On Wheels: The Art of Skateboarding

Lately I’ve been watching skateboarding clips on YouTube. It’s an idle, enjoyable activity that means reflecting on the roughly ten-year period when skating was the whole of my life. Skating’s a young and unusually aesthetic sport, and video has played an enormous role in shaping its culture and progress. For all I know, an addiction to these old films—ten and twenty years constituting age here—is burgeoning again thanks to technology. How easy it is now to find Animal Chin, that figure of myth from the Powell video, and then get lost among all the semi-forgotten footage of his descendants. Those few seconds from the Blind video when Jason Lee hits the Eiffel Tower banks? They’re available again, and now you can watch what they left out—Lee casually skating the famous spot, and then the city more generally, with Mark Gonzales and Danny Way. It’s 1990, and the Parisian pedestrians the skaters swerve around are typically discreet about their brush with greatness, some even affecting to pretend that the riders are some delinquent kids with a camcorder.

As well as video parts and unused tape, a bunch of amateur retrospectives are now up on the net. These tend to feature pro skaters looking back on their careers, or at a legendarily fertile skate scene, Embarcadero in San Francisco, or Philly’s Love Park. Once you have watched such things, there is no choice but to watch certain documentaries in full. I was sorry to realise, while glued to last year’s moving film about Christian Hosoi, that I’d forgotten about him. For shame!, I cried inwardly, wondering how it was possible to forget the most natural style in skateboarding. A god in his time, Hosoi fell into obscurity in the nineties, then drugs and jail, and now embraces religion. The effect of the old movies was to make you rush to your board, and here I was, thinking for days about the star and his trajectory.

As a kid, watching skate videos decidedly meant looking forward. In the mid to late eighties there were two shops (one primarily surf, the other BMX) that stocked a little skate stuff in my hometown of Canberra. The first three Powell and Peralta videos arrived there, as they must have everywhere kids skated, as events of religious importance. There was only one copy of each tape, and we would hire them again and again, our admiration turning to new points with every viewing, and use them as inspiration for our own skating. Gradually there were more skate companies; with cameras more accessible, videos became easier for all to make, and started to come out with greater frequency. In 1991 my brother and I were lucky enough to get our hands on Blind’s Video Days within the first week of its release in Australia; a group of good skaters we were friendly with heard we had it out on hire, and showed up unannounced at our house, though they hadn’t since the days when we had a jump ramp and people still loved those. We huddled around the screen, spines tingling at the intro. Without backing music, fourteen-year-old Guy Mariano came on, doing the handful of tricks that opened his part, a sequence still precisely remembered, probably, by any devoted street skater from those years. Watching the little crew-cut prodigy, our anticipation was mingled with fear. The god of skate videos decrees that the film must finish on the highest note of difficulty possible: if this was how the Blind one began, how might it end? We were not sure such a close would be believable.

As well as sightings of the best locals, it was videos and magazines that brought us the news, because our contact with live pros was limited. In the early days, the demonstrations put on by visiting Americans might occur in the middle of the week and during the day, making skipping school an existential imperative. At one such demo, I remember Tony Hawk making a 540 ollie on the town’s narrow half-pipe. He had only recently learned the trick, and was the only person on the planet to have done it—what an uproar we made in response, crowd of joyous young fanatics that we were. In 1989 our family moved to California for a bit. It was our luck to live near Upland, and thus Upland’s historic Pipeline park, but our misfortune that it was about to close on account of the idiotic litigation troubles plaguing skate parks around the country. It was already closed to the public when we arrived, but, thank God, the Alba brothers, Eric Dressen and other pros could still be seen skating it up to the last few days. We were mostly street skaters, and just visitors, but the melancholy of it all was still palpable. My brother took black and white photos of some of the last sessions, and before the rubble could be cleared away, we salvaged a few blue tiles from the square bowl, with its murderous four feet of vert, and put them in an empty film canister.

