CALIFORNIA ICONS : it all started so innocently...bust your buns, bust your buns. : Thrasher Magazine and the Art of Exploiting the Universe of the Skateboardable

In the beginning was the wave. The wave, of course, had been there forever, but it took mankind several centuries to discover it was an excellent vehicle for hurtling though space at accelerated rates of speed----an activity we seem to have an innate need for.

On his expeditions of the 1770s in search of new lands to colonize, Captain Cook reported seeing Polynesian youths using oval planks to slide over the waves; 100 years later, European missionaries encountered a similar practice among South Sea Islanders. Those stuffy missionaries thought the activity immoral and attempted to suppress it, but their efforts came to naught.

Just how naught those efforts came to was revealed in the late 1950s, when the pull of the wave colluded with popular culture and gave birth to an entire lifestyle. The lifestyle was called surfing, its ground zero was Southern California and it was a universe unto itself, complete with its own dialect (“bitchin’ ”), dress code (baggies), sexual politics (chicks walk five paces behind), hair styles (sun-bleached), music (Dick Dale), vacation spots (Hawaii), preferred automobiles (wood-paneled trucks) and cologne (Jade East).

But what to do when the surf wasn’t up or you couldn’t get a ride to the beach? For such emergencies, surfing begat an offspring called skateboarding. The first skateboards--cobbled together from little sisters’ roller skates and stray pieces of lumber--appeared in California in the late ‘50s, and by 1962, factory-made skateboards were being marketed in vast quantities nationwide. Sponsored competitions started making very young boys rich, and a new sport, fully equipped with its own complex vocabulary of slang, was off and running.

Conceived and perfected in the newly built housing tracts of suburban California where there were miles of freshly poured concrete, wide empty streets and an abundance of swimming pools (a drained pool is the ideal arena for skating), skateboarding was first and foremost a young boys’ sport. According to Thrasher, the 15-year-old San Francisco-based skateboarding monthly, it still is; most skaters are males between the ages of 12 and 18. While one could make the case that this is the only time in a person’s life when the bones are resilient enough and the energy level high enough to meet the demands of the sport, that’s not the only reason for the age and gender bias.

“A big part of the allure of skateboarding is the feeling of mobility it gives,” says Kevin Thatcher, a former professional skater, the original editor of Thrasher and its current publisher. “When you’re a little kid, you’re probably on your skateboard the first time you get off the block.”

Boys tend to take up skateboarding during those formative years when they still travel in packs and dismiss girls as good for little more than watching boys skate. And if you flipped through any of the four major skating magazines--Thrasher, Slap, Big Brother and TransWorld--you’d be hard pressed to find either a girl skater depicted in the magazine or the name of one on the masthead.

“When it comes down to it, the sport is just too rough for girls,” Thrasher co-publisher Ed Riggins, 50, declares regretfully. Girls of this age are more apt to take up rollerblading, a sport dismissed as wimpy by most skaters who take pride in knowing that skateboarding is a “down and dirty” sport. In fact, in 1965, loads of bad press convinced the adult populace that skateboarding was too dangerous, and anti-skating restrictions were put into effect in many public places. At that point, most skaters were losing interest in the sport anyhow; the clay- or steel-wheeled boards then in use were too difficult to control. “In the early days of skating, it was all a death ride,” Riggins recalls.

Then in 1974, a revolution occurred. The urethane wheel, which had been developed for roller skating, was adapted for for skateboards, safety equipment (helmets, knee and elbow pads) was introduced and the sport really took off.

“Skateboarding as we know it today was born with the invention of the urethane wheel,” says Bryce Kanights, Thrasher’s longtime photo editor. A few years later, it skateboarding began to merge with the then burgeoning punk rock community that shared skating’s roots in the youth culture and anarchy. Ace skaters began making small fortunes from endorsements and competition winnings. Then the sport produced its’ first superstar in L.A. skater Tony Alva, and privately owned skate parks sprouted up all over the country.

