"Two hundred years of american technology has unwittingly created a
"massive cement playgound of unlimited potential. But it was the minds of 11
"years olds that could see that potential." - Craig Stecyk, 1975
- Hear me out with my question first. - Okay.
- That question sucked. - Yeah, man!
I'm trying to explain this to you, but you're not getting what I'm telling you.
- I don't like that question. - That was good.
♪ There goes ezy ♪
♪ Ezy ryder ♪
♪ Ridin down the highway of desire ♪
We weren't looking at this as some kind of future.
There was no promise in it. There was no nothing in it.
People were really living in the moment.
There were no goals. There were no aspirations.
It started here, in this area.
That's where it all started.
You know? That was the beginning of the revolution.
♪ Something is forever ♪
♪ So he claims ♪
We were all punk kids, man. We were tough kids.
And we wanted to be something.
It turned into, like, a rock star thing, you know?
♪ We got freedom comin' our way ♪
We were treated like kings at places that we went to.
I was on summer vacation for about 20 years.
It was cool to be in the magazines and stuff, but, you know,
the bottom line was all we wanted to do was skate.
Craig understood that, like,
children took the ruins of the 20th century and made art out of it.
I was, like, 12 years old and I'm reading these articles,
and you don't know where your place is in the world yet.
And you read these words and the things that he had to say
and the way he said them
and the photographs that accompanied them and it was like,
"Wow, I'm really a part of something incredible, something important."
In 1975, the second issue of the recently reincarnated
SkateBoarder magazine would feature "Aspects of the Downhill Slide,"
the first of what would become known throughout the skateboarding world
as the "Dogtown" articles.
These feature articles chronicled the adventures and exploits
of Dogtown's Z-Boys.
They were the badasses. I mean, they were the freaks of the sport.
There was a scary thing about it, like, "These guys will kick your ass."
They didn't seem like they were a part of the rest of skateboarding.
It seemed like they had their own thing going on.
The Dogtown articles were the brainchild of 26-year-old artist
and photojournalist Craig Stecyk.
Using a handful of pseudonyms, Stecyk would conceive, write,
photograph and design the aesthetic
that would come to define the Dogtown movement.
When we saw you guys in the magazines, it was, like,
"This is full-on. They're living this."
No one skateboarded, no one rode a board,
no one was as aggressive or as radical as they ever were.
The Zephyr team had guys with all different styles,
and, really, it sparked a revolution.
I think the Zephyr team was straight-out
the most influential skateboard team ever, ever to be assembled.
The Zephyr Skateboard Team was comprised of 12 individuals
from an area in West Los Angeles known as Dogtown.
They were Shogo Kubo, Bob Biniak,
Nathan Pratt, Stacy Peralta,
Jim Muir, Allen Sarlo,
Chris Cahill, Tony Alva,
Paul Constantineau, Jay Adams,
Peggy Oki and Wentzle Ruml.
DOGTOWN and Z-BOYS
NARRATED BY SEAN PENN
There is a place where America's manifest destiny
collides into the Pacific Ocean.
A place where the fabled Route 66,
the roadway of American dreams, terminates.
This is Dogtown.
There's an invisible line of demarcation
from the north side of Santa Monica to the south side of Santa Monica.
You're looking at one side of town that had trophy houses and lots of money.
And you're looking at the south side that wasn't like that geographically.
It was actually a visible financial line,
where, if you lived above Wilshire, you had money,
and, if you lived below Wilshire, you wanted their money.
Dogtown was a territory encompassing the three beach communities
of South Santa Monica, Venice and Ocean Park.
This was the last great seaside slum.
This was not the beach that people came to vacation at.
It was Dogtown, and Dogtown was
a place where you had to have eyes in the back of your head.
It was dirty. It was filthy. It was paradise.
Dogtown was a faded blip on the radar screen of popular surfing,
a rundown coastal resort inhabited by surfers
infamous for their aggressive localism and outcast behavior.
Surfing in 1972 or 1971 was outcast, period.
Surfing was antisocial, generally speaking, in the world of things.
It wasn't the thing you did to build your self-esteem in society.
It was like... If you were a surfer, it was like saying you were a dropout.
It was not necessarily like it is today,
where you've got Kelly Slater making millions of dollars.
In 1972, 23-year-old surfboard shaper Jeff Ho,
24-year-old surfboard builder Skip Engblom
and 21-year-old artist Craig Stecyk joined together to form
Jeff Ho and Zephyr Surfboard Productions.
In reaction to what they felt to be the mundane world of commercial surfing,
the three scraped together what little cash they had and set up shop
on the corner of Bay and Main Streets in the heart of Dogtown.
They were dedicated to being anti-mainstream,
and they were proud to be anti-mainstream.
I think that we probably started it because there was nobody else building surfboards
of a certain type that we kind of envisioned could be built.
They were a specialist surf shop.
If you wanted the most high-performance surfboard, this was the shop to come to.
It wasn't like you were going into a standard surf shop
by any stretch of the imagination.
There was other surf shops, but they didn't have
the "bad boy" image as it came out of the whole P.O.P. culture.
They created a whole new identity, a totally separate, unique identity
in terms of the kind of surfboards that they made,
the color of the boards, the way they were shaped,
what Jeff Ho was doing was kind of revolutionary at the time.
He was exploring all kinds of design concepts.
Jeff Ho was the most intense person I've ever worked for
in any business environment my whole life.
Jeff was a madman. I mean, Jeff would lose it.
He'd lose his temper.
He could just erupt on a moment's notice
and put you through just the ultimate Chinese water torture
on any little thing.
Jeff Ho was recognized throughout the coastal region
as an eccentric surfboard shaper
who pushed the boundaries of conventional surfboard design.
The boards that were coming out of the Jeff Ho Shop were a different design.
Constantly, Jeff would shape something, develop it,
try it, and then go on to the next level.
I mean, he was, like, a guy that was like Howard Hughes.
I mean, he'd make something and actually fly it.
He was making it, and he was surfing it.
So, he was exploring it as an engineer and a designer,
and also actually riding it.
We just wanted to create something
that was different than the other boards.
I was trying to develop something that was new, unique and different.
Inspired by the wall art tradition of local gangs
and the vivid colors of the area's vibrant car culture,
Craig Stecyk airbrushed the Zephyr surfboards
with a look reminiscent of Dogtown's culturally mixed neighborhoods.
It was to personalize stuff for the user,
to make something that wasn't a mass-media,
garbage, piece of junk
that had been designed in some factory for everybody else.
Because we came from a little bit different environment.
It was graffiti art. It was full-blown, you know, urban graffiti art on surfboards.
It was very much an identification of an environment,
like where we live. "This is who we are."
Our history is based on lowriders and hot rods and Latinas.
Like, I'd fantasize about chicks with huge hair and lowriders.
You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, little blond girls
named Buffy just weren't my scene.
So, therefore, that wasn't what we were at.
The average surf look at the time, the aesthetic of surfing,
was very clean, very powder blue, very beige,
you know, rainbows and sunsets and sandy beaches kind of a look.
What we were doing was "the debris meets the sea."
Using the shop as their front, Jeff Ho and Skip Engblom
formed the Zephyr surf team,
a group made up of the best surfers in the Dogtown area.
We were in the midst of rebar and concrete, airbrush saying, "Go home."
It was a statement saying, "Nothing's gonna stop us,
"and we're gonna do whatever the heck we want.
"And screw you if you don't like it. We don't care."
And that was the attitude, and that was the attitude in the water,
"We're here and look at us. If you don't like it, split."
We weren't really surfers in a traditional sense.
You know, we're from Venice.
