“Big-Ass Balls Boards is the only company where every person on the team is a bad person in real life,” screams Tim Robinson into the camera, wearing the trademark squared-off sunglasses and reversed ball cap of the try-hard skater bro. He goes on to highlight the bad-boy bonafides of his crew, including an ex-executioner, a man who skates with two open knives in his pockets, and a guy who wears a Halloween mask that renders him unable to see.
Though Tim Robinson’s Big Ass Balls team parodies skate culture, the sketch hearkens back to a day when the bad-boy image once held great sway in the surfing world.
In an interstitial for …Lost’s 1995 video ‘What’s Really Going On,’ a man named Chicken Willy kicks back in an office chair, wearing a trucker hat and holding a partially crushed beer can. “I don’t fucking work,” he barks at the camera “All I do is sit on the beach, smoke pot and surf and play my fucking guitar.”
Sound familiar? Brands like …Lost built their image on a no-fucks given attitude and shouted that fact directly at the consumer. Though Tim Robinson’s Big-Ass Balls team goes a step farther to include literal murderers, his assertion that “I’m just trying to do something exciting by having a team with all really bad people,” might as well have come from the mouth of King Chicken himself.
However, midway through the sketch, Robinson’s character goes introspective. “Maybe I try too hard to be a wild guy. I just want people to think I’m fucked up real bad.” In a way, this also speaks to a turn the surf industry has taken more recently. Most contemporary surf companies eschew the punk-rock ethos that videos like Momentum 3 sought so hard to cultivate, instead often focusing on environmentalism and general positivity.
The main character in Robinson’s sketch sums up his ethos in one sentence, and it may as well be printed under the logo in ’90s adverts from brands like …Lost: “I just want to feel cool and dangerous and want people to like me.”
