SK8.

by PHILIP DAWDY
pdawdy@wweek.com

Missing two front teeth, Sage Bolyard looks perpetually impish, but he's actually witty and ebullient. A Portland native, Bolyard lives off of Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard with his girlfriend. His life is not exactly recession-proof; he does concrete work in the summer and picks up stray painting or roofing jobs the remainder of the year. His drink of choice is Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Bolyard--and the culture he represents--is unwittingly at the heart of the most spectacular and comic City Hall battle of 2000.

He's a skateboarder. More specifically, he's a hardcore skateboarder, the kind of man who wears hooded sweatshirts and tosses around terms like gnarly, popping and brother.

Last week, City Commissioner Charlie Hales effectively, though unintentionally, came to the defense of Bolyard and the hardcore skating fraternity, by wedging an ordinance through City Council that lifts the effective ban on skateboarding, in-line skating and even Razor-style scooters in Portland. Before Hales, skateboarding on any inch of pavement downtown used to carry a $297 ticket; it was the same deal in the rest of Portland between sundown and sunrise.

David McBride goes Mach where others only dare to go slow.

But after a City Council hearing that was a mix of political theatrics and civil-rights philosophy, Hales' ordinance set up a complicated arrangement allowing boarders to essentially become part of the transit mix.

Mayor Vera Katz and her supporters opposed the looser restrictions, arguing that their concern was safety--specifically, fears of cars running over skateboarders, skateboarders knocking over pedestrians, and skaters using curbs and curb cuts as launching pads, as Gregg Kantor, chair of the Association for Portland Progress, suggested. But beneath the safety squad's veneer was something else: an unease about skaters' longtime image as bad seeds, a rolling gang of slackers sporting hoodies, breeding a concern about what this subculture would introduce to the mix of shoppers and office workers in Portland's most important economic zone: downtown.

It's a stereotype Bolyard confirms and laughs off.

"Yeah, we're the bad boys with the bad stuff," he says. "We're young and dumb and thuggish, but we have our place."

Which raises the question: Who are these guys, anyway?

Despite the law excluding skaters from city streets and sidewalks, despite Portland's rough pavement and wet weather, this city has long been a hub of skateboarding.

Even though no one tracks their population, it's obvious that there are thousands of skateboarders in Portland. They cruise along Southwest 10th Avenue (illegally until the end of next month), stand in a chilly bus shelter awaiting Tri-Met or push off to classes at Portland State University. Top professional skaters like Matt Beach and Ethan Fowler live in the area.

Joanne Ferrero, Burnside's godmother, surveys the park.

But the pinnacle of all that is skating in Portland is Burnside Skate Park, easily the most famous skate park in the world. Even in California, Burnside is referred to as Mecca.

"It's the first ring in the trilogy," says Jake Phelps, editor of Thrasher, the San Francisco-based skateboarding magazine. "It's too bionic. Burnside is what all skate parks shall be compared against."

It is here that hardcore skaters spend as many as three hours a day honing their skills, pursuing the momentary dopamine rush they get from a perfect ride.

Forty thousand vehicles a day drive over Burnside Bridge's expansion joints. Underneath its east end sits a 10-year-old collection of quarter-pipes, half-pipes and bowls. Taken together, it's a parabolic sculpture--and an icon to American youth culture.

Even on a sleety, mid-December day, upwards of 40 skaters cycle through the park; on a summer weekend, the number can hit 400. None of Burnside's skaters wear helmets, unless they are young and their parents happen to be watching.

Their only concession to the cold is a secondhand windbreaker over their hooded sweatshirts. Other than that, they commonly wear jeans or trashed dungarees; their hair is typically short. On occasion, junior high schoolers stand around the park, their hair dyed violet or green, and eye the truly hardcore skaters--most of whom are older than 20. Bolyard--who will turn 30 next year--is a sponsored professional. That means he gets his equipment free of charge. On the highest level of prize money, shoe contracts and marketing are skaters like Tony Hawk, whose Pro Skater video game features Burnside.

