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June 21st is Go Skateboarding Day. Began in 2004 by the International Association of Skateboard Companies (IASC), Go Skateboarding Day is a day for anyone and everyone to take a break from everything, get together with family and friends and go skateboarding. Go Skateboarding Day is set for June 21st because it happens to be the first day of summer.

It doesn’t matter what kind of skateboarding you enjoy. Street, park, freestyle, racing, downhill or just on your driveway are all perfect. You can ride a longboard, shortboard, or some home made monstrosity. As long as you’re on a board with wheels and having fun, Go Skateboarding Day is for you.

Many skateboard shops, clubs and organizations choose Go Skateboarding Day to hold events, competitions and anything else you can imagine. In 2005 in Philadelphia roughly 300 skateboarders came together at Center City, riding from South Street to LOVE Park. Check out the current Go Skateboarding Day events list to find out where the pros will be, and about some large scale Go Skateboarding Day events around the world.

But as with all things in skateboarding, you don’t need any official endorsement or organization in order to celebrate skateboarding. In fact, there are skaters who are against the idea of Go Skateboarding Day. They have noticed that Go Skateboarding Day was created by IASC in order to get you to buy more skateboard gear. Check out the website No Skateboarding Day to hear more.

The point is, you don’t need a special day to go skateboarding – every day should be go skateboarding day! Go Skateboarding Day is just an opportunity! So, whether you are for the holiday or not, June 21st is still a great day to go skateboarding. Grab your skateboard and head out to wherever it is that you like to skate. Grab some friends if you want and throw a party! You can also check in with your local skateboard shop to see what events are planned, or plan your own. The point is to enjoy skateboarding!

The True Story of Dogtown and the Zephyr Team

Dogtown is an area of West Los Angeles – the poorer, slum area on the south side of Santa Monica that covered Venice Beach and Ocean Park Beaches.

Throughout the 1970’s, the surfers in Dogtown were aggressive and antisocial. They fit into the stereotype of the time that surfers were poor dropouts. For a lot of these young people, surfing was all they had.

Surfing at The Cove
Right between Venice beach and Santa Monica was an abandoned amusement park right on the water called the Pacific Ocean Park Pier. The locals called it the P-O-P. In the middle of the POP was an area where the huge wood pilings and rickety piers were built in a U shape, creating a kind of secret cove. And that’s what the locals called it – “The Cove.” It was an incredibly dangerous place to surf, with large tilted wood pilings jutting from the watter, and not enough room for all the surfers. But the local surfers of Dogtown prized their secret surf spot, and defended it fiercely – often with force. Outsiders had to earn their way in.

This kind of lifestyle and mindset drove into these young people the need to prove themselves. They knew what performance was about, they knew that they had to prove themselves to be anyone.

Jeff Ho and Zephyr Surfboard Productions
In 1972, Jeff Ho, Skip Engblom and Craig Stecyk started up a surf shop called Jeff Ho and Zephyr Surfboard Productions right in the middle of Dogtown. Jeff Ho hand crafted surfboards, and pushed the limits and ideas of surfboard design. He was unique, cutting edge, and a little crazy. Craig Stecyk was the artist who designed the surfboards’ graphics. Most surfboards at the time used soft, rainbow images or calm, pretty island scenes. Craig pulled his graphics from local graffiti, and made Zephyr surfboards reflect the area that they were made in.

The Jeff Ho and Zephyr Surfboard Productions shop also started up the Zephyr surf team. Dogtown was full of young surfers who had nowhere to go, and who were hungry to prove themselves and gain an identity. The Zephyr team provided just that. A lot of what went on in the shop was sketchy at best, but these kids came from broken and messed up families, and the Zephyr team provided a home.

The Zephyr Team (or Z-Boys)
The Zephyr team had 12 members:

Shogo Kubo
Bob Biniak
Nathan Pratt
Stacey Peralta
Jim Muir
Allen Sarlo
Chris Cahill
Tony Alva
Paul Constantineau
Jay Adams
Peggy Oki
Wentzle Ruml
While surfing is what pulled the Zephyr team together, skateboarding would be what would pull them apart. But not before they changed the world forever.

