FickleBoards

every now and then, doing the right thing really hurts you.

two days ago, during the drive of our latest road trip, we dialed up Mike Mills at Syndicate Skateboards and asked him if he wanted to poach himself a Josh Viles.

Why would we flat-out offer one of our best riders, and a dear friend, to another skateboard company?

Well, we're rolling out jokes about how Josh was just way too good for us to keep around, because he is honestly a crusher. an absolute crusher. But the truth is, it's because josh deserves opportunities that Fickle just isn't giving him.

Syndicate is gonna do demos where you sit down and see how it's done. Fickle is just going to skate with you for a week.
Syndicate is going to put on events where you know what it's all about. Fickle is going to sleep on your couches and play your nintendo.
With Syndicate, Josh will have a supporting team and booth and merch and all at competitions that Fickle boards doesn't give a rat's about, much less afford the drive to get there...

So once our wood came out and we saw how sparse our program is, and how huge Josh's potential is, we thought Mike and Don and the good folks at Syndicate would keep josh busy with stuff that's more his league.

We hope we'll see Josh a lot, but we realize that once you plug into a crew, life fills in the gaps. There's always a place at the table here at fickleboards, for Josh, but we hope he never stoops that low again.

It's ironic that we jokingly announced that he was off the team back in the day for doing like a 360-body jar or some such madness... because that's exactly why we let him go. He has a real gift, and we don't want to be any part of squandering it. Again, we are here in full support of Josh Viles, for life. That's why we let him fly free.

Fly free, little birdy! *sniff*