critical review essay

Skate Life Yochim, Emily C

Published by University of Michigan Press

Yochim, Emily C. Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity. University of Michigan Press, 2010. Project MUSE., <a href=" https://muse.jhu.edu/.

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3RD RPP

27  •

“The mix of sunshine and rebellion is really intoxicating”

American Mythologies, Rebellious Boys, and the Multiple Appeals of Skateboarding’s Corresponding Culture, 1950–2006

First commercially released as a toy in 1959, the skateboard has “rolled

in and out of the public’s consciousness” over the course of almost five

decades.1 Several popular histories of skateboarding suggest that the first

skateboards were born of youthful imagination in the early twentieth cen-

tury when children made milk crate scooters from two-by-fours and old

roller skate wheels.2 The skateboard quickly grew into a popular childhood

toy that would later be remembered, with both nostalgia and derision, as a

fad akin to hula hoops and yo-yos.3

More than a simple fad, by 1995 skateboarding had come to be a key dis-

cursive marker of white male youth. That is, throughout the 1990s and into

the new millennium, extreme sports—and skateboarding in particular—

became a powerful marketing tool, the go-to lifestyle for appeals to white

male teenagers, who by 1995 comprised the largest group of adolescents in

history.4 During its many moments of popularity in each of the decades since

1959, layers of mythology have been built into skateboarding’s practice and

portrayal. By considering the articulation of these mythologies, as well as

their particular connections to ideologies of gender, race, class, and nation,

we can begin to understand both the relationship between youth subculture

and mainstream culture and skateboarding’s contemporary symbolization

of white male youth.

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Michele K. Donnelly rightly contends that academic discussions of

skateboarding have relied on the idea that the practice was at one time

an “authentic” subculture rooted in resistance to the mainstream.5 While

most contemporary accounts ground themselves in the myth of skateboard-

ing’s subcultural origins, skateboarding’s earliest roots in the nostalgically

remembered children’s culture of suburban postwar America provide it with

a distinctly mainstream origin myth. Remembered either as a childhood 

creation or a commercial toy enjoyed by white, middle-class kids, skate-

boards sometimes represent a more carefree time when the streets were

safe and children could go out alone. This early history associates skate-

boards with the conformist but simple Middle America of the 1950s and thus

with dominant society.

These roots have certainly been eclipsed of late, as skateboarding has

come to represent “extreme youth” via media texts such as MTV’s Jackass,

Viva la Bam, and Wildboyz, which each feature skateboarders’ gross-out

humor, and the award-winning documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which

rewrites skateboarding’s beginnings as the product of working-class teen-

age boys’ energetic rebellion.6 Skateboarding, in short, has experienced a

discursive evolution from innocuous childhood game to rebellious youth

subculture.

The contours of this evolution—the various moments at which particu-

lar mythologies of the skateboarding culture are solidified and disrupted—

demonstrate skateboarding’s flexibility as both a discourse and a practice

built into and outside of mainstream culture. Skateboarding traverses medi-

ascapes7 and youthscapes,8 moving in and out of—and accepting and reject-

ing—a host of cultural locations that define it, variously, as a diverse and

dangerous subculture, a mainstream marketing mechanism, a childhood toy,

and a creative enterprise. This discursive flexibility, I argue, allows skate-

boarding fans to imagine themselves as both inside and outside of dominant

culture and consequently as both resistant to and in possession of domi-

nant modes of power. That is, skateboarding’s multiple locations of engage-

ment—or correspondence—with both dominant ideologies and images of

resistance situate skate culture as a corresponding culture in which notions

of resistance are fluid.

By tracing the movement of the key ideas, heroes, and innovations of

skateboarding into and out of mainstream media, I highlight the ways in

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“The mix of sunshine and rebellion”  •  29

which enduring ideas associated with skateboarding—enterprise, innova-

tion, individuality, and creativity—correspond with values embedded in

American origin myths and associated with white masculinity. Despite these

associations, however, skateboarding maintains its status as a culture on

the edges of mainstream American life. By mapping these seeming contra-

dictions, this chapter accomplishes three goals: (1) expand the boundaries

of subculture theory to make clear the ways in which American subcultural

values may interlock with key values of American mainstream culture; (2)

illuminate the specific ways in which subcultural and mainstream media

overlap and correspond with one another, highlighting mainstream media’s

use of skateboarding’s multiple performances and portrayals of masculinity

and whiteness; and (3) explain the scope of skateboarding discourses with 

which contemporary skateboarders contend, thereby locating my analysis

of a skateboarding community’s proclaimed pleasures and politics in the

current discursive moment.

Throughout this chapter, I argue that many of the values associated with

skateboarding ally themselves with fundamental tropes of American origin

myths produced in stories of the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the pioneers, and

the American frontier. These stories construct the foundation of the United

States as a fight for freedom from religious persecution and as a quest for

independence. Almost needless to say, these are the myths of white male

America that completely ignore or whitewash the genocide of Native Ameri-

cans, slavery, the denial of women’s rights, and the destruction of land that

accompanied white American men’s pursuit of “liberty.” In his analysis of

late 1990s popular news stories about extreme sports, Kyle Kusz notes that

extreme sports are aligned with “a set of traditional American masculine

values and pursuits: rugged individualism, conquering new frontiers, and

achieving individual progress.”9 More, he argues, because it is white men

who are depicted as participating in extreme sports, these stories “repre-

sent whiteness as American-ness” and thus further deny the multicultural

history of the country.10 As such, Kusz rightly contends, the extreme athlete

as frontiersman trope reinscribed white male dominance during a moment

when that dominance was being challenged by feminism, civil rights, gay

and lesbian rights, and economic decline. Not insignificantly, the rise of the

powerful, white, male extreme athlete coincided with and responded to

rising fears about the role of white men in sports. Sports Illustrated pub-

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30  •  sk at e l i f e

lished an article in 1997 titled “Whatever Happened to the White Athlete?”

Kusz characterizes the article as “a panic-driven news story focusing on the

increasing absence of the white athlete in contemporary American profes-

sional sports.”11

Beyond assuaging fears of white male decline, the change in extreme

sports’ image—from the domain of Gen X slackers to that of mainstream,

white male adventurers—was, as Kusz suggests, marketers’ response to the

newfound buying power of Generation X (“$700 billion in individual and

familial spending power per year”).12 While extreme sports’ new image was

undoubtedly a marketing ploy, it was also a move made in the context of

mythologies that from the beginning have moved back and forth between

mainstream America and subcultural rebellion.

Moreover, it is important to note the ways in which America’s founda-

tional myths privilege rebellion and populism. In many ways, these myths

present the United States as a land of subculturalists, a country founded on

the backs of brave and independent-minded individuals fighting for nothing

less than the freedom to live their lives as they wish. The Pilgrims and the

Puritans, in other words, were “sticking it to” the man of all men, the Church

of England. Contemporary discourse frequently locates American discom-

fort with sexuality in our Puritan roots, but we must also consider the ways

in which these stories might contribute to a particularly American mode of

engaging with subcultures. While individual subcultures may produce spe-

cific ideologies that directly confront a variety of American mores, arguably

their broader appeals to individuality and freedom align closely with values

learned in kindergarten. American subcultures, then, may correspond quite

easily with dominant culture while at the same time critiquing it in specific

and subtle ways. In the case of skateboarding, enthusiasts regularly refer to

the freedom and independence that it allows them while also producing a

nascent critique of dominant norms of white teenage masculinity.

In the American context, then, it makes sense for a subculture, or a cor-

responding culture, to find itself in advertisements, on television shows, and

in the movies, for subcultural stories can be refashioned as stories of the

American spirit. What’s more, in this refashioning the fundamental claims

of that subculture need not necessarily be forfeited or even reworked. As

Angela McRobbie notes, much subcultural practice is entrepreneurial,13 and

even when it is not explicitly market based, I argue, it is about the creation

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“The mix of sunshine and rebellion”  •  31

of a culture and the production of cultural codes, modes of communication,

gathering places, and so on. These independent productions can find their

roots in stories of the development of the American colonies, and entrepre-

neurs can surely place themselves in the context of the American dream.

As such, the correspondence between American subcultures and American

mainstream cultures may take on a different shape or tendency than that

in other cultural contexts. This chapter takes the specificities of American

identity into account, keeping firmly in mind the ways in which the values

of the subculture parallel those of the mainstream.

In tracing the evolution of skateboarding discourse, this chapter sheds

light on the dynamics of corresponding cultures, noting the moments at

which they converge and diverge. It will also serve to characterize the cul-

tural moment in which current skateboarders exist, elucidating their ideas

about resistance and subcultural identity and their relationship to dominant

cultural ideas and institutions. Most broadly, this discursive history should

showcase the ways in which institutions imbued with economic and dis-

cursive power open up and close down spaces in which individuals and

institutions with less power formulate ideas about whiteness, masculinity,

and youth.

Boyhood Creativity: Skateboarding Pre-1959

Popular accounts of skateboarding’s early history locate its origins in the

hands of creative and enterprising male youths looking for entertainment

in the mundane world of the neighborhood. From the early 1900s through

World War II, the stories suggest, restless young boys borrowed the wheels

from their “sister’s rollerskates” and worked with “backyard mechanics

(dads)” to fashion milk crate scooters.14  Recollected  distinctly  as  a  boys’ 

culture, the practice in which youths tinker with found objects to build

their own skateboards is highly reminiscent of other boy-dominated sub-

cultures.15 Such nostalgic accounts, laden with myths of a better time when

children didn’t turn into zombies in front of the television and fathers were

available to their sons, belie the exclusionary and homophobic undertones

of such cultures. For example, skateboarding fan Bob Schmidt remembered

building skateboards with his group of friends in the 1950s: “We tried paint-

ing them, then we found out the girls liked ’em that way, so decided that

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was for sissies and we soaked off the paint and left them plain. But the girls

got mad, mostly because it was usually one of their skates we were using!”16

While Schmidt’s use of the word sissies is surely meant to evoke the simplic-

ity and innocence of childhood, it also points to the way girls are excluded

from discourses of early skateboarding and the creativity and hard work

that these discourses are meant to conjure.

More than just male, these memories are almost exclusively white.

While skateboarding’s earliest history as a homemade toy can be located

in urban neighborhoods, its commercial and more mainstream history is

located in a space explicitly denied to African Americans through redlining

practices: the suburb. The skateboarding magazine Thrasher’s book-length

retrospective includes a two-page, black-and-white photo from 1952 featur-

ing an “’anything on wheels’ derby” in New York City.17 This photo portrays

white girls in bloomers, mothers pushing strollers, and both white and black

boys pushing milk crate scooters. The photo’s city scene, set in front of

the Children’s Aid Society on New York’s East Side, connotes working-class

simplicity and childlike lightheartedness.

This urban image of easy diversity is overshadowed by most nostal-

gic accounts. The skateboard’s early incarnation as a milk crate scooter

in urban neighborhoods is located only in industry retrospectives, and

in most accounts its most significant origins are situated alongside other

images of white youth rebellion in the 1960s. That is not to say, however,

that images of skateboarding in the 1960s evoke the counterculture. In fact,

1960s skateboarding oscillated uncomfortably between, first, being defined

as a harmless childhood game and a dangerous and annoying teenage craze,

and, second, being associated with suburban childhood and California teen

surf culture. As Thrasher asserts, “Product development and skating styles

coincided with the invention and perfection of two other modern Ameri-

can postwar activities: Surfing and suburban sprawl,” and “The dawn of

skateboarding coincided with the realization of the industrial revolution in

America and the increase in cheaper mass-production of steel products for

car parts, tools, and toys.”18 As it moved to the world of the suburbs and

California, skateboarding also became distinctly white, as the availability of

leisure time and access to the relative quiet and space of suburban streets

and sidewalks were distinct to whites. At the same time, however, its surfing

roots in both Polynesia and California and its relative danger, as well as its

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“The mix of sunshine and rebellion”  •  33

association with the burgeoning teen culture, lent skateboarding a rebel-

lious and even exotic edge.

Suburban Roots/California Myths, 1959–66

Skateboarding emerged at a moment in U.S. history when the figure of the

youth rebel was gaining prominence. Leerom Medovoi argues that figures

such as James Dean, the beats, and Holden Caufield all served to shore up

the cold war image of America as “antiauthoritarian [and] democratic.”19

That is, in order to present itself as the better alternative to communism, the

United States had to demonstrate that it would welcome rebellious charac-

ters even in the context of its homogeneous middle-class suburbs. Medo-

voi’s genealogy of identity and identity politics demonstrates the ways in

which countercultural symbols are a fundamental part of the imaginary of

American myths. Along with images of middle-class America, they demon-

strate that the United States offers the freedom and security to “be all that

you can be.”

