SKATEBOARD
WORLD
LIFE TIME MEMBER
No
18769
Name 7000 CONGELLIERE
Sig
Date 04.72
How to Get
AWAY WITH
BEING DUM
Story by Todd Congelliere
THE SMARTEST BOY IN THE WORLD
I can just be grateful that I chose to play dumb.
Not that there was only one incident of that in my
early teen years. I mean, just getting used to the
fact that hair was growing around my privates and
zits frequenting my mug was, all by itself, almost a
good enough excuse to excuse my ideology. But
that's just the beginning of a big ol' list of excuses
I've got. But I'll spare you and just blame it all on
my dad. Yep, it's good ol' pop's fault. When that
dreadful time came once a week, when we ran out
of Ritalin, my old man would take me to Torrance
Skateboard World located conveniently in the drop
dead middle of Apartment Row. I never understood
it myself, the location that is, but then again, back
then I wouldn't have given two shits if it was plant-
ed in Timbuktu. All that mattered was that I had a
ride there and a board to ride, actually, my spoiled
neighbor's board that incidentally was broken (by
me) during a dispute (with him) over whether or not
I made his sister drink lemonade-disguised urine
(which I did) during the planning stages of our
leveraged buy-out of the local lemonade stands..
Incidentally, our idea of leverage buy-out included
the use of dirt clods. So, when my grounded-period
ended, suspiciously near my tenth birthday, I was
awarded a Pro-Class 100 wood skateboard. And I
do stress wood because before that, it was hob-
nobbing on those shitty little plastic toys. This was
the real thing. First on the block with a wood
board. One would think I was a first class stallion,
A Romeo in my own mind. Not only that, but I was
the most enlightened, intelligent ten-year-old in the
whole world. An honest to God Einstein on wheels.
Nothing else mattered.
38 Техния
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
For the next three years, I played" on skate-
boards here and there in between baseball prac
tices, ditch 'em, etc. I do stress the word "play"
because during those years, that's what it was (and
the way it should've stayed).
When I turned thirteen, the lil' skateboard games
me and my pals played included bash 'em, which
was basically a very violent bumper car-style game
we'd play going down our street, and hide and
seek on wheels. These activities started taking their
toll on us, meaning they were getting boring. So,
we decided to build a ramp in my backyard.
About eight months later, if you walked into my
backyard, you'd see something that sort of resem
bled a skate ramp, yet it was the worst waste of
trees you'd ever feast your eyes
on. Still, it was ours. The big guys
would come over and would need
a stretcher to leave from laughing
so hard. They'd take one run and
you'd never see them back there
again. And for a while, I'd use that
as an excuse on why I purposely
built it that shoddy. No one, of
course, believed it except for me.
Somehow I convinced myself that
it was the best ramp on earth. I
managed to fool myself up until
the day I found myself and my
pals swinging from a half torn
down skateboard ramp, actually,
half burnt down, as we knew very
little about the concept of saving
the wood for our next rendition.
THE DUMBEST BOY ON EARTH
About three years and five ramps later, with
very little discrepancy between each, I find
myself very fond of this skateboarding thing.
Maybe due to the fact that for the last three.
years, I dedicated my whole friggin' life to it. I
got way too serious for my own good, partly
due to a half sponsorship from Powell, and
back then Powell-Peralta was the shit. Don't
ask me why. Well, actually, if you look back at
the skaters, they had Hawk, Mountain (my all-
time fave), and Caballero, it was obvious why
they were the shit. Well, actually, Chris Borst
was trying to get me on, and he was giving me
boards and crap till I got on, but just that was
more than I ever
expected. So, I did
what any other
stupid kid would do
in my position: pro-
long the stupidity.
MIKE SMITH
Now that I had all
my goals to reach,
which was, of
course, a uh, er.
career in skate-
boarding, I needed
to do something
about a sponsor.
Well, to be exact, I
needed to get one,
and the whole
Powell thing got cheesier and cheesier by the
minute. So, when Mike Smith asked me to
skate for Liberty, I said sure. He, at least, had
seen me skate, unlike Powell, and I looked up
to him, not just as a great skater, but by the
way his business was run, Yes, it was always run
on a shoddy level, even at its peak, and as far
as income and all that jazz goes, well, I did get
some pretty crazy offers as far as money's con-
cerned, but the fact that I liked going to con-
tests with Mike and didn't want to go with a
bunch of buffoons helped me resist. Plus, I
never had any pressure from him as far as
the contests went, simply because he's still
a skater, running a skateboard company, not
a skateboard coach.
I HATE SKATEBOARDING
It might sound cliché, but it's the
truest thing you'll ever hear when
someone yaps about how when
something pure gets transformed
into a commodity, it gets spoiled all to hell.
Skateboarding, to me, is a commodity. Well,
actually, almost everything is, but my last
moments involved with the whole circuit, I
couldn't get the thought out of my mind of
how much better something like delivering piz-
zas would be. It's nothing but a job full of ass
Explaining the stalefish at
left, Todd says, "Soon
after this, I accidentally
locked up on the way
down and kept riding, so
I started doing it on pur-
pose." Delineating the
Indy air to the far left,
Todd says, "I worshiped
Lance Mountain, there
fore I was suckered into
buying all his boards and
sooner or later the Indy
airs were boned down."
When it comes to the shot
at the opposite top, Todd
has nothing to say, it's
simply an eggplantat
some dumb contest in
Norfolk, Virginia.