By the time we’d returned to Australia, just six months later, the days of the star pros, some the same the people whose autographs we’d just now been thrilled to get, were coming to an end. Though we didn’t necessarily connect the events, certain friends began to drift away from the sport. We forgot them, shamelessly, as kids will, or as people at hectic jobs sometimes do of departing colleagues. We continued to skate with whoever skated, in thrall to the new changes. Some developments we would momentarily deride, but that was all part of progression. In a little while there would be more pros—too many, everyone grumbled—but many were good, and a few stood out like the earlier ones. Being in Australia, we were happy to see whoever could be bothered to fly over. Happily, some of these turned out to be raw, showman-like skaters, ever eager for new terrain. At Belconnen, John Cardiel suddenly ollied from a corner of the snake run, over an area of grass, and into a bank that we’d always considered a completely separate part of the street area. Nearby, with no run-up and a landing spotted with duck shit, just metres from the lake, Alan Peterson threw his tall, slick-haired self down a big double flight of stairs. With punishing repetition, he kept trying and slamming until he made it. A few years later, having seen the tape of Peterson, surely, Jamie Thomas arrived, examined the situation, and did it first try. We were greatly impressed of course, though it was somehow less memorable.

Pros aside, the physical business of skating was changing for everyone during this period. In the late eighties and early nineties, the sport arguably lost some of its residual and superficial resemblances to surfing. The halting tick-tack, that retrospectively amusing carving to-and-fro action that provided momentum from a stand-still, had always made skating look a little clumsy, a cruder cousin to the water sport. That was in the past. Now when you landed a trick, you had to roll away properly, preferably maintaining speed. Thus, stationary tricks on blocks were instantly condemned to pointlessness. Grabs—tricks in which you hold onto the board with your hand—were going out, too, as if someone had simply said, why do we need to grab, anyway? Consistency was now emphasised in the form of ‘lines’ or ‘runs’—an unbroken sequence of tricks—as compared to doing something one-off. So the demands were greater all round; the whole activity was growing more difficult and technical, just as it was getting faster and better looking. The skaters themselves no longer appeared like idle kids fooling around in forbidden places, though of course they were still that. They were more at home in cities, as if they’d sprouted up out of the buildings they rode on, a natural part of the urban ecosystem. And it’s true, for some time now they had been learning to see cities differently from other people, with a combination of imagination and natural right, the latter growing from a conviction about what curbs, ledges, stairs and so on were actually for. They could see the possibilities inherent in these structures, and had an intimate, full-body knowledge of their surfaces.

It’s my experience that this way of perceiving the environment becomes ingrained, and may outlive the prime of one’s engagement with the sport. I know I’m not the only thirty-year-old who walks up marble steps with a sense of longing, who instantly notices transitioned walls in a building, and slides his hand along a low nice-looking handrail, gauging the height of it with his eye. I doubt these instincts will ever leave, and am pleased to learn that there are now architects, former skaters themselves, who slyly design with thoughts like these in mind. Half-consciously, my fingers still assume the fingerboard position along the edges of books and tables and mixing bowls, transforming them into street blocks and bowl lips. When I was younger, I’d picture fantastical things. Every day I mounted the huge double set of stairs leading up to the breezeway of my high school was a day I envisioned doing a 360 ollie down it, the way Danny Way triumphantly did at the end of the Plan B movie. Finally there are memories of real places, all the parks, spots, and towns you went to; the best sessions, the spots hit before they became unskateable. It’s still gratifying to think that I passed through Paris at a time when the Eiffel Tower banks were empty, and to have found a kid there who let me use his board.