Skateboarding, however, did not emerge into this context as a fully

formed symbol of suburban youth rebellion. Rather, its location in a moment 

when youth rebellion was moving to the forefront of public consciousness,

as well as its seemingly simultaneous existence as a commodity toy and a

new symbol of California surf culture, set skateboarding up to take on a

number of dualities that have followed it through its history and make pos-

sible the particular culture surrounding it today.20

Shot through the contours of skateboarding’s early history are two

quintessential images of idyllic America: the postwar suburb and Califor-

nia surf culture. More than situated within such nostalgic American places,

skateboarding in this moment is tied closely to suburban (white) children—

mostly boys—and California surfers—mostly male teenagers. The ideas

and values associated with skateboarding in its many guises, then, bespeak

America’s youthful identity. As I noted earlier, images of youth are tied

strongly to American myths, and the United States is imagined as a youth-

ful nation replete with the energy, desires, and modern ways of thinking of

the young. Thrasher’s retrospective comments, “Skateboarding has a rich

history charged with youthful intensity and adventurous spirit.”21 “Youthful

intensity” and “adventurous spirit” quite easily evoke notions of American

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inventiveness and vigor, and skateboarding’s origin narratives certainly call

these traits to mind.22

By 1959, surfers and suburban kids seem to have found skateboarding

virtually simultaneously, and its suburban origins overlap and interlock

with its location in California surf culture. While Michael Brooke’s The Con-

crete Wave makes no mention of surfers until after the development of a

commercial toy skateboard, both Thrasher and James Davis contend that

surfers discovered homemade skateboards in the late 1940s and early 1950s

before a toy board was produced. The particular sequence of events is rela-

tively inconsequential to contemporary narratives of skateboarding, for it

is the overlap that allows for its multiple meanings. What matters, in other

words, is that both surfers and commercial interests play a central role in

the early days of the skateboard, and the tension and cooperation between

“independent” youth culture and consumer culture traverses the remainder

of skateboarding’s history.

Surely, the overlap between the technologies (i.e., the boards) used for

surfing and skateboarding cemented the connection between the two prac-

tices. What is more telling, however, is the way in which mainstream media

picked up on skateboarding’s suburban appeal and surfer style. Construct-

ing skateboarding initially as a craze among kids “who have gone land-surf-

ing berserk” and subsequently as the latest menace to children’s safety, the

media served to make skateboarding decidedly suburban and subcultural.23

In other words, by simultaneously playing up a rather nonthreatening prac-

tice as a fad (and therefore short-lived, simplistic, and superficial), linking

it to the strange and nonmainstream counterculture of California surfing,

and asserting its inherent danger, mainstream media in the 1960s laid the

foundation for skateboarding’s current discursive/cultural location as a

practice wherein white male youths can imagine themselves as outside the

mainstream and actively critiquing particular modes of masculinity while

concurrently asserting traditional forms of masculine power.

As early as 1959, the Los Angeles Times was reporting efforts to out-

law skateboarding. On June 14, 1959, it reported, “Students comprising the

Pasadena Youth Council board of officers” asked the city of Pasadena to

outlaw skateboarding because of the number of injuries it caused. It further

reported that more than six teens had been hurt riding skateboards the pre-

vious month.24 Only a month later it published a story about a teenage boy

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“The mix of sunshine and rebellion”  •  35

who had to have his arm amputated after a skateboarding accident.25 Not

yet regarded as a subculture, a commercial toy, or even a central part of

youth culture, skateboarding was deemed dangerous (by students, no less!)

and therefore the business of city councils.

The Los Angeles Times did not discuss skateboarding again until 1962,

but in just three years the practice had been transformed from simply a dan-

gerous pastime to a distinctly rebellious and masculine fad. Reporting on a 

growing movement to ban skateboarding throughout Los Angeles County,

the paper enthused:

Skateboarding, to the uninformed, is one of the latest rages of the teen-age

set. Most of the demons either are roller-skating enthusiasts with a yen for

high adventure or surfboard novices who feel they can acquire additional

practice. . . . Others are just roller rebels without straps. . . . You don’t need

an expensive surfboard. Junior just grabs a length of 2 x 4 from the wood

pile, tears apart his sister’s roller skates and nails them to the board.26

Skateboarding, the paper reported, was “such a nuisance” that schools were

prohibiting it, and coaches of both high schoolers and younger children were

upset about the loss of players in other sports to skateboarding injuries.27

  In  1963,  a  commercial  skateboard  associated  with  surfing  was  devel-

oped. Surf Guide publisher Larry Stevenson began producing skateboards

through his company, Makaha, and as a promotional device he organized

a team to participate in skateboarding competitions, the first of which

Makaha sponsored in 1963 in Hermosa, California. In May 1964, the Santa 

Monica Civic Auditorium showed Bruce Brown’s movie Surf Crazy, and the

screening included a live demonstration by Makaha’s skate team.28 Zody’s,

a local store, began to advertise the Champion “sidewalk surf board” as

“Exciting healthful, safe fun!” and public debate about skateboards’ safety

heightened. The Los Angeles Times asked, “Skateboards—are they a men-

ace to life and limb or one of the greatest boons to childhood since the

printing of the first comic book?” According to the paper, public debate was

favoring the skateboarders. One citizen bemoaned, “A child nowadays has

a hard time being a child,” and another celebrated the “skill” required for

“this healthy sport.”29

Noticeable in these debates is their focus on children’s safety and the

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absence of a more fraught argument about teen rebellion or boys with

attitude. While such rebellion was a more general concern during this era,

skateboarding had not yet been broadly associated with such rebellion in

public debates about its safety.30 In other words, skateboarding was trou-

bling because it appeared to put children at risk for accidents and injuries,

particularly given the poor materials used in their construction, not because

it was tied to adolescent misbehavior.

Between 1964 and 1966, the mainstream media spent a significant

amount of time warning of these dangers. The Los Angeles Times pub-

lished several letters to the editor warning of the dangers of skateboarding

in 1964.31 In 1965, the California Medical Association deemed skateboard-

ing “a new medical menace,” and the national media paid attention despite

the association’s lack of statistics and dependence on doctors’ reports. One

auto insurance company dubbed skateboarding a “new traffic menace.”32

Good Housekeeping offered safety rules provided by the National Safety

Council, warning of the possibility of facial fractures, permanent damage

to growing bones, and even death.33 Doctors at Children’s Hospital in Wash-

ington, DC, blamed skateboards for doubling the number of fractures they

treated in one summer, and the chief of radiology there told the Washing-

ton Post, “The skateboard should be outlawed.”34 So dire, and so numerous,

were such warnings that by November the latest issue of Changing Times

commented, “The ski season is at hand, at least for you lucky few who sur-

vived skateboards.”35

Beyond being dangerous for children, skateboarding was perceived as a

growing nuisance to pedestrians, especially women and the elderly. The city

of Arcadia’s citizens worried that a sidewalk planned for students walking

to school “would become a ‘juvenile freeway’ with skateboards, wagons and

bikes,”36 and the editor of Consumer Bulletin reported, “Shopping centers

find skateboarding a nuisance because women with arms full of bundles

find it difficult to get out of the way in time to avoid a swift collision.”37 The

July 27, 1965, Nancy cartoon portrayed a mailman falling and spilling all of

his mail after tripping on a skateboard.38 Some city officials also began to

speak of the property damage skateboarders might cause.39 Skateboarding

was so annoying that the Wall Street Journal’s “Pepper . . . and Salt” column

joked, “The scientists who unlocked atomic energy for industry are now

seeking a peaceful use for the skateboard.”40

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“The mix of sunshine and rebellion”  •  37

The tension between images of skateboarders as children in need of

protection and as teenagers who posed a threat to adults came to a head

in Jerry Doernberg’s Los Angeles Times article “Skateboarders Near Thin

Ice.” The head of the West Arcadia Business and Professional Association

told the city council that 50 teenagers were hanging out in front of the shop-

ping center. “Sixty per cent of these kids have skateboards,” he wrote, “and

they terrify older women. These are good kids. But there’s a real danger of

runaway skateboards seriously hurting people.”41 Others noted problems

with enforcing skateboarding laws. “We have enough trouble with ‘public

relations’ as it is without six-foot cops handing out tickets right and left to

8-year-old kids,” one police officer said. Others were not as forgiving. The

police chief in Bountiful, Utah, “was confiscating all visible skateboards,

calling them a common public nuisance,” and Chattanooga, Tennessee, also

banned the boards.42

The media focused on characterizing this new sport as a wild new youth

fad that they hoped would soon die out. The new laws prohibiting skate-

boarding were upsetting to skateboarders, Newsweek lamented, “But with

such a fad, there has to be a break in it somewhere.”43 In claiming that skate-

boarding was a fad, the 1960s media deemed it passing and thus less threat-

ening. However, the media also characterized the popularity of skateboard-

ing as a “craze,” suggesting that its fans might, in fact, be crazy. A 1966 New

York Times article discussing children’s safety quotes a pediatrician who

proclaimed skateboarding at once a serious danger and a passing trend.

“Skateboards are treacherous,” he says, “and should be absolutely prohibited.

It’s wise, in general, to beware the fad of the moment, which always seems to

involve some sort of danger. We used to get a lot of dislocated bones from hula

hoops [!], and next year something equally hazardous will come along.”44

Some adults, including parents, community leaders, and industry spokes-

people, did take skateboarding seriously, characterizing it as childhood

fun or healthful exercise. Skateboard manufacturers, in particular, tried to

reverse the negative press their product had been receiving. One manufac-

turer began printing safety rules on its boards,45 and SAFE, the Skateboard

Association for Education, was established, urging skateboarders to wear

helmets, participating in campaigns to advocate for safety rules, and pro-

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38  •  sk at e l i f e

viding awards to organizations promoting safe skateboarding.46 Even those

adults who enforced bans sometimes did so with reservations, most often

because they perceived skateboarding to be a healthy childhood activity.

One city leader explained, “I’ve been for the kids and skateboarding looks

like a lot of good, clean fun. But lack of supervision or control creates prob-

lems.”47 In order to create control, some cities began to sponsor skateboard-

ing competitions and exhibitions.48

While media reports of these competitions indicated that they included

girls’ divisions, boys generally seem to have been the default sex on which

most stories relied. When they included images, advertisements for skate-

boards usually showcased boys, who were always white. Only one adver-

tisement in the 1960s used a female image. Stern Brothers Children’s World

advertised a “Tite ’n top set switched on for the skateboard crowd.” This

advertisement is for clothing, not a skateboard, and it uses an image of a

young girl with her foot on a beach ball, rather than skateboarding.49 Per-

haps the most logical conclusion to be derived from this ad is that the outfit

was meant to attract members of the male skateboarding crowd, not to be

worn by them.

Most feature stories used masculine pronouns. For example, the Los

Angeles Times reported that a skateboarding competition in the Covina

City Park had achieved a “separation of ‘men’ from boys,” and contest judge

Hobie Alter, a professional skateboarder and the namesake of a popular

brand of skateboards, told the paper that the skills acquired while skate-

boarding could help to “train a boy to become an expert surfer or skier.”50

It is important to note that the Los Angeles Times did sometimes run pho-

tographs of the winners of the girls’ division at various contests. In fact,

skateboarders Colleen Boyd and Wendy Bearer appeared in the newspaper

several times, apparently the best—or the only—girls competing in many of

these contests.51 Still, very few articles about contests listed the winners of

both the boys’ and girls’ divisions.52

The only space where girls are relatively regularly featured is in human

interest photos presenting skateboarding as an interesting new children’s

hobby. Many of these show preteen girls with their dogs or parks and rec-

reation officials.53 Far from a nuisance, danger, or craze, skateboarding in

these photos is portrayed as cute and interesting. Female skateboarders are

represented as competitive only when they are included in listings of con-

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“The mix of sunshine and rebellion”  •  39

test winners, but in most media depictions, female skateboarders are not to

be taken seriously.

By 1965, skateboarding had been banned in 20 cities, and companies

that had been working hard to fill holiday orders suddenly found themselves

overstocked, victims of numerous canceled orders.54 Still, the practice was

the subject of Skaterdater (1965), an Oscar-nominated short film and winner

of the 1966 Cannes International Film Festival’s Grand Prix for Best Short,55

and the magazine Quarterly Skateboard. The national press praised Skat-

erdater.56 Kevin Thomas of The Los Angeles Times called it “delightful” and

enthused that it “skims across the screen with style and verve.”57

In 1966, skateboarding simultaneously became a part of everyday culture

and a diminishing trend. Several articles wondered if it was becoming less

popular. “Is the skateboard going the way of the hula hoop?” asked Charles

R. Donaldson of the Los Angeles Times. Studio City recreation administra-

tors suggested that skateboarders’ interest in competitions was on the wane,

though children were still interested in skateboarding recreationally. At the

same time, a member of the Studio City Recreation and Parks Department 

claimed, “To our knowledge, nobody is manufacturing skateboards any more,”

noting that they are durable and parents were bothered by their noise.58

Not quite a waning trend, skateboarding became an easy symbol for

youths in 1966 and the mass media spent far less time defining the practice

or discussing its origins and dangers. The New York Times discussed British

and French Samsonite commercials featuring mannequins on skateboards.59

Another article invoked the free feeling “plebes” at the U.S. Military Academy

felt while their older classmates were gone, describing “a young cadet . . .

rolling down the tiled corridor on a skateboard [who] went winging around

a corner with a swift and beautiful grace.”60 Johnny Carson joked that an

NBC vice president was angry with General Motors because “a wheel has

broken off his skateboard.”61 Skateboards, in short, seemed to have become

part of the fabric of everyday life.

