Friday, November 5, 2021

48 SK8

Recently I read that dropping in is to ramp skateboarding what ollie-ing is to flat-ground skateboarding.

I learnt to do the former 32 years after the latter.

I bought my first wide skateboard in 1986 for AU$110.

Aussie surf culture ruled, and one day at the mall my parents rocked my world when they bought me a florescent yellow, pink, and blue sweatshirt front-printed with a brand name which escapes me. I put it with my white “Beau Geste” mudflap cap and pink Lightning Bolt tee on my wardrobe shelf reserved for “surf” clothing that I wore around landlocked Canberra.

I’d been saving for a Tamiya remote-control car that cost $150, but was seduced one day in the surf shop by a matt white skateboard splashed with another forgettable, fluro brand name – “Reflex” – that I could afford to buy straightaway. Had I carried on saving and bought the Tamiya instead, would I now be as taken with RC cars as I am with skateboarding, and a better goal setter and achiever?

Parallel universe stuff.

A few months later Reflex was loaded into a shipping container, and we returned to New Zealand. I sold Reflex to my brother, who spray-painted it florescent yellow and, underneath, painted black stickmen chasing an animal with spears. He also blew my mind one day in the garage when he popped an ollie.

By 1989 the skateboard craze was cranking, and I worked my two-week school holiday in a chicken hatchery to save for a new board. Obviously I’d forgotten about RC cars, because on payday I walked into Cheapskates Henderson and dropped $340 on a Santa Cruz Jeff Grosso deck, Independent trucks, wheels, bearings, tail guard, nose guard, and rails. That’s more than double what I paid for a new Santa Cruz complete in 2021! Maybe because it weighed double (then add to that the weight of my crepe-soled Nomad school shoes that I often skated in, and I’m surprised I got airborne!).

But ollie I did, up the curb on our dead-end street. Then we moved house to the countryside, miles from anywhere skateable. Fortunately though, every morning my dad drove my brother and me with our skateboards to asphalted Waitakere train station, where we boarded a virtually empty train to Avondale College; we skated the aisle, altering our speed relative to the ground. We learnt physics while other kids were still rubbing sleep from their eyes.

The lunchtime skaters congregated around a plywood quarter-pipe that someone had brought to school, and among the Knievels launching off it was Scott Lyons, a pimply, stocky, mulleted king of the jungle. He pioneered bike inner-tube footstraps. I was just trying to ollie or no-comply up a nearby curb in my Nomads.

No train station, train, or concrete at our next house, but at least our street was paved, and on it was a primary school where we stashed a long, solid piece of wood to ollie up onto and railslide (boardslide) on.

Then I was desperate for Doc Martins, so sold my board (to my brother?) and bought some brown low-cuts. Decades passed, over which I noticed the old whale-tail deck shape morph into the current, straight-side “popsicle”, and last year I got back in the game with a second-hand Shifty for $40. Last Christmas my wife and I bought our two young boys 22-inch cruiser boards, but then our eldest started using my board for Young Guns skate school. So on payday I went to Boardertown and bought myself a new complete (I can play with my son’s RC car anytime).

New Lynn bowl is where I first dropped in (fell off the second time), and from there progressed to the waist-high ramp at Valonia skatepark, then the Waterview nipple-high.