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.
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