Skateboarding Disappears, 1967–74

By 1967, skateboarding had lost its hold on both mainstream media’s and

mainstream youths’ attention. Michael Brooke attributes the decline in pop-

ularity to manufacturers’ inability to produce a high-quality product, writing

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that “skateboarders were faced with poor technology (that is, clay wheels)

and concerns about safety.”62 While the clay wheels certainly were rickety

and unreliable, the media’s coverage of skateboards as “a new medical men-

ace” and skateboarders as a nuisance surely contributed to the practice’s

decreasing popularity. However, I also want to note that this dramatic dis-

appearance occurred at a moment of clear strife for young people. With the

Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968, war protests escalated. In this same period,

the country was rocked by urban riots, civil rights protests, and the assas-

sinations  of  Martin  Luther  King  Jr.  and  Robert  Kennedy.  The  end  of  this 

moment also coincides with the Watergate scandal. Perhaps the dramatic

nature of this moment—as well as youth culture’s explicit engagement in

and reaction against a well-defined establishment—rendered discussions of

skateboarding’s rebellious nature rather banal.

Over the course of the seven years between 1967 and 1974, skateboard-

ing was scarcely mentioned in the mainstream media. Periodically, the news

outlets would note a municipality’s decision to ban it or include it in a list of

dangerous toys or California fads, but not a single report features an in-depth

discussion of the practice. In 1968, the Washington Post declared motorized

minibikes the “successor to the skateboard.”63 Although skateboarding did

not entirely disappear from public discourse, its presence decreased dra-

matically, though it did continue to be defined as a risky childhood endeavor

and an interesting California fad.

Technology and Daredeviltry, 1975–79

Stacy Peralta’s film Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) remembers skateboard-

ing’s 1970s resurgence as distinctly working class. For Peralta, the famed

Zephyr Skateboarding team from Santa Monica, California, was a group of

aggressive and energetic boys with little to lose who gave skateboarding

their all and shunned the contemporary norms of the sport. The winner of

the Sundance Film Festival’s Audience Award and Director’s Award, the

documentary positions its protagonists as products of “the last great sea-

side slum.” The story begins with a tour of Dogtown, the California coastal

communities of Venice and Santa Monica. Narrator Sean Penn intones,

“There is a place where America’s Manifest Destiny collides into the Pacific

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Ocean.  A  place  where  the  fabled  Route  66,  the  roadway  of  America’s 

dreams, terminates. This is Dogtown.” Juxtaposing the American dream

and economic and social hardship, Penn guides us through Dogtown and

the wreckage of its myriad amusement parks, including the Pacific Ocean

Park, which one skater describes as a “dead wonderland.” This narration

suggests that by growing up in this run-down, formerly utopic place, the

(mostly) white boys of Dogtown developed the raw, creative, independent

ways of thinking that produced and pushed forward the practice of skate-

boarding. In advancing this argument, the documentary aligns American

mores of independence, freedom, and adventure with working-class, white

masculinity.

The film consolidates these values through archival footage of California

in the 1960s and 1970s that contrasts sunny beaches inhabited by lily-white

surfers with run-down, gritty, working-class towns. As white, bourgeois

beach culture collides with racially diverse, working-class beach culture,

Dogtown and Z-Boys envisions a distinct group of “raw,” authentic, white

teenage boys. The mythology of California as a utopic site of possibility

haunted by racial and economic divides serves as a central trope accounting

for the particularities of white adolescent masculinity. Because Dogtown

and Z-Boys functions as a foundational myth explaining skateboarding

circa 1970 and guiding contemporary skateboarding, I argue, its portrayal of

white masculinity reverberates in current visions of this identity.

While Dogtown and Z-Boys illuminates a key element of skateboard-

ing’s history, it does not tell the whole story. In fact, while skateboard-

ing did take on a distinctly masculine tinge and was regarded by some as

rebellious, it also opened doors for women’s participation and became a

far more expensive—and thus middle class—pursuit. Erupting in 1975 as a

major moneymaking industry, skateboarding came to be defined as a daring

and graceful sport requiring a particular set of skills rather than a fleeting

childhood fad. Skateboarders, in turn, were represented as both risk-taking

and rebellious teenagers and expressive young athletes and artists. As this

newly defined sport/art evolved, its expense pushed it farther into middle-

and upper-middle-class enclaves, and its multiple definitions invited girls’

involvement. Most crucially, the varied and contradictory ways in which

skateboarding was defined during this moment of popularity made the sport

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and its culture a discursive space—a youthscape—in which it was possible

to envision multiple modes of masculinity.

Inventing the Wheel: Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

As I have noted, skateboarding’s rapid demise in 1966 is most often attributed

to the dangers that clay and metal wheels presented. But by 1975 the popular

press was heralding the “rebirth of the boards,”64 crediting skateboarding’s

newfound popularity to the triumph of male ingenuity and technological

innovation. Several publications recounted the story of Frank Nasworthy, a

Virginia Polytechnic Institute student who was suspended for participating

in a political demonstration in 1970, and one proclaimed that “in the annals

of skateboarding” Nasworthy would “go down as the man who invented the

wheel.”65 The myth has Nasworthy hanging out in a Virginia plastics factory

that made polyurethane wheels for roller skates. While roller skaters often

complained about the slow speed of these wheels, Nasworthy realized that

they would work for skateboards, and in 1973 he opened a California-based 

business, the Cadillac Wheels Company. Virtually overnight, these articles

suggest, skateboarding became popular again.66

Nasworthy’s story highlights several key values that follow skateboard-

ing throughout its history. Having been kicked out of college for going to a

political demonstration, he represents the 1960s counterculture and brings

rebellion to mind. More than a rebel, though, he became successful because

of his creative approach to the relatively new plastics industry and his entre-

preneurial spirit. The Los Angeles Times called him a “visionary.”67 While he

lost access to the educational institution, he found success independently

and in the process revitalized the practice of skateboarding. Nasworthy’s

story is, in essence, the American dream. This myth’s centrality to popular

accounts of skateboarding carries through the various veins of a discourse

that allows skateboarders to be perceived (and perceive themselves) as sub-

cultural and mainstream at the same time. Skateboarders can reject certain

institutions (in Nasworthy’s case, higher education) and creatively, indepen-

dently, innovatively participate in mainstream culture—like Nasworthy did.

While Frank Nasworthy did not take center stage in all accounts of

skateboarding’s resurgence, the reinvention of the wheel certainly did.68 The

development of urethane wheels serves as an origin myth even in contempo-

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rary accounts of skateboarding. Dogtown and Z-Boys attributes the 1970s

evolution of skateboarding to these wheels. Urethane wheels were more

stable and softer than clay and metal wheels, and so small obstructions in

the skateboard’s path did not so easily cause it to skid or stop short. The Los

Angeles Times described the new wheel almost lovingly: “It is translucent,

often amber in color, softer than the old wheel.”69 In fact, the article implies,

use of the new wheels might have saved 18-year-old James Robert McCle-

nahan, who died on May 4, 1975, after falling off his skateboard and hitting

his head. An innovation in safety, urethane wheels also allowed enthusiasts

to progress athletically and provided them the freedom to experiment with

daring new tricks.

Technological ingenuity brought more than a safer wheel to skateboard-

ing. The mid-1970s skateboard was completely redesigned. Decks (the board)

could now be constructed of wood or fiberglass, and the trucks (axles) on

which the wheels are mounted had been redesigned to be steadier and allow

for greater ease in turning.70 The New York Times enthused that the new

skateboards were being marketed “with a space-age supersell that points

out superwide, supergrip and superspeed features, including such things as

unidirectional fiberglass deck, aerospace locking nuts, aircraft aluminum

fittings, hand-laminated super-flex board, alloy steel axles and so on.”71 The

discussions of skateboarding’s new technology were so intense that in 1976

the paper joked:

Somewhere in this country—maybe a small garage, maybe in a large fac-

tory—someone who understands the American marketplace is building

the ultimate skateboard. It will come equipped with radial tires, a rear heel

defogger, a citizen band radio and air-conditioning. It will sell for $1000, local

tax and dealer prep not included. And there will be lines around the block

to buy it.72

Despite the joking, this celebration of technology legitimized skateboarding

as a wholly American and masculine sport, an activity to be taken seriously

rather than a forgettable fad. Indeed, William Knowlton Zinsser of Sports

Illustrated noted, “American technology in its relentless push solved the

various problems” of skateboards.73 

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“Hotdogging of a High Order”: Skateboarding Redefined

These technophilic descriptions suggest that the skateboard had become

far too complicated for any backyard mechanic to produce with his young

son. With new technology, skateboarding changed in several ways. First, the

skateboard became far more expensive; second, skateboarders were able

to develop new tricks; and, third, skateboarding was elevated from a fad

or pastime to a sport. In this evolution, skateboarding became simultane-

ously more grown up, and thus the domain of teenagers and adolescents

rather than children; more feminine, as the new tricks could be classified

alongside those of gymnastics and dance; and more masculine, as the new

technology allowed greater speed and specialization. As an adolescent sport,

skateboarding also took on two contradictory qualities. It could be associ-

ated closely with teenagers and juvenile delinquency while at the same time

being legitimized as a sport fit for televised contests and marketing cam-

paigns, and these multiple meanings carry through to the present moment.

Skateboarding simultaneously became a daring new masculine teen cul-

ture and a newly sophisticated sport through which young men and women

could develop athletic skills and grace. Grown up and more daring, skate-

boarders were portrayed as risk takers. Far from young boys hammering

together two-by-fours and roller skate wheels with their dads—or even

neighborhood children getting in the way of shoppers on city sidewalks—

skateboarders in 1975 were tackling empty swimming pools, where they

skated up and down the sides of the pool walls “like the steel ball in a rou-

lette wheel.”74 At the same time, Sports Illustrated characterized pool riding

as “breathtaking” and noted the “grace” of 1970s skateboarding more gener-

ally.75 Newsweek described “solos and couples do[ing] graceful figure-skat-

ing routines as well as acrobatic backbends and handstands” and “Skate-

board hotdoggers look[ing] for exotic sites to conquer.”76 The Washington

Post captured the duality of skateboarding succinctly in its description of a

skateboarder who “duels with disaster, the semisoft wheels making sighing

sounds on the hard asphalt. It is hotdogging of a high order, beautiful and

dangerous and done for the pure pleasure of it, performed not because but

in spite of the onlooker.”77

The dialectic of grace and aggression that exists in 1970s discourses

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about skateboarding provides a space in which young boys can be reimag-

ined or redefined. In other words, in this dialectical space, skateboarding

boys can be graceful and creative while simultaneously conquering space

and participating in a sport that encourages an ever more athletic progres-

sion in skill. William Knowlton Zinsser of Sports Illustrated commented,

after observing his son and others at a skate park, “I felt that I was watching

a random ballet. In a society that suspects the worst of its teenage males,

I would rather have a skateboard park as my neighbor than a grown man

with power tools.”78 Zinsser’s comment implies that skateboarding attracts

or produces a different type of masculine performance, one that is expres-

sive and stylish.

Dangerous, Annoying, Criminal—and Legitimized

The burgeoning interest in skateboarding caused worry, as the practice

was still considered to be very dangerous. Newsweek announced, “In the

Midwest, [skateboarding] is causing parents more terror than Junior’s first

time out with the car.”79 Several articles reported on injuries to skateboard-

ers,80 and medical reports indicated that 27,000 injuries in 1975 were due

to skateboarding.81 Family Health warned that with the new technology

young skateboarders would be pressured by their peer groups to try risky

moves as “a cult glamorizing both risk and pain is rapidly developing around

the sport. According to the code, if you haven’t been badly hurt at least once,

you haven’t attempted a really difficult trick.”82 Still, others noted that the

new equipment was far safer,83 and officials from the U.S. Skateboarding

Association insisted that the sport was safe as long as enthusiasts didn’t

try to do more than they were prepared to do.84 Mary McHugh of the New

York Times reported that the U.S. Product Safety Commission had found

skateboarding to be relatively safe, ranking it twenty-fifth in a list of danger-

ous sports, which bicycling topped.85 But in November 1975 the Consumer

Product Safety Commission noted skateboarding’s role in an increase in toy-

related accidents.86 In the same year the Consumer Affairs Committee of

Americans for Democratic Action warned consumers that skateboards were

dangerous and suggested that they buy cheaper models, which were not as

fast and did not “have streamlined and lethal points in front.”87

Some, as in the 1960s, complained of speeding youths and the nuisance

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and danger they presented to pedestrians and adults more generally. The Cal-

ifornia Highway Patrol began to ticket skateboarders, “some of whom have

been clocked zooming downhill at speeds up to about 30 m.p.h.,” because 

they were hazardous to pedestrians.88 Reader Patricia Bayley grumbled in 

a letter to the Los Angeles Times, “[A]ny lives or limbs endangered should

be those of the skateboarders, alone, not some innocent pedestrian’s.” She

went on, criticizing another letter that suggested that people should accept

a modicum of risk in the quest for accomplishment, “Try to tell a mother

who has just miscarried because of an irresponsible youth on a skateboard

about a fair trade-off. . . . Set up daredevil courses for skateboarders in

neighborhood parks where they can maim themselves, but not the rest of

us.”89 Bayley’s letter puts in sharp relief a perceived disconnect between

responsible (female) adults and reckless (male) youths.

