Tampa Bay doesn't really have any one giant mainstream claim to fame. I mean, the Bucs won the Super Bowl, the Lightning won the Stanley Cup, and I guess everybody who's ever been on vacation has heard of Clearwater Beach, but we're not exactly where the Declaration of Independence was signed, or even the home of the world's largest ball of rubber bands.
We do have our own little off-kilter, below-the-radar accomplishments of note, however. After all, Tampa was the Death Metal Capital of the World. Jim Morrison briefly attended St. Petersburg Junior College. Angela Bassett went to high school in Pinellas County. An interesting scene in the movie Goodfellas takes place at a fictitious location called "Tampa Zoo." One out of every four episodes of COPS was filmed here.
And in the world of skateboarding, Tampa Bay is a pretty big deal.
The Skatepark of Tampa is one of the oldest and most well-known (mostly) indoor skateboarding facilities in the country. (And I don't know for sure whether or not this is true, but somebody told me the other day that the cement "snake run" and bowl at the northwest end of downtown Tampa — the one politically incorrectly known as "The Bro Bowl" due to its proximity to a housing project — is the oldest concrete structure built specifically for skating in the United States.)
SPoT hosts a prestigious annual professional competition, and what is generally considered the most popular and important amateur contest in the sport; in fact, co-owner Brian Schaeffer has parlayed the Tampa amateur event into a nationwide circuit known as the Damn Am series. Tampa has also produced several top pros over the years, the most famous of whom is probably a guy named Mike Frazier.
I used to skate competitively as an amateur back in the mid to late '80s, during the sport's second massive surge in popularity (we're currently living through the extended tail end of the third). Apparently, so did everybody else; it seems like two-thirds of my friends used to ride for a shop, or a clothing company, or an equipment manufacturer. I never really excelled, and nerves tended to make my actual contest runs messy, but I once took second place at an event, winning a brand new deck (that's the part you actually put your feet on, dude) that I broke days later.
Like a lot of kids who thought they'd be destroying public property and hurting themselves at high speeds forever, I eventually traded skateboarding in for drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, playing in bands and not working. I've never really been without a board since, but literal years sometimes go by between the times I pull it out and go pushing around the neighborhood, looking for a curb to fool around on.
Not everybody I knew parted ways with skating to the degree I did. Plenty of guys my age still get on their boards on a regular basis, and some of them rip; Kevin Coss, a talented guy who plays bass in the Tampa punk bands Pseudo Heroes and Pink Lincolns, is probably my favorite "old man" to watch — I once saw him do a manual (that's a wheelie on a skateboard, dude, and no, I have no idea why it's called that) all the way around the deck that surrounds SPoT's shallow wooden bowl without once spilling his can of Budweiser. But adult skateboarders are a different breed. They're essentially nuts, and I never really felt fully entrenched in that scene.
Still, when I hang around with people who talk skateboarding on a regular basis, it always makes me decide that first thing tomorrow I'm going to take my board over to somebody's backyard ramp or one of the small, largely shaped-wood skate facilities that have cropped up around Pinellas County, and have at it. Then "first thing tomorrow" comes and goes while I'm sleeping off "late last night," and I forget about it until the next time somebody starts talking skateboarding.
When a buddy mentioned in passing during a party last week that there was a concrete skatepark tucked away in south St. Pete, though, I promised myself I'd get down there at the first opportunity. Visions of curvy, inclined runs spilling into deep, smooth pools filled my brain.
I finally found the place, only to discover a different kind of skatepark — a "plaza," an assortment of stairs, railings, drop-offs and angled banks designed for the sort of urban guerrilla street skating so popular these days. But I was there, and there weren't any snotty little kids (or better skaters my age) around to jeer.
So I pushed off, sliding around the course, pulling some easy, lazy tricks and just trying to recapture my balance, that feeling of being completely comfortable and in control while rolling at speed. Half an hour later, I was sweaty, sore from falling and completely out of breath, every cigarette I'd ever smoked, every mile I'd never run, tightening every blood vessel in my lungs down to a wheezy pinhole. It felt good, like I'd just had a workout. I also felt like shit, the world's oldest fake athlete. A few rudimentary moves came quickly. Most, nearly all, didn't.
But I wasn't leaving before I pulled at least one semi-impressive trick. I settled on an ollie to railslide (that's where you pop the tail to make the board hop into the air, and turn it sideways to slide along a curb, corner or rail while perpendicular to it) on a cement ledge about two feet high.
It didn't happen. A dozen failed attempts and one painful split-legged groin-stretch later, I gave up and went home.
I went back again today. There were a couple of young kids there, dicking around, but I didn't care. I'd survived the first time back on the board; it couldn't be any worse.
I fell. I sprawled. I sent my board skittering across the concrete to slam into walls, into water bottles, into some little dude's helmet that was sitting empty on the ground.
And finally, finally, I pulled the trick.
Maybe I'm not such an old man after all.
I think I'll go back tomorrow.
This article appears in Nov 9-15, 2005.