In the recent X Games in Philadelphia, the world was shocked — shocked, I say! — to learn that TV stations care only about entertainment.

That message came to us care of Matt Dove, who won the gold medal for the best trick on a skateboard by shooting up in the air from a half-pipe ramp and very neatly turning around twice before touching back down. But before he knew he'd won, Dove blew up, saying ESPN was controlling the event too much and hogging all the money.

"This isn't skateboarding, this is a show," he said (in a Web report by reporter Sean Mulligan). "The lights, everything else, this is just for people to watch, it is not for us to skate. We are just little puppets that are moving around, cutting their footage so that they don't see certain things that they don't want people to see because it's not making them money."

I have two reactions to that:

a) Well duh.

b) This happens with all the arts, sooner or later — whether it's rock and roll or a sport you invented with a skateboard and a discarded sewer pipe.

Money ruins things.

Anyone with a financial stake in public trends is desperate for a claim on whatever interests people between age 7 and 17, the target audience for the X Games. So sponsors and the media grabbed onto this event like a skateboarder grabbing onto the back of a moving truck, to see if it would go anywhere.

That has made for, among other things, weirdly dissonant local news coverage. On the one hand, news stories reported on the games and athletes as if everyone were swept up in X Games fever and, yeah, we're all hep to that scene, dude. On the other hand, the Philadelphia Inquirer also ran a little glossary of skating and biking terms — acknowledging that anybody old enough to read a newspaper (or, for that matter, write for one) didn't have a clue what was going on.

I'm pretty sure I remember how these games started, though. It was when I was in high school in 1975, and my friend Erik Tilgas jumped from my roof into my swimming pool. OK, it didn't just start at my house. Hundreds of guys all over the country were looking around their dull suburban landscape and thinking of ways they could almost but not quite kill themselves with it.

No one thought they were doing this for any practical purpose — though, admittedly, it might help to know some bicycle tricks in case you landed on a planet consisting of curved wooden ramps and alien overlords who demanded that you twirl around. And street luge abilities could be useful for all those times when you fall out the back of a truck at the top of a hill, and you're in a coffin.

But generally, people did it for love.

Cut to 25 years later. ESPN has consolidated all these various quasi-suicidal activities into the X-Games. Participants can win up to $20,000, depending on the event. A person actually might make a living by doing the kind of stuff that would have landed you in the police blotter of my hometown paper.

But how much has ESPN made? Undisclosed millions. Look at all the ads. Look at all the publicity. Look at all the sponsors, who, I'm told, gave free trinkets to teenage fans in exchange for e-mail addresses. And finally, Matt Dove says he's sick of it.

The sport can't go back in time, though. The money has walked in, and everything changes. Increasing the prize values will make things more fair, but with higher stakes, there'll be less sincere admiration of each other's work, and more of the steely, avaricious gaze of a competitor who hopes to be set for life by evening's end. The innocence is gone.

As a post script, here's one absurd end result: In some places, money is the only part of Dove's sport that's allowed. Skateboarding is against the law in a lot of towns throughout the Jersey section of greater Philadelphia, even if stores there nonetheless sell boards for hundreds of dollars.

If Dove really wants to get worked up, he ought to drop by Moorestown's town center. Cops confiscate your board, neighbors rat you out — and X Games sponsors can send ads to your e-mail account.