AGE:-??
I was coaxed into getting back on a board again after an old skate buddy from the 70’s mailed me to catch up. Originally from Cambridge, I live in Palma de Mallorca now, and the local council have just opened two new parks here, one a reasonably decent concrete affair with a near vert bowl, plus school playground type banked flow area.. The other is wooden, with a great U bowl / flat bottomed half pipe, a flow area and vert ramps. So what are ya gonna do? The call was too strong! I started skating in 1976 on a Surf Flyer that would roll about 5 yards after some vigourous pushing…then I got a Super Skuda, with sealed bearing orange wheels that just rolled and rolled and rolled…Bingo! A while later in 77 I got a G&S Stacy Peralta Warptail from Alpine Sports, and road my first half pipe at a visiting Skate exhibition, managing to fakey to vert without falling off, not bad I thought at the time! I Anyway, I won the slalom event at a similar contest a bit later, the East Anglia Skateboard competition, which was odd as I wasn’t really interested in slalom, I bought myself a New setup, an Alva deck, the original maple model with Full Tracks and Yo Yos, which basically opened up a new world as far as learning how to skate vert and bowls - a cracking board. Like lots of kids, I was a total skatefreak in those days; long blond hair, Vans, Town & Country t-shirts, tube socks, Rector, Pro-tec, flared Levis cords -all borrowed from reading copies of US Skateboarder Magazine. We actually named the terrible Cambridge skatepark “Bogtown” as it was situated next to the town’s sewage works! I saw Alva at the Mad Dog Bowl in early ’78, and as I plonked the eponymous deck down for an autograph, I remember he looked a little bemused by the pseudo “Z-Boy” style of some of the skaters in rainy old South London. And I also remember he didn’t like skating the pool, it was too deep and he took a few runs at it, but stuggled to do anything worthy of his rep so gave up and moved to the half pipe. I can’t blame him, it was a fuckin’ mad pool! Too deep , with a bump on the vert as you went directly in toward the centre line - so you’d get enough speed up, then hit this bump, which slowed u down, then over the bump, which put you off balance… forget it! I remember that quite clearly, as I’d tried it before he arrived. Did anyone other MASs skate that pool? I visited parks with pals all over the South – like Rolling Thunder and Romford, where I was pulling frontside airs in the pool one day in summer ’79 on a new Dogtown Shogo Kubo / Indy set up I’d just got, and some locals were looking on mumbling ”who’s this kid…?” … Anyway, I’d been doing that for ages, since summer 78 at least, and when I watched Dogtown and Z-boys again recently, one of the crew proclaimed ”no one outside the states was pulling air for years after Alva did it in the Dog Bowl in fall 77”. Not true! If u went to places like Rolling Thunder any weekend at that time you’d see kids pulling ‘em like pro’s, tuck leg, with style! The Brits weren’t so far behind! We just had shit weather, no surf and paler skin! I suffered a major bongo in the pool at the Hemsby skatepark in ’79, (it had the same type pool as the Rom, maybe the same company built them?) I got hung up and concussed myself so badly that I couldn’t see for three or four hours! Like a lot of others, I stopped skating in 1980 as our local park closed and it became too expensive to travel to skate something decent every weekend. I’m back on it again now and having as much fun as before, but the bumps are taking longer to heal!