Skateboarders also came to be associated with a variety of crimes.

Though few articles suggested that they committed crimes (aside from

skateboarding) more than other groups of young people, several articles did

mention that juveniles had been in possession of skateboards while com-

mitting their crimes. For example, the Los Angeles Times reported that a

ten-year-old boy had escaped on his skateboard after stealing $2.68 from an

ice cream shop,90 and a mall Santa reported that he “got his quota of smart

comments from older boys riding down the mall on skateboards.”91 A report

of a “street melee” featured a photo of three young men in handcuffs, “one

holding a skateboard and another standing on one.”92 As interest in skate-

boarding in swimming pools mushroomed, skateboarders also began to

trespass on properties with empty pools.93  As  the  promoter  Bill  Riordan, 

manager of the tennis star Jimmy Connors, described skateboarding, “It’s

clandestine—the kids have all these secret riding spots. It’s got speed and

danger. It’s got its own language. It’s got a mystique.”94

  While  Riordan  found  skateboarding’s  “mystique”  to  be  ripe  for  mar-

keting, other adults were less than enthused. As in the 1960s, many cities

responded to the perceived dangers and nuisances of skateboarding by ban-

ning it.95 Safety clinics at schools and shopping centers were another solu-

tion to the problem of skateboarding.96 The Pro-Am Skateboarder Racers 

Association teamed up with communities, police, and schools to develop

safe skateboarding guidelines and programs.97 This organization supported

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the creation of skateboarding “areas” or parks in the vein of other public

recreational facilities such as baseball diamonds. Seeking to legitimize the

practice, one spokesman enthused, “Skateboarding is a beautiful way to

develop poise and self-confidence.”98 The International Skateboard Associa-

tion (ISA), an organization of 12 skateboarding companies, was founded in

1976 to advance the sport. The ISA also staged safety clinics and competi-

tions.99 The city of Glendora even decided to make ticketed skateboarders

and bicyclists attend safety lectures on Saturday mornings.100 These clinics

served to normalize skateboarding, as did the development of skate parks,

which exploded in the mid-1970s.

Municipalities nationwide began to respond to skateboarders’ needs

with skate parks in 1975. The New York Times listed “California, Texas,

Florida, Maryland, Chiba Beach, Japan, the town and shire of Albany, West-

ern Australia, and Huntington, Long Island” as having opened skate parks in

1975–76. 101 Skate parks required their patrons to wear safety gear, including

helmets, elbow pads, and knee pads, and effectively negated the danger of

a skateboarder being hit by a car. In fact, in 1977 the Consumer Product

Safety Commission reported that skateboarding in parks was significantly

less risky than doing it elsewhere and that skateboarding had risen from the

twenty-fifth riskiest sport to the second (after bicycling),102 having caused

at least 188,000 injuries in 1976.103 Skate parks also became a prime source

of revenue, and their owners opened “pro shops” near their parks and

sponsored lessons and contests. Skateboard World in Torrance, California,

wooed customers with music, an arcade, closed circuit television (which

allowed skateboarders to review their skills), and a concession stand.104

“A Real Sport”: Skateboarding Contests as a Legitimizing Tool

With the development of the urethane wheel, Frank Nasworthy proclaimed

skateboarding “a real sport.”105 As marketers and promoters began to notice

the success of the industry, they developed contests and exhibitions to fur-

ther promote skateboarding and gain monetarily from it. These contests, in

turn, worked to shore up skateboarding’s status as a sport.

Of course, not all contests were sponsored by big industry players, and

various California locales held competitions beginning in the summer of

1975. Most of them included slalom races and “freestyle” events that tested

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skateboarders’ ability to perform gymnastic or acrobatic tricks, such as

handstands, on their boards. Skateboards were also included in parades,106

Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) holiday events,107 and charity

events.108 These contests and events were not new, particularly to the Los

Angeles area, as they were held throughout skateboarding’s boom in the

1960s. However, as more people proclaimed the activity a true sport, televi-

sion began to take notice, and in 1976 the ABC network broadcast the World

Skateboard Championships.109

In June 1976, National Skateboard Shows, Inc., a new production com-

pany, spent 250,000 dollars to develop the Skateboarding World Masters

Invitational, and the World Professional Skateboard Championships Invi-

tational was held in California in September. Wholly developed by industry

organizations, the titles of these contests are meant to instill skateboarding

with cosmopolitanism as well as an aura of tradition. These contests fea-

ture “professionals” and “masters,” invited by a legitimizing organization to

exhibit their skills. In reality, the New York Times scoffed, “the main floor of

the arena . . . looked rather amateurish for what was billed as the World Pro-

fessional Skateboard Championship.”110 While supposedly world events, the

contests were always located in the United States, and the World Masters

Invitational was only “worldly” in that some of its contestants came from

Hawaii.111 In this context, rumors also began to circulate that skateboarding

would be a part of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.112

Manufacturers hoped to further legitimize skateboarding by paying to

promote it widely and raise it to the level of a popular family sport enjoyed

even by nonparticipants. “With a second lease on life,” the New York Times

reported, “skateboard companies are sending ‘teams’ on nationwide tours

to push skateboarding as the new family sport.”113 Manufacturers began to

pay  skateboarders  up  to  30,000  dollars  to  demonstrate  skateboarding  at 

exhibitions around the country and on television,114 and between sponsor-

ships and prize money skateboarders such as Russ Howell, who told the Los

Angeles Times that he had been in “seven or eight movies, written two books

and won 18 major championships,”115 made 60,000 dollars.116 Although Dog-

town and Z-Boys positions the Zephyr Skateboard team as distinct from

the larger culture of skateboarding in the 1970s, team member Tony Alva

did indeed reach the mainstream press. He told the Los Angeles Times that

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other professional skateboarders are “sportsmen and health freaks. They’re

people just having fun.”117

  Bill  Riordan  started  to  manage  skateboarder  Ty  Page  and  endorsed 

a skateboarding tournament to be held in Long Beach, California. “ ‘Any-

thing that generates $300 million in annual sales,’ Riordan said, ‘can’t be all 

bad.’”118 He also developed a children’s show featuring skateboarding for

the television network CBS with former American Basketball Association

commissioner Jack Dolph.

  Riordan’s  discussions  about  promoting  Ty  Page  capture  some  of  the 

many layers of discourse that have accumulated on skateboarding and its

culture. He told the New York Times:

To make this sport viable in America . . . you need to create national heroes

to sustain it. Ty is a super athlete, he jumps off Oceanside cliffs, he was the

national boys’ surfing champ at age 12 . . . and his image is apple pie and ice

cream. He’s clean-cut, wears proper safety equipment, and everyone wants

to mother him. Jimmy Connors came up in the age of the anti-hero. It was

easy to make a rascal out of him. Those days are over.

Describing Ty Page elsewhere as “a Huckleberry Finn in a blond Afro,” Rior-

dan represents Page as an all-American boy with a twist.119 That is to say,

he was white, childlike, adventurous, and good spirited while at the same

time stunning audiences with his daring skateboarding ability and perhaps

even his hair. His father claimed that before his son became a professional

skateboarder he was interested only in “surfing, skateboarding, and girls”

and was “a ne’er-do-well in the making.”120 Not only all-American, Page was

decidedly heterosexual and possessed at least the potential to be a rebel.

Riordan, at least by his own account, was certainly successful in making 

Page a star; he estimated that Page would earn between 75,000 and 100,000

dollars in 1977.121

In 1976, the New York Times declared, “[P]eople are getting rich on

skateboards. . . . [Skateboarding] has gone Hollywood. And everybody who

is anybody wants a piece of the action.”122 With the development of new

technology, the price of skateboards rose from approximately 10 dollars in

1965 to as much as 125 in 1976. The newspaper claimed, “Though many of

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the early boarders were kids who couldn’t afford two roller skates, today

skateboarding is not a sport for the poor. Like stereo freaks, the stoked

often buy components and assemble them themselves.”123 By 1977, sales

had risen approximately 25 to 35 percent to 550 to 650 million dollars,124

and skateboard manufacturer Hobie Alter was selling his boards through

JCPenney and Sears.125 Toy maker Mattell Corporation launched its Mag-

num Skateboard Division in 1977 as well, and its marketing manager said,

“We do see permanence to the sport. The outlaw nature of it is changing, and

skateparks are providing an anchor to the sport. It has become less faddish,

and a more year-round sport.”126

More than an industry, skateboarding was perceived to be part of a new

youth culture along with rock music and surfing. Skateboarders began to

be featured elsewhere in the media besides in televised contests. In 1977,

Ty Page reported doing four television commercials.127 As the Los Angeles

Times listed skateboarding’s reach into popular culture, “Six national TV

commercials  (Pepsi,  RC  Cola,  Three  Musketeers,  Master  Charge,  Orange 

Plus and MG) use skateboarding in their pitch. Three slick new magazines

have been devoted to the subject, each full color and filled with expensive ad

lineage. Universal will soon distribute a feature film titled ‘Skateboard.’”128

At least part of this youth culture was focused on “authenticity.” Some

professional skaters made it a point to proclaim that they were not partici-

pating in skateboarding for financial gain. “The thing is” one said, “they could

be giving away lollipops at this meet and it would have the same importance

as if they were giving away thousands and thousands of dollars.”129 Still,

even Bill Riordan’s all-American skateboarders began to demand compen-

sation. A “cheerful little tyke,” 13-year-old professional skateboarder Bobby 

(Casper) Boyden, when asked what he liked most about skateboarding,

responded, “The money, the money!”130

More than a moneymaker, the culture of skateboarding was widely per-

ceived to be the domain of young people, and it operated as a never–never

land for some. Skitch Hitchcock, a 24-year-old professional skateboarder,

enthused, “I got to be a kid forever, Peter Pan.”131 Indeed, skateboarders

were frequently defined as “junior high and high school students”132 or

“teens and pre-teens.”133 Family Health defined skateboarders as “generally

boys in their teens and pre-teens.”134 Print journalists maintained the barrier

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“The mix of sunshine and rebellion”  •  51

between young skateboarders and adults by publishing lists of skateboard-

ing slang, indicating that skateboarders had a language of their own. Sports

Illustrated listed a variety of slang terms to which promoter “Riordan and 

his middle-aged colleagues” had to become accustomed.135 The Washing-

ton Post claimed, “[S]kateboarding is still something of an outlaw art, its

grace and beauty heightened by the ever-present possibility of the board’s

betrayal. It’s an esoteric world as well, its language nearly incomprehen-

sible, its mythology rich with teenaged heroes who have found fame and

fortune in a world of nearly perpetual motion.”136

The Los Angeles Times remarked that skateboarding “may be the ulti-

mate sport for today’s youth. You don’t need a natural landscape (a street,

sidewalk or driveway is all that is needed), it’s something you do alone, and

it appears to be something that older people neither understand nor can

ever do as well.”137 The ability to skateboard alone, the story explained,

meant that skateboarders were not “dependent on anyone.”138 The indepen-

dent nature of the practice was tied to its relationship to the self. Pro skater

Russ Howell claimed that skateboarding “tells you a lot about yourself” and 

in recent years “the emphasis has been off teams and on the individual.”139

The editor of Skate Boarder magazine told the Los Angeles Times, “Skate-

boarding is an individual freedom”140

Boys Only?

Skateboarding in the 1970s was still a male-centric sport; however, women

were taken far more seriously in this decade than they were in skateboard-

ing’s first moment of popularity. The Los Angeles Times asserted that 10

percent of professional skateboarders were female.141 Part of the reason

for this shift may be that Title IX, the law mandating equal opportunities in

sports participation for men and women, was passed in 1972.142 But I would

argue that changing definitions of skateboarding also contributed to girls’

increased acceptance.