♪ Freedom fighters sent out to the sun ♪
♪ Escape from brainwashed minds and pollution. ♪
♪ Leave the earth to all its sin and hate ♪
♪ Find another world where freedom waits. ♪
One mile south of the Zephyr shop,
lying directly on the border of Venice and Santa Monica,
was Dogtown's epicenter, the Pacific Ocean Park pier.
Around the turn of the century, visionary land developer Abbot Kinney
set out to create a European-like community,
geared towards art, culture and amusement.
Kinney's dream would become Venice, California, replete with canals, gondolas,
and a full-scale replica of the colonnaded square of its Italian inspiration.
The coastal zone that ran from Venice through Ocean Park and Santa Monica
became the home to so many amusement park piers
that it earned the reputation as the Coney Island of the West.
Eventually, only Pacific Ocean Park, known to the locals as P.O.P.,
an amusement park atop the old Lick Pier, remained.
They had this park with all this celebration of humanity
and people having a good time, and they're free,
and they're out in the ocean and, you know, the ocean breeze.
And then, all of a sudden,
it turns into the worst nightmare you've ever imagined.
The party ended in the mid-'60s.
The beachfront expanse running from Venice through Santa Monica
had become run-down and seedy.
Attendance at the once-magnificent Pacific Ocean Park plummeted,
and in 1967 it closed,
and soon thereafter became a no man's land.
A place where pyromaniacs, junkies, artists and surfers
could excel in symbiotic disharmony.
It was kind of like the circus had left town. It was a little scary for some people.
It was like this dead Wonderland.
I mean, you know, you've got this carcass of all these rides
that are rusted and falling apart.
And it's like, you can hear the voices and the ghosts of the people
that were having so much fun there, and kids like me that were making out
in the sky balls that were going across at 13, you know.
It's like everything that was wonderful and fantastic
suddenly has gone to death in this decrepit way.
And everybody had to live with that every day.
Burrowed deep within the derelict pier and shielded from view was the cove,
a secret surfing spot wedged between a jail cell of broken and decayed pilings.
This was the most dangerous place I surfed in California. There's no question.
You're taking off basically in front of piers. You're riding through piers.
There's wood floating around. There's debris.
You could get impaled on, like, a fallen roller coaster track or, like, a piling.
You knew if you made a mistake that you were gonna pay in flesh.
I mean, you could easily hit your head underwater, go unconscious and drown.
There was one piling in the beginning that had fallen,
called the angle piling, which you could go through it.
That was a tricky thing to do.
It was one takeoff spot, and you had to be an aggressive,
"This is my wave. I'm going. Don't cut me off,"
because, if you did get cut off,
you were in the pilings, you broke your surfboard in half.
I'd never seen that many surfboards break in my life.
♪ Oh no, there goes Tokyo go go Godzilla ♪
Adorning the ruins surrounding the cove
were spray-painted signs, warning intruders to keep out.
POSITIVELY NO VISITORS
You didn't go near that place if you didn't live there
or know the people, because you were gonna get hurt.
That was an extremely heavy local spot.
There was a lot of fights.
You know, people would just physically stop you and say, "You can't surf here."
It wasn't that we didn't want other people to surf the place,
but just that other people would come in and do stupid things to jeopardize your life.
There's limited resources here, man.
There's 10 waves every 15 minutes, and there ain't enough for you, pal.
You had to earn your rights of passage on the land
by your actions on the land and in the water.
You had to go up on the pier with a wrist rocket,
hang out and shoot Vals that came out there, you know.
We would just fly things at people that we didn't know.
They saw guys that came to the pier that weren't from the area,
they threw down pieces of concrete on them.
We'd start firing tiles at them.
All kinds of shit, you know?
People'd throw glass, rocks,
whatever you could get your hands on.
It was really kind of neat because the water all around was, like, exploding,
as shit was flying at them.
If they didn't want anybody else surfing there,
nobody was going to surf there. That's all there was to it.
Best thing I ever saw was someone paddle out in the water
with the guy's carburetor on top of his surfboard.
And goes, "Hey, does this belong to you?" And dropped it in the water.
You weren't just gonna drive up, pull your car up and go,
"Wow, what a nice left. Look, the T's breaking. Let's go out."
You had to earn your way into that, man.
Working their way up through the rubble and rebar of P.O.P.
was Dogtown's next generation,
a group of aggressive young surfers who were all eager
to make their mark in hopes of becoming part of the Zephyr team.
It's almost like a Mafia, you know? You get good enough surfing in the water,
and, all of a sudden, you're a made man now.
And once you got on the Zephyr team, you had entrée.
You're part of their group.
The Zephyr Team
Getting sponsored by the Zephyr team as a kid was nirvana.
It was, like, "Yeah, man!
"They like my moves. They like my... I'm doing it. I can do it. I'm doing it."
If you were wearing the navy blue Zephyr shirt,
you were the shit in the neighborhood.
When we were out here, it was reflecting more the hardcore urban side of the fence.
You know, the Zephyr crew was more street kids.
Most of us came from broken homes, living with our mothers.
Jeff and Skip were like the parent symbol in the equation.
Skip and Jeff really nurtured
the kind of discarded kids that wouldn't have had a place to go.
♪ Gimme danger, little stranger ♪
♪ And I'll give you a piece ♪
The shop provided identity.
It was more like a place where you can go and hang out
and be in the Bay Street environment.
It was much more like a clubhouse.
Everybody, like, had a little job.
You had to either fix dings or sweep the floor
or, you know, roll joints for Jeff in the back.
You also knew that behind that door,
there was stuff going on that no one talked about.
It was lowbrow and wild and "screw you."
♪ There's nothing in my dreams ♪
♪ Just some ugly memories ♪
♪ Kiss me like the ocean breeze ♪
I think there was a lot of family dysfunctionalism going on,
and I think some of that came out aggressively
in their surfing and in their skating.
The Zephyr team, in a weird way, because of the financial insecurity of the area,
people looked at this and went, "Man, I got to make it now."
We were all hungry for recognition.
So we all put out maximum effort. We all... That's all we did.
It was a performance-based environment.
It was a very, very demanding group of people
because they knew what performance was.
If you didn't come out and really perform,
I remember Jeff just, like, leaving.
We worked. We... worked.
You know, creating new moves, new this, new that.
Everybody brought something to the team.
Everybody did something different.
Everybody had a different style.
And that's what the whole thing was all about.
The aggressive performance ethic infused into these young skaters
by Jeff Ho and Skip Engblom
would eventually result in the undoing of the entire Zephyr organization.
A BRIEF HISTORY
NO ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES NO FIRES
In the late '50s, skateboarding became
the popular after-surfing activity of the Malibu beach crowd.
Early on, skateboards took their shape in the form of small surfboards,
and the maneuvers performed on the boards were strictly surfing-inspired.
♪ Grab your board and go sidewalk surfin' with me ♪
♪ Don't be afraid to try the newest sport around ♪
Then, beginning in 1963,
skateboarding began to emerge as an alternative sport for American teenagers.
California manufacturers, such as Makaha, Hobie and Jack's,
began forming teams as skateboard competitions began springing up.
Many of skateboarding's early champions,
skateboarders such as Danny Bearer, Torger Johnson,
John Fries, Woody Woodward,
Bruce Logan, and the Hilton brothers, Davie and Stevie,
were among the first to give the sport a stylistic aesthetic.
For a brief, fleeting period, skateboarding gained national popularity,
but this popularity would be short-lived.
Few Youths Entering Skateboard Contests
Skateboarding crashed in 1965.
Virtually overnight, the young sport disappeared.
Back then, if you skateboarded,
the first thing that came out of someone's mouth is,
"Isn't that just like the Yo-Yo? Isn't that the same thing as a Hula Hoop?"