“By the end of the ‘70s there were more than 200 parks in America, but many of them were so poorly designed that they were dangerous,” Thatcher recalls. Then in 1980, the sport went into another major slump when many of the parks were closed. Liability insurance had become prohibitively expensive, but that wasn’t the only problem. Skaters had begun to boycott skate parks because the parks violated the true essence of skating. The parks had rules and regulations that forced skaters to conform, and skating is a renegade sport that’s vehemently anti-elitist and anti-conformist. Skating’s initial popularity was based on the fact that anyone can afford to do it. Paying to skate just wasn’t happening.

“In 1980 skateboarding was considered dead, but we knew it was the cockroach sport that would never die,” laughs Thatcher, who chose to launch Thrasher that year. “Skateboarding tends to run on a 10-year cycle--maybe because every 10 years there’s a new generation of kids--so we started Thrasher with the idea that we were buying stock when it was low.”

He and two partners started the magazine with $20,000 and a small office in a San Francisco shipyard. The first issue was a 32-page tabloid; they printed 10,000. At the time, their only competition was a magazine called Action Now, which had changed its name from Skateboarder in 1980, but it folded a year later. “They were ahead of their time in that they were covering all kinds of extreme sports,” Thatcher says, “but most skaters felt Skateboarder sold out when they became Action Now--and that ready-made audience came to us.”

Thatcher’s belief in the indomitability of skateboarding was vindicated when the scene started picking up steam again in 1983. Enthusiasm for skating dipped still another time in the late ‘80s, then exploded when the street revolution hit in 1990.

“What we’re seeing now are the fruits of the idea that everything is skateable,” Thatcher says. “Hand railings, bus benches, hills--everything is terrain to be skated.”

Adds Thrasher’s advertising director, Roger Browne: “Vertical skating [commonly referred to as “vert” and done on ramps and in pools] has been replaced by street skating, because lots of kids didn’t have ramps in their backyards; many didn’t even have backyards for that matter. So the move to the streets made skating accessible to many more people.”

Though the accessibility and freedom of street skating have been a boon to the sport, Browne predicts that “skate parks will come back, because cities don’t like skaters on the streets. Society sees skating as an outlaw sport, and that’s one of the reasons skaters tend to go out at night: the streets are less crowded, and they don’t get hassled as much.”

Skateboarding is still generally considered a pastime for juvenile delinquents; the miscreant teenagers of Larry Clark’s controversial film “Kids,” for instance, were skaters. Thatcher says, however, that the skating community has an unusually acute social conscience. “Other than marijuana,” he says, “there aren’t many drugs in skating, because kids use skateboarding as an outlet instead of turning to drugs. Lots of skaters are vegetarian, too, and they tend to be very conscious of environmental issues.

“Because of its suburban origins, skating seems to be dominated by white kids,” he adds, “but when the heavy sessions go down, it’s every skater for himself, and you see a really diverse racial and social mix.”

And the influence of skating is spreading to the non-skating world.

“We have a wide crossover readership,” says Kanights of Thrasher, which now has a paid circulation of 135,000. “Some people read the magazine for the music coverage; music is important to skaters because it’s what gets them going, so we always have lots of music coverage. Other people read it for the fashion trends. A lot of fashion innovations come out of skating Baggy pants, for instance, are identified with the hip-hop scene, but they actually started with skaters who wanted loose clothing that didn’t restrict their movements.”

Although snowboarding--the mutant offspring of skateboarding--has surpassed skating as America’s fastest growing sport, skating has succeeded in establishing itself around the world as a legitimate sport. Moreover, skateboarding has come full circle from its beginnings in that surfers now do tricks developed by skaters.

Skateboarding’s season in the lives of young boys, how ever, will always remain brief. “Skateboarding is a bachelor sport,” concludes Browne. “It’s not like a family thing or a couple thing; it’s a solo thing. It’s always going to be dominated by young teenagers, because most kids leave skating behind once they get a car and a girlfriend.”