unedited. Who knows if that’s true and, frankly, I’m not sure I care about the veracity. Besides that, there are dozens of literary novels and literary journalism about baseball. The point is that literary sports writing can be done and has been done, but hasn’t been done nearly enough, especially about non-team sports. That’s why I was so enamored with The Most Fun Thing.
When I visit the sports sections of bookstores, usually what I find is a history of xyz sport, a biography or memoir of xyz professional sports person, photography books about xyz sport, and books about how to get better at xyz sport. But I see so much room for possibility. What about the non-team sports? What about the everyday people who love a sport wholeheartedly but for whatever reason never does (or has the chance to do) it professionally? What about the people who have seen the sport they love grow and change over the decades and are adept at articulating that in a way that’s accessible to a newbie or layperson?
That’s the kind of sports writing I want to read and that’s what Kyle Beachy has given us in The Most Fun Thing. The book is a combination of memoir, reportage, and skateboarding journalism. The central question of the book––the thesis, if you will––is what does it all mean, this life spent on a plank with four wheels? A skateboard is, both literally and metaphorically, a vehicle and a lens through which to see the world. Until I started skating outside the rink, I didn’t make a habit of noticing whether streets and sidewalks were paved in asphalt or concrete, how what feels like a flat road in a car actually has a steepness to it, and whether a road raises in the middle to allow for drainage off either side. I didn’t look at wheelchair ramps and sets of stairs and consider how they’d feel under my eight wheels. Yet these are the thoughts that occupy your mind when you’re a skater.
More than that, you see the artistry of the skaters you admire and understand just how much work went into nailing that trick. Skating is every bit as mental as it is physical and when you’re throwing yourself off ramps, down stairs, and onto handrails, it’s easy to get in your head. That’s not to speak of the other things like controlling parents, relationship troubles, recovering from an injury, knowing you’re being watched by fans, terminal illness, and more––all things the many skaters who make appearances in Beachy’s pages have experienced. So on the surface, it might seem like a stretch to evaluate marriage and aging and creative writing through the lens of skateboarding, but as Beachy shows, it’s actually quite natural.
Reading The Most Fun Thing was like the skating book equivalent of listening to a band’s greatest hits album. Some of the most interesting skateboarders from past and present appear in the pages and you get to know them as people, not just as athletes. Skaters, like all of us, are flawed people just trying to do the best we can with the information we have at the time. (Except for the white supremacist skater Beachy roasts. Fuck that guy.) Beachy was a skateboarding journalist for several years and the book includes essays from 2011 to 2020, though he’s been a skateboarder much longer than that.
Even if you haven’t read the books he mentions or seen most of the skateboard videos he references (I haven’t), Beachy writes well and clearly enough that you still feel like you have a good understanding of why the reference is important to the understanding of what’s being said in the essay. And you finish the essay wanting to go down a google rabbit hole to learn more about everything he mentions. This is to say that The Most Fun Thing is by a skater for skaters, but I believe is done well enough to appeal to a general audience as well.
If you’d like to buy a copy (which I recommend!), you can do so via your favorite indie bookseller or if you’d like to order online, please do so via my Bookshop link. It supports indie bookstores and this blog while fighting Amazon. Win-win!