One of the telling differences of skating from other sports, and hinting at its outsider tendencies, has to be skaters’ denial that it’s a sport at all. Many, myself included, would quarrel about it being labelled an extreme game; most, if pressed, would probably call it a lifestyle. Observers would be right to view this as semantic quibbling, the special pleading of partisans of any sport. But I do think there is this that distinguishes skating: a high premium on progression. You can get better and better at playing a game, but to skate better and better means changing the game itself, expanding the feats that it includes, and the kinds of terrain on which they’re done. For a trick to count in skating, there are only two negative rules: no doing what you didn’t intend, and no rolling away without both feet on. After this, and always allowing for a love of the simple essence of cruising around, you have, basically, infinity. Certain tricks may look of apiece to those who don’t skate, but to skaters they occur under distinctly different shades of precision, difficulty and style. The resulting intentionality is surprisingly hard to communicate to people unfamiliar with the sport. Partly for that reason, it seems worth stressing how far skating has come along over the years. Despite all that unites them, skaters from different epochs can seem like different species. Much of the street skating in the old Powell videos looks like, well, kid’s play today, though it’s no less charming or significant for that, and today’s tricks would have sounded unimaginable to the old pros.

In the Chocolate team’s film of a few years ago, Marc Johnson remarked that he had studied the second video from Blind and set himself the task of learning every trick in it. Skate teams can change in an instant, and at that time Blind was just Tim Gavin and Henry Sanchez, which made for an odd, special little video. Both riders had lengthy parts and were doing tricks few of their peers had even thought about. That one of today’s best and most technical pros would seek to challenge his limits by studying a video of more than a decade ago says a lot, I think, about the singular creativity of skating at the time, and also something about the role in skating of vision. Skate videos are not usually a forum for conversation, but Johnson voiced his notion that if a trick could be imagined, it could probably be done.

Danny Way had said a similar thing, while chewing on something, it seemed, back in H-Street’s 1989 video, Shackle Me Not. ‘Anybody can do anything they want,’ the fourteen-year-old intoned over footage of back to back Mctwists, ‘you just got to spend time on it’. Of course, it’s really Danny Way who can do anything he wants—including jumping out of a helicopter and into a gigantic half-pipe, also flying over the Great Wall of China. But I think there’s a suggestive truth to his words; after all, concentrations of talented youths bent on achieving whatever they wanted were responsible for Upland and Embarcadero, the Powell and Girl and Flip teams, and any other creative force in skating you might care to name. Friends pushed each other to be better, and made videos; others, inspired by their efforts, strove to outdo the videos. There is small tolerance for boredom in skating, and riders of whatever level constantly think of learning something a little beyond their reach. That aforementioned Blind video was called Pack of Lies, and other skating titles of the period—Mirrors and Wires, Questionable Video, Useless Wooden Toys—likewise jested about skating’s obsession with advancing the possible.

That ‘spending time’ Way referred to means persisting, and to persist in skating involves more than mere repetition, and can mean putting yourself in the line of some downright cruelties. Buoyant health and a kind of mad wilful absorption are called for. In a word, the stuff of adolescence: much easier to get good at a thing when you’re free to make it everything. How much it hurts, slapping for the first time on a cold winter day, and how much you must love skateboarding to put up with it. In fact, after that first one, you don’t much care. Obviously all skaters fall, and hard, but some do so more than others, and each in their own way. One friend of mine, a big guy, would go down awfully while learning anything, and another only occasionally, though when he did it would often involve weeks off and the return of the hated ankle braces. There are also skaters who compound the abuse by fighting with themselves; in their efforts to land a trick, they’ll scream and and throw their boards, as though their decks were incarnations of shortcomings, or frustration itself.

Skating also means just hanging around, hunting for spots, and dragging random bits of wood into desirable arrangements. When I was fourteen, I’d go to the skate park on a summer day at 10 a.m., stay there until about 6 p.m., and then sometimes go out for another skate after dinner. That was the general rule throughout the season. Often we’d venture off to street spots near the park, which might mean getting yelled at and chased, and fraternising with security guards. (The theatre of the absurd is alive and well in skating: ‘I told you to get off the board’; ‘I’m off—can’t you see I’m holding it?’; ‘I said get off the bloody board!’) If we were kicked out of a good spot one time, we’d figure out if there was a safe time to go; in any case, we would try again, magnetically, like animals on dropped food. The powerful desire to skate—I thought of it recently while watching a news clip about an Australian who has nobly set up a skate park for children in Kabul. He brings the boards to the park each day, tied to the back of his bike. No sooner has he pulled up than the youths—importantly, girls are allowed—mob him and pick them off, rushing to get some time in the park’s rudimentary bowl.

