A SKATEBOARDING HISTORY
The concept of skateboarding is such a simple one that it's amazing it wasn't discovered much earlier. After all, roller skating became a real sport in the 1860s, nearly one hundred years before the first skateboards began to appear. So it's pretty safe to say that someone must have tinkered with a broken pair of roller skates and attached the wheels to a solid board back then.
That's actually how the first boards appeared. They were homemade creations that probably didn't last very long. There are reports of crude skateboards appearing as early as the 1930s or 1940s. Certainly, there must have been some boards appearing in the 1950s, especially in the warm-weather climates of Florida and California.
Henry Hester, who would someday become a world champion in the skateboard slalom competition, remembers his first skateboard:
"My dad took a piece of two-by-four and nailed some roller-skate wheels onto it," Hester said. "It was maybe twenty-two inches long, only four inches wide, and real simple. I guess I was in junior high school then and a number of my friends had similar homemade boards."
That was in the early 1960s and just about the time the first skateboard revolution was beginning to take place. It all started as a crossover activity. California surfers saw the skateboard as a way to practice their primary sport during bad weather or even at home when they couldn't get to the beach. So the first skateboards were substitute surfboards.
Sidewalk surfing became a fad in California around 1962 and lasted about three years. There was even a hit song about it by the then-popular duo Jan and Dean. For the first time, several companies began to manufacture skateboards and the first boards sold like hotcakes. One estimate said that by 1965, there had been some fifty million skateboards sold in the United States.
"We would paint little dots on the streets and slalom in and out of the dots," Henry Hester recalls. "By then we had manufactured boards, but sometimes still fooled around making our own. We made the boards out of plywood and bought what they called 'super surfer' boards that had clay wheels. Sometimes we would glue sandpaper on the tail of the board so we wouldn't slip off and we started doing wheelies and things like that."
But the skateboarding fad of the mid-1960s was short-lived. It crested in 1965, then took a nosedive. There were a number of reasons cited for the rapid decline. The quality of the early boards was not good. Many snapped under the pressure of heavy usage and more daring skaters. The boards were flat and not designed nearly as well as later models. In addition, the small, clay wheels couldn't handle rough surfaces and skaters often wiped out if they hit a rough patch of sidewalk or road. Besides poor traction, the boards simply didn't have enough mobility.
At the same time, the public perception of skateboarding had soured. The sound of the wheels on concrete surfaces was noisy and harsh on the ears. With skateboards cruising up and down the sidewalks, weaving in and out of pedestrians, more people began to fear they would be slammed into by an out-of-control skater. They didn't want to compete for sidewalk space with these often daring and quick skaters.
The fear factor went a step further when the California Medical Association released statistics that showed skateboarding accidents were becoming more prevalent than bicycle accidents as a major cause of injuries to children. In addition, nearly one-third of skateboarding injuries involved adults.
With all of that, a backlash against the sport developed rapidly. Many cities from coast to coast began to pass ordinances that banned skateboarding on public streets and sidewalks. And at the same time the youngsters seemed to lose interest. Too many accidents; too many broken boards. The kids and young adults all seemed to quit around the same time. Like the Hula-Hoop, skateboarding was looked upon as a fad that had come and gone with breakneck speed.
"Hardly anyone skated after 1965 or 1966," Henry Hester remembers. "It had been almost solely a sidewalk sport then. But I remember seeing an early movie about that time called Skater-Dater. It was a boy-meets-girl, boy-leaves-girl kind of movie and all the kids were skating barefooted, going downhill.
"There were even some early big names then. We all knew about Torger Johnson, Bruce Logan and Davey Hilton from Hilton Hotel fame. For awhile, we skated every day. Then it just faded away."
There was even a new skateboarding magazine that came out about that time. It lasted just four issues and folded. Skateboarding was out.
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The status quo didn't change until 1973. The biggest initial innovation in the comeback of skateboarding was the use of urethane wheels. Urethane is a soft, durable plastic that was used on roller-skate wheels first. These wheels were softer than clay and as a result gripped the skating surface better. But they were also slower and roller skaters didn't like them. With skates on both feet, roller skaters didn't have the same traction problems that skateboarders had.