Skateboarding’s Rebirth
Skateboarding was a hobby that had a short lived flash of excitement in the late 50’s. However, in 1965 skateboarding’s popularity fell off the face of the Earth. At that time, skateboarders would ride using dangerous clay wheels, and anyone who wanted to skate had to build their own skateboard from scratch.

However, in 1972, the same year that the Jeff Ho and Zephyr Surfboard Productions shop opened, urethane skateboard wheels were invented. These wheels made skateboarding smoother, safer, and more reasonable. Today we still use urethane skateboarding wheels.

From Pastime to Passion
The Z-boys enjoyed skateboarding as something to do after surfing. The activity grew from a hobby for the Zephyr team into a new way to express themselves, and to show what they were made of. Style was the most important aspect of skateboarding to the Zephyr team, and they pulled all their inspiration from surfing. They would bend their knees deep, and enjoyed riding the concrete like they were riding a wave, dragging their hands on the pavement like Larry Burtleman. Burtleman would touch the wave as he was surfing, dragging his fingers across it. This move in skateboarding became known as a Burt and is still in skateboarding language today to refer to dragging fingers, or planting a hand on the ground and turning around it.

The skateboarding of the Zephyr team was unique and powerful. At the same time that they were sidewalk surfing, skateboarding was growing in popularity in other areas of the US. For the rest of the country, skateboarding was slalom (riding down a hill back and forth between cones) and freestyle. Freestyle skateboarding is mostly dead today, but back then it was a huge part of the sport. Imagine ballet on a skateboard, or mixing ice skating with skateboarding. Freestyle was supposed to be graceful and artistic.

While the Zephyr team had nothing to do with freestyle skateboarding, they were familiar with slalom. Bicknell Hill ran down from the Jeff Ho and Zephyr Surfboard Productions shop, and the Z-boys loved to set up cones and practice Burts and slalom on the hill. The Zephyr team also had four grade schools in the Dogtown area that they would skate at. These schools all had sloping concrete banks in their playgrounds, usually because the school was built into a hill, or had water drainage issues. For the Z-boys, it was a great place to skate. It was in these places that each skater developed his or her own style. But they still had further to go – in the hands of the Zephyr team, skateboarding would be changed forever.

The Birth of Pool Riding
California had a record drought in the 70’s, which caused a lot of people to empty their swimming pools. The Z-boys saw opportunity, and they dove right in. They would sneak into people’s back yards, skate as long as they could, and then run when the police showed up.

First the team would just ride the pools, enjoying the flow, but pool riding evolved quickly. Each day each skater would try something new. They would push themselves and each other. They were always looking for a fresh new pool to ride. They even went as far as to bring pumping equipment and pump any remaining water left in some of the pools they found. They also defended each pool from outside skaters with the same ferocity as they defended the Cove.

The Del Mar Nationals
And then in 1975, the famous Del Mar Nationals were held in California. Skateboarding had risen back in popularity enough that a company called Bahne Skateboards held the first big skateboarding competition since the 1960’s. The Zephyr team showed up in their blue Zephyr shirts and blue Vans shoes, and changed the world. The Del Mar Nationals competition had two areas – a slalom course and a platform for freestyle. The Zephyr team mocked the freestyle competition, but they entered anyway. The crowd loved thier low, agressive style, Burts and inventiveness. They were like nothing anyone had ever seen.

The Dogtown Articles
Also in 1975, Skateboarder magazine re-launched. In the second issue, Craig Stecyk began a series called the “Dogtown articles” with his first article called “Aspects of the Downhill Slide”. These articles told the story of the Dogtown team. Craig’s photography was even more inspiring than his surfboard art, and his articles fanned the flames of the skateboarding revolution that had started at Del Mar.

