aspects? What about the cowboy movie star Buck Buchanan
standing up on and riding a buckboard wagon careening
down the Chatsworth Drop for a 1936 Three Musketeers
movie, prefiguring skating on an outsized skate-like plat-
form? What about Bob Biniak doing the first frontside
kickturn on vertical in 1975? Or that Paul Hoffman was
on the cover of Skateboarder in 1978 grinding his front
truck on a curb while doing a nose wheelie, predating
the ollie nosegrind by twenty years? Somebody out
there, back then, has done it first or at least thought
of it. Precedent is irrefutable, but any skater can be
got up and tried it again. Or seeing Mark Gonzales attempting
frontside slide-and-rolls on a three-foot-high wall at a contest in
Oceanside in 1987. It was during practice and he was unobserved,
but I saw him try it and not make it, and it opened my mind to
something I hadn't even thought of. A year later I saw Johnee Kop
ollie 16 steps at a school in Point Loma. He tried it three or four
times, bailing and flying through the air before rolling on the
ground. Then he made it, a long, lengthy flight that blew me away.
The first time I saw anyone ollie a fire hydrant was Jeff Pang
in New York, late at night off Broadway. That amount of
vertical lift off the sidewalk was something that expanded
"GRINDING HIS FRONT TRUCK
ON A CURB WHILE DOING A NOSE WHEELIE,
PREDATING THE OLLIE NOSEGRIND
BY TWENTY YEARS⁹9
that first one to take a leap of imagination and leave
the past behind.
These unheralded actions in the past are an argu-
ment against an all-encompassing model of history. It
cannot be all known, and at the same time it can't all
be ignored or eradicated. That was the folly of Chinese
emperor Shih Huang Ti, who ordered all books written
prior to his reign destroyed. He wanted to erase history.
He obviously wasn't successful. History recovered. Allow
some awareness for history's hidden secrets that might
have some bearing on your own life.
The average skater knows a little bit about skating's histo-
ry. They have some vague notions about surfers and wide
boards and Tony Alva and all that outdated, uncool old school
stuff. That is an advantage in skating its lack of historical
awareness. Skating hasn't been around long enough or recorded
with enough scrutiny to have much of a history. It hasn't gotten
petrified. Another thing skating has on its side is that it is constant-
ly evolving. There are new tricks and new ways of doing old ones
every day. Skating is truly unique in this regard. No other sport or
art form has such a plethora of possibilities, such a capability to
transcend its own barriers. Skating's own history is incredibly com-
plicated and obscure because skating is constantly changing.
Skating has its own internal, organic, shifting history. It is about
what I've seen and what you've seen just as much as what is on the
cover of this magazine. Certainly there are important first tricks
and the advances of the best pro skaters. But there is also your
friend's highest ollie or the first time you did a 50-50 on a handrail.
That is just as crucial and exciting and historic as any history
handed down from above.
Skaters build their own personal history every day. No photos, no
video, no "History." Just you and your friends and maybe the mem-
ories later. You, me, we have all seen amazing things.
My eyes have seen things I will never forget. They might not be
of any relevance to anyone else, but they are a part of skating's col-
lective history. A local named Vince doing five-foot-high backside
method airs out of the keyhole at High Roller in Boulder, Colorado
in 1981 is as vivid to me now as was the day I saw it. My fingers
numb, a year later I watched Joe Johnson float clean, soft frontside
ollies out of his ramp in the middle of a corn field on another cold
fall day in Colorado. On Oahu in 1983 I saw Stacey Gibo stand on
top of a chain link fence and jump into the Off-the-Walls ditch
bomb-drop style onto a ground-down, trashed Duane Peters board
with tiny blue wheels, landing and barely making it to the other side
while the Pacific shimmered half a mile away. Not to mention the
times he slammed so hard the ditch itself seemed to shake, and he
parameters I had thought unchangeable. Or
the exhilaration and wonder this summer of
seeing Ivory Serra ollie from a quarterpipe
up to a Smith grind four feet higher on a
different ramp, making it look so easy, like
he was rolling off a curb. Some of these
people will be remembered, some won't.
But I remember. It's my version of history,
and it's just as valid as any other.
Other people don't have these memo-
ries; they have their own that are apart
from the "history" of the greats, whether
it be that of Danny Bearer and Torger
Johnson, Greg Ayres, Gator Rogowski,
Natas Kaupas, Tom Penny, or Jamie
Thomas. Each generation has its great
skaters, and what they've done should get
its due. They set the standard for every-
thing that has been done and everything
that will be done. Luckily each successive
generation of skaters has been fairly igno-
rant of the history of skating, or at least
indifferent to it. And that is a good thing.
The irony of it all is that to go forward there
has to be a break with tradition, a building
upon precedent to destroy it.
There is a chance to be Archimedes, invent-
ing the screw to raise water, to be Copernicus
developing the theory that the planets revolve
around the sun instead of the other way around, to
be JMW Turner painting impressionist paintings
before impressionism. Be a Tesla, or an Einstein. Be
Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, or Steve
McKinney going 125 MPH on skis for the first time.
They all made the conceptual or physical leap beyond
what was thought possible, beyond the entrenched truths
of their period. There was. time when the things the skater
of today accepts as commonplace were inconceivable..
Nollies? Skating switch? It wasn't too long ago that the best
skaters in the world couldn't imagine doing these things; they were
as inconceivable to them as the heliocentric solar system was to
Copernicus' contemporaries. Ignore yesterday's history and make
your own for tomorrow.
Jocko Weyland
October 1999
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