Roastbeef Sandwich
When I was growing up, a kid on a bodyboard would literally get spat on in the line-up. Older dudes with sticks and tattoos would always be hassling the younger kids, and if you were a kook riding a biscuit like me, you'd only be clawing for scraps before everyone else pissed off to work. I just took that as my comeuppance; the dues I'd need to pay as a young grom. I assumed that when I grew up, I'd be just like those dudes - standing up on waves, tattooed and rough-headed, spitting on poor young frothers and snaking all the spongers. I hated their faces, but I still showed them respect. It wasn't real respect. It was just that phony type of intended respect you give intimidating, annoying or powerful people that are holding you back from something you want.
The bodyboarding scene is pretty similar to the surfing scene. It's kind of like the
relationship between two cousins who grew up together, weren't so close as teenagers, but became mates again in their adult years. Bodyboarding was born from surfing, as was skating, but skaters were never looked down upon by surfers as much as bodyboarders have been in the recent past. Surfers looked down on boogie-boarders in the same way that skaters have always looked down on rollerbladers and scooters. We're not talking any Nazi-skinhead type of discrimination here, but there was just no respect. Riding waves in a different way (a different medium, you could say) has caused bodyboarders to invent unique tricks and ride seemingly unsurfable waves, utilising their craft's optimum potential.
Surfing has been progressing in the same way for decades, the most obvious new innovation being all the cool, new airs and bigger spins, and of course bigger, more gnarlier waves! But I think it just comes down to the fact that when riding waves, there's only a certain amount of things you can do with your board on that one type of obstacle. Sure, there are many different types of waves, but the basic element is generally always the same. All the tricks have pretty much been invented twenty years ago, so it's only natural that we should be content with what we have.
The same goes for in skateboarding. The 80's was knee-deep in new moves with all manner of weird, fucked up names. This is where we got such fabulously named tricks as the Texas Plant, the Jolly Mamba, the Slob Air, the Roastbeef and the Nerd Flip. There are easily over 300 tricks to do on a skateboard. While in bodyboarding there are only about 22 moves you can pull on a wave, and I can't really see too many new variations happening apart from more rotations in a spin and maybe dudes flipping and flicking their boards underneath them, which I have seen and tried before.
Because skaters have had to adapt to a massive variety of cement environments they've been able to invent new ways to skate these places and in doing so, create fresh tricks for other skaters to try to copy. They attack each challenge with an aggression that makes skating unique in its stylistic individuality. At a certain level, skating's not about what you do, it's how you do it. But, you have to be able to do it in the first place.
Nowadays, boardriders seem more focussed on perfecting the already set-in-stone tricks they have before them in their little handbooks. Styling out still is, and always really has been, at the forefront of everyone's mind, and the creativity and inventiveness that gave us all of our tricks when when skating was in its nappies is now more finely tuned into doing whatever's possible in any terrain - with steez. Progression may have slowed as far as trick creation, but all other facets of each of these specifically similar sports are progressing with astonishing momentum. A sport without progression becomes something like gymnastics. Why have those freaks swinging on bars and bouncing off beams and shit when they could be performing in the Cirque Du Soleil, the greatest show on Earth – using their warped body contortions and acrobatic finesse to blow the minds of most audience members, and cause brain-gasms in those on psychedelics. Why are gymnastic events set to standards. Don't the girls get sick of trying the same shit over and over again? When I did gymnastics (for about two weeks), I dreamt every day of lining up every single apparatus into some sick obstacle course to bolt through. I wonder how many other kids had this dream as well, and if that dream was similarly shattered by the bitch who touched your arse as she helped us forward roll. An insane collaboration of all the springs, swings, beams and trampolines in a gym would have endless possibilities! And then from there on it could evolve into all manner of twisted, nut-job events for us to watch some fine human specimens rip into. The competition gymnastics is based around is restricting its freedom and preventing it from becoming something which can form somewhat of a more meaningful lifestyle and culture around it, like surfing or skateboarding. People need to let their sports soar, and continue to make it as great as it can be. How could something so beautifully simple, yet limitless in its possibilities, ever become finite and mundane? Everything matures, but unlike humans, these things we love so passionately will never lay down and die.
The same reason why bodyboarding, skateboarding, snowboarding, sand-, wake-, mountain-, wind- and skimboarding, even kite-, wind-, air- and ironing-board surfing exists at all, is because riders of stuff that rolls or slides are an ingenious bunch of people that see a beauty in something so simple as a long, smooth, banked sliver of concrete, a large, barreling ripple in the ocean, or a rough lump of cement out the front of your house. We take what we see and use our boards to speak a bit of universal truth through our physical forms. I don't think I can explain what goes on in a human beings body when they're shredding a bowl like a demon, or balls deep in one of mother-natures cavernous, blue holes. Whatever it is, biologically, chemically, physically and mentally, when you're in the zone and you’re really feeling it, it's like your entire being - every joint, muscle and tendon – is perfectly tuned and performing every fluid motion you command. It's a feeling unlike any other, and for those people who can't, won't or don't regularly experience what so much of us constantly crave, I truly feel sorry for you.
