12 years
later I moved my recording studio into a big warehouse and
built a 1/4 pipe and a mini-ramp and started skating again.
Pretty soon though I found out that I didn't know anyone else
who still skated.
"No
way man, I gave away my board years ago, I just play racquetball
and golf now.""I skate up to the corner store once
in a while, but I haven't skated a ramp in years."Then
I called up Randy Katen. When I used to skate in the late
70's, I hung out with Katen, John
O'Shei, Marty Radan, Tom Merrick, Tom Bixby, Tim Kelly, Miles
Herman, Roger Folsom, Danny Grady, Doug Jones & Sean O'Callaghan.
The thing to skate was pools. If we couldn't find a pool,
we'd go to the Sierra Wave, a cement skatepark where Katen
was the park pro, and we could hop the back fence and he wouldn't
say anything. Then there was the U-tube; a plywood mold from
the high-school swimming pool that we stole and turned into
a 1/2 pipe. It ripped: 7 foot transition, no flat bottom at
all, and a whole 5 feet wide. But we dug it and many skate
and beer/bong sessions went down before we burned it in 1979.
But pools were the main thing.
We would
drive hours to skate a pool or stay up all night to drain
an abandoned or temporarily vacant pool. Katen gave us a name:
The N-Men. It was a kinda' play on the down south kind of
thing. Back then, Tony Alva, Jay Adams and some others from
Santa Monica pretty much dominated skateboarding as far as
media and progression went. Their tag was Dogtown, and Katen's
was "Fuck Dogtown, we've got a scene up North too, we're
the N-Men." The reputation started to grow, and pretty
soon guys like Rick Blackhart and Steve Olson were coming
up to check out our pools. Here's the thing, two things actually.
Number one: the N-Men was about fun. Some of the guys were
sponsored by manufacturers or shops and some weren't, but
it didn't matter. We would enter contests as the N-Men first
and whoever else second, and as long as everyone was hooked
up with a board, sponsorship was not a big deal. We just wanted
to skate, do road trips and have fun.
Thing
number two: Katen never quit.I didn't see Randy for about
a decade, but the N-Men were still going strong. New blood
like Mike Blanchard, Sam Cunningham and Gary Cross kept pools
drained throughout the Northern State. The N-Men used planes,
hi-tech electronics, generators, pool pumps andsurveying techniques
to find pools, and as the rep grew, so did the list of pools
they'd skated. One year they skated 42 different pools. Katen
is 33 now, but he still skates like a 17 year old. Recent
sessions at the 99 Bowl and elsewhere have Katen and Cross
attacking coping in the 9 foot deep pool with about 3 feet
of vert kidney bowl with full-on aggression. A new generation
of N-Men is still skating pools even though it is no longer
trendy or cool, just fun.
With Randy
& Gary as the official elder statesmen and leaders, newer
skaters like Frank Camp, Paul Becker, Dean Randall, Ronny
Marshall, Doug Bower, Troy Miller and Hunter Kimball are still
making pool dust. Skating a pool with the N-Men is different
than skating at a skatepark with all of the tough guys in
their baggies trying not to talk to each other. At a recent
99 Bowl session, Randy introduced Heckler staffer Sonny Mayugba
to pool skating and helped him get started. It's a friendly
atmosphere where everybody encourages and props everybody
else. It's fun and in my mind that's what skating is all about.
I recently talked with Katen, Cross and Blanchard at the Davis
Skatepark after an N-men session that included not only the
N-Men but their children as well. It was kind of weird; besides
Dean Randall, I think that everyone skating was either over
30 or under 10. Here's what the men who have skated over 150
pools had to say:
Heckler
(John Botch): How long have you been skating?
Randy
Katen: 20 years. Skateboarding back then was kinda' weird.
You had a team where you all dressed alike and had a team
manager. Now days you don't know who's on what team and no
one really cares anyway. But it's kinda' fucked up right now,
no one goes fast anymore. It's kinda' sad, I'm hopin' it's
gonna come full circle. We watched skateboarding kinda' evolve
around us. The skateparks have come and gone, and we're still
here. The pools have all come and gone. We're still here.
Skateboarding, it seems, has come and gone and we're still
here. I guess we're just the cockroaches of skateboarding.
We've survived many extinctions. We've seen the extinction
of vert riding. Mini-ramp riding. Most kinds of aggressive
types of skating.
Mike Blanchard:
We have boards that are older than most kid's skating today.