These changing definitions categorized skateboarding as two distinct

endeavors. The first, as represented in Peralta’s documentary Dogtown and

Z-Boys, focused on defying gravity and included riding in empty swimming

pools and racing down hills. This mode of skateboarding later evolved into

“vert,” or vertical, skateboarding, which is done on large ramps called half

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pipes. Vert skating is heavily represented on ESPN’s The X Games. The

second mode of skateboarding was more akin to gymnastics or dance and

involved performing a variety of tricks with the skateboard on flat ground,

including handstands and lifts. Because of its relationship to the more

“artistic” pursuits of dance—or even ice skating—women’s role in the prac-

tice did not seem contradictory. This mode of skateboarding evolved into

today’s street and flatland skateboarding, which are not as open to women,

in part, I would submit, because of their public nature and their frequent

reliance on trespassing.

Women, however, were not only represented as graceful skateboarders.

Several  achieved  the  status  of  professionals;  Bill  Riordan  included  Ellen 

O’Neal and Laura Thornhill on his “team” of skateboarders.143 The Los

Angeles Times featured 16-year-old Thornhill in June 1977, and the lead

picture portrayed her skateboarding on a ramp with a male skater. The

article reported that Thornhill had suffered “two major injuries and scores

of scrapes,” and when asked why she skateboards she replied, “Because

it’s fun and because of the money—it’s nice making money when you’re

doing something you like.”144 Ellen O’Neal told the paper that she loved the

competition associated with skateboarding and that in her first competi-

tion she placed second in a field of 200 boys.145 The Times also ran a photo

of Desiree Von Essen waiting for the start of a skateboarding race. She’s

perched leaning backward on her board, holding on to two poles and wear-

ing a helmet, gloves, and elbow and knee pads. She stares intently in front

of her, her body is tense, and she appears to be focused and strong.146 Von

Essen, in short, is a far cry from the young girls posing with their skate-

boarding dogs. One exception to this trend is a story that appeared in the

Los Angeles Times, which reported the following about the 1976 California

Free Form World Professional Skateboard Championships.

Ernie Martin from the East Coast broke another record by high-jumping 4

feet 7 inches. Bob Jarvis of Laguna Beach whirled through 151/2 consecutive

360-degree turns, and little Ellen Berryman performed a freestyle show com-

plete with gymnastic and ballet maneuvers.147

This article claimed, “The girl skaters, using gymnastic and ballet techniques,

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add a soft touch to skateboarding. But some, like Laura Thornhill, are as

aggressive as men.”148

Clearly, women were not achieving equal recognition or respect within

the culture of skateboarding, and the same Los Angeles Times article that

featured O’Neal and Von Essen claimed that most pro skaters were men and

many girls associated with the sport were fans looking for “cute guys.”149

Still, it is clear that the sport’s relationship to girls and women was mal-

leable and changing. While important on its own terms, this development

was also crucial to masculinity. As masculinity and femininity are mutually

constitutive, changing norms regarding female participation surely shift the

context of skateboarding so that it may allow for alternative definitions of

masculinity.

Moreover, even as skateboarding achieved heightened legitimacy via

technology, marketing, and new and daring tricks, it maintained a kinship

to more “expressive” and graceful modes. Arguably, this kinship, along with

skateboarding’s riskiness, has created a sporting space in which young men

at one and the same time can conquer space, develop more impressive

tricks, and express themselves artistically.

A Fading Fad? Skateboarding, 1979–84

In 1977, some industry insiders were already forecasting the second demise

of skateboarding. George Powell of the Powell Corporation worried that

companies intent on cashing in on skateboarding’s success would begin

to sell inferior products, though at the same time he suggested that more

adults might begin to participate in the sport, thus maintaining or increasing

its popularity.150 Still, in 1979 the Washington Post noted that the Consumer

Product Safety Commission was reporting such a dramatic decrease in par-

ticipation that it no longer felt a ban on skateboarding was necessary. Money

magazine stated that skateboard sales were down 50 percent in 1977–78,

and in those same years skateboarding injuries dropped from 140,070 to

87,800. The commission suggested that those who were still skateboarding

tended to do so in the more private and safer realm of skate parks.151

By 1979, roller skating had replaced skateboarding as the sport du

jour, catching on as a sport open to everyone, unlike skateboarding, which

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appealed to teenagers generally and boys more specifically.152 The Wash-

ington Post reported, “ ‘It’s got beautiful demographics, just beautiful,’ says

Sure-Grip’s general manager, John Poe. ‘Skateboarding was all male, 10 to

15. This is everybody, 5 to 70 with a big bulge in females 40 to 45—that group

has never had an athletic program.’”153 Poe almost certainly was not cel-

ebrating the development of sports accessible to women as a feminist gain;

rather, he was pointing to the broad appeal of roller skating as an industry.

Indeed, women were represented quite frequently with roller skates. Linda

Ronstadt posed in them for the cover of an album, and Playboy featured a

woman wearing only roller skates. Sharon Borstin published Keep on Rollin’,

which heralded the benefits of roller skating for women, including burning

calories, relieving menstrual pain, and “strengthen[ing] vaginal muscles.”154

By 1981, several reporters were again calling skateboarding a fad, reduc-

ing it to a passing childhood phase with little social relevance. Sebastian

DiCasoli, the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association’s marketing direc-

tor, said of roller skating, “It definitely isn’t a fad, at least not like skate-

boards.”155 The Los Angeles Times asked, “Wonder what ever happened to

skateboard parks?”156 The Washington Post suggested that video games had

overtaken skateboards as the go-to youth activity.157

Skateboarding’s demise in the late 1970s was indeed contested. In Feb-

ruary 1979, a skateboarder told a Los Angeles Times reporter, “Skateboards

were supposed to be a fad,” but many people continued to skate and com-

petitions and skate parks continued to be well attended. The skater pro-

claimed, “It’s here to stay, and I think rollerskating is, too.”158 Continued

discussion about the safety of skateboarding and potential bans, as well as

coverage of events such as contests, skate parks, and exhibitions, suggests

that, although its popularity as a marker of youth culture may have faded,

young people continued to engage in skateboarding in both public and pri-

vate.159 Furthermore, despite being reduced to a passing fad in most media

accounts, skateboarding managed to maintain some of its relevance as a

marker of troublesome youth, daredevils, and even teen rebellion. A Califor-

nia congressman, Barry M. Goldwater Jr., reported that his staff persuaded

him to give up his skateboard because of concern over his “image,”160 and

several articles invoked skateboarding youths as a sign of trouble.161

Michael Brooke suggests that skateboarding’s second demise can be

attributed to its “old nemesis, safety concerns,” because many skate parks

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closed in response to high insurance premiums.162 He also argues that skate-

boarding was a victim of its own success; as companies began to gain mon-

etarily from the practice in the late 1970s, corporate values overtook a for-

merly untainted pastime. As I have demonstrated, however, skateboarding

has always existed in relationship to and within mainstream culture, it has

always been a product for sale, and it never enjoyed a precapitalist moment

when it existed primarily for a mythically pure subcultural group. Never-

theless, even the mainstream media suggested that skateboarding’s demise

was due in part to the media’s interest in it. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times

quoted skateboard manufacturer Tom Sims as saying, “The sensationalism

of the media hurt [skateboarding] tremendously. Media overemphasized

certain elements, the more radical turns and maneuvers.”163

In these interstitial years, when skateboarding no longer dominated

mainstream representations of adolescent males, a niche media industry

serving dedicated skaters developed. The once popular Skate Boarder

magazine was transformed into Action Now and began to feature a wide

variety of “action sports,” including horseback riding, but two new publica-

tions devoted entirely to skateboarding were released: Thrasher magazine

was first published in 1981, and Transworld Skateboarding commenced in

1983.

Thrasher and Transworld Skateboarding, as the two signposts of the

skateboarding world, established a discussion that defines skateboarding’s

existence in relation to mainstream culture to the present moment. Fausto

Vitello, who owns the company Independent, a manufacturer of skateboard

trucks (axles), founded Thrasher with the following editorial statement:

“Skateboarding attracts a unique person. It influences the rest of society.

Thrasher is not about hypocrisy or selling out to corporate America. We are

about skate and destroy.”164 Later Vitello told Sports Illustrated, “We just

wanted to be outlaws. The mainstream thing hadn’t worked, so we just ter-

rorized. That was how we saw we could promote the sport.”165 George Pow-

ell also told the magazine, “We knew skateboarding had to become a more

underground activity to survive, that mystique was good for the sport.”166

Larry Balma, the founder of Transworld Skateboarding, conceived his pub-

lication as an alternative to Thrasher, which he defined as “sex, drugs and

rock ’n’ roll.” Thrasher’s tone, he argued, turned off parents and thus poten-

tial customers.167 Despite their divergent approaches, both magazines were

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clearly interested in developing discursive constructions of skateboard-

ing that would be marketable. Vitello and Powell’s statements, especially,

drive home the always already commercial nature of skateboarding, even

as it is being defined as rebellious and noncorporate. Toggling back and

forth between mainstream and subcultural appeals even in its niche mar-

ket, skateboarding is constantly in correspondence with the broader culture.

These two poles of existence are crucial to understanding skateboarding’s

next wave, during which it was defined as both the domain of punk rebels

and a highly athletic endeavor.

“Skate and Destroy” or the New Little League? Corresponding Anew, 1985–93

Skateboarding’s decline in popularity was short lived, and by 1985 it was

again the subject of feature articles discussing the state of male adolescents.

In April 1985, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on Tony Magnusson, who

was “Believe it or not, a professional skateboarder.” The paper noted that

“skateboarders see a fight for acceptance as legitimate and long overdue.

They may be men in a boys’ world, but they’re as serious as a 16-foot fall

onto concrete.”168 This movement toward mainstream culture was fraught

with contradiction from the beginning. Magnusson described skateboarding

“danger . . . freedom . . . a big rush, like walking on the edge of an out-and-

out disaster,” but the paper said, “it is also brutally competitive and serious

stuff to the man-child heroes who don the equipment and risk its indiscre-

tions.”169 Skateboard manufacturer Tom Sims characterized the industry as

“more of a grass-roots thing but climbing on a solid basis.”170 The Los Angeles

Times also ran a story on Russ Howell, “The Pied Piper of Sidewalk Surf-

ing,” in which the reporter wrote, “You hope the sport is making a more

wholesome comeback, but you know it has a long way to go before society

accepts it.”171 A “wholesome” sport with a punk image, the domain of men-

children, a multi-million-dollar grassroots industry, and an edgy but serious

endeavor, skateboarding in 1985 was loaded with contradictions, and these

oppositions and incongruities have followed it to the present moment.

By 1986, skateboarding was again popular enough to be featured in

Sports Illustrated, this time with Tony Hawk as the central character.172 His

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role as skateboarding’s spokesperson is deeply contradictory and has been

received in various ways by contemporary skateboarders, as I discuss later.

Sports Illustrated’s 1986 profile helps to establish these contradictions. Of

the sport more generally, the magazine reported:

Today annual skateboard and accessory sales are again approaching $300 

million. Models pose in Macy’s catalog in skateboarding garb; MGM moguls

are talking feature-length movies. But the sport is still struggling, split right

down the middle. Anarchists to the left. Little Leaguers to the right. The Defi-

ant Ones—artistic, almost poetic in many cases—live to skate the streets.

. . . They’re turned on by the breeze blowing in their hair and the nihilistic,

satanic sounds of hard-core or speed rock groups like Metallica, Megadeath,

and Slayer. . . . Across the fence stands the [National Skateboarding Associa-

tion]. Its members are no less artistic or inclined to plaster their boards with

skulls or skeletons, but the NSA strives for a more clean-cut, competitive

and organized image.173

Sports Illustrated associated the former with Thrasher magazine and the

latter with Transworld Skateboarding and reported, “Tony Hawk admits

he sits ‘right between’ the two magazines in this culture clash.”174 The mag-

azine’s description of Hawk’s “punk hunk look” emphasized his space in

between: “Blonde hair spills like a waterfall over the left side of Hawk’s soft-

featured face. He comes across as articulate, sensitive, unswayed by others,”

but his knees are also “bloodied and scarred by cement.”175

Sports Illustrated’s depiction of Tony Hawk and skateboarding repre-

sents not only the practice’s existence between what might be traditionally

called “subculture” and “mainstream” but also the multiple masculinities

encouraged by and represented within skateboarding. Both “hardcore” and

“sensitive,” “aggressive” and “poetic,” skateboarding boys can maintain the

power implied by aggressive or dominant masculinities while expanding the

realms of masculinity to thoughtful self-expression. The multiple discursive

markers that follow skateboarding from this moment into current depic-

tions are surely part of the reason that skateboarders in the new century

can proclaim alternative masculinities that are not antipatriarchal without

appearing to notice the contradictions in their claims.