By the early '70s, skateboarding was viewed as just another passing kiddie fad,
and only the most hardcore enthusiasts practiced it
as it became nearly impossible to purchase a commercial skateboard.
If you wanted a skateboard back then, you had to go to the thrift store,
buy a pair of roller skates with clay wheels, cut them in half...
Then, go out in your garage and try and find an old drawer out of a dresser
that was a nice, half-inch or three-quarter-inch oak, if you were lucky.
Or go down to the hardware store, and we'd buy, like, a solid piece of oak
or maple or whatever.
Borrow a Skilsaw or band saw...
Make it like a surfboard shape, you know?
And whip it out.
We used to go to Sears, like the sporting goods section of Sears,
and we'd go in with tools with just our deck that we made custom,
and we'd put all the new parts from the stock boards on the shelf.
- Right. - One guy would be watching.
Two guys would be just taking all the parts. And then we'd just cruise out of there.
Boards were equipped with clay wheels, the pinnacle of Stone Age technology.
You had to worry about hitting rocks, sliding out.
Any crack in the sidewalk is a hazard to your health.
Or a pebble... You hit a pebble, and the wheel would instantly lock up.
Your board would come to a screeching halt
and you'd fly and you'd smash cement.
In 1972, East Coast surfer Frank Nasworthy came upon a great notion,
that the petroleum-based product urethane might make a good substitute for clay.
So, he created Cadillac Wheels,
which would pave the way for the coming skateboard revolution.
These urethane wheels would just... It was almost like a 4-wheel drive now,
where the car would just grab the ground.
And you could really, really make hard turns.
It was the whole beginning of what skateboarding is today, period.
STYLE
We were just getting into surfing then,
and you could only surf in the morning around here
because it blows out, the wind blows out the waves around 10:00.
So, you have the rest of the day to do something, so we skateboarded.
We used to skateboard at this place called Bicknell Hill.
I mean, it ran right down the street from the Zephyr surf shop.
We started skating outside the shop at first, 'cause we were all surf rats
and we were hanging around the shop, and then they decided
to put this team together and we all started skating on Bicknell Hill there.
And we were trying to get real low and, you know,
we would, like, be looking at the surf and riding this hill
and dropping in and sliding and doing cutbacks, like we were riding a wave.
We'd work on our Berts, and then we'd set up cones and do our slaloms.
And, you know, it was really fun practicing on Bicknell together.
♪ Wake up Maggie I think I got something to say to you ♪
♪ It's late September and I really should be back at school ♪
♪ I know I keep you amused but I feel I'm being used ♪
♪ Oh Maggie I couldn't have tried any more ♪
Surfing had everything to do with everything,
and skating just kind of went along after, when the waves weren't good.
That's when you skated.
Surfing was it, and skateboarding was
just an extension of our surfing.
I remember being in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium,
watching Hal Jepsen's surf film, Super Session.
And a young Hawaiian surfer named Larry Bertlemann came on the...
Larry Bertlemann was the fundamental impact on the Z-Boys thing.
The Z-Boys thing was, "Larry Bertlemann on concrete."
That's what we were all trying to do,
because Larry Bertlemann just blew doors on everybody.
He, like, put his hands on the wave.
He was one of the first guys that I remember doing that.
So we started copying that on the ground.
Larry Bertlemann exploded the status quo of surfing upright
and redefined the idea of what could be done on a surfboard.
When I saw Larry Bertlemann in a movie
do a cutback, I wanted to copy that
more than anything in life itself on a skateboard.
If I couldn't do it in the water, I'll do it on a skateboard.
We were surfers, first and foremost.
And the low, pivotal style in surfing is really functional.
It also has a beautiful aesthetic.
We used to call them, "Do a 'Bert."'
And we'd do that on the banks. Even on the flat ground, we'd do it.
Five miles northeast of the Zephyr shop,
located in the elite neighborhood of Pacific Palisades,
was Paul Revere Junior High School.
Three miles east of Paul Revere Junior High was Kenter Canyon Elementary School.
Four miles east of Kenter was Bellagio Elementary School.
Three miles south of Bellagio was Brentwood Elementary.
And four miles further south of Brentwood was Mar Vista Elementary.
These five schools were built at the base of steep hillsides
or burrowed within deep canyons,
with walls of banked asphalt constructed to level out the sprawling playgrounds.
I think skaters were significant because they actually
took those environments and they reworked them
and made them into something different, that was more human, I think,
than what the architects originally had planned.
SKATEBOARD RIDING IS PROHIBITED
That was where it started for us. That was like our original skate park.
We would just ride bikes there, with our skates on our handlebars.
Skate all day and break our boards, and then ride back,
fix our boards and come back the next day.
These perfectly-tapered waves of black asphalt
would allow for the virtual transmission of surfing-born maneuvers to concrete.
We were surfing these asphalt waves.
That's what we were doing with the skating. So we had a surf-skate style
because we had the waves to ride it on.
We were, like, riding really hard and low
and really doing a lot of sliding, and, like, thrusting kind of moves.
We were always touching the pavement.
It was all about feeling what you're doing.
Feeling your wheels grinding and pivoting around your hands.
I just wanted to ride more banks, go faster, do better turns.
We were totally emulating all of these surfers that we idolized, on skateboards.
Instilled within all the Dogtown skaters was a devotion to style.
Going big worked only as long as you looked good doing it.
You could get all the maneuvers,
but having great style was what you were really shooting for.
Style was, like, the most important thing.
Style was everything.
♪ Watching him dash away, ♪
♪ swinging an old bouquet - dead roses ♪
♪ Sake and strange divine ♪
♪ you'll make it ♪
I think that was one thing that really bound us all together, too,
was that we all possessed a surf style.
There was no one in our group that wasn't fluent.
Individual style was who you are as an individual.
Whatever flair that you were throwing in,
that's just an extension of you as your personality.
And everybody's personality is different, so everybody's style was different.
There were surfers with good style,
and there were surfers that we would call "cockroach style," or no style, you know.
And if you had a bad style, right there you had one mark against you.
'Cause you had to look at it. You had to watch someone.
If they were skating with a funky style, they were stinking up the area. You know?
So, after a while, "Hey, you can't watch that guy.
"He smells." You know?
I mean, the blues are three chords, but every guy that plays the blues
plays the blues differently, because that's their own style, right?
♪ The over- indulgent machines were their children ♪
♪ There wasn't a way down on earth here to cool 'em ♪
♪ 'Cause they looked just like humans at Kresges and Woolworth ♪
♪ "Generation Landslide close the gap between 'em" ♪
♪ And I laugh to myself every man and the ladies ♪
♪ Who never conceived of those billions dollar babies ♪
We weren't making money off of it, we didn't think there was any future in it,
and we were doing it because we loved doing it.
THE BIRTH OF VERTICAL
"Skaters by their very nature are urban guerillas: they make everyday
use of the useless artifacts of the technological burden, and employ the
handiwork of the government/corporate structure in a thousand ways that the
original architects could never dream of." - Craig Stecyk, 1976
In the '70s, California experienced the worst drought on record,
and the city government wouldn't allow you to water your lawn.
You weren't even allowed to serve water at a restaurant.
And so, what happened is, all these swimming pools,
which are abundant in Southern California, were drying up.
California's drought served as a midwife to the skateboard revolution,
as hundreds of pools across the Los Angeles basin
were left empty and unused.
Once pool riding came in, you know, that's like all that we wanted to do.
We were, like, the first people that were riding these empty swimming pools,
and we had no idea what you could do.
I remember the first goal, the first day, was to make it over the light.
That was the first accomplishment in the pool,
was to "over the light" successfully.
