Josh Ew Uh alerted me about this last night… and because I like to do my best to give you all a candid look at what’s going on in the area, I want to give you a full rundown.

The tour coming up next Sunday is a promotion from Warner Brothers in an attempt to push the cartoon character Speedy Gonzalez. It goes without saying, the idea of a tour based on Speedy makes people tilt their heads and say… “huh?” But then again, when you have Danny Gonzalez, Patrick Melcher and the legendary Steve Caballero coming to town, it helps to ease situation a bit.

Anyway… last night, Josh informed me that the official tour website (located here) had our part of the tour labeled as New Orleans (see for yourself). As everyone in this state knows, we love New Orleans with all of our hearts… but we aren’t New Orleans. We’re not even considered part of the greater New Orleans area (something I tried to explain to one of the marketers last night, something that I believe fell on deaf ears). All of us here in Hammond have busted our collective asses in making sure that Hammond was known as Hammond… and I think every skater in the state understands that we have our own thing going on. As always, we invite everyone to take part in what we have going on, but the differences between our scenes and the scenes in other areas of the state are very clear.

Mr. Marketer was trying to tell me that they were making an attempt to cater to the “New Orleans market,” which simply doesn’t make any sense. That would be like having an event in Los Angeles, yet claiming an attempt to cater to a market in San Francisco (as far as cultural identity is concerned).

We have a very special relationship with New Orleans, we have all the respect in the world, and more friends, family, and roots there than I can count… so I don’t want this to come across as even remotely negative to my people over there, because it’s not. This is a matter of pride regarding who we are… we’re Tangipahoa Parish, dammit. We’re Hammond, Louisiana.

Last thing: I’ve been in regular contact with Steve Caballero about various concerns we’ve had with these marketing types, and he’s been 100% supportive of us… then again, he’s a skateboarder. I don’t want any negative criticisms here to appear like a critique on any of the pros that are coming… it’s not them, it’s the uninformed marketing people that work as desk jockeys all day that I have a problem with, and I’ll continue to have that problem with them until they give us the recognition we deserve.

If any of the marketers involved in the tour are reading this right now, it’s spelled H-A-M-M-O-N-D.

Grrrr.