My friends and I marked and chipped countless curbs and blocks and benches, sure that we valued the presence of these objects—indeed, we were connoisseurs in them—infinitely more than lunching adults did. We bought boxes of cheap white candles to blacken curbs, stood sentry at stair landings for each others’ runaway boards, and liked to spiral as fast as possible, following one another, down multi-level car-park ramps. We skated crappy mini-ramps, and built our own crappy quarter-pipes in the garage, skating them until they died. In one old video sketch from the eighties, the floor of a skater’s house is laid with wooden boards, with ramps going up against his walls and furniture, so that he can skate back and forth through the various rooms: excellent idea, we thought. People bothered by the criminal side of skating may or may not find a small qualification in all this, in the thought of how much pleasure skaters manage to extract from even the shabbiest constructions. How purely skaters revel in the simplest places! I remember going out on cold winter nights to skate spots that were a bust during daytime. Near the bus stop there was a smooth tiled area surrounding a shopping strip, and after our real session, before the last bus, we would go there, pushing as fast as we could, to see how long we could simply slide for, continuing around a corner and onto a downhill section. Nobody, I’m guessing, can have had as much fun with that totally unremarkable mall.

If there’s one video that embodies the best side of modern street skating to me, it’s the original Blind one I mentioned earlier, the video a million other skaters of my generation would also single out. Though I’ve implied Video Days was well ahead of its time, it still had one toe happily in the past. This is most apparent with Mark Gonzales, who begins his part by carving playfully around the streets of London, dragging his hand towards the ground as though he really were surfing. He goes on to do a great Hawaiian-shirted sequence of old school tricks on a mini-ramp and at one point skates in moving traffic, pushes past a car, lays back down on his board and does the coffin.

The Gonz was twenty-one at the time of the movie, having named the team, an imprint of World Industries, as a riposte to the company he used to ride for, Vision. He was one of street skating’s big stars in the eighties, yet still innovative as could be; if a visionary of street skating could be said to exist, he was one, or it. The eccentric Gonz came up with tricks that others wouldn’t contemplate until years later, and he did them in his own style, as if he were skating in his sleep, doing things as soon as he dreamed them up, or as though he’d just awoken and was merely coming up with them on the way somewhere, an appointment he was late for and would soon forget about. He also had the talent of keeping good company. Along with the other hand-picked riders, there was John Coltrane and the Red Garland trio, who provided the music, listed in the credits simply as ‘some damn good jazz’. Gene Wilder as Willie Wonka presided over the part, opening it aptly with the words ‘We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams.’ The video’s director was an unfamous Spike Jonze.

Pros generally still liked to skate humble curbs back in 1991, and Gonz was not above sessioning one at 3.43 a.m., if the camcorder clock doesn’t lie. Such details look heartening from an age of ubiquitous filming, when big gaps and technical tricks on scary handrails have long been the norm. Where current pros mention the impending videos in a magazine, it’s usually to bemoan the burden, the pressure to come up with something still more difficult and new. Video Days was notable for not having a slam section—the part of a video that catalogues the miseries behind the miracles—and I wonder if this isn’t related to the relative casualness of the whole enterprise, its truth to how the riders normally skated. The other team members have said that Gonz and Jason Lee were both regularly doing better tricks than appear in the video, but just weren’t filming all the time. This is amazing, and I believe it.

