Sketchy Andy with Madonna during the Super Bowl halftime show!

If you watched the Super Bowl this year (Giants won), you may have watched the halftime show. If so, you undoubtedly saw a curly haired man in a dress (er... toga) bouncing around on a rope. This man was Andy Lewis, also know as Sketchy Andy or Skandy, and what he was doing is called slacklining. 

Slacklining is where you stretch a piece of nylon webbing between two points and then walk across it, or in Skandy's case, do back flips and spins. Slacklining is an extremely popular activity for rock climbers when they are taking a break from climbing. Aside from being an entertaining challenge, slacklining requires a great deal of balance and concentration- two skills which happen correlate directly with rock climbing. How the Super Bowl halftime planners ever thought to put slacklining in the Super Bowl is astonishing really, but hey, it sure was cool. Overnight Sketchy Andy has gone from a modest celebrity in the slacklining world to a nationally recognized extreme sports star. Below I've attached a couple videos about Andy Lewis including a piece by ABC and a video explaining how he landed himself the nickname Sketchy Andy.

The first is an ABC piece on Andy Lewis and the Super Bowl halftime show. The second is a Youtube reel that explains the nickname.