Skateboarding Past a Midlife Crisis
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: May 9, 2012
A GRINDING sound, somewhere between a rattle and a rumble, erupted over the suburban New Jersey hill. The figures, clad in motorcycle leathers and helmets, started to appear, one, two, three, until there were almost 20, crouched on skateboards, like a squadron of roller-villains.
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Tom Barnhart, 47, the leader of a group of skateboarders called the Bergen County Bombers, near his home in Cresskill, N.J.
Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times
Bill Robertson, 49, trying to land a skateboard maneuver at the Carolina Skate Park in El Paso. "We're the group with helmets and pads on," he says of the 40-somethings.
One by one, the skaters rounded a turn, dropping a gloved hand to the asphalt as they scraped their wheels in a slide, taking care that nobody crossed into oncoming traffic and found themselves splattered across the grill of a Buick.
At the bottom of the hill, the leader of the Bergen County Bombers, as this gang of skateboarders is known, wrestled the black motorcycle helmet from his head, revealing a mortgage broker with gray flecks in his beard and the crow’s feet that come from decades in the white-collar trenches.
“It’s a total midlife crisis,” said the group’s leader, Tom Barnhart, 47, of Cresskill, N.J., who started skateboarding two years ago for the first time since the Carter administration. His life, he said, had been in a rut. “My kids grew old, so I got a dog. My dog grew old, so I got a skateboard.”
“That was what knocked the cobwebs out of my head,” he added.
Forget the little red sports car: the new symbol for midlife crisis is the skateboard. Graying members of Generation X, and even their older brothers, are reclaiming their youth and rebellious streak by hopping back on a skate deck. Some are even showing off old tricks in the skate park.
It’s the latest gasp for a generation of perma-dudes who listen to Black Flag in their BMWs and trade high-fives in client meetings. It’s a bid to escape the corporate grind, beat back their flagging vigor and even make good on a generational cliché: to extend their adolescence until their federal prescription-drug benefit kicks in.
“The skate geezers are having their revenge,” said Michael Brooke, the publisher of Concrete Wave, a skateboard lifestyle magazine based in Ontario, Canada.
Indeed, the skate geezer is becoming something of a trope in popular culture. A recent satire in The Onion was headlined, “43-Year-Old With Skateboard Not Fooling Anyone,” complete with a close-up of Tony Hawk, the skateboarding superstar, looking a bit weathered in his helmet. Dave Carnie, the gonzo writer and former Johnny Knoxville sidekick on “Jackass,” introduced a line of decks with Tum Yeto skateboards called Fat Old Guy Skateboards to appeal to skaters who “just awoke from a coma and still think it’s 1984,” he said.
And why not? Skateboarding itself is entering middle age. Like the older members of Generation X, the sport was born in the ’60s. The pioneers are now at an age when they’re paying off mortgages and their children’s college tuition.
“Tony Alva and I have joked about it,” said Stacy Peralta, who, along with Mr. Alva, was a member of the legendary Z-Boys skate team in Venice, Calif., in the 1970s. As detailed in Mr. Peralta’s 2001 documentary “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” they would sneak into unoccupied suburban homes and drain swimming pools to skate in them.
“When we were kids, it was so new, we could never imagine doing this when we were 50,” he said. “The idea that my dad could be doing the same thing I was doing in a swimming pool was unheard of.”
But now Mr. Peralta is 52, the father of a 21-year-old son, and he is doing precisely that, spending his weekends at a state-of-the-art skate park near his Santa Monica, Calif., home.
“It’s got beautiful transitions and voluptuous shapes, unlike the dangerous pools we rode as kids,” Mr. Peralta said. “They finally figured out how to design a skateboard park that is forgiving to middle-aged men.”
It’s not only the parks that have become more forgiving. The skateboards themselves are now smoother and grown-up-friendly, thanks to a booming segment called longboards.
Longboards are the luxury sedans of the skateboarding world. They are usually about 40 to 48 inches long, compared with traditional street decks, which are around 32 inches. Fitted with bigger, softer wheels to roll over sidewalk cracks and pebbles, they are built for cruising and carving, not tricks and aerials, and appeal to riders who no longer risk broken bones by grinding rails and ollying curbs, as they did as teenagers.
“It’s like snowboarding,” said Brian Petrie, the founder of Earthwing, a skateboard company based in New York. “Anyone can learn to push, turn and stop in no time.”
Leading longboard manufacturers like Honey Skateboards of Colorado, Bustin Boards of New York and Original Skateboards of New Jersey report a surge in sales among older riders. That corresponds to a noticeable graying of the skateboard demographic. The number of skateboarders over 35 has nearly doubled in the last decade, to 742,000, from 404,000, and now accounts for 10 percent of the market, according to the National Sporting Goods Association, a trade group in Mount Prospect, Ill.
Even though longboards are more forgiving to older riders, the feeling they inspire is one of eternal youth, devotees said. A skateboard has a countercultural appeal that a single-speed bike or a tennis racket does not. It is a talisman of youthful rebellion, a rude gesture to Ward Cleaver responsibility. This isn’t just a way to work up a sweat. It’s a way to shred (ideally, not knee ligaments).
