A FLAIR for ‘BIG AIR’ : Skateboard Champion Jesse Roach’s Star Is Soaring to New Commercial Heights

Jesse Roach handles his new-found celebrity with aplomb. Take, for instance, a recent day on Santa Catalina Island. All around him things were hectic. The activity was furious as cameramen scurried into place and NBC’s “Today” show wound up its taping on location.

Between segments, anchors Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley quick-stepped along the Avalon pier to the chalk marks showing where they must stand when the camera returns after a brief word from their sponsor. Hundreds of vacationing onlookers gawked and strained for a view. The clatter and noise escalated, then suddenly hushed as cameras returned to the action.

Amid all this, waiting for his cue, champion skateboarder Jesse Roach yawned.

Why shouldn’t he yawn? Jesse is 11 years old.

On this day he shared the camera’s attention with a pair of network anchor people and some of sports’ biggest names--Magic Johnson and Orel Hershiser--to say nothing of everyone’s favorite weatherman, Willard Scott. Even among such notables, the unflappable Jesse Roach’s star was on the rise.

Consider:

He has made dozens of public appearances with traveling exhibitions.

He just finished filming a TV commercial for Gatorade.

He will be on the July cover of Sports Illustrated for Kids, the national sports publication’s new monthly magazine for ages 8 and up.

And he just may be the best 11-year-old skateboarder in the country.

So wasn’t Jesse Roach the least bit nervous as the “Today” show crew prepared to tape a skateboarding segment?

“Me? Noooo,” said the grinning Laguna Beach fourth-grader, a tassel of yellow hair protruding from his crash helmet. After a little prodding, Jesse allowed that “it’s pretty cool” to appear on national television before millions of viewers.

“Skating’s helped me a lot in everything,” he said. “It makes me work harder. It makes things seem more important.”

Jackie Rosecrans, who with her husband, Everett, organized a “Pee Wee” skateboard team of pre-teens for Vans, a shoe manufacturer based in Orange, describes Jesse as “an extraordinary young man and an extraordinary skater.”

In the parlance of the skateboard world, Jesse gets “big air,” meaning he soars very high above the ramp when performing.

Jesse spends virtually all his free time practicing, which is one reason he has mastered tricks such as the “hand plant” in which he skates into the air at the top of the ramp and grabs its lip with his hand before his board returns to the wood for the ride down. He also performs what he calls “a front side 360” in which he comes down the ramp backward. Jesse has dubbed it “The Roach Twist.”

Jesse was the No. 1 rated amateur vertical ramp skater in California for youths 12 years old and younger last year by virtue of winning a statewide contest. Now he has moved up to “the grown-ups,” as he puts it. He competes against teen-agers and young adults, with hopes of someday making a career of skateboarding.

Some, including sponsors who have provided equipment, believe Jesse can succeed in competitive skateboarding.

James La Fave, 27, Jesse’s first sponsor at Galaxy Sports, a Laguna Beach skate shop, recalls that the youth’s parents stood behind him, transporting him to practice sessions and competitions.

The determination Jesse has developed for skateboarding has helped him focus his life in other areas as well.

“His grades went from Ds to Bs and A’s when he got an interest,” La Fave said.

Being featured on television and in news stories has boosted his self-image, Jesse agreed.

Or in his words: “I feel kind of better, you know.”

Jesse Roach is a boy of few words but much motion.

In Catalina, he scrambled on cue onto a portable ramp to perform his patented swooping and leaping, defying gravity with the self-assuredness of a veteran risk-taker.

“He just lives to skate,” said Jackie Rosecranz of Vans. As a Vans team member, Jesse trains on specially constructed ramps at the shoe manufacturer’s factory, travels to demonstrations and is supplied shoes and gear.

Stacy Peralta, 31, a world champion skateboarder when he was a teen-ager, was impressed by Jesse’s credentials and recently added him to his touring team of champions.

Peralta, a principal in Powell Peralta, a Santa Barbara-based skateboard manufacturing firm, has 35 sponsored amateurs and professionals. They have been around the world three times, have skateboard models named after them and regularly appear in movies, videos and TV commercials. Jesse is the youngest team member by two years. He doesn’t have a model named after him yet, but he has become a “factory team rider” for Powell Peralta.

That means he’s in “the highest division before pro,” Jesse’s father, Jerry Roach, said. “He’s too young to turn pro.”

