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Joe BrookMike Anderson bleeds the chevron and star from here on out

With the consolidation of core sneaker brands the skate footwear unemployment line is getting longer and longer in 2012. When staple core brand éS announced it was halting operations earlier this year it left a lot of great skaters barefoot, including Krooked Skateboards' Mike Anderson, whose first pro model shoe was about to debut. Luckily for Mike he didn't go long without a shoe sponsor. It was announced today that the restructuring Cons Skate Program had added Manderson and legend Jason Jessee to its roster. Expect further changes from Cons in the near future when, like every other brand this year, they cut their dead weight and set it adrift.

ESPN.com: How did this Converse thing come about?
Mike: I was bugging Mickey Reyes a lot about trying to find a shoe sponsor and I told him I was very interested in Converse and I was at ASR trade show and Mickey dragged Steve Luther up and made an awkward introduction. It all went from there. The next thing I know they were down to do a contract so I was stoked. Converse is rad.

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Jason HainaultCorey Duffel-between rehabing his foot and filming for the new Osiris.

ESPN.com got Corey Duffel on the phone to discuss Mother's Day at the Duffel house, coming back from injuries, the new additions to the Osiris team and their upcoming video "'Till the Wheels Come Off".

ESPN.com: Are you back in Walnut Creek (Ca.) now?
Corey: Yeah, I had to come up to see mom on Mother's Day. We just went over to my aunt and uncle's house. Met up with my grandparents and cousins, barbecued some steak, hung out for a couple hours.

How often do you come down to San Diego?
I guess it depends. This time, we were filming for an Osiris commercial. It's got some wild stuffI think it should be coming out soon.

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Santa Cruz, Calif. has been known throughout the history of skateboarding as the central hub of Santa Cruz Skateboards, Derby Skatepark (one of the first ever built) and the band Blast. Well, maybe Blast isn't what comes to most peoples mind, but they're great. But over the last few years this sleepy, patchouli oil soaked beach town of Santa Cruz has taken on a new role as the residence of the one and only Emmanuel Guzman. Santa Cruz Skateboards number one son, Emmanuel, sat down with ESPN.com to spell out the recent resurfacing of Derby skatepark, his new shoe on Circa and the up coming SC video due out in 2013.

2012 Street League: Kansas City, Mo.

Rob Dyrdek's Street League Series returns to Kansas City, Mo. Gallery

Nyjah Huston fought off challenges from Bastien Salabanzi and Chaz Ortiz to win the season-opening stop in Street League Skateboarding.

We'll have to wait nearly a month for the second stop, in Ontario, Calif., but in the meantime you can check out the videos above for all the action from Rob Dyrdek's revamped skateboarding series.

Deville NunezEvan Smith threads the needle through the fence and front blunts the bank-to-ledge.

If you have ever seen Evan Smith skateboard in person it's magical. Evan's skating seems so effortless and his style is something that can't be faked or copied. He's a new kid on the block but I've seen Evan skate this good since he was 12. Evan is going to change the way people approach the streets and it shouldn't be much longer until you see a board with his name on it. Evan Smith rips!

ESPN: What's going on Evan?
Evan: Wow... So much, the family and myself have been working around the clock.

How does it feel to be done with Element video "Future Nature"?
It feels great!

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Street League is many things. Street League is a multimedia extravaganza. Street League is sports theater. Street League is an attempt to introduce something resembling objective, data-driven analysis to a sport that has always prized the subjective and the highly eccentric. Street League is Rob Dyrdek's ambitious personal vision and aesthetic writ large.

Yet, there are transcendent moments during many Street League events in which all of this -- the JumboTron, the Monster "Dime Squad," the T-shirt gun, instant scoring technology (ISX) -- seems to suddenly melt away. And what remains is something simple yet profound: skateboarding.

In the beginning of March, 2012, Chris Haslam, Chris Mathis and myself took to the sky and crossed the Pacific in search of marble ledges and untouched spots. Being Chris Mathis' first trip out of the country, he did not know what to expect, but with our sights set on Guangzhou in the south of China we were ready to go. Haslam flew out from Los Angeles directly to Guangzhou while Mathis and I flew through Japan. A word to the wise: if you are used to carrying your board with you on a flight, in Japan they frown upon this. While going through security my skateboard and tripod were taken from me because they were too long. Mathis was sent on to stop the plane from leaving due to a tight connection. After going back and forth with the man, using only hand signals, I took my brand new board, broke it in two and he was immediately pleased as they let me pass through. Luckily, we made it without much more hassle and beelined it to the hotel where Haslam was waiting for us.

Street League offers viewing enjoyment on several levels. Most of those levels were on display Friday, during the "Preliminary Qualifier," the first official event of the contest series. And purely as an audio-visual experience, Street League is certainly impressive.

Whether it's the JumboTron broadcasting immaculately produced DC Shoes commercials or realtime footage of the skaters as they compete with a filmer in tow, the event has succeeded in synthesizing aspects of mainstream sporting events with things like, well, Habitat pro and first time Street League contestant Austyn Gillette's ever so graceful yet ever so gnarly frontside 180 flip to flat.

Bryce KanightsGreyson Smith grinds the over-vert clam shell at the West Linn skatepark in the suburbs of Portland, Ore.

Skateboarding is a baby compared to surfing. While we're celebrating the Z-Boys of the 70s and the Bones Brigade of the 80s as our pioneers, surfing was already huge in America for three or four decades by that point (I'm not even going to get into how it dates all the way back to the 1700s). When Alex Olson turned pro in 2008, becoming the first son of a pro skater to turn pro, surfing had already had generation after generation of pro lineage. Flip Skateboards' newest am, Greyson Fletcher, belongs to such a lineage. His great grandfather, Walter Hoffman, was a big wave pioneer in the 50s, his aunt Joyce a women's champion surfer in the 60s. His grandpa Herbie Fletcher, dad Christian Fletcher and uncle Nathan Fletcher are household names in the surf world. So how the hell did Greyson Fletcher, heir to a surf empire, become a sponsored skater instead of surfer? He lived inland.

ESPN: How did you get hooked up with Flip?
Greyson: I was skating at the Vans Skatepark at the Block in Orange County and they started kicking everyone out for a private session with Curren Caples and his friends for his birthday. I was like, "I know Curren, I'm staying." Jeremy Fox was there from Flip with Lance Mountain and Geoff Rowley and they saw me skating the mini ramp and that's when they got interested a little. After that I started skating with Arto Saari at some backyard pools and stuff and meeting up with him in LA every weekend and skating his pool. Flip seemed stoked and I started getting some boards from them. Right before the Pro-Tec Pool Party Andrew [Shusterman] from Flip asked me if I wanted to ride for them and I was like, "Hell yeah, I'm interested. Sounds really fun!" That's when they put me on the team.

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Grant PuckettShane O' Neill (left) and Bastien Salabanzi (right) during the practice session for stop one of the 2012 Street League Series.

Before we begin our coverage let us first address the elephant in the room.

Some members of the skateboarding community are not particularly enthusiastic about Street League. Some people, in fact, harbor a certain dislike for Street League. Actually some people hate Street League. Some people, in fact, really, really hate Street League. More to the point: They hate what they take Street League to be, what they think it represents.

To such observers ("haters" if you will) Street League is synonymous with skateboarding's penultimate assimilation into mass culture, its marriage of convenience to various corporate interests, its recent emphasis on raw, blaring athletic achievement, presumably at the expense of pure, subtle artistry.