Friday, September 11, 2009

I´m guessing this guy lives in a city with no skatepark..

I used to have a small ramp in our garage when I was younger where I´d spend hours practicing tricks. I didn´t learn many, but we didn´t have Youtube and other electronic things to play with back then and I had to do something after school.
The village I lived in (nor any of the nearby cities) didn´t have any stuff built for skaters. It was all hockey, handball and football. But my grandfather (my moms dad, who died 12 years and 2 days ago) built so many things for me to skate.
A 2 meter vert ramp, an amazing boardslide feature (which I actually learned some tricks on) and other various ramps.
My uncle also build a 6 meter with mini-mini ramp (about 60 cm high, which I didn´t learn anything on either) with a little spine on it. I didn´t really realize how supportive my family and relatives were of my skating back then, it takes some perspective to grasp. I was also the only skater in my village (and high school) of a couple thousand inhabitants.
In elementary school I actually made a skateboard. How many skiers, hockey players etc can say they build their own equipment and designed and made things to use them on? (no half assed hockey goals in the driveway counts)

Therefor I kind of got a connection with the guy in this clip. He seems to have built this skatepark for himself, maybe in his parents house?
And I think a lot of skaters did similar things growing up. No cities in Sweden did much to keep kids skating. They still (at least Swedish) to this day doesn´t realize the importance of a spontaneous activity like skateboarding. And I´m not gonna start to mention why it´s a great activity for kids to get into, at least not in this post..

Here´s the guy with his own skatepark in the basement:



Added a picture of my first skateboard, well not my first first, but the one who got me crying on x-mas eve.
I think it´s from 1985 ish.

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