Only a few short months after the Del Mar nationals, the Zephyr team was ripped apart by the fame and popularity that they had won. Skateboarding was on the rise, new skateboarding companies were cropping up, and more competitions followed with even larger cash prizes. Everyone wanted a piece of the Zephyr team, and Jeff Ho couldn’t compete with the money his team was being offered. The Jeff Ho and Zephyr Surfboard Productions shop closed down soon afterward.

The Zephyr team did get together for a while at a place they liked to call the Dogbowl. This was a large pool on a huge private estate in the rich area of North Santa Monica. By that time, they had all gone their own ways, but there at the Dogbowl they were able to hang out together, one last time.

Each member of the Zephyr team moved on, some to bigger and better skateboarding, some to other things. A small group of outcasts from the slums of Dogtown had changed their own lives, and the world, forever.

A Brief History of Skateboarding

Skateboarding was first started in the 1950s, when all across California surfers got the idea of trying to surf the streets. No one really knows who made the first board — instead, it seems that several people came up with similar ideas at the same time. Several people have claimed to have invented the skateboard first, but nothing can be proved, and skateboarding remains a strange spontaneous creation.

These first skateboarders started with wooden boxes or boards with roller skate wheels slapped on the bottom. Like you might imagine, a lot of people got hurt in skateboarding’s early years! It was a sport just being born and discovered, so anything went. The boxes turned into planks, and eventually companies were producing decks of pressed layers of wood — similar to the skateboard decks of today. During this time, skateboarding was seen as something to do for fun after surfing.

In 1963, skateboarding was at a peak of popularity, and companies like Jack’s, Hobie and Makaha started holding skateboarding competitions. At this time, skateboarding was mostly either downhill slalom or freestyle. Torger Johnson, Woody Woodward and Danny Berer were some well known skateboarders at this time, but what they did looked almost completely different from what skateboarding looks like today! Their style of skateboarding, called “freestyle”, is more like dancing ballet or ice skating with a skateboard.

Then, in 1965, skateboarding’s popularity suddenly crashed. Most people assumed that skateboarding was a fad that had died out, like the hoola hoop. Skateboard companies folded, and people who wanted to skate had to make their own skateboards again from scratch.

But people still skated, even though parts were hard to find and boards were home made. Skaters were using clay wheels for their boards, which was extremely dangerous and hard to control. But then in 1972, Frank Nasworthy invented urethane skateboard wheels, which are similar to what most skaters use today. His company was called Cadillac Wheels, and the invention sparked new interest in skateboarding among surfers and other young people.

In the spring of 1975, skateboarding took an evolutionary boost toward the sport that we see today. In Del Mar, California a slalom and freestyle contest was held at the Ocean Festival. That day, the Zephyr team showed the world what skateboarding could be. They rode their boards like no one had in the public eye, low and smooth, and skateboarding was taken from being a hobby to something serious and exciting (Read more about the history of Dogtown and the Zephyr team). The Zephyr team had many members, but the most famous are Tony Alva, Jay Adams and Stacy Peralta.

But that was only the first big jump in the evolution of skateboarding – continue to the next page for the rest of the history…

The Zephyr team, and all the skaters who wanted to be like them, also made skateboarding even more edgy in the public eye, and added a strong anti-establishment sentiment that still remains in skateboarding today.

In 1978, only a few years into the popularity of this new style of low-to-the-ground skateboarding, a skater named Alan Gelfand (nicknamed “Ollie”) invented a maneuver that gave skateboarding another revolutionary jump. He would slam his back foot down on the tail of his board and jump, thereby popping himself and the board into the air. The ollie was born, a trick that completely revolutionized skateboarding — most tricks today are based in performing an ollie. The trick still bears his name, and Alan Gelfand was inducted into the skateboard hall of fame in 2002.

Unfortunately, near the end of the 70’s skateboarding faced its second crash in popularity. Public skate parks had been being built, but with skateboarding being such a dangerous activity, insurance rates got out of control. This, combined with less and less people coming to use skateparks forced most to close.

