For a couple of years there, starting around 1973, nobody knew what direction the newly-revived sport of skateboarding was going to go. Or nobody cared, is the better way to put it. We were just ridiculously stoked on urethane wheels, and making it up as we went. That comes through clear as a bell in the video above, and in this article by Steve Jones, "Skateboarding: the Dry-Boogie Revival," which ran in the December 1974 issue of SURFER. It was like, Thank you Cadillac and Chicago and Metaflex for the wheels and trucks, and ohh those new encased bearings look rad too, but we'll take it from here. The DIY-ness of the period plays my heartstrings. The garage-made decks. The wholesale borrowing and stealing from other sports. That's author Steve Jones himself in the photo at the bottom of the page, bearded and clocking 30 MPH, in tennis shoes, motorcycle leathers, a hockey helmet, and gardening gloves. Cause that's how we rolled!

Waves, winds, hills . . . all are forms of potential energy. The trick is to translate it into kinetic energy, to actuate potential, to make it jump to our side of the mirror. Surrounded by tools, we rush to translate efficiently. Now, before the brand names and cigar-men take over, consider the skateboard as a translating device.

There’s a set amount of power in any given hill situation, and juicing it—juicing yourself with it—is a vital equation involving you and the hill. Your vehicle modifies the equation, provides the interface. The better your board, the more in-tune your skills are, the closer to the hill you get.

Assuming you can key yourself up to do some limit-hunting, and assuming you can find a hill (our government and our businessmen have graciously provided us with huge, fallow, sloped plains of asphalt), your equipment can make a difference. It has evolved from homemade to mass-made to the fringes of well-made. Amen.


All of the polyurethane-based wheels are good. The durometer difference between Metaflex, Olo, Cadillac, and Control is very small, no matter what the ads says. They all wear well, offer fine traction on asphalt or cement, and are quieter than the old clay composition wheels. The lower profile, two-inch wheels are quicker turning. Polyurethane wheels are to skateboarding what fiberglass glass and foam were to surfing.


The loose-ball-type are still more common, but precision bearings are quieter, longer rolling, generally indestructible, and never require lubrication. We don’t need the noise anyway.


Flex is interesting—I'm looking forward to what happens in a slalom competition with it. Many good points for both flex and rigid boards stop me from stepping on toes. More important is the placement of the hardware on the board. Wheelbase to taste, but 16" or so seems to be plenty, even for a 35-plus MPH downhill run—anything over 16" limits your short-turning ability. The hottest setups are mounting the hardware on stringers attached to the bottom of the board itself, giving a ‘‘fender" area for the wheels, which allows far more radical turns. You can’t dig a wheel into the board with this system, and 360's are possible at fairly slow speeds.


Another gusto-grabbing innovation from California's Tahoe region. They’re like abbreviated water ski slalom bindings, so you can step out easily enough. They are incredible for powering frontside turns into 360’s, or hopping. Strap yourself in and fly.


Century (Metaflex trucks) and Chicago are the best. Some of the Roller Derby stuff is also very good. Generally speaking, the beefier the hanger (mounting plate), the better the quality.

I went to the hills of LA with a group of madmen from Nevada City and Tahoe to see what we could do. I saw it all that day. High-wire acts on the curbs. The slalom course of cans. Gary "Mucho" Maass blazing at 30 MPH-plus, leaving his pound of flesh (and no more thanks to Bell helmets). All of it. It’s just a matter of footwork before we see some really awesome acrokinetics.

And the runs! Feeling the lines and limits of gravity, with the road just nipping your back on an inside turn. Rainbow turns.

Skateboarding is a different pursuit than surfing or skiing. There’s no good reason to make it an imitation of anything else. It will develop all on its own if we keep minds open. If we hold out for intelligently-made equipment, we’ll get it. And get down.

[Top photo by Art Brewer, bottom photo by Krisak]

"SKATEBOARDING: THE DRY-BOOGIE REVIVIAL," STEVE JONES (1974)

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