REGIONAL REPORT : Blade Skaters Could Be Rolling Toward Trouble : Recreation: The activity’s popularity is booming, but so are the injuries. Some cities are cracking down.

Whoosh! There they go by the score, swooshing along on those newfangled ice skates on wheels--arms swinging, legs pumping. Lycra glinting in the sun. Shades just so.

Whoa! Over there, a cop stops one and points to a sign: “No skaters.” A ticket? For skating? No way--but it’s true!

Wham! The skater with the Walkman just hit a crack in the pavement and crashed. Check it out. The shades are shattered. The Lycra tights? Shredded! And that cockeyed wrist--it looks bad to the bone.

Across Southern California this summer, the hippest, trendiest place to be is perched on a pair of “in-line” skates. That perch, however, is becoming precarious as doctors, police and city officials increasingly threaten to blow the whistle on the fun.

Unlike conventional roller skates, on which the wheels line up in pairs, in-line skates feature up to five wheels in a single row. That design makes them much faster than conventional skates--”bladers” can hit speeds up to 30 m.p.h.--and that’s their basic thrill. Their flaw is that they are much harder to stop, leading to a rising tally of spills, medical bills and municipal ills.

From Santa Barbara to San Diego, doctors report a zooming injury toll, typically cuts and scrapes--dubbed “road rash” in skater lingo--or broken wrists and elbows. Some bone specialists said they see 10 in-line skaters a week.

Though good protective gear exists, most in-line skaters stumble along without it. Last year, a San Diego State University professor died after striking his unhelmeted head in a skating fall, said Michael Scahill, an official at San Diego’s Mercy Hospital.

In Long Beach and several Orange County towns, parks officials tell of roving bands of street-hockey players who have commandeered tennis courts, some even cutting nets to make more running room. Police have ticketed skaters, especially in Venice, where skating of any sort on the coastal bike path can bring a $25 fine.

And even more ominous trouble lurks just around the bend. The sport’s carefully cultivated image could be spoiled through guilt by association with skateboarders--already urban outlaws.

Ordinances banning “wheeled play equipment” were enacted in Huntington Beach three months ago and in La Canada Flintridge last week. Though both communities were primarily after skateboarders, traditional and in-line skaters were targeted, too.

Dick Dwinal, president of the Minneapolis-based in-line skate maker Innovative Sport Systems Inc., said the industry is alarmed by the emergence of what he called “the nuisance factor”--the view that skaters are swarming pests, a nuisance to be dealt with by municipal code.

“It’s like the skateboarders who created chaos a few years ago,” Dwinal said. “There will always be a few who create the problems for the masses.”

He said the industry is just beginning to seek ways to regulate itself before even more towns take over the job.

So far, however, nothing has slowed the rate of fun-seekers flocking to sporting goods stores, where retailers said they cannot keep in-line skates in stock, even at $159 a pair.

Industry officials predict 1991 national retail sales of in-line skates will reach $300 million. That’s double last year’s sales of $150 million, which in turn were three times the 1989 number, marketers said. California sales account for about 20% of the market, officials said.

Although Southern California is widely perceived as the nation’s “blading” hotbed, the in-line skate is not a California invention. Two Minneapolis brothers refined an in-line skate in 1980 and began their own company, Rollerblade Inc., opting at first to market it as a summer training aid for hockey players, then to other athletes as a cross-training device.

In 1986 the company switched strategies, targeting instead the general recreation and fitness markets, and the boom was on. Rollerblade Inc. estimates that the number of in-line skaters increased from 20,000 in 1984 to 1 million in 1990.

The firm remains the leading maker of in-line skates, and the company name has become an integral part of the in-line skating lingo--the skates are commonly known as Rollerblades, practitioners as bladers and their newfound passion as blading.

With other manufacturers now on-line, another million skaters will go in-line this year, Rollerblade spokeswoman Mary Haugen predicted.

What was invented along the Southern California shore, Haugen said, was the product’s image: aerobically sleek and out on the edge, the new way for the young urban hipster to revitalize. After snagging the trend-setting 18-to-35 set, the product’s appeal was broadened to other ages, she said.

“Our efforts in California were, we think, instrumental in developing the success of the skates across the states,” Haugen said.

The boom is by no means limited to the beach. In Palm Desert, Sports Fever owner Shirley Cubbison said she sells $100,000 worth of skates a year. “I have one customer 75, another 72, and they just get along beautifully,” she said.

Enhancing Southern California sales has been a growing craze among youths for roller hockey, inspired by the popularity of Wayne Gretzky and the Los Angeles Kings, retailers said. The game is played on pavement with a ball instead of a puck.

“As it stands now, you can’t drive around certain suburbs of L.A., the Santa Clarita Valley, Orange County, without seeing a net set up and kids playing roller hockey,” said Bob Haueter, vice president of marketing for La Canada-based Sport Chalet, which has 12 outlets.