But skaters kept skating. Through the 80’s skateboarders started to built their own ramps at home, and to skate whatever else they could find. Skateboarding began to be more of an underground movement, with skaters continuing to ride, but to make the whole world into their skatepark.

During the 80’s, smaller skateboard companies owned by skateboarders started cropping up. This enabled each company to be creative and do whatever they wanted – new styles and shapes of boards were tried.

It was also during the 80’s that the VCR came on the scene, and opened up the world of skateboarding to any kid, anywhere. Stacey Peralta and George Powell pulled together a team of young talented skaters and named them the Bones Brigade. Stacey had a talent for filming, and in 1984 shot the first of a long series of revolutionary skateboard videos – The Bones Brigade Video Show. The team included Steve Caballero, Tony Hawk, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain, Rodney Mullen, Stacy Peralta, and Kevin Staab, among piles of other huge named skaters. Peralta made more Bones Brigade videos – Future Primitive in 1985, and the famous Search for Animal Chin in 1987. There are many, many more. Skateboarding began influencing clothing styles, music and culture.

Unfortunately, near the end of the 80’s, skateboarding started to dive in popularity again. Vert skateboarding quickly lost popularity, and most skaters only rode street. Each time skateboarding has fallen in popularity, it has fallen a little less. But these dips in popularity have huge impacts on pro skaters. Pure vert skaters like Tony Hawk had a very difficult time holding on through the late 80’s and early 90’s. The stress on Tony Hawk was incredible, and he even lost his first wife during this time.

Vert skateboarding took a dive in fame in the early 90s, but skateboarding still remained, though it became primarily street. It was then that Mike Vallely and Natas Kaupas came on the scene and pushed street skateboarding even further.

Skateboarding started to grow again in popularity in the 90’s, this time with a more raw, edgy, and dangerous attitude. This coincides with the rise of more angry punk music, and the general discontent with the current system that raged throughout this time frame. Call it discontent, or call it Post Modern frustration, but the image of the poor, angry skater punk came to the surface loud and proud. Interestingly, this only helped to fuel skateboarding’s popularity.

In 1995, ESPN held their first Extreme Games, in Rhode Island. This first X Games was a huge success, and helped pull skateboarding closer to the mainstream, and closer to being accepted by the general population (read more in the History of the X Games). In 1997 the first Winter X Games were held, and “Extreme Sports” were classified. Plenty of skaters resent the way skateboarding has slowly moved from underground to mainstream. However, the X Games did bring vert skateboarding back into popularity. The X Games and competitions like that have continued to keep vert skateboarding popular, even though vert few skaters actually ride real vert ramps. Vert skateboarding has slowly become a much loved spectator sport.

Since 2000, attention in the media and products like skateboarding video games, children’s skateboards and commercialization have all pulled skateboarding more and more into the mainstream. The benefit of this is that, of course, skaters are more accepted, and the assumption that all skaters are criminals is slowly being torn down. Also, with more money being put into skateboarding, there are more skateparks, better skateboards, and more skateboarding companies to keep innovating and inventing new things.

However, there is a large group of skaters who miss the underground days, and who strongly disagree with the way skateboarding has been made more mainstream. One benefit of skateboarding is that it is a very individual activity. There is no right or wrong way to skate. However, if skateboarding is officially classified as a “sport”, many skaters fear that this freedom will die out. There is currently a great deal of concern about skateboarding becoming an Olympic sport (read Skateboarding in the Olympics? for more).

But, with all this history crammed into such a short period of time, it’s easy to see that no one knows where skateboarding will truly go from here. Skateboarding still hasn`t stopped evolving, and skaters are coming up with new tricks all the time. Boards are also continuing to evolve, as companies try to make them lighter and stronger, or try to improve on their performance. Skateboarding has always been about personal discovery and pushing oneself to the limit, but where will skateboarding go from here? Wherever skaters continue to take it.