victoire*s_slam: The Skater - To be or not to be?

Sam is an out and out skater. Before the whole baby-thing, skating is his life and even while Alicia’s pregnancy he goes skating if everything is outgrowing him. But what are the “distinctive features” of a REAL skater? Here are the results of my internet research:

The Skater - his appearance:

Skate punk (sometimes called skate core or skate rock) is really popular among skateboarders. In actual fact, skate punk is a musical style, a subgenre of punk rock and fuses the intensity of hardcore punk and thrash with more melodic songwriting. Skate punk started in mid 1980's California, where skateboarding became really popular and was considered a form of rebellion. Bands such as RKL, NOFX, Stalag 13, and Suicidal Tendencies were among the first wave of skate punk bands, whose members were and are often skateboarders themselves.

Now we know what music a skateboarder listens to - ROCK! =) According to that, many skateboarders refer to this music, what involves the fact that they also dress like „skate punks“.

Yes, I know that many fancy skaters this way:

But there are also lots of “normal” skateboarders who just wear their Charhartt cap, Ethnies clothes, Billabong bag and Converse shoes...

So, this is the skateboarder the way I know him:

The Culture&History - from where it all came from:

At first skateboarding tied to the culture of surfing. Everybody who saw the film “Lords of Dogtown” knows the commencements. The persons who didn't, here's the trailer:

Skateboarders were always judged as parts of the dirty, rebellious, non-conforming youth and it was and still is in common that the appearance of crime and drugs were and still are in some parts of America higher in the areas of skate parks. For this reason certain cities still oppose the building of skate parks in their neighborhood.

The fact with the crime and the drugs is true but like in almost everything, you can’t lump them all together. I think in Europe skateboarding has an other meaning as in America, maybe here it is more like a sport than a attitude towards life.

Also films like “Grind” and “Gleaming the Cube” have helped people to show that their prejudices against the “stereotypical” skateboarder are not always right and that group spirit is supposed to heavily influence the members of the skateboarder community.

"In presentations of this sort, showcasing of criminal tendencies is absent, and no attempt is made to tie extreme sports to any kind of illegal activity." (sourced form wikipedia.org)

Even the video games which were made popular by Tony Hawk and in return which let Tony Hawk‘s name become known also by persons who haven‘t anything to do with skateboarding, this video games made skateboarding culture become mainstream - in a positive AND negative way. Maybe because of Tony Hawks try to stay popular, he knifed his own culture and disposed it to money for his own…
All in all skateboarding was, is and will be a nice hobby, even if you just focus on the sport aspect.

Trick skating - degenerate art:

When people started to build skateparks and elaborate ramp skateing, the invention of many tricks began. In 1976, skateboarding was transformed by the invention of the ollie by Alan "Ollie" Gelfand.

The ollie was adapted to flat ground by Rodney Mullen in 1982. Mullen also invented the "Magic Flip", which was later renamed the Kickflip, as well many other tricks including, the 360 Kickflip, which is a 360 pop shove it and a kickflip in the same motion. All by Rodney Mullen invented tricks are listed in his German "Wikipedia"-Entry. The flat ground ollie has formed the basis of many street skating tricks.

In "Slam", Nick Hornby mentions many skateboarding tricks. Here the most important tricks are shown:

First of all: The Ollie