With its wild wall murals--Jack Nicholson in The Shining, a skull-and-crossbones with a biker's bandanna, a Rottweiler with a studded collar--the place projects rowdiness. Several years ago one skater fathered a child in a long-since-removed tool shed, and last summer a young skater set fire to one portable toilet--trying to impress a woman, goes the story.

John Corbly spoke at City Council Dec. 20, bearing a stack of tickets skaters have received over the years and a message: Change the law.

"There is no best skater here," says Bolyard, just before shooting up the high east retaining wall, where he kicks back to gain speed, before shooting across to the 8-foot-high round bowl 90 feet away where he can execute whatever move pleases him at the moment. Frontside 50-50. Fakey-ollie-to-board. Handplant (a move he does as a warm-up).

In line with Burnside's ethos of no-pecking-order-allowed, there may be no "best" skater. But David McBride would have to come close.

McBride has brownish-gray eyes, and in his left nostril are two thin gold hoops. He's in his early 30s, a painter by trade and in remission from intestinal and testicular cancer. Skating Burnside is how he's processed his anger, chopped it up into manageable bits, he says.

On a recent afternoon with a raw eastern wind, he arrived wearing camouflage pants, a black fleece jacket, black Vans sneakers and a backpack with a skateboard strapped to it. He shucked off the pack and jacket. Then he dropped off a 10-foot-high wall and just flat-out bombed it--peaking at 30 miles per hour, "going Mach"--attacking the parabolas and pumping his thighs up and down to generate extra speed.

Eleven skaters stood on decks around the park. McBride dropped in 7 feet into the "square bowl" and circulated around it twice--like a ball in a roulette wheel's gutter--and then shot up the east retaining wall next to the rendering of Nicholson, dropped across the bowl (10 feet across and 6 feet deep), popped out and slid across the metal coping in a layback transfer slide, wheeled down the backside of the bowl and with two mighty leg kicks fired himself across the flat to the 8-foot-high round bowl at Burnside's west end. Five skaters watched but said nothing. McBride next executed an ollie-to-board, a common move rather like a surfer's cut-back at the top of a wave but with the--grindddd--disorienting sound of board and axle on cement, and blasted back across the flat. He picked up the low end of the retaining wall and shot back to a ledge where he stepped off, casual as you please.

Two hundred feet to the west is Interstate 5. Closer still, 15 semi-trailers are parked at right angles against the loading dock mouths of Pacific Fruit Company. Skaters like McBride and Bolyard will tell you that they are so focused on hitting the right spots to execute moves--and then pulling them off--that they never notice traffic 15 feet away on 2nd Avenue.

Over the next seven minutes, McBride repeated that same circuit three times. Then he donned his fleece jacket and slid on his backpack. All told, he'd been at Burnside for 10 minutes.

"I'd like to know what the g-forces are," he says. "When I'm up on the wall, I can feel my guts moving toward my back." He adds, "I go faster in the summer."

Burnside is considered Mecca not only because it set a casual engineering standard and an architectural target for all skate parks that followed, but because it was homegrown and hand-built, lending it immediate cachet among skaters the world over.

"If you're gnarly, you're going to prove yourself there," says Phelps, the editor of Thrasher.

In late 1990, the public right-of-way between 2nd and 3rd Avenues under Burnside Bridge was a flea market for junkies, alcoholics, prostitutes and drifters waiting to catch a freight train to Sacramento. Homeless men slept in abandoned cars; the pavement was littered with rigs for shooting heroin.

Except for days of high wind, rain seldom wet the pavement. A few skaters had futzed around the area before. Around the same time, a proposed skateboard park in Gabriel Park had been killed by neighbors (including Charlie Hales). Skaters had a need and access to a few bags of cement. So on a rainy Halloween, five skaters--whose identities remain sketchy, even to this day--troweled a cement ramp into place against a disused loading dock and retaining wall.

