DSL Slidefest

Longboarding used to be a solo effort for me in Memphis, Tennessee. I'd find a parking lot, street or (later) a good spot on the Greenline and I'd cruise, carve and pump some loose trucks for speed and flow. Facebook, for all its supposed faults, changed all that. I was able to get together with other longboarders in the Memphis area (we call ourselves DSL: Down South Longboarding) and we have made it a regular thing to get together and ride.

Well, the time has come to share our passion with others. Thanks to Greg and others in the group we are having a "Slidefest." It will be a demo and contest (of sorts) at Shelby Farms on October 8th. We'll have some freeriding, some slalom cones, a launch contest, sliding and more.

The event has gained tons of sponsors. Big names in the longboard world like Sector 9, Dregs, Arbor, Nersh, Bustin, Original, Mudge, Longboard Loft, and Outdoors Inc.
It starts at 10:00 a.m. October 8th at Shelby Farms (behind the visitor's center). Bring a helmet to this one because it is helmet mandatory this time around.

The Wet Spot (or: I am not a builder and neither are you)

I was ready to hit Al Town for a stress relief sesh after work. What I came to find was the spot still wet from the rain of the last couple days. The only place that looked dry was from the tusk to the wall. All good. I've made a full, fun sesh with less. I figured I'd skate the tusk, get a grind or two and call it an early night.

Until I was informed that some dismantling of an ill-made quarter was happening.
Let me be the first to say that I am NOT a builder, and I won't even fake it that I am.

Obviously, someone else isn't a builder either.

Kudos to Sam and the crew for taking this down before it became a more permanent problem.


I hope that all the skaters who use Al Town (part deux) can come together and work on the project as a whole rather than doing random things. This is a great opportunity to learn the craft and art of making skateable obstacles (and enjoy them once they're built).

I am stoked on what has been built as a group so far. The skaters who have done this have taken a seemingly wasted space and turned it into a place where skaters can come together. I sincerely hope it stays that way.

Rufus Skates Sticker Designs

These are the current sticker designs for the very first rufusskates.com products. I've got tonight to ponder them before they go to the printer.

Stereotypes, Helmets and Slayer

I ride a long skateboard. I guess that makes me a longboarder. However, what has become the typical longboard type skating isn't what I normally do. I don't downhill for speed or spend much time sliding as a 'thing'. I slide when I need to stop and spend most of my time riding a 40+ inch board on transitions, banks and parking blocks. I do have a pintail cruiser type board that I take on the Greenline and on the occasional push ride. I love cruising, carving and pumping on it. There is nothing like hitting the Memphis Greenline and carving/pumping like a madman with some good music on the mp3. Fifteen minutes and all stress and cares of the day are gone!

I'm not saying there is anything wrong longboard sessions. They're pretty fun. I just don't do it very often.

I posted on the DSL (Down South Longboarding) facebook group page that I was heading to Shelby Farms for a slide session this morning. I admit this is primarily because my body is SHOT from skating the rufusskates ramp and Al Town almost everyday last week and a slide session is less taxing on the body than throwing yourself up concrete walls for hours on end. You let gravity take you down the hill then hit your slide.

So, I posted up that I was going and got a response or two from people I didn't expect to get responses from...namely teenagers. I thought at 9 in the morning it would just be an out of school old geezer like me that would be able to skate. Then one posted on the DSL page to me, "if you have a helmet...WEAR it."

I tend to not wear protective gear. I guess growing up as a punk rock skateboarder who wasn't going to take shit from anyone, I take offense to being told to do anything. So, I took offense to it. I spent a good half of my life in Arkansas. We don't even have a helmet law for motorcycles. They are your brains. If you want to scramble 'em that is your prerogative.

I do own a helmet and I do wear it when I feel it is necessary. For instance, any transition over 6 feet tall, I might just don the hard hat to skate. And I know that now that my four year old is getting on a board I'm going to have to set a good example for him because he wears a helmet and full pads to just look at the skateboard.

All that said...it seems helmets have become fashionable for longboarders. Which is cool, I guess. But, if you don't tighten the strap to your head the helmet is nothing more than a fashion accessory. If I wear it then I believe my noggin has a good chance of getting smashed. I tighten it up and ride.

