The first craze

In the early to mid 1960s, skateboarding really took off. Surfboard manufacturers such as Hobie undertook mass production of skateboards and, in 1965, the skateboarding National Championships were broadcast on TV, including events such as freestyle and downhill slalom. Freestyle tricks during this time consisted mostly of balancing acts like wheelies, weaving in and out of cones, and the famous barrel jump, where a skateboarder approaches a row of barrels at speed and leaps off his boards, over the barrels to (hopefully) land on another skateboard positioned at the other end.

Skateboarding's popularity at this time was further boosted by a national publication, Skateboarder Magazine. However, such instant and massive popularity was revealed to be somewhat of a fad when, in 1966, Hobie's sales figures dropped drastically and Skateboarder Magazine ceased publication. Nobody really knows why skateboarding crashed so dramatically but many people indicate the instability of clay wheels (any obstruction caused them to jam and the rider went flying), the fickle nature of the media spotlight and a lack of interesting things to do once you had learned the basics.

Skateboarding did not return on any large scale until the 1970s with surfer Fred Gainsman's invention of polyurethane wheels and specialised trucks allowing skaters to manoeuvre their boards more efficiently. At the beginning of this era, skateboard decks moved from wooden construction to composites such as fibreglass. These thinner models, often coloured yellow and known as banana boards, were much harder to balance on than today’s wider wooden skateboards. However the extra grip provided by polyurethane wheels allowed a more radical style of riding and in the 1970s, amongst the decrepitude of California's most famous seaside slum, a bunch of bored teenage outcasts took skateboarding to a whole new level.

Dog Town and Z Boys

The Z-boys were a group of youths local to the 1970s seaside slum district of Venice beach. Mostly from broken or troubled homes, the Z-boys would congregate around the Zephyr surfshop (hence the name Z-boy) and spend all their spare time surfing. Then, when the waves were no good, they went skating. The gang developed a low surfing style where their bodies were almost touching the waves and they skated in the same way.

This new ultra-stylised form of riding a skateboard had its national debut when they attended the Del-Mar National Skateboarding competition. Despite the new technology available, the other competitors had not moved on since the 60s, competing in terms of tedious balance tricks, headstands and stationary turns. With their bad boy skating style, the Z-boys came onto the tarmac and presented something new, something edgy and something everyone wanted to be a part of. The judges didn't know how to score what the Z-boys did but it didn't matter - the crowd went wild.

When the California drought of 1976-77 hit, skating found a new home in the disused backyard pools of abandoned holiday homes. The Z-boys would descend on a new location, pump out any remaining sludge and clean the pool. Their ambition was to get to the lip (the top edge of the pool) and their knowledge of surfing allowed them to master this completely foreign environment. Eventually they learnt how to pivot and grind on their trucks along the pool edge. Finally, when Tony Alva did the first front-side air (jumping from the top of the pool, turning in the air and landing back on the incline again) vert skating as we know it began and skateboarding was changed forever.

With this new wave of popularity, organised business started cashing in on the idea of vert skating and skateparks began opening up to the public. They could not stand up to America's litigation culture, however, and a high incidence of accidents forced most skateparks to close. As practitioners of an urban youth sport largely marginalised by the mainstream, skateboarders usually did not have the money or resources to build themselves ramps. Media attention switched off the subject and once again skating was seen to die in the public eye.