"There was the first ramp, the second and a third," Bolyard says. "We were clueless about construction, but the monster was alive."

They didn't even need to be stealthy about their unpermitted construction.

Joanne Ferrero, who runs a neighboring auto-parts warehouse, had seen the kids skating down there before; they'd been no problem. Plus, as she recalls, she knew about the Gabriel Park outcome and from talking to them that they wanted a place to skate. More than that, they passed her sniff test.

"They cleaned the place up," she says.

At first, some local businessmen were nervous; so were the police. Being a warehouse district, the neighborhood was already tough, a playground for thieves at night, and by day, filled with men wearing handlebar mustaches, watch caps and bomber jackets, posturing like longshoremen. Adding a collection of skateboarders could be dynamite.

"People around here were nervous, because they had a bad reputation," Ferrero says. "I mean we'd had graffiti around for years, but suddenly it's attributed to them."

She made it her business to know the skaters--they were right next door. More crucial than Bolyard was Mark "Red" Scott, who is credited with being Burnside's prime mover (today, he deflects questions about the park to others). Ferrero became the park's ambassador. At neighborhood association meetings, whenever anyone mouthed concerns, she laid out her observations: These presumed troublemakers were carting off years' worth of accumulated trash from the land, and, most important, their mere presence kept the junkies and prostitutes at bay.

"The skaters got surrounding businesses to support them," says Peter Finley Fry, a long-time planning consultant to the Central Eastside Industrial Council. "'We're going to drive off the bums' is what they said."

"These skateboarders are enterprising," Fry says. "The business owners kept the cops nodding their heads, and the city didn't have a clue what was happening. After nine months they woke up to the fact that they were trespassing on public property--and everyone starts freaking out. CEIC was the only one not freaking out."

In 1992, Portland's risk management bureau reported that the city was making itself a target for every personal-injury lawyer in town.

But skaters had acquired some allies. Suddenly, influential citizens like Bill Naito, former police chief Tom Potter and then-Central Precinct Capt. Dan Noelle began writing letters to Mayor Bud Clark on behalf of the park.

"East Precinct patrol officers report that since the park has existed, a previous pattern of theft from autos in the adjacent area has been significantly reduced," Potter wrote. "Also, nearby business people say vandalism and break-ins at their buildings have ceased." He coyly referred to the outcome as "an unexpected synergistic effect."

In June 1992, City Council passed an ordinance that would legitimize Burnside Skate Park as long as the skaters continued to properly maintain the site and were self-policing.

Eight years later, Portland police have no complaints about Burnside (despite the local joke that it's actually controlled by Pabst Blue Ribbon). According to Southeast Precinct Cmdr. Stan Grubbs, the park works as designed. On top of that, the City Attorney's Office reports that no legal claims have ever come from the park. During six lengthy visits to the park, in only one instance did this reporter observe anyone drinking; not once did he observe any drug use.

Which is not to say that hardcore skaters haven't expressed a talent for trouble when they weren't skating.

Skaters were always the ones mobbing into a house party, 40 strong and late, taking over the kitchen, muddying white oak floors and wool carpets, draining the keg, sweeping up a few of the impressionable women and heading for the next stop, according to several longtime Portland skaters.

"All for one and one for all," as Bolyard describes the guiding principle. "We were banned from so many parties."

Left to their own devices, skaters like Bolyard would not have changed the city's skateboarding law. This group of hardcore skaters, who largely fulfill mainstream society's demand for an incarnate caricature of underemployed and rowdy slackers, were comfortable with a Burnside-centric universe. Besides, while some of them skated Portland's streets and sidewalks, they were good enough skaters to turn the city's anti-skating law into a game of cops-and-skaters--and typically win.

It was a different class of skaters that prompted Charlie Hales to fight the mayor and downtown retailers--skaters like Joshua Springer, a 14-year-old in-line skater who attends Cleveland High and is the son of former state Sen. Dick Springer and current Multnomah County Commissioner Diane Linn.

