How I Became Best Friends With My Skateboard
By Zoe Srikanth
The understated niches of skateboarding; a sport I've grown to call my own
Becoming a skateboarder, to me, felt a bit like making a new best friend.
The first time I tried it, I knew it was a sport I would proudly call my own. The peeling stickers on the ragged wood of my deck, the wax residue accumulating on the rails, and the whispers of freedom as my 99A wheels slid across the smooth concrete. Every second I spent doing it, I'd uncover new intricacies about the sport, peeling layers until I reached the core of what it truly means to be a skateboarder—the undoubted passion behind every mild annoyance, the acceptance of concrete slams to power-slide lands, and an eventual love that blurred the line between the end of myself and the beginning of my board.
True enough, every best friend comes with their own set of nuances. Even the ones made of seven layers of maple wood. And these are the niches that define this sport lurking behind its signature boldness, or rather, the ultimate guide to becoming best friends with your skateboard.
The Skater Handshake
On a balmy summer afternoon, I decided to try my luck at skateboarding. My coach held out his palm, and after a simple high five, I walked away leaving his fist bump hanging, completely oblivious to the handshake that defines the skater community today. Now, it feels like a parallel life outside the skatepark. Every time I extend my arm for a high five, I always linger an extra second until I realise this sacred movement is worthless to everyone else. This high five-fist bump combo signifies a sense of belonging. It's for every first try, hard slam and eventual land. And perhaps, a tangible symbol of the connection stringing through the skateboarding community today.
Public Enemy Number One: Pebbles
It isn't usual that one would hear 'skater' and 'impossible' in the same sentence. Whether it was trying my first ollie down a ledge or a backside heel lip on a ramp, they were fueled by the same urge. One to swerve past the obstacles in my mind to focus on the five-stair obstacle lying in front of me. One to be unstoppable, because isn't that what skaters are? Almost. Unfortunately, skaters hold a grudge against something typically overlooked, basically invisible and foundationally irrelevant—pebbles. This little dynamite hinders the wheel from turning and conducts the energy onto the skater instead. Which means that even if I survived the body slam on the down rail, there is no escaping those pebble-caused scraped knees. You know what they say—no sweets without sweat and a couple of scratches.
Trophy Cabinets of Destruction
"Skate and destroy." That's what they said when I started. And now it's intertwined with my very definition of success. Unlike most sports, your level of skateboarding isn't conditional on the number of trophies in your cabinet. Ironically, it feels a lot like the opposite. When I began skating, I used to compare the scratches on my boards to my friends' to see who practiced harder. Whose stickers were completely ripped out. If the scratches were in the middle for boardslides or on the trucks for grinds. Whose shoes had a bigger hole, and so, who had the highest ollie. How many boards had each one exhausted. One every two months? Skateboarding isn't a sport determined by perfection, which arguably is its appeal. Skateboarding is mismatched shoe laces, an echo of applause to every broken board, and shoe-glue to patch up tears, because it actualises the effort behind every encore. It's the rawness the sport's built on.
Skatepark: Sticker Central
Being a skateboarder means having a community. And, for better or worse, there's no way out of it. Which, a lot of the time, means playing a game of SKATE with girls you've never met in similar doodled knee pads and helmets plastered with stickers. A few years into skating, my friend and I decided to DIY a collection of stickers. We pasted funky poses of ourselves on graffitied backgrounds, copied them onto sticker paper, cut them out on my bedroom floor and distributed them around the skatepark. We started curating our own designs, until our helmets and decks were a similar jumble of color and youth, and our jar was still brimming at the top. As a skateboarder, making stickers felt like an emblem of my identity; a way to scream my passion in the confines of sticker paper and a printer. And every time I saw a stranger's deck with one of my designs stuck on it, I felt a larger part of myself infused in this community built on expression.
One Last Try: A Skater's Biggest Lie
Leaving a trick half-complete is like starting a murder mystery and the internet crashing right before they reveal the true culprit. Even if it's the most gut-wrenchingly frustrating piece of television I've ever laid eyes on; even if the detective takes another hour and forty-eight minutes to solve it, it feels almost immoral to leave it incomplete. Just like it does when I leave a skate session unfinished. Even when the sweat is dampening my t-shirt, the sky's warm glow is slowly fading and it feels a little like my board holds a personal grudge against me, I just have to count down the tries until my feet perfectly land on my four bolts. Until I can leave drenched in a feeling of fulfilment; satisfied in the subtle knowledge that there's one more trick I can safely call my own; another possession that no one can take away.
Naturally, every sport does come with its own set of understated layers. Yet, skateboarding seemingly is more than a mere sport. At least to me, it's an outlook. An outlook that welcomes belonging, persistence, identity and a raw reality. And these were just a few ways it does it.