From there, we started doing double carves and hitting tile on both sides.
Our goal was to get to the lip and to actually hit the lip of the pool, so...
It was, like, completely foreign, mentally and physically.
But the fact that we were surfers, we knew which movements needed to be done.
We just didn't know if they were possible yet.
Then it got to the point where we were getting on one wheel.
All the other three wheels are out of the pool.
That one wheel's on the coping above the tile and flying back in.
We were definitely the first guys, I mean, the whole Dogtown crew
to really take it to the top, to the lip,
and actually grind and pivot on the lip.
You have to understand that, what they were doing on skateboards,
it just had never been done anywhere else before.
There was just no such thing.
In a covert convergence, skaters would come from miles around
to savor the fleeting, illicit thrills of skateboarding inside
a recently-discovered backyard pool.
Once we found a couple of good spots,
we knew that there was more of them available,
and we just kept scouring the neighborhood.
We did extensive searching, looking for backyard pools.
We would drive up and down the alleys in the Valley,
standing on the roofs of the cars.
Jay got on the top of my car, and we're driving down alley after alley
in Beverly Hills, and Jay is on the top of my car, going,
"No. No... Wait! Wait!" You know.
We'd go up and down the alleys on our bicycles
and jump up and look over the fences.
We'd go up and down canyons, and take vantage points, and we had binoculars.
We went to places where the pool was completely filled in with dirt.
We dug out an entire swimming pool so that we could skate it.
We would find some that were full of water,
but they had to be emptied one way or another.
I mean, they just had to...
The water had to go and they had to be ridden, man, you know what I mean?
At one point, we were so guerilla about it,
we had electric pool pumps, gasoline-operated pool pumps,
hundreds of yards of drainage hose,
brooms, everything you needed.
♪ You're not supposed to do that ♪
There was plenty of times we found pools and we'd throw the pump in there,
throw a wire over a wall, find a live socket.
Didn't know the house, didn't know any of the neighbors, any of the people.
Water would be running out...
And we'd drain a 30,000-gallon swimming pool in less than four hours.
♪ Bad boys get spanked ♪
Any house that was up for sale, that had a pool,
nine times out of ten it was drained, or maybe it had two feet of water in it.
We'd drain the rest out, and we'd skate until the cops came, and then we'd split.
The tension was really high.
And you had to do what you had to do here and now.
It didn't come later.
When you have an empty swimming pool that you know might only be open
for a day, or a day and a half, and that's it, you've got to skate it for as long as you can.
You had to almost, like, time yourself to be in there,
trying to get there early in the morning, trying to get a few runs,
and get out of there before the cops came, you know?
It was totally just illegal barging sessions.
And as soon as we heard either sirens, screeching tires,
someone would yell the magic words, "Bail!" and we were out of there.
You could definitely get arrested.
I mean, you could probably get charged a lot of money,
because, let's face it, the pools weren't the same after we got done with them.
My dad would have killed me, bro.
He would have killed me if he had to pay that kind of money.
Part of it was the thrill of knowing that the police could come anytime.
We got caught skating in the Canyon Pool,
and I was hiding up in the tree looking down,
and there was cops below me looking for us.
And I was afraid I was gonna drop my skateboard and nail them in the head.
And then I thought, "God, I'm gonna be arrested for,"
you know, "assault and battery."
If we got caught at a location,
we'd go back the next day, and we would figure out how to not get caught that way.
So, if they came in the front, we'd post a lookout in the front.
If they came in through the back, we'd post a lookout in the front and back.
We'd go through the side yard, you know?
You got to understand, man, this is concrete warfare we're talking about.
This is... You know, you might find a pool,
and it's here today, maybe gone tomorrow.
If you're gonna ride it, you'd better get on that shit.
♪ I see there ain't nobody out there ♪
♪ that even wants to be a little bit mellow, now is there? ♪
♪ Anybody wants to get mellow, you can turn around ♪
♪ and get the... out of here, all right? ♪
With the drought in full effect, there was nothing to prevent
invading skaters from turning someone's backyard paradise
into a riotous ensemble.
No pool was left untouched, and any kid could be king for a day.
There'd be five or ten guys really rocking and rolling in the bowl.
Each pushing each other's limits. It was an incredible scene.
You could feel the energy coming out of the pool. It was intense.
Just to be there standing on the deck was hardcore,
because you were privy to something
that you don't readily see anywhere else, you know?
If you were in the pool, standing in there, getting ready to take a run,
you were even badder. But if you were an actual player,
you know, busting moves and pushing the limits of the session going on,
you were a straight-out punk rock star. I mean, big time.
We pushed each other all the time.
We pushed and praised. You'd come off of a heavy grind,
and then all your bros are hooting.
We were getting each other's adrenaline levels so high,
that's how the stuff evolved.
On any given day, anybody was the best.
It was almost like a daily competition between all of us
to see who could pull off the hottest shit.
And then we'd look up into the shallow end at each other and go, "Wow!"
When Tony Alva, or Stacy Peralta, or Jay Adams, or Shogo, or Biniak, or Muir,
any of these guys steps into a pool,
it's like, even if they didn't know them, as soon as these guys rode,
other people would just want to sit down and watch and learn.
I mean, that's what it really was. You talk about special.
ZBOY'S RULE
So many other sports are so derivative of something else.
Even what Michael Jordan does, you know, other people play basketball,
and he took it to another level.
And skateboarding, in a very great sense, comes from surfing.
But when Tony and Jay and Stacy started doing it, it was like
it was coming from a whole new realm.
We really didn't know what was possible.
It had never been done before.
I think that people sometimes think that
we were thinking about all this when it was happening.
Nobody was thinking about it when it was happening.
I think we talked about it afterwards, after, like, actually trying these things,
- but it was pretty much spontaneous. - There were no precedents.
They set precedents every single day when they went out and rode.
We worked so hard to get those pools
that we didn't want other people going there,
because we knew if we took other people,
they'd bring other people, and eventually, the pool would be lost.
We'd just keep them really, like, low profile.
You know, we wouldn't let anybody know about them.
It was almost like a local surf spot where, you know, you're not coming in.
And if you came in without our permission, you were gonna get whupped.
You didn't show up with somebody at the pool.
You had to have a meeting about that kind of shit.
You had to have a meeting, and that had to be voted.
You could argue about it, do whatever you want.
Bottom line was, you didn't clear it with the crew,
and you brought someone to the pool, you know what'd happen?
You couldn't skate the pool.
I'm not shitting you. Almost happened to me.
Let's hold it one second.
With the invention of the urethane wheel
and the ability to ride new terrain came a groundswell of enthusiasm
as skateboarding once again began to grab the attention of teens across the country.
Rumors of a national contest began circulating,
prompting Ho and Engblom to build and equip their team
with boards and a ragtag uniform.
We had these shirts, we had Levis, and we had dark blue Vans.
And that was our uniform, and everybody complied to that.
That's what we wore. That's just what came up from the neighborhood.
Well, we all pretty much had grown up together,
you know, and we had all been riding together,
so there was a lot of camaraderie there.
And yet, at the same time, there was a competitive drive.
You know, from that P.O.P. energy, where everyone was riding each other.
If you're not gonna do well, you don't deserve to do this, right?
That's what made us, like, a step above everybody,
is that we were used to competing with each other.
One of Z-Boys was always with one of Z-Boys.
And, like, we were so tightly knit as a group
that we sort of used each other's different qualities
to come up with a style which, in the end, ended up being unique, you know.
We each had our own style, but it was really a combination of all of us flowing together.
And Skip and Jeff sort of assessing our moves, and saying,
"Yeah, that looks good, man."
I remember Skipper coaching me on how to hold my hands.