So, I show up to Shelby Farms in a bad mood about stereotypical 'teenagers' with Slayer's Reign in Blood blasting on my stereo. I got out and sat on a bench while I waited for the kiddos to show up. I'm a grouchy curmudgeon of an old dude sometimes.
That said, there is something about skateboards that can make differences disappear. I got over the helmet issue, the kiddos put their hard hats on, and we went for a ride around Shelby Farms.
And the truth is, I learned a lot about sliding this morning. My pintail is set up to be a loose carving machine and isn't perfect for sliding, but I was able to knock back a couple new (to me) slides. Thanks guys. The stoke was spread today, and I may just invest some time into the slide after all. And some real slide gloves. My dollar store gloves didn't even make it through the day.

It was a good chance to get to know the luvmud hill a little bit too. I don't plan on entering the contest or anything, but I will definitely be down for the session beforehand.

Hey you! Why the long board?

Years ago Rodney Mullen did a demo in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was amazing what happened when he stepped on the skateboard. The control over both his body and the board were astounding. His board spun, flipped, rose and fell with the slightest flick of his feet and he landed everything cleanly. I was in the presence of greatness that day, and I knew it.

Now, it seemed the tricks he did were all anyone was doing. I spent countless hours of my life (that I can never have back) being frustrated by kickflips and heelflips. At one point I even invested in a set of soccer shin guards because my legs were becoming so bruised and dented from the board flipping up into my shins. I was miserable, and although I finally started to learn some of these elusive tricks, it made me want to give up skating.

I just couldn’t. Giving up skating for good would have been like cutting out a part of my soul. I had to find an alternative, but until I found the alternative, skating slipped down to the shadows of my priority list.

When I discovered longboarding I felt the urge to ride rise from the ashes of a popsicle stick deck. The act of riding a skateboard was new again. The slightest slope of a hill was enough to carve for speed and soul.

My first longboard was a beast. Over four feet long and over eleven inches wide, it served the purpose of introducing a new genre of skateboarding to me. Shortly after first stepping on the beast, I opted for a shorter, narrower set up.

It was strange. Those flip tricks I had so many problems doing on a shorter board were suddenly easy for me. Doing a kickflip on a longboard seemed so easy. Blunt slides, I don’t know why, were suddenly simple on this longer board. It didn’t take long before I was even sliding down handrails on a forty-four inch long deck. I switched out the usual big, soft longboard wheels for some 80’s inspired hard yet reasonably sized wheels.

All of this isn’t to say that I suddenly became a technical wizard on a skateboard. Instead, I was able to move between the flippery and the carve with relative ease. After skating for so many years, I had found my niche.

Greenline Push Ride June 21, 2011

Skateboarding has been an integral part of my life for over 30 years. I've never considered it a sport, but more of an act of expression of self. Here is a video of our Greenline Push Ride from June 21, 2011

The Common Criminal

Sometime during my high school career I realized the dream of being a professional skateboarder wasn’t going to come to fruition. I would never grace the cover of Thrasher magazine doing a layback rollout, and there would never be a skateboard branded with my name and the graphic of my choosing. In fact, I was unsure if it was me or skateboarding, but our relationship was changing.

I, of course, had discovered girls. For the most part the girls didn’t want to hang out with a bunch of sweaty skaters as they practiced rock and rolls on the half pipe. My Saturday evenings were now spent riding in a car rather than on a skateboard as my best friend Steve and I would discuss our relationships (or the lack thereof). I hadn’t quit skating, but it suddenly took second place in my life.

I wasn’t the only one changing. The early 1990s were a time when skateboarding was changing as well. The skaters I’d admired were suddenly gone from the magazines, and the skaters replacing them were so radically different from what I was used to. It seemed like skateboarding was no longer my own. Companies began releasing much smaller skateboards. The average ten inch wide deck shrank to eight inches or less. The wheels were shrinking from 60 millimeters or more down into the 45 to 50 millimeter range. Skulls were disappearing from graphics as the newer boards were either covered with cartoon characters or were inexpensive blanks devoid of any graphic.

My tricks were even becoming obsolete. One of my favorite things to do on a skateboard was to ride up to a parking curb, and slap my back truck into a grind as my back hand planted onto the ground much like a spoke on which the wheel of my body would turn. I always felt it had style. It flowed. Now, I saw all the younger skaters kickflipping and heelflipping around parking lots. Smooth took second place to technical skating.