Fortunately, the wheels weren't discarded. It took a surfer named Frank Nasworthy to think of using urethane wheels on skateboards. Nasworthy was from Encinitas, California, and before long his idea was put to use by several skateboarding companies. Urethane wheels gave the skaters a safer, smoother ride. Combined with new, flexible fiberglass boards, skaters now had a piece of equipment they could push to its limits. Skateboarding began to take off once again.
This time the sport really grew quickly. It wasn't just a bunch of kids surfing on the sidewalks. This time it had a real sense of purpose and organization. Skateboard parks began opening around the country--places where people could go and skate half-pipes, in bowls, and on ramps. They could practice downhill and slalom racing or just plain have fun.
There were more competitive contests springing up all over, with skaters competing in downhill racing, slalom racing, cross-country, bowl-riding, and freestyle. More and more youngsters took up the new sport and many became outstanding skateboarders in a relatively short period of time.
By 1976, skateboarding had become a $300 million-a-year business, with both large corporations and small entrepreneurs turning out skateboards at a fast pace.
Rodney Mullen, who would become a world-champion freestyler, began skating at about this very time.
"My father was a doctor and was fearful that I would get hurt on a skateboard," Mullen said. "But finally in January of 1977 he relented and bought me my first board. I was just ten at the time and thought skateboarding was a cool thing to do."
Mullen was so good at it and practiced so much that within two years he won the amateur championship of California and a year later was a world champion in freestyling. He was just thirteen years old at the time.
Mike McGill began skating on a borrowed board when he was nearly twelve. He began on his driveway in Florida and before long had his own board and was building a driveway ramp. From there it was on to a skate park in Tampa, Florida, where he began to excel at vertical skating. Before his fourteenth birthday he was representing his park in contests against other skate parks in the area.
"Back then there was a lot of bowl-riding, flatland freestyle, and snake runs, which was like a cross-country course," McGill said. "This was about 1980 and stuff like the downhill and slalom was already starting to die out by then."
Mike McGill would become a world champion at vertical skating (ramps and bowls), but by that time the sport was changing once again. In the early 1980s, skateboarding inexplicably went into another down period. This one is tough even for guys like Mullen and McGill to explain. It just seemed to happen. Not many youngsters were taking up the sport. But then in the mid-to-late 1980s it began growing once more, and spread to Europe and to the Scandinavian countries, even to Australia.
"I remember about 1985 and 1986 I began going out on a lot of tours, giving demos all over the place," said Mullen. "By 1986, it was huge again and we were all stars."
It was the age of the VCR and skateboarding videos were popping up all over, enabling more and more youngsters to observe the sport in their own living rooms. There were new and better skateboards, with new ideas and new models being tried and sometimes discarded. But the latest boom didn't last, either.
The sport was changing again. It had been a real speed sport during the boom of the mid-1970s. Skaters were running hills, racing in the downhill and slalom and over cross-country courses, trying to beat the fastest time. But by the time of the resurgence of the mid-1980s, most of the speed aspects of the sport had disappeared. New skaters were more interested in technique, and streetstyle slowly evolved.
In the early 1990s, skateboarding was in another state of flux. Once again interest dropped, though not to the extent it had during the other down periods. One of the problems was the disappearance of many skate parks. Problems with liability insurance and lack of interest caused many to close. And many towns and cities still ban skating on most public sidewalks and parking lots. Sometimes a kid just doesn't have a lot of places to skate.
The disappearance of the popular early disciplines (downhill, slalom, flatland freestyle) has eliminated many choices for skaters. The most popular style of skating in the early 1990s is streetstyle. That can be very technical and sometimes devoid of movement.
"I've seen a group of maybe six, seven, or ten skaters just working on one structure or obstacle," said Henry Hester. "Maybe it's a pipe, a curb, or a handrailing. But they'll just stay there and work that thing for two or three hours, trying different technical tricks."
Skateboarding remains ever-changing and evolving. Its history is by no means complete. Because of the unpredictable nature of the sport, there is always a chance that future skater...
