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.
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