A Board of Painful Education

Twelve-year-old Tommie Doe of Garden Grove smiled when I asked which arm he’d broken while skateboarding. He held both out together, the right one almost hideously bowed, with nasty knots at the elbow.

“Broke my collarbone too. But that was another time,” he said.

The skateboard is as much a tool of Southern California living as in-line skates or surfboards. But keep in mind, if your youngster wants to take up skateboarding:

It’s great exercise, lots of fun, but you can get hurt.

An acquaintance of mine said his 11-year-old son was excited about their first trip together to the new Vans Skatepark at the Block in Orange. Before going home, they also took in the UCI Medical Center’s emergency room, just across the street: 12 stitches to his son’s head after a skateboard spill.

Since the skate park opened, UCI officials say, their emergency room has been averaging two skateboard injury treatments from there each week. When I was observing at the skate park this week, an employee even noted as a selling point to a parent, “We’ve got a hospital across the street, and its ambulance is usually here in five minutes.”

But don’t interpret this to mean that UCI is annoyed with Vans Skatepark. Just the opposite.

“We are glad that skateboarders have a place to go that’s a supervised environment,” said UCI spokeswoman Kim Pine. “Especially because the skate park requires them to wear helmets and pads.”

Too many skateboarders hate wearing safety equipment. California has a bicycle helmet law for those under 18, not so for skateboarders.

The other day I came across six Garden Grove youngsters hanging out, three on skateboards. None of the three had helmets or pads.

“It’s ghetto,” said Johnnie Lopez, 12. “Ghetto,” I learned, means cool. And what Johnnie meant was, it was cool to not wear the helmet.

“It’s poor,” said David Nguyen, 13. “You can’t wear a helmet and look good.”

Adds Tommie Doe: “It looks cheap.”

So how cool is this bunch? David recently got out of a cast after breaking his arm on a skateboard. He’s decided to give it up awhile. Johnnie Lopez suffered a broken leg last year when his skateboard simply slid out from underneath him. Then there’s Tommie’s record of medical mishaps on the board.

But they had a ready answer for my helmet question: It wouldn’t have spared any of their broken bones.

Well, then that’s because they’re lucky, said Stephanie Lush, trauma coordinator at the UCI hospital.

“You break your foot, we can fix that,” she said. “You get a head injury, that’s damage to your brain; that’s much more serious. Not wearing a helmet on a skateboard is just foolish.”

No one is recommending you take away your youngsters’ skateboards. Lush emphasizes that skateboard injuries make up less than 1% of all the trauma treatments at UCI.

But almost all skateboard riders I’ve talked with have suffered some kind of injury. And at the skate park I saw lots of hard spills. I side with the experts, who say helmets and pads can at least reduce the chances of a serious injury.

But all six of those Garden Grove boys I saw hanging out made the same point with me:

The risk is part of the fun.