Grabs

 

Grabbing the board’s toe edge between your feets with the front hand is a Mute grab. But why ‘Mute’? Well, a deaf skater called Chris Weddle was one of the first skaters to execute this trick and, so legend has it, Alan Losi’s father saw Chris pulling the trick at The Ranch Pro/Am contest in 1981 and called the trick ‘mute’ as Chris was quiet and has speech difficulties due to his deafness. Yeah, perhaps not the most thoughtful thing in the world (Chris was lucky not to have been beaten and napalmed for being different) but nevertheless the name stuck.