Your average pro today could probably do most of the things in the video, leaving aside maybe the transition segments and a certain double-kinked handrail, but it is still counted as a classic. One reason for this is historical and technical: the plain originality of the tricks the riders came up with at that moment in time. The first note after seeing a great skating video could be crushingly melancholic—how was one ever expected to become so good? But this quickly gave way to another reaction, which was to make you want to go out skating, harder and hungrier and with more freedom than before. In the case of Video Days, this response was compounded by irresistible style, the other general point behind the video’s lasting appeal. Jason Lee, whatever his fame as an actor, will still always be most reverenced for the way he had with a 360 flip. Before Mariano emerged, nobody had seen someone so small (very nearly, anyone at all) skate with such aplomb and board control.

That is not to say these riders were all polished skaters, or had the same kind of style: just that they were a team of individuals, gifted people who skated in ways that were fully their own, and who fitted well together. It was personal style that explained why, when it came to the pros, you would be happier to see one skater do three tricks in a video and not hear from him again for months, than another do three minutes worth in video after video. In one movie, in a section shared with some other riders, Jovontae Turner suddenly nollies a big block at a San Francisco pier, and continues with three other tricks at top speed; what a memorable part it is, and how often we rewound it. Certain skaters might always appear doing virtually the same tricks, and you didn’t care at all. The same applied to scale. What did it matter if Keenan Milton or Gino Iannucci didn’t tend to do a lot of handrails, if everything they did do was so suave. Tom Penny is doing a front side flip yet again, and Kareem Campbell a backside one? Brilliant. When such skaters surprised us, it was by doing a trick we’d never seen them do before. In one stroke the trick became theirs, and made an unexpected natural sense.

These people were all skaters’ skaters, and accordingly the subjects of much benign envy. To land something hard with style and control is not about mere vanity, but means feeling great, getting the maximum possible pleasure from the sport. The counterpoint to this is skaters’ exacting frankness about coming up short. However long it took, if you made it sketchy, it may as well not count, and there is nothing for it but to do it again properly.

In the Hosoi documentary, Danny Way makes a canny observation. He comments that Hosoi would do backside air after backside air on a half-pipe, but that he did each one so individually that, in effect, they became different tricks. As most people interviewed in the movie imply, strange would be the skater who wouldn’t wish to be able to skate like Hosoi. And yet, it seems to me, the greatest rival of Hosoi, Tony Hawk, despite the self-deprecating things he might say about it, is not a skater whose extraordinary technical skill annuls style. There may be another skater who could do the innumerable tricks of Hawk, but Hawk’s lanky way of doing them was and is his own. Asking either pro to skate differently would amount to asking him to stop being himself. The standard was whether one went as far as one’s nature allowed, but it was also, in some basic way, about that nature in its simplest form, about how a skater looked while just cruising around. As much as my skating friends and I used to talk, when we used to talk, I mean, about which new tricks we’d love to learn, we’d ask each other which basic ones we’d be happy doing forever, if we were limited to just four or five. Every retired pro I’ve seen interviewed is like every older skater I know, in that, in the end, they just love to roll around.

It’s my surmise that this preoccupation with style goes beyond a fan’s preferences about the best skaters and extends to more general matters, such as why street skaters won’t wear pads, or why the existence of skate parks will never, ever prevent the skating of cities. It’s part of the dream of street skating to be physically free; not an athlete but someone who just happens to moving through the city on wheels, standing up, with a useless wooden toy under his or her feet. Someone going anywhere on a board, and doing anything he chooses with it. The conceit is that it’s one’s organic way of being.

There is a different kind of simplicity in serious skating, in skating to master tricks, and one that likewise has its appeal. At its highest level, skating shares with many sports a kind of dream of action, the promise of a mental state that is total concentration and no concentration at all. To have body and will mastered, in perfect control and unison, and to be just a set of eyes watching it all happen. It may take someone days and weeks to land a trick that is, finally, never more than a trick. There may be some suffering for this act that will last as long as a cat’s jump; it may not be seen by anyone, and may never be done again. However, few satisfactions are as solid as the ones that ripple from those split seconds. Apart from everything else, I like the purity in that. Although, I'm partial. As a skater's eyes are marked to see a city differently, so, just possibly, might the brain adhere to every argument favoring the time spent on wheels.