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  Between  1985  and  1993,  skateboarding  was  represented  equally  as  a 

practice for both punk teens and innocent schoolchildren. In 1985, Tony

Hawk’s father Frank, president of the NSA and a former Boy Scout leader,

convinced the Boy Scouts to take over the Del Mar Skate Ranch in order to 

alleviate its insurance difficulties. Although the Boy Scouts would remain,

for all intents and purposes, an invisible partner, the organization did train

the skate park employees “in the goals and principles of Scouting: citizen-

ship, patriotism, character building and such.”176 In 1987, a sporting-goods

store owner, Steven Grigorian, told the New York Times:

Some people think it’s a radical activity, some kind of rebellion, involving a

lot of hippie-types. Actually it’s a very healthy sport that has a national sanc-

tioning board. . . . A lot of kids use their boards for transportation, riding

them to school, for example. And some use them for their paper routes.177

American Health magazine suggested that skateboarding is an activity

through which teenagers can channel their energy and aggression;178 a let-

ter to the Washington Post called skateboarding “wholesome and time-con-

suming fun”;179 and the mother of an 11-year-old boy with HIV defended him

as “a regular kid,” declaring, “He loves to skateboard.”180

Between 1987 and 1992, skateboarding fashion became a clear marker

of youthful cool,181 and in 1992 Curad released neon bandages designed to

match “kids’ fashions, rollerblades and skateboards.”182 Skateboarding fash-

ion was relevant yet hip enough in 1992 for Vogue to run a feature article on

it. Declaring skateboarding “a lasting subculture with its own patois, rituals,

and fashion,”183 Vogue praised both the “grace”184 and the “outlaw aura”185 of

skateboarding. Featuring a variety of photos of black and white teen males

wearing baggy jeans, oversized shirts, and graffiti-style logos, the article

concluded, without a hint of irony, “Skateboard culture may already be suf-

fering the fate of punk: it’s being institutionalized and marketed for a mass

audience.”186

Indeed, skateboarding had become a marker of youthful cool in the

mainstream music, television, and film markets. Skate-punk hip-hop art-

ists the Beastie Boys released their first number-one album, Licensed to

Ill, in 1986,187 and the TV network Nickelodeon was launched in 1986 and

began airing SK8TV in 1990.188 In 1987, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

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animated series began, and the turtles loved not only pizza but also skate-

boards. Perhaps the quintessential radical skater and innocent child, Bart

Simpson, came to network television in 1990.

Despite the skateboarding industry’s—and Transworld Skateboard-

ing’s—efforts to convince the public that skateboarding was simply a new

mode of competitive sport, many media outlets continued to portray it as a

highly rebellious activity. People Weekly introduced “the world of thrashing,”

a subculture of skateboard “punks—mohawked, skinheaded, tattooed types,

proud of their bravado and oblivious to the dangers of hard surfaces.”189 A

1985 Los Angeles Times article also included young women in its depic-

tion of rebellious skaters. The article suggested, “Audrey Ritter is strong, 

if not admirable. The 14-year-old . . . considers herself hell on four wheels.

‘I skateboard, but I’m dangerous,’ said Ritter. . . . ‘I’m suicidal—a suicidal 

skater.’”190

Aside from these two articles, however, the press ignored female skaters,

and by the early 1990s, as I will discuss, skateboarders were defined exclu-

sively as male. In the interim, discussions of skaters as rebels continued.

Maclean’s dubbed skateboarders “hell on wheels,”191 and Time ran an article

describing them as “bigger, badder, radder and more streetwise than ever.”

The magazine also quoted one skateboarder as declaring, “I mean, this is not

a ‘nice’ sport like golf,” and Thrasher’s Kevin Thatcher proclaimed skate-

boarders to be “the punk-rockers of the sport set.”192 In 1990, the Washing-

ton Post Magazine depicted skateboarders as

lighting up smokes and swigging Cokes. . . . [S]tripping down to T-shirts

that reveal biceps decorated with some truly baroque tattoos. The boom

box blares Metal Church—music that sounds like the midnight shift at the

steel plant or a psychopathic dental drill or a garbage disposal eating a beer

can.193

This article also made it clear that women in this group serve solely as

girlfriends and spectators. “Two skate bettys in black leather jackets,” it

reads, “sit watching [the skateboarding] with no noticeable interest.” The

article depicts the young women reading books, smoking, drinking, eat-

ing, “and gossiping” about clothes and ruining the skateboard ramps so that

the skateboarding boys will be forced to stop skating.194 To channel John

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Berger, “Men act and women watch and appear bored.”195 Though here we

see women watching men rather than vice versa, the men are still doing/

acting/performing—displaying their agency—while the women are sitting

on the sidelines.

Placing Boys on Display

Between 1989 and 1992, several articles took pains to define skateboarding

as the domain of young men. Reporter Peter Watrous described the “per-

fectly formed surfer bodies” of the rock group Red Hot Chili Peppers and 

the Urban Dance Squad’s music video for “Deeper Shade of Soul” as “adver-

tisements for the good life in California, where boys can do what boys do,

which is play music and skateboard. Clearly this is a closed world that pos-

its a type of joy and community without female interruption.”196 Similarly, a

1989 article in Seventeen magazine titled “Why Boys Have More Fun” sug-

gested that while boys “are attempting to perfect the art of bouncing a skate-

board from their feet to their hand” girls “are plotting a course that will lead

them to become solid, self-sufficient grown-ups.”197 The girls are making a

poor choice, for “worrying about things like your future twenty-four-hours

a day is not going to help.”198 These two reporters invoked a tired stereotype

of women as civilizing figures,199 and they did so at a moment when a back-

lash against feminism was consolidating in mainstream culture.200

Not simply an aggressive subculture, skateboarding had morphed into

a never–never land where young men could continue to act like boys, con-

tent in their playful immaturity. In 1991, Spike Jonze, then 21, teamed with

several others to develop Dirt, a spin-off of the popular magazine Sassy, as

an alternative to teen magazines such as YM and Seventeen. Its editors had

earlier been employed with small BMX and skateboarding magazines. Dirt

was designed as a general interest magazine for teen boys, but it relied on

skateboarding as a cultural marker.201 By 1995, Dirt was defunct.202 Spike

Jonze later went on to produce a variety of niche skateboarding videos and

now owns two skateboarding companies, “girl” and “chocolate.”

This playful boys’ culture, however, was also clearly a space in which

boys were being looked at. Surveilled by authoritative adults, skaters also

became the object of marketers. Peter Watrous discussed skateboarding

as part of a new era of “beefcake” in depictions of men, suggesting that

“Feminism, in its attempt to give decision-making powers to the exploited,

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inadvertently allowed for a whole new type of commerciality” in which

women (and apparently men as well) exploit themselves as a mode of power.

Images of skateboarders in videos are, for Watrous, both characteristic of

a moment in which men must be vigilant of their own bodies and signs of a

men-only playground.203 Sassy also discussed skater boys’ performances in

an article titled “Skater Babes: Asexual or Not?” The article gushes, “Skater

boys. Yummmm,” and suggests, “Practically every girl knows why all skater

boys are babes: They are the perfect combination of attitude and excess fab-

ric.” But 16-year-old author Mary-Kate Arnold noting skaters’ lack of interest

in women, said, “that’s probably the very reason we’re so attracted to them.”

Her article makes it clear that skateboarding is a boys’ culture, and, despite

their apparent disinterest, skateboarders are defined as heterosexual. But,

the article claims, “they’re just not worthy of our attention. They’re too

obsessed with their concrete fantasies to ever give a relationship the atten-

tion it deserves.” Perhaps more important, Arnold points out the discomfort

many male skateboarders exhibit when being watched. “Sort of like how

girls feel when guys watch them walk down the street, eh?” she teases.204

Sassy’s short and snappy critique keeps heterosexuality firmly up front,

a move particularly necessary for denying homoeroticism in boys-only cul-

tures. Although Watrous suggests that women finally have enough power to

exploit themselves, the exclusion of girls from boys’ culture only serves to

further marginalize them. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the adolescent

girls on the edges of skate culture played one key role: they watched the

boys in order to shore up the heterosexuality of skate culture. Not quite the

innocent white youths of the Little League, but also not overtly rebellious

teens like Dogtown’s Z-Boys, the skaters of this moment were positioned

as cool, cute, and stylish boys who hovered on the outskirts of mainstream

culture.

Teen Demographics and The X Games, 1995–97

In the mid-1990s, the teen youth market began to grow in part because of

an increase in the number of teens. In 1994, the Rand Youth Poll reported 

that American teens were spending 61 billion dollars a year on goods for

themselves and were influencing 139 billion dollars’ worth of their parents’ 

spending decisions. What’s more, the experts at this time predicted that

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this spending would increase between 12 and 15 percent each year through

1999.205 Surveys in 1998 showed that teenagers were helping their parents

with the shopping, and therefore were highly influential in the choice of

household products, but were also spending lots of money on themselves.206

By 1999, Advertising Age reported that “Teen boys pack spending power

estimated at $650 billion a year.”207

In 1995, ESPN introduced The Extreme Games, which TV Guide

described as “the first truly ‘gnarly’ (translation: cool) made-for-TV sports

show.”208 According to ESPN lore, The Extreme Games were conceptual-

ized by Ron Semiao, a programmer for ESPN2, after he took note of multiple 

advertisements utilizing extreme sports. From the beginning, The Extreme

Games were designed to take advantage of this trend, and the program-

mers worked to maintain the “extreme” tone of these individualistic sports

through extreme production values. “[E]xpect wild camera angles, rock

music, and announcers who know each sport’s slang phrases,” TV Guide

declared.209 TV Guide further shored up the notion that the sports featured

in The Extreme Games were different from other sports by pointing out

that the prize money, totaling 370,000 dollars for the entire event, was a pit-

tance compared to that of other sports. There was no reason to worry, the

magazine noted, because “Most extremists insist that they compete for the

love—and thrill—of their sport, and they probably do.”210

The Extreme Games—renamed the X Games in 1996—cut a skillful

path through the counterculture-mainstream athlete dichotomy set up by

Thrasher and Transworld Skateboarding magazines. The event represented

“outlandish, on-the-edge sports”211 but also “true athletes.”212 The network

marketed its event skillfully, deeming extreme sports “sheer unadulterated

athletic lunacy” in its promotional materials. Marketing executive George

Bodenheimer claimed, “These sports come from the streets, not from a

TV studio.”213 At the same time, as Robert E. Rinehart notes, The X Games

worked to incorporate a mainstream sporting ethos into the skateboarding

lifestyle, positioning it (and other extreme sports) as a sport tied up with

competition, risk, and pain. Despite such incorporation, it must be pointed

out, contra Rinehart’s view that “In extreme sport, in the mid-1990s, brand-

ing was unknown,”214 that skateboard culture since at least the 1980s had

worked to brand itself in multiple ways as both mainstream and subcultural.

The X Games hadn’t completely co-opted and changed skate culture; skate

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culture had always had a contradictory stance vis-à-vis mainstream sporting

culture. For skateboarding specifically, the mainstream press made it clear

that despite its success in the wake of The X Games and an Olympic show-

case, “skateboarding has not entirely shed its underground image, which

might explain its attraction to teenagers. . . . It may be the only sport in

which participants can get arrested.”215

Tony Hawk on a half pipe in ESPN’s Ultimate X: The Movie (2002), a celebration of The X Games. His athleticism is clear, as is the epic nature of the depiction. (Courtesy PhotoFest.)

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The X Games also showcased the branding power of extreme sports.

Marketers for the first games included Taco Bell, Mountain Dew, Chevrolet

trucks, Miller Lite Ice beer, and the Pontiac Sunfire.216 Marketers delighted

in the show’s alignment with their consumers. Janine Bousquette of Pep-

siCo claimed that The X Games “reinforces [Mountain Dew’s] active and

cutting-edge image,” and Peter Waller of Taco Bell said, “The X Games are a

distinctive property with an outdoor attitude that delivers a pure audience.