And that I was holding my hands wrong, and that it looked bad, it was bad style.
The skateboard team was good
because it gave everybody a sense of regimentation.
You know, something that you did from 3:00 till 5:00 every day or, you know...
You know, it's like daycare.
Skip would really hassle you if you screwed up,
but, at the same time, he would take your time
and give you the gentle pat on the back. A little advice.
He kept us in line. He wanted us to be radical.
He wanted us to be out there in the limelight. He wanted us to be visible.
He wanted our moves to be recognized. He wanted all of that stuff for us.
But what he didn't want was, he didn't want us in jail,
he didn't want us getting run over by the buses
when we were doing Berts under the back wheels.
You know? But, at the same time, he wanted us to be rad.
If you looked at the story of Peter Pan and The Lost Boys,
Pan took the children and they defeated Captain Hook, right?
But in my world, and in the world of the Zephyr shop,
I would be Captain Hook.
And we, essentially, defeated Pan, and we've turned them all into pirates.
DEL MAR, CA 1975
In 1975, Bahne skateboards, the leading manufacturer of boards and wheels,
resurrected competition by spearheading
the first major skateboard contest since the mid 1960s,
the Del Mar Nationals.
The competitive setup was based on a classic '60s model.
A plywood ramp with a top coat of urethane was built for slalom racing,
and a small wooden platform was erected for freestyle.
Attention all skaters, please report to the freestyle area.
All skaters to the freestyle area.
The dated contest format did not end there,
as many of the top competitors were performing the upright maneuvers
made popular during skateboarding's brief boom in the '60s.
"...the world wasn't ready for the Z-Boys." "...there was so much aggression,
"they were more like a street gang than a skate team!"
We get to Del Mar and there's this little freestyle area that's about 12 by 12,
with plywood and some urethane coating on it or something.
And we're looking at each other, going,
"What the hell are we supposed to do with this?"
Del Mar would be the Zephyr team's first introduction
to the world of organized skateboarding.
Their unconventional skating and disorderly presence
marked them as outsiders right from the start.
It was like a hockey team going to a figure skating contest.
The difference between us and them felt very real.
♪ Now I wanna be your dog ♪
Inspired by Larry Bertlemann's low, pivotal style and the vertical walls of pool riding,
the Z-Boys took skateboarding's traditional upright approach
and drove it right into the ground.
They didn't like us from the first part they saw us,
because, you know, we weren't of the status quo, for what they were into.
People were just looking at us, like, "Wow, what is this?"
"I mean, these guys, man, Zephyr guys, this isn't skateboarding."
And I remember me and Jay were, like,
"What are you talking about? This is skateboarding, man."
"What the hell are you guys doing, you know, nose wheelies and all that?"
We were the rock 'n' roll, heavy metal of Dogtown.
We came prepared to kick these dudes' ass.
And we got inside their head instantly. Man, I put on my best pimp gear,
walked up there, pushed these moms and dads out of the way,
threw down our entry blanks and asked for our trophies.
We had the ammo, and we knew we were just gonna bust out and blow minds.
Our purpose was to go there and shut these guys down.
Shut down Ty Page, shut down Paul Engh, shut down Hester,
shut down Skoldberg. All those guys, dude.
♪ No you won't fool the children of the revolution ♪
The first skater from the Zephyr team to enter the competition
was its youngest and most naturally gifted,
13-year-old Jay Adams, whose explosive energy and bold moves
epitomized the Dogtown style.
♪ Foxy, Foxy ♪
♪ You know you are a cute little heart breaker ♪
Jay Adams went out for his first freestyle routine,
the first guy they've seen of our whole group...
and we knew that they didn't know what they were about to see.
And boom! Their world had changed.
It would never be the same for skateboarding again.
He was doing tricks he'd never even done before.
I remember Jay doing Berts off the side of the platform. Remember that?
Off the platform, down onto the ground,
and hopping back up on the platform and skating.
People were just flipping out. They couldn't believe that.
And I remember just looking at him, bugging out.
He was spinning nose 360s crouched on his board. He'd never done that before!
Many of the competitors, accustomed to the more upright classical form,
were not impressed.
♪ You got a bad reputation ♪
♪ That's the word out on the town ♪
♪ It gives a certain fascination ♪
♪ But it can only bring you down ♪
♪ You better turn yourself around ♪
They were unconventional, and they didn't care if they were judged well, you know?
They were just there
to, you know, skate and get rowdy and have fun.
Bruce Logan, Russ Howell and Ty Page, these guys were great skaters.
But the skating maneuvers were based on a '60s paradigm.
And we decided to do it like surfers from the '70s.
They had never bent their knees and done, like, a Bertlemann turn on their skateboards.
There was not a single soul that was skating our style.
They were all riding around like stick men, man,
and we were like slipping and sliding and jamming, getting in every little pocket.
They didn't know how to judge it.
They didn't know how to put it in their criteria and spit out a first place.
Some of the girls didn't like the fact that I skated like a guy,
and so they protested me to the judges.
And one of the judges said that I skated better than some of the guys!
Peggy Oki took first place in the Women's Freestyle.
Jay Adams and Tony Alva took 3rd and 4th place, respectively,
in the Junior Men's Freestyle.
And Nathan Pratt took 4th place in the Junior Men's Slalom.
The Zephyr team's infectious presence and abundant talent pool whet the appetite
of the industry's most prominent skateboard manufacturers.
All the other companies decided they needed one of you guys to be on their team,
so they went after all you guys.
Six months after the Del Mar event,
Jeff Ho and Skip Engblom would lose the very skateboard team
they'd worked so hard to build.
A year later, because of mounting business problems,
they would close the Zephyr shop. It would never again reopen for business.
Jeff Ho and Skip didn't have money to try and compete
with people that were trying to buy us out, you know?
And, you know, I think it's kind of sad that we were bought out,
on one hand. On the other hand, you know, it's like,
what does a kid do when you put a candy bar in front of him?
That's sort of what was happening.
That was, you know, a hard one for me to deal with.
Because I could see that things were just gonna cave in.
It was real easy for any company to come along and just go, okay,
cherry pick what they needed.
There's no way that it could hang together.
There was no way that the band could remain together.
It had to go elsewhere, because there was so much energy
inherent in what was going on, it had to blow itself up and go out.
We all started to branch off in different directions.
And we represented different companies that were competing against each other.
What happened is, after Del Mar, these contests started to pop up,
and every weekend we'd be going to another contest.
And then, all of a sudden we said, "Wait a minute.
"There's something more to this."
It just became obvious that something more was gonna happen here.
That it looked like skateboarding was gonna get really popular.
Skating away in the ol' SA
By 1975, skateboarding was on its way to a national comeback,
prompting Surfer magazine to resurrect SkateBoarder,
which had had a brief run in the '60s.
The magazine's second issue would feature Craig Stecyk's first Dogtown article,
his personal account of the guerilla adventures of Dogtown's Z-Boys.
Stecyk's words and photographs became the template
for the attitude and aesthetic that would come to define
the culture of modern-day skateboarding.
Craig had a way of looking at a situation, photographing it, writing about it,
and then giving it to kids and sparking kids' imagination.
You know, some kid in Ohio could look at this and go,
"Man, there's like a dream out there, and I can have my own dream."
It certainly was something that spoke to me, and everybody in Washington.
That kind of Venice, Santa Monica,
vato, wild-style writing that you guys would incorporate.
That was something, growing up in Montana, that I just didn't know.
I didn't see it as a "being Hispanic" thing at all.
I just thought that it was this crazy style of art, you know?
Stecyk, of course, was the master of, you know... He wrote a great story.
He was writing it in a way that it was confrontational.
