David Browne - Amped: How Big Air, Big Dollars, and a New Generation Took Sports to the Extreme

Amped

How Big Air, Big Dollars, and a
New Generation Took Sports to the Extreme

David Browne

First published in Great Britain 2005

Copyright David Browne 2004

This electronic edition published 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The right of David Browne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 2041 4

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For Maeve Rose,
who will not be allowed to attempt any of these activities without express written permission (and a helmet)

Contents

On one of my first research trips for this book, I ventured to a newly opened skatepark in Greenport, a town of winter-lashed homes and waterfront businesses on Long Island's North Fork. On this late-winter afternoon, roughly two dozen skateboarders, BMX bikers, and in-liners were practicing grinds, kickturns, box-jumps, and drop-ins; from a distance, the sight resembled a jumping-bean convention. Taking it in while huddled on aluminum bleachers and sipping warm beverages were the riders' parents, and I joined two of them, Bob and Phyllis, who were keeping watch on their ten-year-old son Timothy. The couple ran an auto-body repair shop an hour and a half's drive away and, in a startling indication of the newfound acceptance of these sports, were completely supportive of their son's seemingly risky pastime. At Timothy's request, they had bought him a skateboard for a Christmas present; for Easter, he received a new pair of skate shoes.

"I don't see a lot of the kids he knows joining teams," Bob said. Behind him, the baseball diamond of the local high school.

"It's much more sophisticated now, isn't it?" Phyllis added, checking out the other, older riders in the park. "The kids seem nice. Look they're giving each other tips." She observed Timothy, who wore knee and elbow pads and a helmet. "That was pretty good, the way he was going back and forth a few times," she said. Bob, who wore a Mets jacket, nodded.

After an hour, Timothy skated over to them. He had short, light-brown hair and an open, outgoing manner, and his red sweatshirt bore a snowboarding logo. "My wrist hurts," he said, a little surprised. Pulling off his gear, he said, "I can't feel my shins. Or my butt."

His friend Dylan, who was smaller and wore glasses, critiqued the park. "This is all vert," he squeaked confidently. "But where I live, we have street skating."

"What does that mean?" Phyllis said, dumbfounded.

"I can't feel my wrist," Timothy muttered.

I asked what they preferred to call these sportsextreme, action, alternative?

"Wiping-out sports," Timothy said, grinning.

Then I asked why they pursued these activities if they were so bruised. "It's more action," Dylan said. "You get more hurt playing football." He said he had wrecked his first board while attempting a kickflip down the stairs at his school. "I put my foot through it and broke it," he explained.

"They let you do that?" Phyllis gasped.

"Yeah, at high school," Dylan said. "But not at elementary school."

"We can go down the stairs at our school," Timothy said.

"After it's closed, right?" Phyllis asked, concerned.

"Yeah, but they don't see us," her son explained.

"I don't wanna know" Phyllis said, shaking her head. "It's a whole other language."

She was right, of course: It was another language, not to mention another worlda parallel sports universe with its own stars, history, language, culture, and sensibility. It was a world, it turned out, with which I had had a few brushes over the years. As a scrawny preteen in New Jersey who had little interest in joining teams (especially after having dealt with the humiliation of being chosen last for one basketball squad), I eventually tried my hand at skateboarding which ended when winter arrived and, housebound, I accidentally rammed my board into one of my sister's feet as she stepped into the hallway. During the same period, I practiced wheelies on my banana-seat bike; many years later, I took a brief, doomed stab at in-line skating. As much as I tried, though, I was not especially adept at these activities, perhaps because I am not a particularly fearless person. I have a vivid childhood memory of trying to dive into a friend's backyard pool. Afraid of belly flopping or injuring myself, I stood paralyzed on the board for what felt like hours until finally my friend's father threw up his hands and walked away. I never did learn.

I wasn't meant for a life of such experiences, but others clearly were. As the decades rolled on, I watched, fascinated, as skateboarding and similar anti-team sports grew in scope and popularity. Evidently, a sizable portion of the public was rejecting traditional sportsand the values they entailedand replacing them with physical activities that stressed the individualistic and the idiosyncratic. I saw and heard about the increased levels of participation in skateboarding, snowboarding, and bicycle motocross; I noticed the stream of movies, TV shows, and commercials that utilized their imagery. I watched as snowboarding was featured in the Olympics. I read about skate-shoe companies posting gains of $50 million. As a pop-music writer by day, I observed action-sport exhibitions on the sidelines at rock festivals. By the nineties, the so-called "extreme" sports worldwhich also came to include freestyle motocross riders, wakeboarders, mountain boarders, downhill skateboarders, snowmobile racers, street lugers, downhill mountain bikers, wall climbers, and any number of other, more questionable activitieswas not only thriving but had become a vast, valid, and significant community and industry. It comprised millions of participants and raked in millions of dollars, and like the punk rock with which it identified, it was an irascible, unconventional subculture continually grappling with issues of integrity and identity, especially in the wake of its increasing acceptance.

Eventually, my own anxieties eased somewhat, and I learned how to kayak and pilot a mountain bike off-road. Still, my victories were nothing compared to the continuing numbers who plunged down ramps or slopes or flew into the air on their bikes and motorcycles. If only for myself, I wanted to know why anyone would willingly do such things. I wanted to learn about the iconoclastic spirit that fostered this world and what it said about the culture and the generation behind it. This, I felt, was a story as much about the riders and their worldview as the sports themselves. Who were these people, and why did they take to half-pipes and isolated mountain trails over football fields and basketball courts? How much more ubiquitous would it all become? Questions such as those eventually led to this book.