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A 540, switch-foot, tick-flip McTwist–Ev Rosencrans says it’s the hardest trick he’s ever seen executed on a skateboard. “It looks like he goes upside down, but then he spins the board, catches it, ticks it and lands on it again while doing a twist in air…”
Well, you get the idea. The feat was performed by skateboard pro Tony Hawk, whom fifty-year-old Rosencrans, himself a grand old man of alternative sports, calls the best ever. “He’s probably got one more complicated than that,” Rosencrans adds, as if to prove his point.
Nobody knows the sport and the lingo better than Rosencrans, who’s been in it for the long haul. He took up skateboarding when it was still an underground pleasure in the mid-Seventies–not as a kid, but as a father–and went on to nab various amateur titles. These days he wears a number of extreme-sports chapeaus–bike racer, program coordinator, boarders’-rights advocate, event emcee and talent booker for the ESPN X Games Xperience, a traveling hands-on (or feet-on, to be exact) alternative-sports expo coming to Denver over the weekend.
Though the esoteric extreme-sports pantheon includes everything from stunt biking to street luge, most people associate it with skateboarding, a free-spirited recreation that requires nearly superhuman gifts of coordination and balance, not to mention a hard head. It’s a sport that’s evolved from its early beginnings in the insides of empty swimming pools in Southern California to a place on the television screens of the world, and the people who do it well, Rosencrans says, are special indeed. Diligent, to say the least.
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What got them started in the first place? “It’s the adrenaline rush of dropping onto a ramp,” says Rosencrans. “When you hit bottom, you have a real appreciation for what it means to drop in. The floor of the ramp hits you so fast you don’t know what hit you.” He remembers the early days, when predominantly all-cement skate parks precipitated a surfeit of fractured wrists and broken legs: “We were just thrill-seekers in T-shirts and shorts–you had a lot more scabs that had to heal up. If you could survive and come back to do more, they’d call you a little bit crazy. Now kids have safety gear; today the payback is not as costly.” Still, Rosencrans estimates there’s a one-in-five chance a beginner will crash and burn on an attempted stunt. The winners are the ones who get up and try again.
His own broken bones notwithstanding, Rosencrans fully expects to live to see alternative-sports events cross over into the Olympic realm. There’s money in them thar hills: Both Fox and NBC are taking a cue from ESPN and formulating their own extreme-sports formats, he notes, and that’s a sure incentive to acknowledge their place in the mainstream arena. “Now it’s a faint painting on the wall,” Rosencrans says. “Before, it was just a total dream.”
Of course, a certain amount of regimentation comes with acceptance, he adds, his voice a tad melancholic. “It used to be all fun and games–now it’s more serious,” Rosencrans stresses. “Today all the kids competing have skate parks built in their backyards. Everybody I know owns one. It’s the only way you can prepare.” Hand in hand with the media’s intrusion into their sport comes the need for extreme athletes to perfect their moves for the camera’s benefit. For them, it’s a living, and with the promise of high-stakes cash prizes, endorsement contracts and the like, it seems to be a pretty good one, reason enough to feel a need to hone their stunts and stay in top form.
But that doesn’t mean that every average suburban kid has to follow suit. Rosencrans sees skateboard parks as a panacea for the youth-gone-awry situations getting recent media ink. “In a world of confusion, the worst thing you can do is not have something for your kids to do,” he says. “When a city can turn around and spend money for a jail and not have a place for the kids to go–what the hell’s wrong here?” Again, he points out that there’s money to be made in skate parks: “Vans Skate Park in Orange [County] is the most successful in world. If they saw how much revenue it makes, every other city in the country would get their asses in gear and open one up quick. The revenue made is better than what’s made from writing tickets.”
That considered, there’s no place to go but up for extreme athletes, he supposes. But Rosencrans thinks they deserve whatever kudos they can get: “I give them my total respect, because I know what they’ve gone through. They’ve fallen many a time and broken many a part to get where they are in the standings. I can guarantee that to get there, they’ve spent a lot of time in plaster.”
–Froyd
ESPN X Games Xperience, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. June 5-6, on Colfax between 14th and 15th streets (adjacent to the Capitol Hill People’s Fair), free, helmet required to participate, 1-800-489-8444, www.espn.com.