In fact, the hardcore crowd has mixed feelings about the mainstream skaters who gave them their freedom.

In-line skaters, "fruit booters" in skater parlance, are particular objects of scorn. Their sport came to prominence in the early 1990s; in the minds of many skaters, they haven't paid their dues.

"Fuck them," says Bolyard. "Everything they've gotten, they've got off our backs. They've never put anything back in."

He understands their need to ride, too--just like the trick bikers.

But there are doubts that linger at the back of skaters' minds; they can't seem to accept that the political process is accommodating them, that soon those gnarly tickets will be history.

As last Wednesday's council session wound down, both Katz and City Commissioner Jim Francesconi--each opposes the new ordinance--said that the city needs to build more skate parks. The mayor even made the theatrical admission that she watches skateboarding competitions on ESPN.

Her statement didn't exactly appease the packed chambers, filled with skaters whose hoodies gave City Hall the air of an anarchist fashion show--one skater, John Corbly, slapped a large stack of tickets on the speakers table, and Nathan Childs made a impassioned civil-rights argument for lifting the ban and then concluded a response to one of Katz's questions by saying, "yada yada yada."

With a few minor language adjustments, commissioners Hales, Saltzman and Sten voted to lift the skating ban. Some skaters began to talk as if they had just been freed.

But not Sage Bolyard.

He'd been leaning against one of the chamber's Ionic columns, wearing a little gray hoodie, jeans and Vans sneakers. What did he think of everything?

"We did okay, I guess."

WE'RE HERE, WE'RE SKATERS, GET USED TO IT

When skateboarding exploded out of California in 1975, the sport was the province of suburban teens. Skateboarding, fresh and new, had many of the same principles of balance as surfing, yet seemingly with its own laws of nature.

Master it and be a new kind of teen god was the cultural imperative. Thousands of teens persuaded their parents to drain backyard swimming pools, creating impromptu skate parks.

In 1975, the first official skate parks were built in Carlsbad, Calif., and Daytona Beach, Fla., complete with pool-like half-pipes; scores more followed. But within five years, skateboarding practically became an endangered sport, owing to the number of liability lawsuits around skate-park accidents.

Out came the jackhammers, down came the rebar and concrete.

Skateboarding went underground, where it percolated, angry and brooding, for the next decade. Skaters allied themselves with punk rockers, who'd been pushed underground during the early 1980s as well, until their outward behaviors--cheap beer, bad jobs, no future, fuck it all--became so intertwined that it was difficult to tell the sub-species apart except by the presence or absence of a board with urethane wheels.

Which explains why Burnside itself is in some quarters referred to as "the most punk-rock place in America."

Over the past decade, skateboarding has come into the limelight once again. And, again, its growth is intertwined with punk rock. This time out, it's not bands like Agent Orange that new skaters are listening to, but Blink-182, which first rose to popularity through appearances on skateboarding and snowboarding videos.
--PD

URBAN BADLANDS, PART II

While City Council wrestled last week over the skateboard ordinance, there appears to be little opposition to Charlie Hales' plans, announced last month, to build another skate park, this one at the western terminus of the Steel Bridge. Mark "Red" Scott and Sage Bolyard, who are part of a company that's built six skate parks in Oregon over the past several years, will have a heavy hand in the design and construction; the park is projected to cost $1 million. Their reputation as design/builders was only enhanced this year with the opening of parks they built in tiny Aumsville and Newberg (Thrasher recently proclaimed Newberg "the luckiest small town in America").

Similar to Burnside, the Steel Bridge site is an urban badlands. But this time out, the new park will fly through the city approval process. The initial conceptual drawings promise the world's most ambitious skate park, with a combination of street skating obstacles such as ledges and handrails as well as a section of bowls and pipes. At 50,000 square feet, it will be six times the size of Burnside.
--PD