For me this was all freestyle, something I respected for the difficulty, but nothing I’d ever wanted to do. My favorite skaters like Duane Peters, Tony Alva and Jay Adams wouldn’t be out there, in the middle of a flat ground parking lot, trying to switch 180 heelflip.

In 1992 I had just finished my freshman year of college, and it hadn’t gone well. Going through all of the compulsory classes made college feel like high school all over again. I had never been a whiz at math, and biology was never a subject that could hold my attention. I wanted classes with artistry involved. I wanted my English class to feel like it was more than just an extension of the English classes I’d taken over the previous decade. College didn’t feel like a place I belonged. Couple this with the changing of skateboarding and I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t just unsure of my future. It was at the point that I could see no future at all. I wanted to drop out of college, hide away in a cavernous, windowless room and only come out at night to feed.

When all of my hope was gone, my skateboard once again became my dearest friend. It didn’t matter if skateboarding was changing, I still had my skateboarding, and I spent the entire summer skating. We had a few makeshift ramps behind an unused building, and every minute of sunlight was spent rolling on four wheels.

The skateboarding scene had grown. The group of four or five skaters I had grown up with had all moved away to college, but dozens of kids had taken up skating after they had left. There was now even a group of young skaters lobbying our city for a skatepark. They held our town’s first contest that summer.

I remember the contest not only because it brought out skaters from all over our area that I didn’t know existed, but because the crowd chanted the words, “Old school,” as I took my final run. I had shaved my hair back down to the stubs just as it had been in the ninth grade. I was wearing a six year old Minor Threat t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. My jeans were decidedly tight compared to the baggy jeans with the boxers poking out that other skaters wore in the nineties. And while the other skaters were kickflipping around the course I was laying down bert reverts, layback rollouts and some kind of strange backside switch grab indy air thing that I was fond of doing at the time. At the end of the day I was proud of my third place finish, but I knew that my style of skating had truly passed. I was a dinosaur in this new crowd.

Branding

I allowed the fluorescent and day-glo colors of the eighties, for the most part, pass me by. The closest I came were a couple loud pairs of chucks (Chuck Taylor shoes). One pair was a turquoise-like blue while the other was purple, bordering on lavender. I would wear one blue and one purple shoe, an act one of my grandfathers couldn’t comprehend.

By now I was used to being an outcast at school, but acceptance within the family had always been a given. I was aware that they didn’t necessarily like the way I dressed, but I always felt that, at the end of it all, they knew the me that was hiding underneath this new style.

Suddenly, after some questioning that felt like an interrogation, I knew I was becoming separated from them as well. Teenage angst coupled with the fact that I didn’t see many of my relatives very often left us, quite often, speechless with one another.

I felt like I was expressing myself through my clothing. I was dressing how I felt.

The greatest oxymoron of punk rock was that you had to, in some respect, wear the punk rock uniform. The same could be said of skateboarding. Even the five guys that made up our local scene found ourselves identifying with certain companies and ‘branding’ ourselves to match them.

Generally, it started with the type of board you rode (or wanted to ride). Each brand had its standard type of graphic to identify with. All of them had their fair share of skulls and colorful monsters, but each company had a certain, individual flair.

Powell Peralta graphics tended to be punk yet professional with a child-like innocence. How is that possible? The graphics on a skull and sword deck was something my mother would like despite the skull and sword. On the other hand, Dogtown skateboards, with their connection to punk/metal crossover band Suicidal Tendancies, looked mean, almost demonic. Their possessed to skate deck was a mother’s nightmare.

Then there was Skull Skates. Skull decks were always black and white. They didn’t even contain grayscale. It was as if they were made by stencils and spray paint. I immediately identified with Skull skates. This was the epitome of punk rock and skateboarding combined.

Marketing. Every style niche in skateboarding comes down to marketing. At one point in the eighties every board had essentially the same shape. The standard deck had a short, rounded nose that rolled into a ten inch wide main space. Every deck had approximately seven inches of tail. Sure, there were different levels of concave and every company used wood from a different source, but overall the differences in decks were very minimal except for the graphics and, of course, the pros that the graphics symbolized. Of course, the common skater didn’t have to be aligned with one single company, but generally the companies one chose were within the same spectrum. At the end of the day we are all consumer victims of marketing.