Powell Peralta’s promotions coordinator, who goes only by the name Sasha, said: “We’ve got some young ones, but I think 11 is about our youngest sponsored amateur.”

“I usually do not sponsor kids below the age of 13,” said Peralta, the firm’s vice president. “There are mental demands this puts on a kid. It can affect them in a negative way by too much pressure.

“It can really tweak a kid’s health. The opportunities are one thing. But mental health is really most important.”

However, Peralta was impressed by the support of Jesse’s parents. “We’d like to work with him for 10 or 15 years . . . to build a career with him.”

Moreover, he said, “you can see it in some kids. They simply have it.”

Following the “Today” show taping (the show has already aired), Jesse sat for promotional photos with Gumbel and Pauley, and they inspected his nicked and scraped knees and shins. His “scars” relegated him to a supporting role rather than being the principal skater in the recent Gatorade commercial, Jesse said.

Jerry Roach said his son has never been seriously hurt skateboarding.

“My wife (Joan) is convinced he is going to walk through life unscathed,” Roach said. “I like to think that too.”

Joan Roach said she used to “scream, shriek and cry out” when her son performed. But no more since he has been using protective gear such as hip pads.

“The worst injuries that are going to happen are a broken shoulder, a broken wrist, a broken arm, maybe some ankles,” said Roach, a real estate salesman. “But I haven’t heard of anybody being disabled by ramp skating.

“My son’s been hurt more playing baseball,” he said, recalling the time Jesse caught a hard throw on his forehead instead of his glove.

“The only time I worry about him is when he’s skating around the house. That (street) asphalt is unforgiving.

“I think Jesse got serious about (skateboarding) when we got a ramp put in our back yard about three years ago. It was 6 feet high and about 25 feet long and 12 feet wide. It cost about $1,000 and three months of labor.”

Jesse’s older brother, Cory, now 18, built the ramp when he was a high school freshman.

Jerry Roach said he believes having the ramp has not only prevented serious injury--”when they fall, they slide”--but sharpened the skills of the three Roach boys, Cory, Jesse and 8-year-old John. All are good skateboarders.

However, a neighbor complained about the makeshift back-yard ramp, and the city of Laguna Beach said it had to be dismantled.

“It required a variance,” Roach said. “It was too close to the house by 2 feet. They were afraid if they gave me a variance and anybody ever got hurt on it they’d be liable.

“As soon as the ramp got closed down a neighbor kid broke his wrist skating in the street. They don’t wear (protective) equipment in the street. He was over here every day and never was injured.”

Like most 11-year-olds, Jesse enjoys other pastimes. He plays tennis and likes to play catch. Still, nothing compares to his devotion to skateboarding.

“He’s really motivated to go skate,” Roach said. “From what they tell us, he is the best vertical ramp skater for his age in the world.”

A vertical ramp is like a large pipe cut in cross section, allowing skateboarders to soar up one curved side, skate back down and then roll up the opposite curve to repeat the process.

Jesse won the only vertical ramp contest he entered last year by a large margin competing with youngsters in his age group from throughout the state.

“The sponsors and the pros say there is nobody his age who can do what he does,” his father said.

Paula Garner, a spokeswoman for the California Amateur Skateboard League, which sanctions skateboard competitions, noted that Jesse’s excellence has not gone to his head. He willingly gives tips to younger kids, she said.

This year Jesse entered his first competition “with the grown-ups and he finished about in the middle of the pack,” his father said. Jesse was pitted against sponsored amateurs, generally five to 10 years older.

By age 15, Jesse expects to be competing as a professional skater, some of whom make as much as $15,000 a month, Jerry Roach said. However, Jesse’s mother concedes, only a very few who have turned professional are able to support themselves through skateboarding.

“It’s new that the little kids are starting to skate” competitively, said Jackie Rosecranz of Vans. “It’s only happened in the last year.”

As it turned out, Jesse was the fourth of four Pee Wee skateboarders to roar one at a time up and down Vans’ portable ramp in the 95-second spot that closed the “Today” show in Catalina. The trouble was, the first three skaters took up 97 seconds, and by the time Jesse climbed up to replace his younger brother, the taping was over.

The next day Jesse was back on the training ramps at the Vans factory in Orange, skating up to and then soaring above the lip, reversing direction and slashing back down at high speed. He also broke new ground, but not his neck, when he inadvertently soared too high above the ramp, lost his board and did an accidental somersault in the air before crashing uninjured to the bottom. “I was kind of scared,” Jesse said later. “I made a mistake.”