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This is me, doing a kickflip to primo… Or is it?
Primos are one of the most misunderstood tricks to name. And that's because a Primo is not
a trick…. It's a dude.
This is Primo Desiderio, a staple in the top 5 in freestyle skateboarding competitions
in the 80s. His biggest claim to fame was his impeccable 80s style, and also being the
first to ever do a sliding rail stand, which came to be known as the Primo slide. This
is him in action in 1987, performing his signature move. Here he is again in 2002, still at it.
So what exactly is going on here? Long before the Primo slide was invented, there were rail
stands. The edge of your board is called the rail, and standing on the rail of your board
was, of course, called a rail stand. Doing a flip trick from rail stand is called a “rail
flip”. Simple stuff.
So when did it get so complicated? October 28, 2001. Not-so-coincidentally the release
date of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 in North America. Ok, so Tony Hawk already ruined hardflips.
What did he do to Primo slides? You might be surprised to learn: pretty much nothing.
Let's take a look at the game. In Pro Skater 3, there are a few special manual tricks you
can assign, including the primo slide.
Well, what's wrong with that? The only subtle issue here is that they dropped 'slide' from
the name. Of course, like every other manual trick, you're expected to do it in motion
as a way to link other tricks together. And you can't really even do it stationary. No
matter how you do it, you'll still move around at least a little bit.
So what happened is that this game came out, and kids wanted to learn this trick. Of course,
learning the actual slide part is really difficult, so they did them stationary and used the only
name they knew: Primo. Some would try to make it more accurate and say Primo stall. Little
did they know that that's like saying axle grind or disaster slide. They called the flips
primo flips and started calling it 'landing primo' when you accidentally land on the rail.
There's another weird issue in Pro Skater 3 though. An unknown skateboard anomaly called
the Reemo slide.
There are two rails on your board, the heelside, and the toeside. A regular primo slide is
done heelside. But the Reemo slide is a toeside primo slide with a 180 in it. It's clearly
named after Kareem Campbell, and it's assigned to him as a special trick.
To my knowledge, Kareem Campbell never did any freestyle on video, but it's not that
unlikely that he did this trick a couple of times. A lot of street skaters find toeside
to be easier because you start on the bolts, tip the board, jump and land on it. It's more
familiar. Heelside is actually easier because you can step into it without ever losing contact
with the board, but it's a more unnatural feeling for people who aren't used to it.
So if you ask a street skater to do a “primo”, chances are, it will be toeside. In the book
“Skateboarding: Legendary Tricks 2”, Torey Pudwill demonstrates primo slides, and he
does it toeside.
In Pro Skater 3, every skater had some kind of special manual trick. It's possible that
Kareem never even did one of these before. But they gave it to him to pad out his trick
list, and because it's a “special” trick, they had to give it a name, so they simply
named it after him. “Reemo” rhymes with “Primo”… maybe they came up with the
name first and worked it out from there.
If you search YouTube for “reemo slide”, you'll see videos of kids doing stationary
toeside rail stands. Luckily, this name has been mostly forgotten over the years, but
it caused a lot of fights on the internet years ago.
Although Pro Skater 3 included some freestyle tricks, they didn't really go all in until
number 4. Let's see how this one handles it.
Surprisingly, again, not that bad. This time, you're actually expected to be doing the freestyle
stuff stationary. Nobody really does stuff like pogos in motion.
In the game, you have to start a freestlye combo from a manual. If you were to do a manual
into a railstand, you would indeed say 'manual to rail'. Or 'casper to rail'. So it is actually
correct. It's just that they never give a standalone name for that trick. “Rail flip”
is actually accurate. It's more common to do a varial 1.5 flip, but that's not a big
deal.
So, again, kids were confused. They would say things like “I did a 'to rail'”, or
“I did a primo to railflip to rail”. Primo was the standalone name of the trick, and
'to rail' was what you would say in a combo.
It's a mess. Search YouTube for 'primo skateboarding' and see how many mistakes you'll see. Unfortunately,
since this started 15 years ago, it's been plenty of time for really good skaters to
come around who grew up thinking this way. It's not uncommon to see experienced, pro-level
skaters use 'primo' incorrectly.
This time, I can't blame Birdman. His games are actually accurate in this, except for
the whole Reemo debacle. It's just that lots of kids misunderstood it, and there wasn't
a big online freestyle community to set things straight back then.
But not you! Now you know better.
That's all for this time. What other weird tricks would you like to see me cover in the
future? Let me know in the comments. Thank you.