The Birth of Addiction

The towns across the Great Plains were like islands fenced in by an ocean of corn fields holding their populations isolated. This isolation made for a slow changing and community-centric society. Unlike a city with its various neighborhoods huddling together to form a whole, the small Midwestern town stood alone, a single community, and took pride in this self sufficiency. The ancestors of the area had been strong willed, plainspoken people who had left the comforts of established communities to make an agrarian living from a difficult, often tempestuous landscape. Future generations, still toiling to survive on seeds and soil in the land of the dust bowl, maintained their forefather’s sober attitude.

Our school mascot was the duster, paying respect not only to the power of the environment, but also to the men and women who had stayed on their homesteads until the rain came back and the earth gave life again. Although friendly people ready to wave at a passerby, these were not people given over to fashion or petty trends.

For instance, you can imagine disco didn’t make much of an impression on Holdrege, Nebraska. The collars of my father’s shirts may have widened, but only because that is what the store had in stock. I remember sneaking into the drive-in in the back of my parent’s car when they went to watch Saturday Night Fever. Sure, the movie made an appearance in the town, but the impression was slight.

Function before fashion was the way in southern Nebraska. Shoes must be comfortable to work in, but sturdy enough to last. The color of a man’s hat didn’t matter. The hat was to keep the sun out of his face while he worked, nothing more. The color was unimportant. Rather than sweeping in from the coasts, trends and fads sometimes seeped in, but even those that made it generally lost vigor as if swimming all those miles had reduced their impact making them seem (often rightfully) superfluous, and silly.

It was because of this isolation that I had no idea there had been a skateboard craze happening in other, more densely populated, areas of the country. The day my grandparents showed up to visit with a blue plastic Free Former skateboard I couldn’t fathom that there might be parks filled with people riding skateboards. In no way could I imagine a pool being drained of water for people to skateboard up its sloped walls.

Although I’m quite convinced I had seen a skateboard before, in all honesty, the possibilities of this blue plastic toy, while interesting, seemed limited. It was a toy on which you stood and moved forward until you stopped, and this seemed so much less useful than a bicycle. A bicycle seemed an efficient mode of transportation. One could get to school and back quickly on a bicycle, and the bicycle could even outrun the German shepherd that made chase as you came home on an afternoon. This was the Midwestern way. We saw an item as it was without fanfare, and sometimes without possibilities.

I can’t remember the first time I stood on the skateboard. I don’t remember if I fell. I can picture the board shooting out from under my feet, but it seems that I see that scene because I’ve watched it with other first time riders to many times since then. I do recall that standing on the board without falling off was a challenge, but also that the learning curve wasn’t long. By the end of that first day of skating I was easily rolling around my street, navigating four wheeled turns and tic-tacking onto my next door neighbor’s driveway. I’ve over thought the experience since then, and come to the realization that, for the first time (or at least the first remarkable time), the act alone seemed sufficient. There needn’t be a necessary purpose except the enjoyment of the challenge itself.

I wanted to ride this new toy everyday. The challenge of going just a little faster each time, and turning just a bit more had taken hold of me. One of the great things about a skateboard (that non-skaters don’t understand) is that you naturally adapt and innovate according to your terrain. As I said before, I had never seen a pro skater, and didn’t know such a person existed, but this new desire to make use of any concrete available took over. I started ramping my skateboard up the eight inch tall sloping curbs that ran down our street. It was something I had done on a bicycle a thousand times, but this felt so different. On one hand it felt so much more dangerous. On the other, it felt so much like flying than being practically harnessed by a bicycle. The bicycle suddenly meant very little to me. Sloped streets (hills didn’t exist in our Nebraska town) suddenly took on an importance that they never would have otherwise. I could have no inkling that this blue, plastic skateboard would inspire my life in every way.

The Criminal Cast

The year is 2011. It is 9 o’clock in the evening, and I just finished sessioning a local mini ramp with 15 other skaters, only one of whom I knew by name before tonight. We looked a motley crew with our tattoos, worn out t-shirts, and dirty jeans. If we walked into an upscale clothing store together they’d probably call the cops. They’d follow us around the store for sure, but as for this session tonight, I’ve never met a bunch of nicer guys.