It was like Hunter Thompson. It was like, "We're... with you.
"We like to... with you. And you know what?
"We're good at it! How's that?"
"The one certain thing is: when you hit the pavement at 70 plus,
it's not gonna matter who you ride for, or what your name is."
You're reading this 3,000 miles away, in a town that has snow.
So, we're living through it vicariously.
And we would live for that magazine. It was our radio station.
'Cause you're not seeing any of these people move.
You're just seeing the photos in the magazines.
♪ Act! While in delirium, ♪
♪ I no longer know what I say, ♪
♪ or what I do! ♪
♪ And yet it's necessary... make an effort! ♪
♪ Bah! Are you not a man? ♪
The photos really translated the velocity of the move,
the way you guys were living. They said way more than,
"Here's a guy on a skateboard."
They showed a lifestyle. They showed an attitude.
They showed a code.
It was aggressive and it was stylish. It wasn't mechanical.
You'd see a Dogtown article, with, like, some, you know, torn-up pants, just ripping,
and you were just like, "I want that."
Dogtowners get to go to Hollywood parties and they get to hang out with rock stars.
They break into people's backyards and skate empty swimming pools.
I'm in! Sign me up!
Everyone was into the Dogtown thing,
'cause there was no other skateboard crew that we saw in magazines doing that.
We mythologized you. We read so much about it, and we talked about it so much,
while we were skating.
As hard as it might be for some people to believe, in the '70s,
SkateBoarder magazine was the biggest-selling magazine
in 1978 for the entire Southland Corporation.
That's all 7-Elevens. It was the biggest-selling magazine they had.
There were a lot of opportunities to make money.
With the Dogtown articles came international recognition and fame.
For the first time in history, teenagers were being offered huge sums of money
to compete in something previously considered a rogue activity.
We were being paid to ride skateboards.
Imagine a kid today being approached by Nike,
and Nike saying, "We're gonna pay you $10,000
"to spray graffiti all over the city."
"We're gonna sponsor you to, you know, spray paint graffiti."
That's what it was like in the '70s to get paid to ride a skateboard. It was crazy!
♪ I'll give you money ♪
♪ I'll give you lovin' ♪
It seemed like free money, you know?
And it just happened that we were in the right place at the right time,
and we were in the magazines and...
People are looking at these magazines, you know?
And they're seeing us.
We were treated like kings at places that we went to, you know?
It was, like, just red carpets. Everywhere.
And the greatest thing about it is, we were not the valedictorians of the school.
We were the guys that would have been chosen last to succeed.
And for some reason, by doing something that everyone said was a waste of time,
we ended up influencing kids all around the world.
It turned into, like, a rock star thing, you know?
I mean, I went to London, England, in 1976 or whatever,
they had a bowl named after me inside an abandoned theater in London, England.
I was like, "Wait a second. This is crazy."
Tony was the first person we knew, he was becoming famous.
And there were articles on him in People magazine
and US magazine and Rolling Stone,
you know, and SkateBoarder, he was the skateboarder of the year.
In 1977, Tony Alva was voted skateboarder of the year
in SkateBoarder magazine's first worldwide reader's poll.
Tony's first place, along with four other places in the top 11,
thrust the Dogtown skaters even further into the limelight,
prompting big offers from deep-pocketed sponsors
eager to ride the sport's growing popularity.
There was only a few guys that were really making some good money at it,
and Stacy being one of them. I mean, Stacy,
you know, he was making some good money.
I started bringing home these checks. And my parents were looking at this, going,
"What's going on here? Where's this money coming from?"
Stacy was the most commercially successful skateboarder in the world.
More of his model Warptail skateboards
were sold, I think, than any skateboard ever produced.
Stacy, you know, handled himself a little bit more mature than we did.
I got to give him, you know, credit for that, because he represented himself
a little bit more professionally than we did, I think, at that time.
He toured the world a lot.
I mean, every time you'd call Stacy's house, oh, he's somewhere, Australia, England,
Germany, Japan.
I wanted to go out and show the world skateboarding.
DOGTOWN WILL BE RIGHT BACK...
What is that?
It's a skateboard. What does it look like?
- A skateboard. - Pretty far out, huh?
Charlies Angels ABC Television
I grew up in Santa Monica.
A lot of drugs ran through the beach that I surfed at.
And I saw a lot of guys that I knew were going to stay on the beach
for the rest of their lives.
And I wanted to get something out of this. This was my ticket.
Finally, I was good at something in my life, and I didn't want to let it go.
♪ One way out baby, Lord I just can't go out the door. ♪
In 1979, Stacy Peralta would be the second Dogtown skater
to win SkateBoarder magazine's worldwide reader's poll.
♪ Cause there's a man down there, might be your man I don't know. ♪
He stopped skating professionally, and then he hooked up with George Powell,
and they started Powell Peralta, and he began the Bones Brigade.
And he picked all the talent, and the few guys that he picked at the time
were just revolutionary.
It was just this amazing group of skaters
who were doing for skating what the Zephyr team did in the '70s,
and he was the mastermind behind the whole thing.
In a relationship that would span three decades,
Peralta would hook up with Craig Stecyk as his creative partner and early mentor.
Through a series of pioneering skateboard videos,
Stecyk and Peralta showcased the remarkable talents of the Bones Brigade
to skaters the world over.
They turned that into the biggest skateboarding adventure ever.
I don't feel I came into my own until I was behind the scenes.
That's when I flourished.
♪ I hate fast cars ♪
Although Peralta would become the most financially successful skater
to emerge from Dogtown,
the two skaters who best personified the Dogtown spirit,
and who won the most acclaim, were Tony Alva and Jay Adams.
Jay and I, the thing that we had so much in common
is that we were both completely out of our mind, like, mischievous, you know?
We were all crazy, but Jay, Jay could instigate some shit, man.
Man, Jay was nuts! He would be screaming and making these goofy faces
at... old ladies on the bus.
Giving her a big rat face, and he's right in there. Oh, man, it was unreal.
And it got to the point where the bus wouldn't even pick us up!
- They wouldn't even stop. - They'd accelerate,
'cause they didn't know whether they were getting rocks
or they didn't know whether Jay was gonna pull a wig off some lady's head.
They didn't know what the hell was gonna happen.
♪ Old man look at my life I'm a lot like you were ♪
Jay was from a broken home, too.
And he had a stepfather in his life that treated him well
and really pushed him both in surfing and skating,
and took us places to skate and pushed in a loving way.
When you're six, seven years old, you're not thinking "pro surfer" too hard,
but just be a surfer, be a kid, you know?
I didn't really think much about future.
- It just kind of came along, you know? - Right.
And then, by the time I was 12 and 13, it was kind of already set,
what I was gonna do, you know what I mean?
I'd just be a skateboarder and a surfer, you know?
You know what I mean?
Some kids are born and raised on, like, Graham crackers and milk.
He was born and raised on surfing and skateboarding, you know.
♪ Ah, one look in my eyes and you can tell that's true ♪
When God decided to create skateboarding, he said, "Let there be Jay Adams."
Jay Adams was the most spontaneous skater that you ever met.
Absolutely, incredibly gifted.
Jay was the most talented, natural skateboarder, surfer, athlete...
He had an energy like no one I ever met.
There's nobody like him, as far as "skater" is concerned. He's the original.
♪ Freedom, give it to me That's what I want now ♪
♪ Freedom, that's what I need now ♪
♪ Freedom to live ♪
♪ Freedom, so I can give ♪
When he skateboarded, you were watching something happen.
That's why Jay's so great, is 'cause nothing's ever the same, before or since.
You know, Jay doesn't practice. Jay doesn't redo it.