Some doctors, though, said they can’t work more than a couple of hours without seeing a patient who has an in-line skating injury.

At Santa Monica Hospital Medical Center, at least a half-dozen injured bladers wobble in on an average weekend, mostly with wrist and elbow injuries, said Wally Ghurabi, medical director of its emergency department.

“I would say I must see 10 a week now, purely Rollerblade injuries,” said Dr. Gary Kelman, a San Diego bone specialist. Patients tend to be one of two sorts, he said: age 8 to 12 or age 35 to 40. “Most of them go down the first time,” he said. “Frequently, it’s the last time, also.”

Even for a breeze along the boardwalk, and especially for hockey, what skaters call a “full plastic jacket” should be mandatory, doctors said. That means a helmet as well as wrist, elbow and knee pads. The splintlike wrist pad is particularly critical, since most people try to break a fall by bracing with their hands, doctors said.

Sensitive to a potential backlash, leading manufacturers and skate shops joined forces in June to initiate a safe-skating campaign. In addition, due to debut shortly on MTV are segments on safe and courteous skating, said Dwinal of Innovative Sport Systems.

It’s too late for courtesy in Cypress, however, where the City Council voted recently to ban skaters from playing roller hockey on a concrete slab directly underneath the council chambers. The ordinance takes effect Thursday, said deputy city clerk Lillian Haina.

“It just became so popular that it became a problem area,” said Marvin De Carlo, director of the Cypress park district. “A lot of damage was done” and “the noise just can’t be tolerated,” particularly when the council is in session, he said.

In Long Beach, roller hockey zealots stormed city tennis courts, sometimes taking the nets down and later putting them back up, but sometimes simply cutting the nets, said Phil Hester, manager of its parks bureau. The hockey bunch, mostly preteen and teen-age boys, also swarmed onto public tennis courts in Anaheim and Garden Grove, city officials said.

In Long Beach and in Anaheim, there now are signs saying the tennis courts are for tennis, parks managers said. In Garden Grove, the tennis nets have been locked into place, said Mike Fenderson, deputy city manager.

“We’re not interested in locking kids up,” said Hester of Long Beach. “Our interest is trying to find a place for them.”

That’s precisely the issue in Venice--trying to find a place for the hordes out for a workout or a stroll on skates. Under state and Los Angeles municipal law, the bike path is off limits, and the police will issue those $25 reminders.

The number of tickets issued in the past year was not available. But, said Police Sgt. Dennis Fuller, the night beach supervisor: “We try to get the rumor out there that we do it, and that works pretty good. By writing a few tickets, the word travels real fast up and down the boardwalk. And that ceases the problem.”

Under the law, bladers must move to the Venice pedestrian path. That makes little sense, especially on a crowded weekend, said Will Prouty, manager of Rolling Soles in Venice, which sells and rents in-line skates.

Then there’s Huntington Beach, where, since April 15, downtown has been out of bounds to in-line skaters. The ordinance was aimed originally at skateboarders and then extended to blading--although, said Ron Hagan, the city’s director of community services, “Problems with Rollerbladers are one-tenth the problem with skateboarders.”

“People coming out of stores with (bladers) skating fast nearby were problems,” sparking complaints from merchants, Hagan said.

In addition, he said, “The Rollerbladers, even more than the roller skaters, like to do tricks, and a lot of tricks they do are (in) driveways and jumping on and off curbs. The handicapped access ramp provides a stunt area for in-line skaters. Those infrastructures are in the business districts,” where the ban was enacted.

So far, the city has received “voluntary compliance” with the law, Huntington Beach Police Lt. Ed McErlain said.

In La Canada Flintridge, the City Council last week adopted an ordinance, effective Aug. 14, that regulates skateboards, roller skates and blades in commercial areas, saying the growing popularity of the activities was a risk to both skaters and pedestrians. The council expressly reserved the right to ban them from the city’s main drag, Foothill Boulevard.

Nicholas Berkuta, chairman of the city’s Public Safety Commission, said recently: “All of the commissioners have had experience in town as witnesses or becoming near victims of skateboarders or Rollerbladers. These guys jump in front of cars and frighten pedestrians.”

Bans, injuries and tickets--these are the signs of consumers and communities struggling to cope with an industry’s rapid growth, said Neil Feineman, editor of Beach Culture magazine and author of Wheel Excitement, a how-to book for in-line skaters. He added, “I think those are real threats” to a potentially billion-dollar business.

“I use that word, threat, at least once a day,” Feineman said. “It’s just a sport. And you want to keep perspective. But they’re clearly threats.”

The potential for growth remains enormous, Feineman said. But as the skateboarders have learned, public opinion can turn, he said, adding, “The thing is, as far as we can tell, you don’t have any inalienable rights to skate.”