A Skate Rat Grows Up : The ‘Agro’ Business of Skateboard Mogul Christian Hosoi
THE FIRST THING IS THE ATTITUDE: studied distraction and sullenness bordering on a sneer. Christian Hosoi wears it easily, like the fluorescent plastic watches and oversize sportswear he models for Swatch and Jimmy’Z. Outside a late-night club in downtown Los Angeles, he and three friends arrange themselves for a photographer, Hosoi at the center of a street-gang tableau. Turn the other direction, the photographer suggests. “Uh-uh,” Hosoi says curtly. He knows how to pose.
Then there’s the move--the taut, nervous lope that threatens to erupt in a burst of energy as he ducks into a shop on Melrose Avenue or inspects the products at a skateboard factory. His short legs give him a low center of gravity--just what he needs to launch into one of the death-defying, land-on-his-feet flips he tosses off in skateboard competitions around the world.
Finally there is the speech, with its echoes of Venice Beach, where he skates with his friends--bits of skateboard esoterica knit together with “ya know”s when the words fail. “It’s fun to skate to Metallica or to Iron Maiden, Judas Priest,” Hosoi says, ticking off the names of three heavy-metal bands. “That type of stuff gets you amped out to do stuff. It just gets you in the mood to get ‘agro’ (aggressive) or something like that. Ya know?”
Christian Hosoi is an oh-so-hip, tightly muscled, 5-foot-6 blend of exceptional athlete, teen cult figure, savvy businessman and out-to-party 19-year-old. Under the guidance of his parents, he has transformed his top-five National Skateboard Assn. ranking into a minor financial empire in which promotional appearances, fashion endorsements and his own skateboard line are expected to earn him about $150,000 this year. Like skateboarding itself, he has moved beyond a rebellious, street-punk image and gone thoroughly pro. No longer is skateboarding the sole province of landlocked “surfies” doing bloodcurdling flips on backyard ramps. Skating has grown up, and Hosoi is one of its few children to have recognized the sport’s marketing potential.
Lately, his fans have taken to calling him Christ--as in Jesus but short for Christian. He is pictured in the skateboard magazine, Thrasher, lost behind dark glasses and a crowd of teen-age girls. “Christ surrounded by admirers only moments before they lost control,” the caption says. On a promotional trip to Brazil, he was disappointed that he couldn’t visit the mountain of Corcovado, from which Christ the Redeemer towers over Rio de Janeiro. The enormous white statue has given Hosoi an idea for a new skating trick. He vaults into the air, feet together and pointed down, arms outstretched to his fans in benediction.
“HEY, POPS! WHAT STREET WAS I BORN ON?”Hosoi yells from an office at Santa Cruz Skateboards in Soquel, where his Hosoi line and those of other top skating pros are made.
“Beachwood,” answers Ivan Hosoi, who affects the same loose-fitting surf wear as his son. “In an old house right underneath the Hollywood sign.”
“Killer,” Hosoi says. “But I moved to Hawaii when I was 7 for a year and a half, and I went to second grade there and started skating. My dad made one of my first skateboards out of fiberglass from a surfboard mold.” The family returned to Los Angeles in 1975. “Then on Dec. 28, 1978,” he continues, “the Marina Skatepark (formerly in Marina del Rey) opened, and all the pros were there. I went there on opening day and kept going every weekend. I was just a grommet hanging out. A little skate rat.”
The skate rat practiced, went professional in 1982 at age 14, and in 1985 Christian Hosoi Enterprises Inc. was born. It’s a family business, even though his parents are now divorced. Hosoi’s mother, Pua, “does the bookkeeping, and she takes care of the secretarial stuff,” he explains. “My dad and I do the promotional stuff. He does the designing and the managing. Plus Santa Cruz Skateboards takes care of the manufacturing and distribution. We design our own graphics. I come up with the concepts, and my dad draws them”
When he isn’t on the road, Hosoi alternates between living at the Los Angeles homes of his mother and father. But today he’s at Santa Cruz to test a new board. He wears an unbuttoned red-and-black shirt with a bold geometric design over baggy white cotton pants. His black Puma high-top tennis shoes have thick red laces, and he has two Swatches on his wrist and a mother-of-pearl cross around his neck.
“Tim will cut this form out for you today so that you can try it out,” Ivan Hosoi says, handing his son a crude skateboard form. Hosoi fondles the wood, then suddenly jumps on it, rocking back and forth in low knee bends. The next moment he plops onto his back on the floor, his feet flipping the skateboard in the air like a pancake.
Tim Piumarta, vice president of Santa Cruz Skateboards, looks on casually, as though such writhing is natural. “This gives you what you wanted--a longer tail and a longer board,” he says. “How does it feel?”
“Feels good,” Hosoi says, hardly winded. “Whoa! For verticals, this is a nice board.”
