Whatever happened to the Z-Boys?

My wife and I were talking about swimming pools. We were standing in one, and she wanted to know why there were no longer any round-bottomed, kidney-shaped pools, like the ones skateboarders favored back in the 1970s.

My wife was a skateboard enthusiast back then, as was I, briefly, and it was watching a DVD documentary called Dogtown and Z-Boys that brought all those memories of sanded boards and urethane wheels flooding back.

Skateboarding was big here, for a while. Like many Filipino teens, Therese and my brother-in-law, Gary, spent their martial law youth careening around on boards and reading about their skateboard idols – dudes like Stacey Peralta, Tony Alva and Jay Adams.

The other big sport at the time in the Philippines was bowling. In comparison, skateboarding must have seemed like a blow to the empire.

Nowadays, most swimming pools are square-bottomed infinity pools – patently unskatable – while skateboarders themselves are slicker, more savvy at self-marketing. They become celebrities, like the guys on Jackass, or Hollywood actors like Jason Lee. But often overlooked amid all the name-brand boards and talk show appearances, Dogtown shows us just how guerrilla skateboarding was, especially in 1970s Southern California.

The skateboard culture grew directly out of the surfing scene in California, naturally. But it was also the economic decline of certain surfing havens – like old Venice Beach, with its dilapidated boardwalks, ethnic mix and population of junkies and artists – that led to a kind of wild, "extreme" surfing and moved the thrills up a notch. Stacey Peralta’s documentary (he was a member of Zephyr Team, the first organized guerrilla skateboard outfit) shows remarkable footage of surfers threading their way through busted boardwalk poles and floating debris. Danger was a constant reality on Venice Beach. Turf meant a lot, too.

The scruffy kids who surfed in the mornings sought an urban outlet for their moves by afternoon – when the tide went out. They grooved on "earthy" surfers like Larry Bertelman, who would crouch low enough to touch the waves, moving like fluid on his board (Later, attempting that down-to-the-ground move on a skateboard was called doing a "Bert"). Surfboard designers like Jeff Ho came up with funky surfboards, and then skateboards, that mirrored the graffiti art of the streets. Another big advance was the introduction of urethane skateboard wheels, which quickly replaced the clunky old clay wheels that would jam up at the smallest pebble.

Mostly, what Zephyr Team offered the world was a new way of skating. The young dudes, many from broken homes, had little ambition beyond finding a good place to jump on their skateboards every day (well, some proved more ambitious than others) and they looked at the urban jungle as their wide-open landscape. The most natural place to throw down their boards was in the many swimming pools dotting suburban California.

Picture these young skateboard rebels, casting a lustful eye at any neighborhood swimming pool, any concrete or tar surface with natural ramps and smooth curves. There’s an aesthetic here that is peculiar to California, perhaps: life, at its best, is about catching the perfect wave.

It was a long drought in California that provided the skaters their opportunity to explore every pool in town. Since water was rationed, filling pools was banned for a time. But the Zephyr Team had to act on the sly. They became pirates, jumping fences, posting a few lookouts, surfing the bowl as long as they could before the owners called the cops. The team went as far as showing up with suction hoses and gas-powered engines, to drain any leftover water from the abandoned pools. Guerrilla skating at its finest.

The most dramatic moment in Dogtown comes in Del Mar, California, 1975, where a national skateboard competition offered the perfect entrée for the Zephyr skate punks. Excellent Super-8 film footage by Craig Stecyk and Glen E. Friedman makes skaters like Alva and Adams seem like they’re from another planet – riffing, scooping the ground, doing cutbacks and reinventing the toe wheelie. They failed to bowl over the more conservative judges, but the new styles caught international attention. Soon, every kid was skateboarding – even in the Philippines, where Skateboard magazine was widely read.

In the process, Peralta wants us to know (through the somber tones of narrator Sean Pean) that skate kids practically invented what later became known as extreme sports. All the crazy stuff that guys now do, risking pain and agony for the thrill, just might have come from these kids, pushing their verticals as far up the side of the pool as possible.

With a vintage hard rock and metal soundtrack (heavy on the Black Sabbath, Aerosmith, James Gang and Stooges), Dogtown and Z-Boys is a grainy, gnarly look back at a time when guerrilla sports actually mattered, however briefly. Nowadays, kids seem less inclined to hit the pavement and risk life and limb just for physical fun. After all, there’s the Internet and video games to provide them with voyeuristic thrills.

Mountaineering may get a boost here with the conquest of Everest by several Pinoys. But what’s the hot sport in the Philippines over the past couple years been? Badminton. How hardcore is that?

No, skateboarding may not have changed the world, and as a philosophy it never had anywhere to go beyond the next empty swimming pool, but there is something aesthetic, maybe even poetic, in the slow-motion images shown in Dogtown. Maybe it has to do with freedom, or the promise of it, that the Z-Boy pirates embodied. Hell, nowadays the only pirates left are those buying gaming software over in Greenhills or downloading files via broadband.

So whatever happened to those smooth, skatable swimming pools, anyway?

And whatever happened to guerrilla sports?