One of the great things about skaters, real skaters, who are truly into it for the love of skateboarding, is that they will accept any other skater into the brood without hesitation. It doesn’t matter how good you are or whether you’re wearing branded skateboard clothing. They will accept you as a skateboarder and cheer you on as long as you appear to be pushing your own boundaries. Colors don’t matter. Age doesn’t matter. What matters is the bond created and shared through a piece of maple plywood and four polyurethane wheels.

We can thank the lean years, when skateboarding fell out of popular culture for this sense of brotherhood. There was a time in the 1980’s when you would immediately walk over to someone who looked like they might skate and strike up a conversation. That conversation would quickly go from what board a person rode to where they skated and what type of terrain they were interested in riding. From there, you would go skate.

When I was in the ninth grade, my mother bought me a t-shirt with a skateboarder on it. This t-shirt was the catalyst for me to join a subculture that I never knew existed. For years I had ridden my flea market and department store skateboards in driveways and up curbs around my neighborhood. Although my family had left Nebraska, I was still clueless as to the world of professional skateboarding. I was content to cruise around, carving and hopping up curbs with the occasional ride down a sloping hill.

We had moved to Dardanelle, Arkansas. Dardanelle was no larger than the small Nebraska town I was from and only slightly less rural, but somehow skateboard culture had found a small following in Dardanelle. After art class one afternoon, one of my fellow students walked over to me and asked me if I skated. I told him I did and he asked me what tricks I could do. The honest truth is that I didn’t know what tricks one could do other than 360s and tic tacs. I said, “All of them,” or something that sounded as equally conceited. Luckily, instead of thinking I was a complete jerk (or despite), the four skaters in my new hometown took me under their wing, and showed me the world of skateboarding as I’d never known it before.

The first time I rode a pro model skateboard was thrilling. With its high quality urethane wheels and NMB bearings it was amazing.

I immediately understood the concept of concave. I’d never ridden a concave board before. All of the cheap boards I’d ridden had been flat. Even the grip tape had a better tooth than the low quality, smooth sandpaper feel of a cheap board.

One of the guys gave me a set of his old wheels. They were huge, yellow, seventies style wheels, but they rolled so much better than the plastic wheels on the board I had before.

They showed me tricks like powerslides, ollies, and railslides. I was immediately hooked on trying to slide as far as I could, and I practiced my ollies when I should have been working on algebra. It was amazing the things someone could do on a skateboard. It was beyond anything I could have ever imagined.

The other thing they introduced me to was how to accept being shunned. In between our move from Nebraska to Arkansas my family spent a year in Norman, Oklahoma. I went from being a small town future athlete to being a nobody in a much larger place. The year I spent in Norman was difficult. I was able to make a few friends, but I never found someone whom I really felt understood me. In truth, it is only looking back that I can comprehend that as the problem. At the time I just knew I was miserable.

With this new fellow group of outcasts, I finally felt accepted. And we were outcasts. In fact, we were looked on as the future criminal culture of our town. We were run out of everywhere. Even churches made us leave there parking lots, and all because we wore specifically branded clothing and rode skateboards.

If you tell a child he is bad, he will become bad. Or at the least, he will fulfill your prophesy in some form. We were lucky; for the most part we came from good homes where we were taught morals and social mores. As far as I know, none of us became criminals. In fact, one of us became a pastor while another joined the F.O.P.

But, to all outward appearances, we played our parts. We dressed as wild as we could. If you were going to shun us for our looks, we will give you something to shun us for. I shaved my head. Another guy got his hair cut to look like a mushroom was sitting on the top of his head. We wore the loudest colored clothes we could find, and we listened to the most rebellious music we could. We were branding ourselves as the other.

It wasn’t long before the community tried to stop us from skating by making it illegal in the downtown area. Ten years earlier, as I first stood on that plastic Free Former, how could I know that this innocent act would be made illegal?

The interesting thing about the situation we were in as small town skateboarders in Arkansas was that it mirrored what was happening all over the country. Skateboarders were a criminal caste for no other reason but that they loved to skateboard.