As the company president, Richard Novak, explains later, skateboarding has come a long way since its invention in the 1920s, using an orange crate fitted with a set of roller-skate wheels. While the sport grew as a fad with the surf craze of the early ‘60s, the technology progressed. In about 1963, clay wheels were introduced; then came urethane wheels. The boards became lighter and more streamlined with the use of fiberglass and laminated wood. A breakthrough came in 1974 with the introduction of a more sophisticated wheel assembly, which resulted in the brave new world of vertical skating, performed on U-shaped ramps and curved walls. In the late ‘70s, “kicktails”--curls at the rear of a board--were added for better control; boards got wider and began to be produced in lightweight foam. Today’s skateboard can sell for as much as $150. Novak estimates that about 1.5 million are sold annually in the United States.
“We’ve been working on the foam boards for seven to eight years, and finally we’ve got someone in Christian to give us feedback,” he says. “We had the technology but we needed the contribution from our riders.” The board he’s working on, Piumarta explains, is a graphite-reinforced fiberglass composite, similar to the material used in ultralight aircraft. “Christian is getting higher with it, and when Christian gets higher, everyone else wants to get higher.”
The Santa Cruz factory, a complex of corrugated-metal buildings surrounded by eucalyptus trees, reverberates with the sound of pneumatic drills and reggae music. Hosoi leads a tour through the room where graphics are silk-screened onto his boards, past the stock and assembly areas to a back office where the machine-shop noise is somewhat muffled. He explains that in the spring of 1985, when he was in 11th grade, he left Westside Alternative School in Marina del Rey because he was forced to choose between school and skating.
“I was making enough money to live--as much money as a normal person would make working five days a week. And I would just go traveling, and skateboarding was the life. My mom would say, ‘You must go to school and you cannot travel.’ But I figured that I might as well go for it because life is only a matter of strategy and a game. You work into it as hard as you can, and see how you can do it the way you want to do it. And I figured out that skating would become bigger. Now the ‘80s are taking it to the professional level. Everybody is starting to know what skateboarding is.”
He pauses, as though considering the impossible. “Sometimes I think to myself, ‘Will skateboarding die?’ My mom thought it might be a fad, but this is something that won’t go out. I want to stick with it and be a skateboard consultant. I want to do business and sponsor the younger generation.”
PUA HOSOI READS from Christian’s 1985 Daily Planner:
Description of goals--”Making lots of money and having a great time.”
Target--”Start now--finish when I die.”
Plan--”Finding good wood and honest people and having a great time doing it.”
Pua Hosoi says that her son is “secure, not an arrogant, starlike person.” It’s not unusual, Pua says, for skate rats to come by the apartment hoping to have Hosoi autograph their boards. “ ‘Is Hosoi there?’ they yell up to my balcony,” she says.
ATER THAT DAY,in Soquel, Hosoi and some friends are testing the new board at a deserted skateboard park now used only by top skaters. After a few warm-ups, their shirts come off. Ivan Hosoi watches as the skaters scrape up and down the sides of a concrete bowl, sailing into the air.
“They’re banning skating all over, and everything is illegal on the streets,” he says. “So that’s why Christian and the other pros are trying to think of a way of opening up a skate park run and owned by skaters. It could be used for competitions but also to teach the kids how to skate. Keep the kids off the street.”
It is almost dark. One skater has fallen, and there is a little blood on the cement. Hosoi rests on the edge of the bowl, shiny with sweat and drinking Vittel water. He is ready to critique the test board.
“I figured out that these little curves are just a little too big, and I’m going to round them off, because they hit my thumb every time I try a trick. But other than that, I like it and am going to use it.
“But tonight is an Oingo Boingo concert, and tomorrow I’m heading home and then off to Phoenix for a contest, then Brazil, and back for a competition in Anaheim and a demonstration at a nightclub in L.A., and then on to Japan and Europe.
“Once in a while I have a free weekend and will be able to stay home,” he says wistfully. “It’s like a foreign place because I don’t know anybody at home. I only get to see my friends a few days of the month. We go and hang out at the beach.”
But with a grueling schedule of about a dozen contests a year, visits to his skate-rat beginnings are rare. “There was a roller rink (in Venice),” Hosoi recalls, “and I used to go down there when I was 10 years old and skate around. That was when I was dreaming about what I’ve got now. And I wasn’t even dreaming this far.” How to Sound Killer: A Brief Glossary
Agro: Aggressive, rowdy.
Air: A maneuver in which the skater rolls off the lip of a ramp and into the air.
Bail: To fall.
Bio: Any trick that takes the skater high in the air; short for bionic.
Cruising: Smooth, straight skating.
Gnarly: Wonderful, cool; as in, “See that gnarly babe over there?”
Grind: The sound of a skateboard wheel assembly scraping against concrete.
Grommet: An inexperienced skater; a “skate rat.”
Killer: Very cool, smooth.
Poseur: Someone who looks like a skater but isn’t.
Pull: To complete a trick; as in, “He pulled a bio air.”
Rad: Extraordinarily good.
Ripping: Skating well.