Getting Crusade on a Roll : Skateboarders Push for Park to Ply Their Tricks

They might have looked like a bunch of bad boys kept after class for a little detention action. But the throng of very hip-dressed teens who hooted and hollered up a pre-pubescent storm Friday night at a school gymnasium in Ocean Beach were really activists of sorts.

And they had a message to convey to the police and other older-generation types--some very serious food for thought--or maybe for kicking around like a board gracefully greasing some juicy downtown street curb: “Skateboarding is Not a Crime.”

It’s not just a slick bumper sticker to grace the bottoms of skateboards from Oceanside to Otay Mesa, but an idea that’s become a teen-age anthem of the streets.

Because, for these teens, these boys in baggy shorts and T-shirts brandishing their four-wheeled slabs of polyurethane, skateboarding has become more than just a sport. It’s become a sort of teen-age calling, an urban happening. But nowadays, it only brings them trouble from police and politicians who they say are trying to drive them off the streets.

So the concerned ones showed up for a rally planned by a sympathetic parent. They wanted to get political and write city officials that skateboarders have rights too.

What they want, said the 150 youths at the meeting, is more understanding of their very radical sport and a publicly funded skate park in nearby Robb Field in Ocean Beach.

“The bottom line is that these kids are going to skateboard--there isn’t much people can do about it. And there’s more of them on the way,” said Ocean Beach resident Mike Ryan, whose 11-year-old son is a skateboarder.

“So let’s just get real and build them a place to do their thing--instead of passing news laws trying to outlaw them and drive them off the streets.”

Right now, there are no publicly operated skateboard parks in San Diego County--even though Northern California has lots of them and even cities in the Los Angeles area, like Huntington Beach, are starting to build them, the kids say.

“Hey, like, San Diego is the skateboarding capital of the whole world,” said Bryan Doane, a skater who plans on attending college next year. “The government is taking our money through all the taxes they collect with skateboard sales. But they’re not giving any of the money back. Instead, they’re using it to build tennis courts and football fields. Well, we want our fair share.”

The skateboarders and their supporters have done their homework, they say. Statistics show there are eight sports that result in more accidents nationwide each year than skateboarding. That includes bicycling, basketball and football. Skateboarding ranked right above playing on the monkey bars in the schoolyard, they say.

They also dispute numbers that show there are an estimated 11 million skateboarders in the United States--with another 4 million to join their ranks by 1995. This is a sport, folks, they say. Not a criminal endeavor.

“But people treat skateboarders like criminals,” Tony Snesko said. “The police see these kids as easy marks. So kids get tickets. They get arrested. They get their skateboards confiscated. And they develop a very real fear of the criminal justice system. That’s what we’re teaching them, that it’s not a good idea to get a little exercise rather than do drugs or commit crimes.”

Snesko is somebody important on the skateboarders’ side. He’s a Poway city councilman who is now pushing for a skateboard park to be built in his town, too--a place that would have nasty concrete curbs and ramps and jumps and nooks and crannies where the kids could go hog-wild on their boards and not become burrs on the hides of merchants and motorists.

“That’s exactly what we want,” Snesko said. “A legal place for these kids to go.”

So Snesko and the skateboarders and their advocates have a message to anyone who spots a kid surfing the streets beside them. He is not-- they repeat-- not a criminal. Just a youngster out for a good time.

That’s what Snesko, in effect, told the crowd Friday night--the fidgety teen-agers who clutched in their hands tickets for a chance at free skateboards and T-shirts and bumper stickers.

On hand were activists like Silas Brandon--slick as a skateboarder’s poster child in his leather buckles, metal chain and Circle Jerks rock group T-Shirt.

He got his skateboard taken away by a cop in downtown San Diego--took him 20 bucks to get it back. He thinks things ought to change.

And there were skateboard fanatics like 12-year-old Kenny Keefer, who isn’t a teen-ager yet, but who says he knows what’s right.

He came to stand up and be counted. Or was it really to take a crack at winning a nifty new skateboard.”

“Yeah,” he says with a smile. Then quickly. ‘I mean ‘No.’ ”