Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Brought back so many memories. I was there at most (if not all) the skateparks and contests in the first third of the film. I skated with Tony Hawk many times. Not like friends. Just all the guys skating the same contest, same pool, practicing at the same time. He was just a kid, literally 10-years-old.
I'm a professor now, and I tell people, for a time I used the be the top amateur contest skater in SoCal (and then briefly pro) in the early 1980s. I say to folks, 'Oh, I used to skate with Tony Hawk," etc. I don't think folks realize the significance of that. They might've heard of him or played the old PlayStation Tony Hawk video games, but to know the real guy, and back then, to have no idea he'd go on to be the world's most important skateboarding icon of all time. Sheesh, who'da thunk it?!!
At the screenshot, the standings from early 1981.
You can see at top "Tony Hawk --- 12 and Under." My name is further down below. I was a first in the rankings in "Unsponsored Open." (17 and over; zoom in.) About 17-years-old at the time, I used to go by my middle name Kent.
That's me at the Upland Pipeline Skate ASPO Contest, about 1982, taking first place in the pool event. The move is a "layback." I'd never done one it that pool. It was twelve feet deep with straight vertical walls. Completely intimidating. Totally scary. But I wanted to win, and just went for it. What a memory. I was just a kid myself.
Jeff Grosso’s first skateboard wasn’t much.
It was a hand-me-down miniature-sized banana board he got from his mom’s boss when he was 8 years old. Even for 1977, it was antiquated, with rickety old clay wheels and worn-out bearings. Grosso barely knew how to stand on the thing, struggling to keep his balance without toppling to the ground.
But for a curious boy whose childhood home was next to a steep hill, there was an instant connection. He would sit on his back or lie flat on his stomach and let gravity take over. Every time he bombed down the street, he fell more in love with the feeling.
“Initially, it was the rush of going down a hill, and the wind in your hair,” Grosso once said. “Poetic nonsense.”
The skateboarding world looks much different now than it did then. Its ever-increasing popularity is pulling the fundamentally subversive sport into the mainstream. Formerly relegated to back alleys and sparse concrete parks, it is now set to debut on the Olympic stage during this summer’s Tokyo Games.
But somewhere at its core, the lust for that poetic nonsense remains.
No one understood it quite like Grosso.
“He was the gatekeeper to why skateboarding was cool,” said skateboarding legend Tony Hawk.
Grosso looked an unlikely figure for such a role. He didn’t have a long pro career, flaming out at the end of the 1980s, hardly spanning the decade. He battled drug addiction and suicidal depression. By his late 20s, it seemed like his life had bottomed out.
But then he rebounded, embodying the resiliency that has defined the entire history of his sport.
Grosso became an ambassador, speaking for skateboarding’s soul through his beloved “Loveletters to Skateboarding” YouTube show. He was a guardian and a helping hand to skateboarding’s newest generation.
In many ways, he was like a north star, his effervescent personality and endearing pertinacity emitting a guiding light through the sport’s most transitional times.
And when he died unexpectedly last March of an accidental drug overdose, it left a void the skateboarding world is still trying to fill.
To best understand skateboarding — its counter-culture roots, its rise to the Olympics, its helter-skelter tale of competing styles, clashing customs and self-sabotaging plot twists — it’s best to understand someone like Jeff Grosso.
Complicated. Flawed. But an authentic source of joy to the end.
“It’s a total rush. It’s the feeling that when you go out there with your board, it’s a no-hero type of thing. And you either accomplish something or you don’t.” — Jeff Grosso, to the St. Louis Dispatch in 1986.
The rarest sight in skateboarding might be a frown.
Even after a failed trick or nasty wipeout, most skaters are wired to smile, laugh, shake off the dust, and climb back on their boards.
That carefree disposition is what initially captured Grosso’s interest. A stubborn and expressive freckle-faced kid born in Glendale in 1968, he felt like an outcast from a young age. He liked to draw, read “Lord of the Rings” and listen to punk rock. He picked contrarian arguments during conversations simply to spark a debate. And he moved around a lot as a kid: from the hillside house in Eagle Rock, to Las Vegas for a year with his mom, and then to Arcadia for the start of fifth grade.
Though he was naturally athletic, he found the structured pressure of team sports arbitrary and suffocating.
Only when he was on a skateboard did Grosso truly feel free.
“You have this culture of kids that need that,” said his mother, Rae Williams. “They need to go and do this and be creative and come up with new tricks and try different things.”
The newly opened parks soon faltered under liability issues and financial distress, and the young demographic of riders once fueling the boom grew up and moved on. By the time Grosso discovered the sport at the end of the ‘70s, only a small community of self-willed skaters remained.
“Skateboarders were very rare at that time,” said Grosso’s childhood friend Eric Nash, the only other kid at their Camino Grove Elementary School who matched Grosso’s passion for the sport. “Jeff enjoyed that rebel spirit. I think that’s who he was.”
Grosso and Nash spent almost every weekend at one of the few Southland skate parks that were left. Grosso was a perfectionist — at home he was constantly rearranging the furniture in his bedroom — and practiced for hours to perfect a trick. Skate City in Whittier became their home base, though sometimes they snuck away to more secluded spots — a cement ditch behind a church in Glendale, an empty washway nicknamed the “V bowl” in Irwindale.
One of their friends, future pro skater Lance Mountain, had a ramp in the backyard of his Alhambra home where the group would spend hours together honing their technique and embracing a recalcitrant culture few others could comprehend.
“We were a bunch of nerds, we were weirdos, we were social outcasts,” Grosso said in a 2015 episode of his “Loveletters” series. “We were the people that nobody wanted to be, doing things that nobody wanted to, and that nobody understood. … We were the freaks. That’s how you rolled. That’s how it was. That’s what drew us to skateboarding.”
