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Skaters Over 50 and I can’t Ollie?

skaters over 50 ollieskaters over 50 ollie

One summer morning in ’78 as I was headed up to Winchester Skatepark in San Jose, California, I was thinking hard about some moves I wanted to go for. I started on the Washboard, a set of moguls you pumped through that propelled you up this huge beautiful wall; it was like skating toward the sky. After that I hit the halfpipe, where I pushed myself to go higher and higher until I reached that spooky weightless feeling at the top.

Then I headed to the pool.

Back in the day it was all about pools and aerials. I had yet to do an aerial but I dreamed of them over and over.

When I rolled into the pool at Winchester I   decided that would be the day I caught air. I started pushing myself harder and harder, pumping the board for the momentum I’d need to leave the pool and shoot up past the lip. And on one particular run, when I knew I had the speed I’d need, I arced up and over the coping – just like I dreamed I would – and floated back toward the pool to touch back down. But a truck on my big Powell deck caught the lip as I re-entered. As I left my board up on the coping and fell backward toward the bottom of the pool, I stretched out my right arm to break my fall.

My fall is not what broke.

When I looked down my right forearm was bent into a shape that’s hard to describe. After surgery to straighten it back out, and a week in the hospital, and months in a cast (all spent not skating), I started to drift from skateboarding. Pretty soon I was working as much as I could to save and buy a car – and then girls came into the picture in a pretty big way and skateboarding started to seem like a kid thing to me. And at that age I was trying to be anything but a kid.

Eventually I finished high school and joined the Service. Then I went to college, started a family, found a career and got a mortgage – pretty much in that order. Life was busy, a little too busy to skate. But whenever I saw a kid on a board I’d stop and watch for a minute, you know?

In 2000, when my son Charlie turned 8, I bought him a skateboard for his birthday – and something rad happened: Once I had that board together and stepped on it to “show him how,” I didn’t want to get off the thing. It was like part of me – a part I’d put away – came back. That part of me that lived to skate rolled over from his long-ass nap and said, “Hey, where’s my board?” So I bought a new-old-stock Bahne Rocker, onto which I mounted Indys and OJ’s (just like I coveted back in the day), and Charlie and I started skating parks together. But things were different now. Skateparks were different.

The first thing I noticed at the parks? There was no one my age, at least not that I ever saw. And there were few, if any, pools. The parks instead featured odd structures like rails, and steps, and, well, more rails. Gone were the days of big, wide decks and sweet, soft urethane. Gone also were the days of pools and halfpipes.

But now it’s 2016 and things are better, at least to this old skate rat. Parks have pools again, and popsicle decks are now occasionally seen with big soft wheels on them. I’m even noticing board shapes evolving (devolving?) back to what they looked like in decades past. But here’s something else I’ve noticed: There’s a sort of rift between old school and new school, between “vert skaters” and “street skaters.”

And I don’t like it.

You know, if you want you can get all hung up that “skateboard” now means a popsicle deck, and that “longboard” refers to just about everything else (even if it’s 27”) … OR … you can remember that it’s all skateboarding – and age, or skating style, isn’t really a divisive element.

Why is it people think the way they do things is the way things should be done? Is that human nature? Maybe – or maybe it’s just one of those ideas that grow from distrust or fear. Well, the best way to erase a fear is to face a fear – and I faced one recently. Okay, maybe not a genuine fear, maybe more of a shortcoming – a hole in my skating repertoire, so to speak.

skaters over 50, Concrete waves magazine, vintage, skate life, skate history, skateboarding, vancouver, canada, ontarioYou see, I don’t ollie.

It’s not that I don’t want to – it’s just that I don’t know how. Really. No one ever showed me, and I never tried to learn. I left skateboarding the year ollies came on the scene, and was away for over two decades. That trick was a rite of passage for a different generation of skaters. I think my own prejudice made me see it as somehow “not really skating,” and, I hate to admit, the symbol of a change skateboarding had undergone that I didn’t like.

But one of the cool things about being my age is that life’s become easier to figure out. I mean, hell, at this age there’s very little I haven’t already done, so how hard could fixing an old prejudice be?

Maybe not as easy as I thought.

I figured I’d need instruction, so I went to my local skate shop, Lighthouse Skates, down by the beach here in Santa Barbara, and enlisted the help of Naren Porter Kasbati, a street skater who runs the place. Naren agreed to help, so we met up at the skatepark a few days later. His offer was if I could learn to ollie, he’d also teach me to kickflip.

I had high hopes – I really did. I thought, “How hard could it be, right?” Naren said just pop the tail with one foot and push the board with the other. Really? A two-step process and that’s it? Dude, I thought, I’ll be rockin’ these things in no time. I mean, sure, I’m getting older, but I’m still athletic. Just last week I rolled my longboard 27 miles in under three hours. So I’m going to pop a board into the air and land on it? Big whoop.

An hour – and gawd knows how many pop/push combos – later, I still hadn’t done what you would call an honest-to-goodness ollie. I could get the front wheels off the ground, and I’m pretty sure a back wheel even came up a time or two, but a real ollie, where the whole board is up a foot or two (or even a few inches!) off the ground? That wasn’t happening.

Now, Naren is a nice kid, and the whole time he kept a great attitude, saying things like, “Good job!” and “You almost had it that time!” But a John Gavin ollie was turning out to be like the Loch Ness Monster – nowhere to be found.

So what did we do? Moved on to the kickflip! Which, by the way, you have to be able to do an ollie to even attempt. But you know what? It wasn’t that bad. In fact, it was fun just trying. Soon Naren and I were trying to do them side by side – and by “trying” I mean he was actually doing them and I was actually not (though one time my board did rotate half way ’round and land on its top – and I’m calling that a win).

Here’s the truth: It was a blast giving those tricks a go – and I laughed my ass off more than once, even while landing on my ass. Am I any good at them? Well, no. But you know what? I was skating. At a skatepark. With other skaters. And I freaking love that!

We’re all skaters, right? Yes – yes were are. We do this thing because we love rolling a board along, and the feeling it gives us. For me, that means pushing a longboard a long way and careening down the occasional hill. For others, it means trying and mastering crazy new tricks. But it’s all skateboarding. All of it.

So get out there and get your skate on. If you’re older and a kid ollies past you, show some camaraderie and say “Hey.” And if you’re younger and some geezer like me is in your way? Remember that, if you’re lucky, someday you too will be where I am: just enjoying the stoke (even if it sometimes comes with the aroma of Icy-Hot these days).

Next, I think I’ll give downhill/sliding a try – I mean, how hard could it be, right?  By: John Gavin  Photos: Adam Gray Thanks to Michael Brooke of Concrete Wave Magazine.

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