Women Should Play Sports: Ronda & Leticia Bufoni

I thought Rashard Evans made a very perceptive comment pre-fight to UFC 190, Rousey v. Correia; he said it was Ronda's imagination that separated her from the pack. I couldn't agree more. The thing I love about watching her fights -- and the Gracie breakdowns -- is her ability to see two moves ahead, or adjust on the fly, improvise, and pivot to other possibilities. She's like Coltrane, improvising like crazy in a stream of consciousness way, but from an unshakeable bedrock of classic theory. You put elite skill level together with the creativity of a top flight artist and the mental toughness of Godzilla and you have athletes like Muhammad Ali, Rickson Gracie, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Joe Montana, Ted Williams, Sandy Koufax... and Ronda Rousey.

Then there's Leticia Bufoni. Being an LA boy, I couldn't help but be exposed to skateboarding although my first loves were football and basketball. But skating has an element of freedom I admire and the rogue, non-bullshit attitude perhaps best embodied in LA legend Jay Adams. Leticia, I think, reflects that attitude. If it's seemingly at first odd to put Ronda and Leticia together in a post, I thought of it because both possess this quality; they are of course highly accomplished and yet self-possessed. They own themselves before anything and that sets the table not just for themselves, but for anyone searching for meaning in this upside down world. Particularly young women.

That they're both LA girls -- Ronda by birth, Leticia via Brazil -- is just icing on the cake.

Jay Adams

We weren't really surfers in the traditional sense you know? We're from VENICE.
--Skip Engblom

[Jay's] the original.
--Shogo Kubo

[Jay's] the real thing, an original seed, the original virus that infected all of us. He was beyond comparison.
--Stacy Peralta


It's fitting that R.I.P. is "rip," because that's what this LA legend did.

Spam: Corporate Shit = Your Annoyance

Shepard Fairey was on The Henry Rollins show this past week, and while I think he's an ok dude, I think his art is just kinda eh. Though he does have a cool pic of Jay Adams:



I digress. The point Fairey (man, did HE get picked on as a kid) made that's worth echoing is the one about spam. Basically, why is it that he has to take shit for his graf when just because corporations pay all of a sudden their spam is legitimized, and moreover, we just accept it or shrug our collective shoulders.

Good point. One that Robbie Conal has been making for way longer than Fairey. And of course, the poster boy, Keith Haring.

But isn't it interesting that white dudes like Conal, Fairey and Haring are celebrated as art iconoclasts and even sometimes go on to commercial success, as Fairey admitted? Point: Graf is a staple where I came up, on the Old English tip and beyond.


The above is probably one of, if not the most notorious and steeped in East LA lore barrios: Cerco Blanco (White Fence). As a kid, I grew up near their arch rivals, Varrio Nuevo Estrada (VNE), but was always more taken with the lyrically named White Fence. Although I probably have it wrong, the way their name was handed down to me was that their founder was shot and fell over a white fence. My pops came up in Boyle Heights, steeped in White Fence.

And graf was everywhere in East LA. My favorite restaurant, Largo's Mitote, (RIP) had a back alley that was littered with spray paint way before it got going as "art" on the east coast.

Cholos - the prototypical/stereotypical "Mexican American gangbanger" - also had tats fired up decades before the current trend. Indeed, I remember being with Jerry Ortiz and going down to the Pike to get tatted. In the end, I chickened out because I just plain hated needles; as a kid I was always getting stuck because I had asthma and allergies. I hated needles.

But a cholo's placa isn't seen as art by the mainstream. And they certainly aren't getting on Hank's show.

Destroy All Fear: Jay Adams

As a kid I had a skateboard, but we never screwed around with them in creative ways like the legendary Dogtown boys clear on the other side of LA did. They were the arbiters inventing the modern-day phenomenon and big biz it is today. Which is to say that while I liked skateboarding, I didn't love it. Basketball and football were my things.

Some years later I discovered that movies could be "different" after plunking down in my 10th grade English class late and loaded, right in the middle of Nichols', Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Thereafter I went on a tear, and in my consumption I came across Bruce Brown's, On Any Sunday.

Why mention OAS in a piece on Jay Adams when I'm not even crazy about skateboarding? Well, for one, I've always had a fascination with people who really got into what they were doing, almost irrespective of the pursuit. That's where OAS comes in, because it gets into motorcycles and the men who ride them from many different angles and digs deep.

It is also full to overflowing with affection, and conveys the unique freedom that riders feel. In its own way, On Any Sunday is a very moving film. When I saw Stacy Peralta's, Dogtown and Z Boys, a few years back I remember thinking that it evoked the same feeling that On Any Sunday does.

So it is we come to Jay Adams, virtually a consensus lock for the most creative and free spirit to have skateboarded back in the formative days.

The following article first appeared in that legendary melding of street, punk, sport, and art known as Thrasher Magazine. I remember picking up Thrasher back in the day and riffing through it to find stuff on Black Flag, the Jerks, X, et al, and, even though I wasn't a skater, admiring the aesthetic. Corporate Amerikkka had no place there.

The article - in excerpt - is written by another of Jay's fellow Z Boys, Stacy Peralta, said director of Dogtown and Z Boys. Reading what he has to say about Jay, some thirty years later, reminds me of what Michael Bloomfield said about seeing and hearing Jimi the first time, how revelatory and transcendent it was. Peralta's words convey staggering admiration, and, yes, deep affection.

Maybe even love.

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Here's something about Jay Adams: Jay was not the greatest pool skater, nor was he the greatest bank skater, or the greatest slalom skater or the greatest freestyler. The fact is, Jay Adams' contribution to skateboarding defies description or category. Jay Adams is probably not the greatest skater of all time, but I can say without fear of being wrong that he is clearly the archetype of modern-day skateboarding. Archetype defined means an original pattern or model, a prototype. Prototype defined means the first thing or being of its kind. He's the real thing, an original seed, the original virus that infected all of us. He was beyond comparison. To this day I haven't witnessed any skater more vital, more dynamic, more fun to watch, more unpredictable, and more spontaneous in his approach than Jay. There are not enough superlatives to describe him.

In contests, Jay was simply the most exciting skater to watch. He never skated the same run the same way twice. His routines were wickedly random yet exceedingly tight and beautiful to watch: he even invented tricks during his runs. I've never seen any skater destroy convention and expectation better. Watching him skate was something new every second: he was "skate and destroy" personified.

I believe this photo of Jay is the most stunning and strikingly clear representation, of any photo ever taken, of modern skateboarding. It contains all the elements that make up what modern-day skateboarding has become: awesome aggression and style, power and fury, wild abandon, destruction of all fear, untamed individualism, and a free-spirited determination to tear, shred, and rip relentlessly.

Jay Adams may not have been the world's best skater, but he was the man, the real deal, the original, the first. He is the archetype of our shared heritage.
---Stacy Peralta