I've recently been finding my adrenalin fix and platform to experience some pure physical movement by rock climbing. Climbing is so different in many ways from the sports I grew up being shit at. Rocking up to an outdoor climbing spot, or an indoor centre, most other climbers will greet and farewell each other all the time, often with a friendly bit of banter or advice on some rock you're trying to get on top of. I'm not saying that skaters or surfers are never friendly like this, but climbers are pretty much always like this. I've often spent many an afternoon, half-naked, with an absolute stranger, moaning and straining as we try to work out how to mount some big, hard rock. It's a much more peaceful and serene lifestyle, which is pretty much where the subculture surrounding surfing has ended up nowadays. They are much more spiritual and in touch with nature because what they ride/climb are naturally occurring phenomena - only that waves are instant, forming and dissolving before our eyes, while rock is somewhat constant, taking shape over immense periods of time.
Maybe this is the reason why surfers are notoriously cagey about their secret spots. Almost as much as fishermen. They can't rely on the same formations always being there, ready to perform on. Waves can fall slack, and surfers become fidgety and tense when they do - hence the invention of skateboarding. A climber never has to worry about their rocks not being there on certain days. The only factors they need to consider are the weather, which can be combated by going to an indoor centre, and crowds, which is something that plagues anyone who surfs, skates or climbs.
Skaters can be brutally territorial over certain spots, especially if they've created or found them for themselves, but if you wanted to know the best places to climb in Sydney, or the Blue Mountains, or anywhere else in the fucking world, all you need to do is go and buy one of the many handy and well-informed guide-books. How my mates and I would've loved a 'Central Coast Surfing Guidebook' when we got lost in the cliffy bush trying to find The Zone for the first time as teenagers. Climbing mags even go into great detail
about how to access certain crags and cliffs. But if books and magazines aren't your thing, just log on to the net where the thriving climbing community continually updates topographical maps for you to download and peruse at your leisure before venturing out on your next climbing adventure.
Rolling up at the local break or skatepark is never the same experience, unless you're a local. In that case you're sweet, ride for your life, just don't be a cunt about it unless it's warranted. Localism is what climbing doesn't have. There may be people who climb certain places all the time, live there, and even call themselves a local, but they never 'localise' that spot and enforce rules upon it, stopping certain people from climbing and having fun there. Not to my knowledge anyway. Climbing, like surfing, is such a physically demanding venture. It takes peak athletes to climb some of the shit that sits on the Earth's face, and some of these guys, and gals, are built like tanks! On the other hand, we've seen surfers mellow out from the party scene in recent decades, and I put that down to the fact that the competition scene is so fierce and financially significant that it takes a superior human specimen, both mentally and physically, to perform at the level that these guys do.
Skater's may be lucky in that the sport/past-time/hobby/lifestyle they've chosen is slightly less hard work. Sure, they may cop more beatings than anyone else does, landing hard on the concrete or slamming that hunk of wood or metal into their shinbones. That may not compare to a two or three wave hold-down at a thick, heaving, solid reef-ledge, but skating is just so much more accessible than other board sports. You can do it with a huge crew in a busy city plaza or with your best mate on a neighbourhood curb cut. It's the same reason why skating is so applicable to do whilst drunk, high, tripping, completely unfit or clinically psychotic. It does make sliding into a barrel a bit more special because it is further removed from our natural environment. For a surfer to get in that barrel, they've worked bloody hard (usually) to make it out the back, drop-in, bottom-turn, and shack up. The pay-off is more or a prize because the road to get there was more daunting, but who can really say what feels better out of pulling out of a sweet pit, or landing that perfect back-smith on a smooth marble ledge? It's the reason why we ride what we ride the way that we want to. It's the reason why these things that seem so insignificant and meaningless to other, more closed-minded, normal people (or 'civvies' as a I like to call them) mean so much to most of us. For a lot of us it is the sole reason why we exist. For some it is the opening of a door into a new realm of perception that cannot be closed, and for others, it's merely just a bit of fun.
Looking out from the inside it's obvious to see how other people are missing out on something, and I'm not just talking about these 'sports' here. I'm talking about the simple, seemingly mundane aspects of our life, whatever they may be, that make life so beautiful and worthwhile. So many things are so often overlooked by the masses, but realistically, to some people they represent the absolute meaning of life. Trying to explain this to a 'civvie' is like trying to tell a devout Saudi Arabian Muslim that Allah didn't create the tree's and the soil. It's like trying to force your own leg down your throat – they just do not and cannot understand or comprehend IT. IT may not be the reason why we exist, but IT sure as shit make our existence a whole lot greater.
And IT, my friends, is the reason why that to this day there's over 300 tricks to do on a skateboard.
Now get out there and see if there's any left to invent.
3RD JULY 2013