He doesn't do it twice. He doesn't do it three times. He doesn't even do it one time.
He's over it before it happens.
He will be in the middle of a maneuver
and have the whole thing collapsing on him,
and somehow in the center of that disaster,
he will make something else out of it completely, which becomes art.
Jay Adams' skating was an athletic stream of consciousness.
Through a seemingly reckless approach, he attempted a series of aerial maneuvers
that would presage what skaters would be doing in years to come.
When skateboarding finally blew up and people were able to make money,
he really didn't care.
♪ Keep on pushing straight ahead ♪
Everybody cares about money a little bit, just...
Things don't always work out how you kind of wanted them to, you know what I mean?
He didn't give a shit about it, and I don't think that's why he did it to begin with.
He never was interested in any of the material rewards
that came from skateboarding.
I think that he just basically had a total "f-you" approach
to the whole commercialism of skateboarding.
It was just fun. You know, before it got too serious.
You know what I mean? Like in the amateur contest days,
it was just kind of fun and stuff.
And then when it got to the, like, pro pool-riding and stuff,
it just got too serious and...
What do you mean, "Too serious"?
Just guys didn't seem like they were having as much fun.
It was more of a job, and a lot of tension, you know what I mean?
But when things got commercial, I think it kind of freaked Jay out.
You know? There was responsibility. You got to show up at a certain time.
You got to do a demo. You got to... You got to fly here...
If you had people coming to you, promising you something,
making you sign contracts when you're a minor,
you know, telling you what to do, telling you where to go, telling you how to act...
Those people didn't care about Jay.
He would be so naive in dealing with these people and these situations
that he would believe what they said.
People just wanted to have what he had.
You know, they just wanted a piece of him.
It opened a lot of doors to do a lot of things that I probably shouldn't have.
Like quitting school and buying weed and partying, and just that kind of stuff.
But it also did good things, too,
like helped me pay the rent for my mom and stuff like that.
- Do you have any regrets? - Yeah, there's regrets,
like, just doing drugs and stuff like that. You know?
Not skating as much as I should have, partying too much.
You know, I missed a lot of good times
by doing things that I shouldn't have been doing.
You know what I mean? Like, just going out,
getting drunk and partying, and stuff like that.
You know? Where I could have done a lot of other things.
Or the business side, where I could have taken it more seriously
and marketed myself, or had someone
market myself differently, you know what I mean?
Right.
So I guess that's some teeny regrets, but nothing to cry about.
Right. You're stoked about what happened, though.
Yeah.
I mean...
There's certain mistakes that I'd like to change,
but I don't trip on it too hard, you know what I mean?
Right. Do you want to say what they are?
- I kind of just did. - Oh, okay. No, I... Okay.
Jay's probably lived one of the hardest lives I know
for someone who's still alive, you know? And...
You get one chance at doing this.
And if you miss it, you don't get it again. And that's...
That's the hardest part of it.
That's the hardest part. And it's hard for me to even see it,
because I see it in a guy like Jay Adams, and I go,
"He should've had it all."
Jay should have had it all, and it makes me so sad that he didn't.
Because he was... He was better than all of us.
My father was like a really hardcore, you know, real...
He was a pretty strict guy, you know, and I think that a lot of the things,
a lot of the aggression that came out, you know, when he communicated with me,
I kind of transferred that to dealing with people and stuff, too.
♪ I was burned in the heat of the moment ♪
♪ Though it couldn't have been the heat of the day ♪
♪ When I learned how my time had been wasted ♪
♪ (And a) tear fell as I turned away ♪
Tony made it really known that, "Hey, man.
"I'm gonna be number one, and that's it."
Tony was Mick Jagger. He was the radical.
He was the front man. He was preening. He was doing the show.
He was the Michael Jordan of skateboarding back then.
And at the same time, he was Dennis Rodman.
Tony had a real strong personality.
And when you hung around Tony, you were pretty much hanging around the Tony Show.
Tony was probably the first person who taught me what the word "ego" meant.
We all had big egos, but Tony's was bigger than all of ours put together.
If a person has a big ego, they better be able to back it.
And, like, Tony could back his ego.
You don't achieve those levels of your art
unless you do have an ego.
Now Hackett said, when he used to go to pools with you,
he said that you'd show up at the pool, and you'd walk right up to everybody
sitting in, you know, the shallow end and say, "That's it, guys. I'm here. Out."
No, not necessarily. I might have done that a few times,
but usually I just let my skating do the talking.
His timing and balance and speed and agility
were far beyond everybody else's.
It was just a known fact. When you saw Tony skate,
he was so far above everybody else.
His style, and the way he flowed, and the lines that he drew,
he was just a little more advanced than other guys at the time.
He could carve a pool fluently and effortlessly.
And then, at the same time,
every turn was attacked as though his life depended on it.
He was a really fierce competitor, and Tony wanted the prize.
I've always wanted to be the best. I've always been very competitive.
My goal was, I wanted to be a world champion.
I wanted to be the best in the world.
In 1977, on ABC's Wide World of Sports,
Tony Alva became modern skateboarding's first overall grand national champion.
At 19 years old, getting that title,
the men's overall world professional skateboard champion,
that was a big thing for me.
You know, that was like Muhammad Ali, you know,
kicking Joe Frazier's ass or whatever, you know.
Six months after winning the world championship,
Tony would shun the sponsorship world,
and in an unprecedented move, go it alone and form his own skateboard company,
Alva Skates.
That was the turning point because I'd done everything that I could do
- riding for other companies. - Right.
And I was making them a lot of money without even having a model.
In that way, he was professional, and he wanted money for everything that he did,
at some point, because he saw he was getting exploited.
So, I started my own skateboard company at 19 years of age.
I mean, I was pretty... self-centered at the time, man.
My deal was, like, "I'm gonna make some money.
"I'm gonna capitalize. I'm gonna travel around the... world.
"I'm gonna get laid every... night, you know?"
Like, you know, I'm gonna do it all, right now.
When Tony Alva came out with his first ad for his first company,
it was a complete revolution in the skateboarding industry.
People were just up in arms.
Because here's this guy, standing just, like, really tough, and it was...
All of a sudden, the advertisement was no longer about skateboarding.
It had nothing to do with the product. It was about attitude.
There's just no two ways about it. Tony was a rock 'n' roll star.
He was so in love with the fame.
He was so in love with himself.
He could jump barrels, he could race downhill,
he could do freestyle, he could do street style,
he could ride vert. He did it all better than anybody.
He was one of the pioneers of the progression of skating.
I think that he really helped show what was possible on a skateboard.
Tony Alva's an icon that
I could look up to when I first got into the sport.
He is the most important skateboarder of all time, in my opinion.
You could look at the photos, you could look at the film,
you could look at the guy talking back then.
So far, since I was, like, the innovator of vertical skating,
and I'm, like, the oldest one and I'm only 21,
we're saying that there's really no limit yet to the, I think, "oldness" that you can be.
Tony is the Chuck Berry of skateboarding. He developed a style of playing,
and Tony's gonna play that style his whole life.
That's what he does, and that's what he's always done,
and that's what he'll always do.
There's no way that you can really say that, "He's over the hill," or anything,
until the guy just totally drops out of the whole scene and isn't recognized
as a, you know, person of high esteem
in the world of professional skateboarding, or whatever he's doing.
I mean, if there was a skateboarding hall of fame,
I think Tony Alva is the first name that should go down.
SKATEBOARD RIDING IS PROHIBITED
THE DOGBOWL
We lived...
We lived at a place called the Dogbowl.
We were there every day, just about, skating all day.
In an ironic twist of fate, it was on the grounds of a posh estate
in the affluent neighborhood of North Santa Monica
where the Z-Boys came together for their final sessions
in what they considered to be their crown jewel.
