Chairman of the Board
By Kevin Ott
Staff Writer
The skaters have the DNA of lemurs and butterflies in their boards, the bikers telekinetic control over the BMX frames that extend from their hindquarters.
They might hover millimeters over the ground as they seem to skid along it, but they’re moving too fast for anyone to tell.
The art they practice is delicate. Like a praying mantis or one of Homer’s sirens, it is beautiful and deadly.
It still struggles for respect.
When the BMX bikers, in-line skaters and skaeboarders gathered Tuesday at Camp Woodward to watch Tony Hawk’s Gigantic Skatepark Tour, they forgot for a few hours the times people called the police on them, the times they were shooed out of parking lots, the times they were told to go back to the skate parks where they belong.
They forgot how hard it is to practice a sport that, for all the video games and B-movies and ESPN2 specials, has yet to be accepted by the mainstream, and instead watched the masters at their best.
Hawk was there, sliding up ramps and stairway railings in defiance of everything Newton has led us to believe about gravity.
At 33, Hawk is the world’s premier skateboarder, the first ever to perform a 900-degree spin in midair ­ two and a half turns from a starting position.
He invented the tour to bring top-rated skaters and BMX riders to skate parks around the world and to create awareness that skateboarding, BMX and in-line skating ­ collectively called “action sports” ­ aren’t anything to be afraid of.
They did ollies, varials, 720s and kickflip mule grabs. There were no-footers, no-handed backflips and popshuvit nosegrinds.
It’s a far cry from afterschool team sports.
Ben Kiggen, 17, has been on a skateboard since he was 13. He lives in State College and skates at the local skate park, on Penn State University’s campus or wherever else he can. He loved the opportunity to see his idols in action.
“I don’t see any big skaters from California that much,” he said. When he does, it’s usually on one of those black-labeled highlight videos that circulate among skating crowds like beach balls at a rock concert.
Lots of people still associate skaters with drug use and delinquency, Kiggen said. Certainly, there are always the requisite bad apples, but as action sports gain a greater following, the numbers of good kids at skate parks increase.
His neighborhood got together to build a skate park a while ago, which seemed like a good move at the time. But skating is all about finding new challenges, and most skate parks don’t present much difficulty for the accomplished skater.
So skaters look for new challenges. And the locals get angry. You’ve got a skate park, they say ­ why can’t you skate there? Sometimes, they call the police.
Kiggen, a clean-cut, soft-spoken boy with short red hair, once ran afoul of a cop who was none too happy with his pastime.
“He got up in my face and started yelling at me. He was this close,” Kiggen said, holding his palm an inch from his nose.
Hawk, who invented 80 skateboarding moves himself, embodies creativity. And he’s making parents who might not normally allow their kids to get into action sports to have second thoughts. “He obviously demonstrates that you can make a living doing something countercultural,” said David Wise, a Stat College resident who brought his son to the event.
Back at the half pipe, where Hawk hung in the air for seconds on end and twirled his skateboard beneath his feet like a miracle of science, the oohs and ahhs alone might have been enough to change the face of action sports forever. Adam Jungers, a BMXer from Atlanta, wasn’t watching.
He was sipping a smoothie on the lawn a few hundred feet away. But he smiled as he listened, and as he thought of the future.
“Every person who watches this sees how amazing it is. And that’s one more person who won’t kick us out of a parking lot.”