Skateboarding

Plastered onto a park bench on a downtown courthouse, where the steps are worn and the curbs are waxed for skateboarders' tricks, a bumper sticker reads “Skateboarding is not a crime.” Many skaters assert that skateboarding is a serious sport, but they are countered by an opinionated contingent who believe that skating's codification into sport competitions has ruined skateboarding. However defined, skateboarding is a highly creative form of serious play that has had a huge influence on contemporary culture.

Skateboarding's relatively recent beginnings are related to the older sports of skiing and surfing. It is likely that rollerskaters adapted a prototypic version of [Page 638]the skateboard from a single skate by the 19th century, but skateboarding's origin is unknown. Documentation does exist that by the late 1950s, Californian youths created homemade skateboards by tinkering with an asphalt sled called a Flexi Flyer and sidewalk scooters. This technique of adapting and rearranging older materials to create something new remains a central aspect of skateboarding. Skaters are bricoleurs, defined as someone who makes constructions for the fun of it out of anything that is lying around. They look at sites designed for varied uses such as water drainage and handicapped access areas and invent new terrain for skateboarding.

By the early 1960s, the first skateboards were commercially manufactured. Surf companies patterned their models after surfboards, and toy companies began producing boards by 1964. A skateboarding craze swelled from California, and skateboard manufacturers sold millions of boards across the nation. With this early skateboard mania came concerns that remain part of skateboarding. Namely, the fad was seen as a dangerous activity tied to a subversive, antiauthoritarian ethos. In fact, skateboards of the 1960s were dangerous. The clay or metal wheels created major problems, as they gave skateboarders a rough, noisy ride. Emergency rooms treated countless skateboard injuries, skateboarders were killed in accidents, and the craze faded in a few years.

A Revived Sport

A key innovation in 1973 revived skateboarding when Frank Nasworthy created a new skateboard wheel from polyurethane. The new wheels not only absorbed small bumps on hard surfaces, but also kicked away the larger pebbles and stones that would ordinarily stop a steel or clay-composite wheel. This innovation remains the biggest influence on skateboarding, but other engineers also developed new boards, and especially more sophisticated skateboard trucks, or the assembly that connects the wheels to the boards and allows for turning the entire wheel assembly.

Skateparks were first built in the 1970s and included pools, bowls, snake runs, freestyle areas, banked slalom areas, half-pipes, and full pipes. It is estimated that a new skatepark opens somewhere in the world every three days.

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The innovations created an even bigger skateboard craze that saw a burgeoning of skateboard manufacturing, skateboard shops, competitions, magazines, and eventually new parks specifically created for skateboarding. With the advances came new ways of riding, and skateboard teams, such as the Z-Boys of the Dog-town neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, invented new ways to skate by riding in empty drainage ditches, swimming pools, and irrigation pipes.

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