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Birth of the Board
29 June 2002

When Jay Adams stepped into the arena at the Del Mar National Skateboarding Championships in 1975, the art of skateboarding changed forever. The elfin 15-year-old, with his girly blond hair and blue eyes, did things with a plank of wood that no one at that time would have dared to imagine.

In footage from the event, newly incorporated into an award-winning skateboarding documentary, Dogtown and Z-Boys, Adams is seen crouched low, flicking his board into the air and bouncing deftly off the sides of the arena like a pinball. Using his hands to propel wild turns off the ground, he seems as unselfconscious about his display as his fellow competitors with their 1960s-style nose wheelies and stiff acrobatics, appear awkward.

Dogtown and Z-Boys, which scooped two awards at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival among other accolades, locates the birth of modern skateboarding among the discarded needles and dilapidated boardwalks of Dogtown, a run-down beachfront area of Los Angeles, slumped between Santa Monica and Venice. In the documentary, Dogtown is the place "where the debris meets the sea".

Once a popular resort packed with funfairs and parks, by the 1970s the neighbourhood had become a graffiti-stained stamping ground for street gangs and extreme surfers. When the waves were limp, children such as Adams, who had been surfing since the age of five, took to skateboards, deriving a style from the low-slung moves of surfers. Jeff Ho, Craig Stecyk and Skip Engblom, owners of Dogtown's Jeff Ho and Zephyr Production Surf Shop, gathered the teen skateboarders around them and trained them up. The Zephyr Skating Team, or the Z-Boys, as they were known, came into being.

Within a year of debuting at the 1975 Del Mar competition, Adams and his honchos had come to define the New Cool. When California experienced terrible droughts in the mid-1970s, the Zephyr crew discovered the delights of skating empty swimming pools. Television film crews followed the Z-Boys on illegal pool rides, filming their athletic manoeuvres and their equally athletic flights from pursuing police. Skateboarding had given birth to its first set of international heroes: Zephyr team members were soon endorsing skate companies, appearing on the covers of magazines and touring internationally. Z-Boy Tony Alva even had a skate bowl named after him in London.

The documentary, which leaps from footage of the Z-Boys to present-day interviews with former Zephyr members and other skate-savvy commentators, was written and directed by Stacy Peralta, who was a member of the Zephyr Team. "Making the movie was a way for me to get in touch with a part of my past," he says. "It reminded me of who I was."

It is no surprise that aficionados such as Peralta are keen to recoup something of skateboarding's roots. In its 50-year history, skateboarding has come in and out of fashion, changing its identity with almost every decade. At various times regarded as a fad, a guerrilla pursuit, and a legitimate sport, skateboarding is experiencing a renaissance, driven to a large extent by media and commerce.

"Dogtown and Z-Boys is an important film because it helps us to understand what skating grew from, rather than just seeing it as something that appears on every commercial today," says T. Eric Monroe, president of the United Skateboarding Association, a leading US skateboarding body.

According to the International Association of Skateboard Companies, there are more than 20m skateboarders globally, of whom 16m are in the US. Skateboards and skateboard-related products generate $1.4bn dollars in annual retail sales. With skateboarding featuring prominently in international sports events such as the Triple Crown and X Games and with leading television networks such as Fox Sports and ESPN televising skateboarding to millions of viewers worldwide, the sport is reaching more people than ever.

Similarly, skateboard fashions are being worn by youngsters regardless of whether they can skate or not, and pro skateboarders such as Tony Hawk and Lance Mountain are making millions of dollars in product endorsements and videogame royalties each year.

"A lot of corporations like to have their products associated with skateboarding," says Monroe. "But three or four years ago, people wouldn't talk to us."

Even Hollywood is getting its skates on and has acquired the rights to the life stories of three Zephyr Team members. The Lords of Dogtown, the working title for a fictional feature film based on the Z-Boys, is scheduled to appear in cinemas next summer.

Skateboarding may be capturing mainstream attention, but Peralta thinks the sport will always remain on the edge.

"The fact that you can skateboard anywhere there's concrete keeps the sport subversive," he says. "Doing things like sneaking into empty pools gives kids a taste for riding terrain that wasn't designed for that purpose." Never mind empty pools - in some parts of the world, skateboarding is illegal, full stop: in San Francisco, for instance, anyone caught skateboarding can be fined up to $80.

In spite of that city's tough stance on skateboarding, Dogtown and Z-Boys is encouraging not only children to practice "ollies" and "kickflips", but adults too. At FTC Skateboards in San Francisco, store manager Tyler Buchanan says that since the documentary was released, a disproportionate number of over-30s are coming in to buy skateboards.

"The older guys have been coming in, filled with nostalgia from seeing the movie," he says. "It's great for business. I just hope they don't hurt themselves."