“The little wooden toy is a kiss and a curse. It’s everything. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me and the worst thing that ever happened to me, all rolled up into one.” — Jeff Grosso, to Juice Magazine in 2006.
Like any good parent, Williams tried to get her son to think about his future as he went through grade school. Skateboarding, she told him, “is fun and can be a pastime, but you can’t make a career out of it.”
Reliving the memory during an interview, Williams stopped herself and laughed.
“Boy, were we wrong.”
Instead, as Grosso went through his teenage years in the mid-1980s, the sport became cool again...
The thing about the "counterculture" aspects of the old skating scene is certainly the punk rock and drugs --- lots of drugs.
Three of my best friends from back in the day are dead, one from a heroin O.D. years ago, and two of my other best buddies died of drug-related illnesses more recently, especially liver disease.
That Grosso overdosed himself is extremely sad, but not surprising at all. His death is loss for the sport, but he leaves a great legacy of commitment to the genre.
I'll leave off here with a photo of myself (below), from around 1980, at the Upland Pipeline skatepark, back when the old "pay to play" parks were the big thing. But because I had won so many amateur contests (like the one at the photo, where that "layback" finale scored well with the judges), I had an "all parks" pass to skate for free, at any SoCal skatepark; and in 1984 I turned pro for just one contest, where I was killing it in the banked slalom, but on my first run I lost control going around the third cone, and tumbled badly, breaking my wrist. I didn't quit the contest, though. I got up and completed my second run, and you only get two runs through the course, so that salvaged my self-esteem, and a few folks came up after to praise me for my hard-charging style.
Nowadays, I still skate once in a while, most recently at the Redlands skatepark a few weeks back, although I mostly putter around the "freestyle" area, like the old man I am.
This is interesting, but pay attention to the second photo he talks about toward the end of the video. That's Steve Alba at the Upland Skatepark "combi-pool" circa 1981. Unbelievable.
Born in 1979, the Dish was the first skatepark in SF. Over the years it's seen broken bones, race riots, Animal Chin—all of it. The Trust for Public Land came at me about a year ago to redo the Dish; I recommended Grindline and they got the job. Fast forward to Dec. 3, 2016 the ribbon was cut and the park was open. Senators, skaters, builders and city councelors all made this day special. Anyway, it's there. Come and get it at the top of Hudson St. SF, CA. Nobody does it better — Jake Phelps.
12 December 2016 (Vista, CA) – Youth in San Francisco are enjoying their new skatepark at the city’s rebuilt Hilltop Park, and other communities can now take advantage of the same Tony Hawk Foundation construction grant that helped fund that amazing project.
A public skatepark typically requires funding from several sources, and over the past fifteen years the Tony Hawk Foundation has become one of the most significant, with over $5.6-million awarded to projects in all 50 States. As THF’s 519th skatepark to open, Hilltop is just the latest.
According to Will Rogers, Chief Executive Officer of The Trust for Public Land, THF’s contribution may not have been the largest, but it was pivotal. “The Trust for Public Land is deeply grateful for the Tony Hawk Foundation’s support of the Hilltop Skatepark. They didn’t just give generous financial backing, their support generated real excitement in the local community and being able to call on the Tony Hawk Foundation for technical advice and suggestions was tremendous. You can already see how popular the new design is with skaters of all ages and abilities, and we thank them for helping make that possible.”
The 16,000-square-foot concrete flow course and bowl was the result of local residents collaborating with several agencies and organizations, including San Francisco Recreation And Parks, The Trust For Public Land, Parks 94124, and the Tony Hawk Foundation.
In recent years, many THF Skatepark Grant recipients have reported that the contribution from Tony Hawk’s foundation also catalyzed their local fundraising. “The value of winning the Tony Hawk Foundation Grant cannot be measured by sheer numbers,” said Sarah Anderson, who led the Nyack, New York public skatepark to its grand opening in 2015. “The esteemed THF grant not only filled the skatepark coffer, it legitimized the project in the eyes of the public and activated donors, both public and private, to carry us forward to the finish line.”
I'm 54, so back in the day, when I was skating the SoCal skatepark circuit at around 17, Tony Hawk would have been 11-years-old. He was already great then. No one had any idea, however, that he'd one day become the world's most successful (and famous) skateboarder.
The bonus here is how utterly clueless are Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota. Such fake enthusiasm for something about which they know nothing and for which they literally couldn't care less.
I met up with Tony Alva and Christian Hosoi at the Bomb in a Bowl fingerboarding art show in Los Angeles, back in December 2013. It was the highlight of my son's brief fingerboarding career, heh.
I hadn't seen Tony in years, and frankly he seemed way more subdued. Somewhere, on Facebook I think, I'd read something about him overcoming substance abuse. Lord knows there was plenty of that back in the '70s and '80s, but I guess Tony was having some really difficult times.
The video's actually from 2007, so again, I can't confirm where Tony is right now with his life or recovery. I do know that he is perhaps the purest skateboarder ever, and thank goodness he's doing alright. Skated many times with him back in the day. And oh those were the days.
The teen was airlifted and has had some of the best care you can get, and he has needed it.
"We don't know the full damage right now," Robin said. "He will have a brain injury, [and] he will have hearing issues."
10News learned Joseph smacked the back of his head so hard his brain hit the front and became bruised.
"Yesterday, the swelling was just too much, and so they had to remove the right side of his skull," Robin explained. "They're going to take his feeding tubes now and surgically put them into his stomach tomorrow morning."
Then, they will wake him when, and if, he is ready.
"I just want him to wake up," Raymond said.
Raymond and Robin are the parents of Joseph Rogers, a 17-year-old going into his senior year in high school.