RK: Skateboarding
periodically kills itself off. There used to be about 25 cement
skateparks in California. There were four in Sac. But, once
you get adults involved in something fun, with more cement
than brains, it gets all fucked up. We still skated pools
back then. I'll get up at five in the morning to skate a pool.
Then wood parks got popular. Tim Payne and Dave Duncan were
designing rad parks with big wood bowls. Then wood obstacles
and street/junk style started happenin'.
Gary Cross:
It used to be you had to hide your pools from people and keep
them secret. Nowadays, you couldn't drag a street skater to
a pool and beg him to skate it and have a good time. Nowadays
it's hard to get a good session together.
H:
Isn't there a middle ground somewhere? I mean all the street
skaters slag on the pool skaters, and all the pool skaters
slag on the street skaters. But isn't street skating like
ollieing fat gaps or grinding long handrails just as aggressive
and creative as pool skating?
RK: Yeah,
but pool skater's slag on street skaters cuz' they haven't
even tried to skate anything else. I've got scar tissue older
than some of these street skaters. Don't slag on what you
don't know. I can pool skate, I can downhill or slalom and
I can go and ollie a curb and almost look decent on the street.
(RK did an ollie to board slide down the handrail on his first
attempt a few minutes later to demonstrate this) The other
day I was at the Daily Grind and I was watching some kid try
the exact same trick 50 times in a row. He just went up the
wall at 3 mph and then tried some flippy trick on the pyramid.
He did it at least 50 times before he made it and he didn't
even seem stoked or happy when he made it. This is kind of
what skateboarding's become and it saddens me. In fact, I'd
like to extend an open invitation to any street skaters reading
this and invite them to come skate a pool. My work phone number
is (916)988-9747. Give me call, and I'll show you the basics,
and if you still want to slag on it after you've tried it
I'm cool with that.
H:
But what about guys like Omar Hassan and Kris Markovich, guys
who can rip pools and street?
RK: Yeah,
but you don't realize how long some of these guys have been
around. Omar's been skating for over ten years.
GC: It's like in Jake's editorial in Thrasher. If you watched
that kid that Randy was talking about, you wouldn't even understand
it much less want to try it.
H:
So you're not slagging on street skating as much as the extremes
it's gone to?
RK: Yeah,
it's just not radical. It's too specialized. It's good, I'll
give a clap or a holler every time some one makes one of those
things whatever it was they did. It's just not aggressive,
there's no danger. There are some rad skaters out there though,
John Cardiel, Chris Senn, Mako Urabe, Jeff Toland, Joe Sierro,
Noah Saladneck.
H:
Saladneck?
RK: Yeah,
that Noah Saladneck guy. Salasnek. Those guys show aggression
because they're rad snowboarders. After you do a fucking 40
foot air on a snowboard, doing an ollie over a 10 foot pyramid
is nothing. John Cardiel does flips to his bare knees on em.
These kids have no fear and that separates them from a lot
of these kids these days. Snowboarding has actually made their
skateboarding ten fold as they've progressed. I admire those
guys even though Noah never comes out to the pool.
GC: He
did say that he wanted to though, so he gets a point for that.
H:
How long have you guys been snowboarding for?
RK: Shit,
since 1979 when boards were plastic with no edges and all
you could do was powder carves.
MB: I remember Tom Sims first board, it was a big chunk of
maple with a skateboard on top.
H:
do you board the 1/2 pipe when you snowboard?
RK: Not
really, I usually board powder and jump off a cornice. If
I could ever find a good 1/2 pipe I might. Boreal had a cool
mound 1/2 pipe last year. They had a pretty good street area
too. I broke my leg once snowboarding though, so I just mainly
cruise and have fun. Snowboarding is just a blast for me.
I went up 24 times last year with my girlfriend. It's a lot
of fun.
H:
Anything else you want to say?
RK: I
like to skate and I plan to keep doing it. I skate for recreation
and I skate for fun, not to be hip. The N-Men are something
that's never going to go away. As long as Gary and myself
are around, and guys like you and Mike, we'll always be skating
pools. GC: Pools are never going to go out of style.MB: Considering
that we were in on the beginning of it, we have a good chance
of becoming the first 60 year old skaters.
I think
that Randy and Gary probably will still be skating 10 and
even 20 years from now. They run their own business and Randy
is a Boy Scout Troop Leader, but skating and snowboarding
is still what they do for fun. They may be out of date and
un-hip, but I can't help but wonder how many of today's crop
of baggy flipster guys will be still be skating in even ten
years, and how many of them will have gone the route of my
old friends, drone bees going about their work and paying
$50 a month to work out on the 2003 equivalent or a stairmaster
or roller blades.