The Games reflect the free-spirited, energetic attitude of our consumers.”217

More than an “energetic attitude,” The X Games represented a shift in

interest from team-based to individualized sports. In 1997, the New Yorker

ran an article discussing the new marketing strategies of the National Foot-

ball League (NFL), which had hired MTV’s copresident, Sara Levinson, to

remake its image. Levinson’s hiring represented a major shift in the NFL’s

strategy and not simply because she is a woman. The league wanted

Levinson to bring MTV’s noncomformist values and rock and roll aesthetic

to the traditionally disciplined, team-based sport without, of course, alienat-

ing its older and more traditional fans. The article notes that changes in the

sport’s rules (the introduction of free agency meant that players could go

on “the open market” four years after being drafted) encouraged players to

see and market themselves as individuals rather than team players. Further,

more general cultural shifts from an economy based on physical labor to one

based on information and entertainment encouraged us to value creativity

and individuality over a willingness to follow rules. Levinson explained that

the NFL did not have a “rebellious” image that young people could relate

to. Rick Welts, the president of NBA Properties, explained that youths were 

responding well to the National Basketball Association’s (NBA’s) person-

alized marketing of individual players, but “Football players, on the other

hand—hulks behind helmets—are faceless performers for the team. Foot-

ball is about character, not personality.”218

Such cultural shifts are surely crucial to understanding the rise of the

individualistic sports represented in The X Games, though participants also

invoke a more personalized dissatisfaction with the on-the-ground patriar-

chy that traditional sports—and their coaches—represent. Shaun Palmer, a

snowboarder and mountain biker, told Time that “individualistic extreme

sports are ‘a lot better than going to football practice every day and having

your coach yell at you.’”219

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Co-optation and Rebellion, 1998–2001

By 1998, the mainstream press was beginning to discuss the ways in which

extreme had gone mainstream while at the same time maintaining that

extreme sports were alternative and edgy. As Forbes reported, “Extreme

sports are coooool. Edgy, adrenaline-inducing pursuits.”220 In fact, The X

Games was so cool that NBC launched its own version, The Gravity Games,

in 1999. Still, Forbes claimed, “These guys are no Michael Jordans,” for the

athletes’ involvement in extreme sports was not resulting in huge incomes.221

Sport suggested that, while extreme sports “emphasize freedom and self-

expression and are fueled by equal parts talent and adrenaline,” their stars,

such as Tony Hawk, were “overexposed.”222

Marketers were indeed wary of attempts to co-opt this subculture. Forbes

warned of the fate of Nike’s 1995 attempt to break into the skate shoe mar-

ket. Although the company waged an award-winning marketing campaign

depicting golfers, runners, and tennis players being chased by police and

asking, “What if we treated all athletes the way we treat skateboarders?”

a boycott led by the skateboard manufacturer Consolidated Skateboards

rendered the shoe unsuccessful. Tony Hawk told Forbes, “Nike has a tainted

image, because people consider it cashing in on skateboarding’s success.”

Still, Forbes reported, many marketers had been successful in their appro-

priation of skateboarding, and Hawk advised, “You have to make sure that

whatever you’re doing is hard core.”223 He later told the New York Times that

he had rejected a proposal to market pasta shaped like him,224 and his man-

ager and sister, Patricia Hawk, refuses to sell the Tony Hawk clothing line

anywhere but in department stores.225 In a later article, Forbes explained the

limits some extreme athletes were putting on their endorsements, including

refusing sponsorships by alcohol and tobacco companies and “reject[ing]

brands that depict their sport as a sideshow.”226 Business Week discussed

shoe company Vans’ strategy for maintaining its authenticity, noting that

it focused its efforts on “events, sponsorships, and even a documentary

film [Dogtown and Z-Boys] to celebrate the outlaw nature of skateboard-

ing culture.” Vans’ efforts were apparently successful, for in 2001 its sales

were up 23 percent from the previous year.227 As Rinehart explains, ESPN 

maintained The X Games’ aura of authenticity by anticipating charges of

co-optation and preempting them with clever rationalizations.228

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Despite their mainstream inclusion, extreme athletes, and skateboard-

ers more particularly, were still defined as edgy or alternative. Reporting 

on the Gravity Games, Advertising Age claimed that the festival’s athletes

weren’t “clean-cut, All-American types” and after a rainout the show’s orga-

nizers were worried that they might spend so much time partying that they

would not be able to resume competition. Rolling Stone ran a feature on

the professional skateboarder Bob Burnquist, describing him as a “Fearless

skater who completes death-defying tricks with ease.”229 Jake Phelps, the

editor of Thrasher, told Rolling Stone that he had discovered Burnquist in

Brazil and skateboarding “is about the constant thrill of scaring yourself.”230

Although Burnquist’s father is American, and he reads, phenotypically, as

white, his Brazilian roots may contribute to the construction of him as fear-

less. As with much of its discursive history, these rebellious attributes were

a source of conflict. Jim Fitzpatrick, executive director of the International

Association of Skateboard Companies, told the New York Times, “They’re

not urban gangsters or terrorists who are hell-bent on destroying significant

and historic locations,”231 and a Parks and Recreation director told the paper 

that in spite of their clothing and chain wallets skateboarders “are the lead-

ers of their high school. . . . Many are honors students or Eagle Scouts.”232

Not “urban gangsters or terrorists” but “Eagle Scouts,” skateboarders’ con-

struction as rebellious quite easily brought up signifiers of race. Fitzpatrick’s

claim is notably fraught with racist stereotypes; he all but says skateboard-

ers are white kids, and so one need not worry about them. Clearly, industry

folks and authority figures had an interest in determining whether skate-

boarders were participating in a harmless rebellion expressed sartorially—

the domain of white kids who during the week were honors students—or

the dangerous, scary, and purposeful destruction of “significant and historic

locations,” apparently the work of “urban gangsters” (read black kids) or

terrorists (read Arab kids). Whiteness, it seems, was good for business.

Whether skateboarders were defined as rebellious troublemakers or

all-American good kids, they were certainly utilized as markers of youth-

ful style. Advertising Age suggested that “the adrenaline athletes are more

accessible role models for the baggy-pants crowd, and they’re beginning to

show up as endorsers of everything from sneakers, sports drinks and fast-

food to telecommunications products and automobiles.”233 Between 1994

and 1999, several publications invoked skateboarding style as trendy and

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hip. A “cool hunter” for Converse shoes deemed skateboarders, along with

transvestites, “the most innovative and experimental of dressers,”234 and in

1998 the New York Times reported that Calvin Klein had appropriated the

skateboarders’ wide-legged jeans.235

Although at times they were still regarded as rebels or troublemakers,

extreme athletes were also aligned with “American” values. Several journal-

ists attempted to explain the popularity of extreme sports in terms of the

cultural moment, and each suggested that risk taking was part of the Ameri-

can fabric.

The early explorers—men who were willing to set off in the direction of the

edge of the world with no clue where they were headed—were extreme, as

were the Western Pacific Islanders who jumped off cliffs with vines knotted

around their ankles.236

Invoking both the white masculinity of early explorers and the “exoticness”

of islanders, the paper manages to suggest that extreme sports are a part of

a long history of daring, adventure, and achievement. Time magazine also

made such claims.

America has always been defined by risk; it may be our predominant national

characteristic. It’s a country founded by risk takers fed up with the English

Crown and expanded by pioneers—a word that seems utterly American. Our

heritage throws up heroes—Lewis and Clark, Thomas Edison, Frederick

Douglass, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart—who bucked the 

odds, taking perilous chances.237

The magazine also suggests that Americans would be more interested in cre-

ating opportunities for such chances during a time of relative peace: “[A]t

the end of a decade of American triumphalism abroad and prosperity at

home, we could be seeking to upsize our personalities, our sense of our-

selves.”238 Such risk taking could be the path to greatness, the magazine sug-

gests, but it also helps to explain why Americans were so “forgiving” of Bill

Clinton during “Monicagate.” Men’s Journal editor Mark Bryant told the

New York Times that extreme sports helped Generation Y “reject the appar-

ent dullness of modern life” in a successful economy.239

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Tony Hawk provided perhaps the most direct image of skateboarding

as all-American. Portrayed frequently in his roles as husband, father, and

entrepreneur,240 Hawk also often espoused the value of hard work. He told

Sport, “[T]he kids who see us really understand the level of athleticism and

dedication required to succeed—that it’s not just a ‘go for it’ sport that takes

guts to try,”241 and he told Sports Illustrated for Kids, “When I skate, I never

go half way. If I don’t do my best, it eats at me. It kills me inside.”242 Hawk

also continued to lobby for skateboarding’s acceptance: “[W]e are finally

getting the legitimate coverage about the talent and athletics instead of the

lifestyles, the tattoos and the hairdos. Maybe that’s part of our culture, but

that’s not what the emphasis should be,” he told the Providence Journal-

Bulletin.243

Women’s Sports and Fitness also suggested that extreme sports are “a

mode of self-expression . . . a reaction against everything considered to be

mainstream” that was “co-opted as a way to sell stuff.”244 The New York

Times was even more direct: “While high-risk, attitude-laden extreme sports

. . . might have once been about having fun and busting free of the confining

rules of traditional sports, they are now increasingly about money.”245 And

in October the paper claimed, “Mere skateboarders have become nearly as

dull as the once-amazing triathletes and endurance athletes.”246 An ad for

Wild Turkey Kentucky Bourbon made fun of extreme sports’ trendiness,247

and Sport deemed “the skateboarder-as-tattooed-troublemaking-outcast-

teen . . . a tired cliché.”248

The New York Times also quoted Kevin Thatcher of Thrasher, who

declined ESPN’s invitation to work with the network on The X Games

skateboarding contests because “TV flattens skateboarding into one big ad.”

Kevin Semiao, the creator of The X Games, retorted that the event encour-

aged more kids to skateboard and so was highly supportive of the industry.249

In many ways, the debate between Thatcher and Semiao skillfully manages

and reinforces the false dichotomy between subculture and mainstream by

suggesting that skateboarding should be—and was at one time—one or the

other. As I have noted, Thrasher’s long-running campaign to define skate-

boarding as subcultural was in and of itself an effort to market the sport.

Although Thrasher promotes itself as an “authentic” part of a “pure” skate-

boarding culture, the culture to which it refers never existed. On the other

hand, as my interviews with skateboarders reveal, The X Games’ focus on

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competition does feel, in part, like a corruption of the practice’s values, for

many skateboarders are in fact attempting to escape the competitive world

of traditional sports.

Mythmaking, Brand Making, and Authenticity, 2001–6

In 2001, former professional skateboarder Stacey Peralta released Dogtown

and Z-Boys, a documentary depicting the lives of the Zephyr Skateboarding

Team based in South Santa Monica and Venice, California (Dogtown). As

I have noted, this award-winning documentary positions the 1970s skate-

boarding era as a moment of working-class teen rebellion.250 More than tell-

ing a partial history of skateboarding, this documentary produces a myth

central to skateboarding’s current definition as a mainstream but edgy

culture. Released just as the mainstream media were beginning to worry 

about marketers’ co-optation of skateboarding, the film serves as a cultural

reminder that the practice is supposedly rooted in rebellion and thereby, I

argue, mitigates the dampening effect that marketing may have on skate-

boarding’s image.251

Although the mainstream press noted the self-mythologizing that was

operating in the documentary—it does, after all, feature Peralta and his

friends prominently—critics were generally enamored by what Roger Ebert 

called its “infectious enthusiasm.”252 More important, the press used the film

as an opportunity to discuss skateboarding’s “roots.” The New York Times

reported in one article:

The golden days are resurrected in explosive, freewheeling montages that

synchronize old home movies and [skateboarding photographer Craig] Ste-

cyk’s photographs with a rock soundtrack . . . into a synergistic rush that cap-

tures the sport’s exuberant bad-boy aesthetic and lends it a mystical glamour.

Beyond being an exhibition of physical prowess and daring, the essence of

skateboarding excellence is that elusive personal quality known as style.

That’s why the movie’s suggestion that skateboarding is an art form—with

its emphasis on grace, inventiveness, and self-expression—doesn’t seem so

far-fetched.253

Dogtown and Z-Boys reinserted notions of style and expression into discus-

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sions of skateboarding that had come to be dominated by a focus on The X

Games and competition. Of course, Dogtown’s styles were quickly appropri-

ated by the fashion world. Vintage skateboarding T-shirts and Vans became

popular, and high fashion picked up on this trend. One fashion industry

insider said of the Dogtown style, “So much of youth culture has been over-

exposed and this feels so fresh. They had so much attitude and style, and it

was so natural—the bright, colorful, sporty, fun feeling.” Another said, “That

whole Dogtown look is really so much about lifestyle and belonging, and the

mix of sunshine and rebellion is really intoxicating.”254 The appropriation

of this image did not seem to negate its power, for even 2005’s fictionalized

version of Dogtown, titled Lords of Dogtown and written by Stacey Peralta,

was well received. The New York Times credited director Catherine Hard-

wicke (who also made Thirteen) for its “appropriately scruffy, unpolished

look consistent with the resourceful, do-it-yourself aesthetic of the place

and time it depicts. . . . [The] scenes have both the loose, stop-and-start

rhythms of a long summer day and the restless, competitive energy of young

men in the heat of adolescence.” The reviewer continued, “[T]here is some-

thing about it that feels right—the looseness of its construction, the eclec-

tic welter of its soundtrack, the faces of its cast.”255 Entertainment Weekly

deemed the film “rare in its grit and authenticity” and praised its use of “a

God-on-the-street’s-eye view of skateboard heaven.”256 Although these point-

of-view shots evoke reality in their tone, they are also a convention of the

niche skateboarding videos, which I discuss later.