There was a kid, Dino, that lived there.
He was dying of, like, brain cancer, and he was a skateboard enthusiast.
You know, the kid's gonna die. He went to his father and said, "Hey, listen, for me,
"empty the pool. Let my friends skate here."
The next day, he was there with the pump.
Two days later, we were in there skating.
Every afternoon, after surfing and hanging,
we would go to his house, hang out with him, and just skate his pool.
At a place you cannot even imagine, people can't imagine, the huge pool,
in a beautiful property, you're allowed to skate it.
Dogbowl was the only place where we could skate in peace.
That was like a skate park to us, because the owner
would let us skate and watch us skate.
There was all these dogs that lived around the pool,
and they would always hang out and just stick their mugs
right in like Friedman's camera lens or in like...
That's how it eventually got called the Dogbowl.
The Dogbowl sessions were definitely the heyday, like, for all of us.
Guys used to go there every day and just skate, and skate, and skate all day long.
We perfected a lot of things
and had a lot of time to spend in one pool.
♪ In the attic, lights ♪
♪ Voices scream, nothing seems ♪
♪ Real's a dream ♪
Almost the entire original team would be at that pool in one day,
which was, like, kind of weird.
It's kind of like it was back to the old Zephyr shop in a way.
'Cause you had this whole group of guys, and it was in Santa Monica,
and it was the most incredible pool ever, and you didn't want anyone else there.
The crew, like, in a way, probably was not like that maybe ever before.
'Cause all of a sudden, everyone is famous and they know it.
- But we're still pushing each other. - But that's it.
You're pushing each other. No one else is around. It's just the original crew.
♪ Woh, welcome to my town ♪
♪ High energy is all around tonight ♪
♪ Woh, you best beware ♪
♪ There's violence in the air tonight. ♪
♪ Well, Detroit city, she's the place to be ♪
♪ This mad dog town's gonna set you free ♪
Eventually, we were hitting the top so hard,
and just grabbing the sides of our boards, just the rail and stuff,
we started to pop out and actually do aerials.
It just changed the whole ballgame.
That time, fall '77, is when T.A. did the frontside air in the pool.
I mean, everyone is there, and people were doing little bits of aerials in different places.
But what Tony did one day, I think it was in September, he goes up,
pulls the board up, turns in midair, comes back down into the pool, and makes it.
It was fucking unbelievable. It's something that you... It could be described today,
but you just don't understand because it's a given, and it's seen.
Now, other people have said that people did aerials at other places, other times.
No one did it like Tony did, and no one did it as well.
And no one did it with style for many years to come, outside of that crew.
There are points of evolution in every sport and every art form
that center around significant events which define all that follows.
When the Z-Boys began skateboarding inside empty swimming pools,
they destroyed the status quo and challenged the idea of what was possible.
Tony Alva followed this line
when he propelled his body and board above the coping and into the air
as aerial base maneuvers would become the departure point for the next generation
of modern skateboarders.
Dogtown was the actual beginning of all of vertical skateboarding
and modern skateboarding as we know it today.
That was the beginning.
If you look back, you don't see a skateboard contest like you did in Del Mar today.
You don't see a flat ground, you know, some guys doing 360s and pirouettes.
They're all doing it in pipes. And basically, a half-pipe was what a swimming pool was,
but we just hadn't figured out how to build a half-pipe back then yet,
so we had to empty swimming pools and ride them.
There wouldn't be any X Games, there wouldn't be any vert skating,
there wouldn't be anything at all if it wasn't for most of the boys
that I skated with and competed against, and that whole scene.
That's where it all started.
Craig Stecyk saw what we were doing before anybody else did,
and he believed in it as a culture,
and he presented it as a culture.
People thought this was some, like, stupid thing that little kids did.
Right? Craig Stecyk understood it as more of an extension of society.
I think it was an act of significance.
I think you guys were doing some profoundly different things.
And I think nobody appreciated that at the time I got involved with dealing with it.
Skateboarding could have easily, without Craig Stecyk,
become little league baseball. It would have just been a novelty.
But, you know, the way Craig presented it, and the way he wrote about it,
I mean, it really brought it to another level, and it gave it a significance.
The whole Dogtown thing said, "It isn't a ball-and-stick sport.
"It isn't about winning or losing. It's about the process.
"It's not about the ends. It's about the means."
You know what? This sport isn't just a stepchild of another sport.
It's really, almost, an art form.
I think we were all looking for the best time.
The best ride. The best grind.
The best carve. You know?
The best barrel. Yeah.
Not to outdo each other, but just to aim for the best, you know?
'Cause the feeling you got from that, it's indescribable.
Shogo Kubo is married with two children, and works and surfs in Hawaii.
Bob Biniak, a businessman, he is married and lives in Malibu, California
Nathan Pratt founded Horizons West Surfboard shop, occupying the same
space as the Zephyr surf shop. He is married with two children and lives in
Somis, California.
Stacy Peralta, a filmmaker, lives with his son in Santa Monica, California
Jim Muir owns and operates Dogtown Skateboards.
He lives with his son in Venice, California.
Allen Sarlo is a real estate agent and surfing champion.
He lives with his wife and two children in Malibu, California.
Chris Cahill Last seen in Mexico.
Tony Alva owns and operates Alva Skates in Oceanside, California.
He has two children. He skates pools every day.
Paul Constantineau works as machinist, he lives and surfs in Santa Monica, California.
Jay Adams is alive and well, but serving time in
a hawaiian state corretional facility on drug related charges.
Peggy Oki, an enviromental activist, and fine artist/graphic designer.
She lives and surfs in Carpenteria, California.
Wentzle Ruml owns and operates an aquaculture farm.
he is married with children and lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Skip Engblom owns and operates Santa Monica Airlines, a builder of surfboards
and specialty skateboards. An actor, he lives in West Los Angeles.
Jeff Ho hand crafts Jeff Ho/Zephyr
surfboards on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii
Craig Stecyk continues to pursue art and photo-journalism.
He has two sons and lives in Santa Monica, California.
Ripped by riotbr Corretions by chamallow and riotbr www.addic7ed.com
Finding an empty pool like that was like finding a secret,
you know, like a secret surf spot or something.
It's like finding the most beautiful virgin woman.
There was like a sensuous, kind of like, exciting feel to it.
It was like having, you know, sex.
I mean, that's what it was like.
So it was like, every time we found a pool like that,
we had the experience that, you know, here's somebody who's unridden.
I mean, I don't know how else to explain it.
I remember one time, Jay said, "Come check this out."
And there was an alley right across from his house on Highland,
and I went down there, and I hear this, "Tink, tink, tink, tink."
I'm like, "What is that?" And Jay's in hysterics.
He goes, "Just watch, man. Just watch."
All of a sudden, I see this cat come out of this under car parking garage,
and it's got a 3-foot piece of string tied to its tail with a tin can with rocks in it.
And I'm like, "You got to be shitting me!"
Back then, we weren't wearing all these pads,
and if you take a look at some of the still shots from back then,
you'll see that I'm on the wall with nothing on.
I mean, if you fall then, you're gonna get hurt.
We didn't care. We just wanted to get radical.
Okay, really quickly. It was August, the dog days. It was hot.
I was drunk. I was drinking papaya juice and vodka.
I was sitting on a bus bench in front of the store with Craig.
I went to Craig, "Hey, Craig, you know, these are really the dog days,"
and he went, "Yeah, this is really a dog town."
And I went, "Yeah, it is a dog town," and he went,
"'Cause you know, we live in Dogtown."
That's the truth. That's how it happened. That's the story. Period.