Kyle Kusz offers a scathing critique of the racial politics of both Dogtown

and Z-Boys and Lords of Dogtown. The documentary version of the Z-boys’

story, he argues, enacts “a new cultural racism” that reinscribes the domi-

nance of whiteness by depicting young white men as socially marginalized

heroes who can do no wrong (despite their criminal behavior).257 The film

particularizes the boys’ whiteness by referencing their working-class status

and superficial relationship to racial “difference” (via skate shop owner Jeff

Ho, Z-“boy” Peggy Oki, and Z-boy Tony Alva’s nonspecified race). By mak-

ing these claims to difference while maintaining the centrality of the boys’

whiteness, Kusz argues, the film recenters whiteness. Lords of Dogtown,

while still noting the boys’ economic marginality, positions the skaters as

lords, as masters of their domain. In the post-9/11 world in which that film

was made, Kusz argues, cultural texts worked to present men as imperi-

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alistic dominators rather than a group besieged by the powers of women,

people of color, and the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) com-

munity. Both of these texts, then, walk the line between images of white

male dominance and youthful rebellion. The New York Times summed up

skateboarding’s image as such.

Much of its current appeal comes from the image of skaters as loners whose

very status as outsiders makes them all members of a tribe of sorts. This

quality of being an individual and yet still belonging is classic Americana—

and it’s what corporations and magazines try to sell with T-shirts that say

Rebellious boys skating in an empty swimming pool in Dogtown and Z-Boys. Simul- taneously gritty and utopic, the image captures the contradictions of skate culture. (Courtesy PhotoFest.)

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‘Skate or Die.’ Perhaps this makes skateboarding not an extreme sport, but a

trick of balancing extremes.258

Skateboarding certainly did begin to balance extremes, as I have been

arguing, and The X Games also worked to maintain the edginess of extreme

sports even as it proclaimed their centrality to modern athletics. “While

business has gotten bigger,” TV Guide reported, “the sports themselves are

still conducted in a heady cloud of street-style, indie machismo. Competi-

tors perform against a pumping wall of music.”259 The industry continually

worked to maintain this image. New York Times reported:

An insider’s understanding has kept the lucrative board-sports industrial

complex—skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing—mostly in the hands

of hard-core practitioners, even as these sports have grown more popular.

Mainstream companies like Nike that have easily penetrated other sports

often find themselves on the outside looking in, struggling to gain traction

with action-sports athletes and fans who define their world by its anti-estab-

lishment bent.260

The article further explained the meaning of authenticity, which in large

part relied on distribution decisions rather than a perceived level of sales.

Lora Bordmer of Action Sports Retailer, a board sports industry trade show, 

explained that exclusive distribution to smaller board shops—rather than

large retailers—is a key component of authenticity. In 2006, Nike was more

successfully breaking into the skateboarding market by distributing its shoes

in board shops and sponsoring small contests; Pacific Sunwear, a mall chain

that sells extreme sports apparel, made a major mistake when it ran an ad in

skateboarding magazines with a skateboard’s trucks (axles) on backward.261

By the time Dogtown was released, Tony Hawk had become both a myth

and a brand. Stacey Peralta called him “a part of American culture,” and

Sports Illustrated deemed him “a one-man marketing phenomenon” and “a

legend in the world of skateboarding.” The youth marketing company Alloy

found him to be the “coolest big-time athlete” in a survey, and fellow profes-

sional skateboarder Bucky Lasek claimed, “He could put his name on toilet

paper and sell it to the world.”262 Although, as I have noted, Tony Hawk

claims that he has made careful choices in order to preserve his authentic-

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“The mix of sunshine and rebellion”  •  73

ity, his history in the sport, as well as his sheer talent, has also served this

purpose. Still his image is constantly in question.

Marketer John Griffin called Tony Hawk “a guy who, for corporate

America, can reach parents. You get a family guy, a squeaky-clean guy.”

But Hawk’s image is not all goody-goody, for he appeared on MTV’s Jack-

ass and Viva La Bam, and Jackass’s executive producer, Jeff Tremaine,

reported, “His concern about damage to his image doesn’t override his

sense of humor.”263 Crucial to Tremaine’s claim is the notion that Hawk

appeared in the MTV shows because he found them amusing, not because

they would balance his family-guy image well and remind viewers of his

roots in the skateboarding community. These roots have been used by cor-

porations to project the legitimacy of various mainstream products. The X

Games owes its success in part to Hawk’s early involvement, as “He signed

on and enlisted cool skateboarders who might otherwise have rejected the

event as crass commercialism.”264 Hawk also brought such authenticity to

Activision’s line of Tony Hawk video games. “An avid gamer, Hawk insisted

on creative input,” advising the developers on the game’s combinations of

skateboarding tricks as well as nixing over-the-top moves and cheesy set-

tings.265 In 2006, Hawk participated in a major cross-promotional endeavor

with Jeep, Rolling Stone, and Activision, which included an “advertorial”

in Rolling Stone; a Jeep Wrangler outfitted with a skateboard, snowboard,

and surfboard; an appearance by Jeep and its Toledo, Ohio, factory in the

latest Tony Hawk video game; and several other initiatives. Pat Hawk again

made clear Tony’s commitment to authenticity, noting that he was once a

teenager intent on spotting sellouts. She told the New York Times, “That’s

why Tony doesn’t have a deal with Nike” or Gap—because skateboarders

do not buy Nike or Gap products. Conversely, Tony Hawk has explained

that he endorses McDonald’s because “I take my kids to McDonald’s. I

always order a No. 2.”266

Hawk’s image, carefully maintained, is also carefully naturalized. His

company, Birdhouse, sponsors a team of street skateboarders (whose legit-

imacy has been less frequently challenged than that of the vert [vertical]

skateboarders who are featured on The X Games), and he makes surprise

appearances on their tours in such mundane places as Fargo and Wichita.

Hawk also maintains a foundation that sponsors public skate parks, and his

demo fees support the foundation. He defends himself against claims of sell-

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ing out by arguing that he skateboards for the love of it rather than for the

money or fame.267 He told Time:

I always keep the focus of what I do on the skating itself. I’ve turned away

plenty of endorsements and promotional opportunities when the basis was

not around skating. Quality skating will always be at the fore-front of the

image I project, and if I start sucking, then I don’t deserve any of this stuff,

and I won’t be out there promoting it.268

This argument is supported in part by Hawk’s history in a sport that has not

always been popular. His autobiography, distributed by Disney, takes care

to detail Hawk’s struggles when street skating became more popular than

vert, and he is routinely characterized as a skateboarder who did not take

his success to heart at earlier times when skateboarding was popular.269

In fact, Hawk is positioned as a success story in the face of other skate-

boarders who allowed fandom to go their heads during skateboarding’s ear-

lier heyday in the 1970s. Several cautionary tales enforce this notion while

at the same time reminding audiences of skateboarding’s rebellious under-

tones. Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator, a 2003 documentary by Helen 

Stickler, tells the story of former professional skateboarder, Mark “Gator”

Rogowski, who is in jail for murder and rape. The film positions Gator as 

a legend of the 1980s skateboarding scene, an early professional who was

making 100,000 dollars annually in 1984 at the age of 17. The New York

Times reported that “the fame would prove destructive. Mr. Rogowski grew 

arrogant, alienating himself from his skateboard buddies, falling into trouble

with the law.” In one scene in the movie, Gator says, “I love getting arrested.

I’m one of the most illegal skaters in the circuit.”270 Filmmaker Helen Stick-

ler, a former stripper, pushes this cautionary tale even farther, suggesting

that she could identify with Gator in that both skateboarding and stripping

are “alternative communities, industries where ‘youth and vitality are sold.’”

Youth, she said, is fleeting and easily lost, and without it Gator had nothing. 271

Although  a  review  of  the  film  notes  that  Rogowski  showed  symptoms  of 

manic depression, much of the film focuses on his poor response to fame.272

These discussions, of course, ignore the way in which patriarchal structures

encourage the gender inequality that contributes to the existence of rape.

In yet another cautionary tale, Sports Illustrated ran a feature story on

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former professional skateboarder Christian Hosoi, who was a champion

vertical skateboarder in the 1980s and 1990s with Tony Hawk and was

invited to be a central contestant in the first Extreme Games. Hosoi did

not attend the games, however, because in the zeal of his early fame and

fortune he had descended into drug addiction and was on the run from the

authorities. Sports Illustrated’s overview pits Hosoi and Hawk against one

another, pointing out that Hawk’s father instructed him to do calisthenics

before contests while Hosoi’s father “would alternate sucking pure air from

an oxygen tank and taking bong hits.”273 Furthermore, Hosoi was highly suc-

cessful in the mid-1980s, sponsored by Oakley and Swatch and appearing

in a Beastie Boys video as well as Coke and Pepsi ads. In response to that

success, he “bought a Mustang, a Harley-Davidson, a tricked-out Jeep and a

McLaren sports car, all before he had a driver’s license. He hung out with the

Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Beastie Boys, Ice-T and the actors River Phoenix 

and David Arquette,” unlike Tony Hawk, whose father urged him to invest

his money in a house.274 Hawk reported, “I didn’t fall into the trap of celeb-

rity and partying and burning out, so when things turned back around, I

was one of the only guys from that generation still skating hard.”275 By 2005,

Hosoi had been released from jail and was serving as an announcer on The

X Games, solidifying the notion that Hawk had taken the correct path.276

  Hosoi and Rogowski’s stories serve several purposes. They operate as 

mythic cautionary tales, reminding audiences of a moment when skate-

boarding was supposedly rebellious, underground, and “subcultural.” They

suggest that skateboarding has a long history that should be remembered

reverentially and that its rebellious roots are somehow innate to the prac-

tice, not a construction of the niche industry. At the same time, these stories

remind us that Tony Hawk was a part of an industry that crashed and that,

through both business acumen and dedication to the practice, he managed

to survive. Hawk, then, cannot be a sellout, for he clearly loves skateboard-

ing so much that he stuck with it even when times were tough for other

skateboarders. Finally, these tales remind us that fame can have conse-

quences and current skateboarding stars should not get caught up in money,

attention, or celebrity. Rather, they should, like Hawk, keep their focus on 

skateboarding.

Alongside these reminders of rebellion, however, the mainstream press

between 2003 and 2006 began to suggest that attitudes about skateboard-

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ers were changing. By 2002, the press was certain that skateboarding and

extreme sports had become firmly entrenched in youth culture. One 26-year-

old man told American Demographics, “Extreme sorts are my Monday

Night Football,”277 and the president of American Sports Data, Inc., said

“These new sports are an authentic slice of the wider youth culture and not

just a fad.”278 In 2002, Better Homes and Gardens, which had long decried

the dangers of skateboarding, noted, “The label ‘extreme sport’ is outdated

for skateboarding, as is the stereotype of skateboard kids—radical daredev-

ils with multicolored hair who hang out on street corners.” The magazine

deemed the practice “a mega sport that attracts the whole family,” pointed

out its cooperative nature, and noted that professional skater Bob Burnquist

likened it to a new form of playing catch.279

Hartford, Connecticut, was dubbed a skateboarding hot spot, and,

rather than fighting this designation, town leaders embraced its potential

for increased tourism. While the owner of a local skate shop there worked

to promote Hartford’s skateboarding potential, convincing national skate-

boarding companies to tape parts of their videos in the town, local officials

tacitly and explicitly supported the effort. The Hartford mayor, rather than

denouncing the skaters’ increased presence, said, “I hope they’re spend-

ing money in our city,” and local businesspeople, while they worried about

liability and asked skateboarders not to use private property, characterized

the practice as “exciting” and the skateboarders as “friendly.” Local fast

food restaurants enjoyed increased revenues, and an employee of Hartford

Proud and Beautiful stated vigorously, “Don’t you write anything bad about

those kids. Skateboarding is just youth and exuberance.”280 In November

2003, the New York Times reported, “Demographers who made a fetish of

soccer moms in the 90s may well be swooning over skateboard moms by

this decade’s end,” as many suburban parents were supporting their chil-

dren’s skateboarding by allowing them to build ramps in their backyards.

The newspaper also reported that liability was not a major issue at pub-

lic skate parks, for the Consumer Product Safety Commission had found

that skateboarding yielded a smaller percentage of injuries than basketball

and football. Doug Wyseman, who served local governments as a risk man-

agement consultant, noted that skateboard injuries did not often result in

lawsuits, for skateboarders saw them as “a badge of courage.”281 In 2005,

the Manhattan Parks Department in New York City decided to redesign the

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Brooklyn Banks near the Brooklyn Bridge as a “skateboard-friendly park”

that would include benches, ramps, and planters on which skaters could

practice, as well as areas to be used in other capacities.282 More than a brand

and more than a myth, skateboarding has again been legitimized as a rela-

tively harmless—but still cool—practice.

It remains to be seen whether skateboarding’s continued acceptance in

mainstream culture will cause its eventual downfall. Although I have argued

throughout that the practice’s subcultural roots are mostly a discursive pro-

duction of the media, skateboarding is, nonetheless, an activity that has

generated its own niche industry and culture and is supported by enthu-

siasts who regard it as a location of difference, as I note in the next chap-

ter. Skateboarders are in constant correspondence with these depictions of

their culture, and in their own spaces—particularly the skate shop—they

teach one another how to manage skateboarding’s appropriation. Through

their discussions about and with niche skate media and their explications

of skateboarding’s appeal, skateboarders construct a seemingly “authentic”

definition of their practice.