MANY middle-aged skaters grew up reading about the outlaw exploits of skaters like the Z-Boys. And while they may not have sneaked into backyard swimming pools themselves, the sport’s subversive bad-boy ethos became as ingrained as the scars on a veteran skater’s elbows. As every high schooler knows, skaters have always been the teenage thrill-junkies who tended toward punk rock, tattoos and C-minuses.
Parents, police and city officials have tried to crack down on skateboarding, which only added to its anti-establishment image. Skateboarders, for their part, would plaster their decks in stickers that read “Skateboarding is not a crime.”
Decades later, that renegade spirit lingers for middle-aged cubicle captives who return to the fold. Their comeback ride is like the scene in “Easy Rider” where Billy and Captain America remove their watches and toss them roadside.
“When you step on a board, all of your muscles are firing at the same time to do one thing,” said Chadd Hall, a 39-year-old information technology manager in Atlanta who slips out of work at lunch to ride his 39-inch Rayne skateboard. “You don’t have a whole lot of time to think about all the things that make up a 40-year-old’s life: how the kids are doing in school, all the different people at work coming at you needing something. All of that fades away.”
The anti-authority mystique is not lost on Joe Borress, 41, a contractor from Greenwich, Conn., who took up skateboarding two years ago, and now commutes from Grand Central Terminal to his office in SoHo on a 38-inch Bustin Maestro. “Skateboarding has that association: youth, punk, rebel,” he said. “It has that connotation of being bad.”
It’s not just men. Annie Messick, a 36-year-old housewife in Gulf Breeze, Fla., who took up longboarding last year, put it this way: “It is my mellow that I have been seeking for all my life.”
That mellow, it should be noted, is not without a price. Don Bailey, a news technology manager for a television station in Atlanta, occasionally shows up at work with a limp. Colleagues don’t bother asking anymore.
“I found out the asphalt is much harder,” said Mr. Bailey, who is at the older end of the skate-geezer spectrum at 53. “You’re skinned up, with skinned elbows, so you stop at CVS on the way home and buy bandages, cover up as best as you can before wife sees it.”
For those who ride in packs, skateboarding is not just a rebellion against age, but also against middle-age isolation. The sport affords skaters in their 40s and older a chance to hang out with buddies in a way they have not since they married and had children.
Consider the rolling party that is the Old Guy Skate Camp, run by Steve Morris, a San Diego real estate agent and skateboard enthusiast. For several years now, some 30 skaters over 40 pile into a luxury R.V. stocked with beer and carne asada and spend three days traveling from skate park to skate park in Southern California.
Or the weekly powwows in El Paso, Tex., where Bill Robertson, an associate professor of education at the University of Texas at El Paso, gathers fellow 40-somethings at a skate park, where they egg one another on as they try to master a backside air.
Yes, they look a little weird. “We’re the group with helmets and pads on,” he said.
Of course, teenagers are not always thrilled to see grayhairs crowding their turf. When Travis Cowan, 48, a network analyst in Columbia, S.C., shows up at a skate park with his fluorescent orange board from the ’80s and his silver temples, skaters young enough to be his children act stunned, asking him, “Did you skate at Dogtown?” He can usually shut them up by pulling off a board-rail grab invert, he said.
The raised eyebrows are more complicated when they come from your own children. Teenagers throughout the decades have sought to distance themselves from the squares they call parents. And it’s hard to flout authority by skateboarding when your dad is rolling along beside you, in kneepads and wrist guards.
But Mr. Brooke of Concrete Wave magazine finds that skateboarding with his two sons actually blurred the parent-child gap that defined his own teenage years. “It humanizes me a little bit,” said Mr. Brooke, 48. “There are a lot of dads who stand on the sidelines. There’s none of that in skateboarding.”
But even if your children are willing to ease up on the sideways looks, other people are not.
More than once, Gary Saenz, a 52-year-old quality-assurance specialist in Germantown, Md., has been skating in an industrial park or new housing development when a police cruiser has rolled up ominously. Bracing for a tense standoff with The Man, he usually just gets a quizzical look.
“They realize I’m not a teenager,” he said, “just an overweight dude with gray hair.”
Credits for Top Image:
Models: Sam Margevicius, left, and Chris Jarvis.
Stylist: Jason Rider.
Grooming by Valery Gherman at de facto for Dior Homme.
Sam’s look:
Levi’s Vintage Clothing T-shirt, $95; mrporter.com.
American Apparel corduroy shorts, $34; store.americanapparel.net.
Giles & Brother necklace, $110; gilesandbrother.com.
Vans sneakers, $45; shop.vans.com.
Vintage skateboard, showpiece only. Courtesy of Pilgrim Surf + Supply, 68 North Third Street, Brooklyn; (718) 218-7456.
Chris’s look:
Sunspel hoody, $230; sunspel.com.
H.W. Carter & Sons shirt, $185; unionmadegoods.com.
Levi’s Made & Crafted shorts, $175. Available at Smith & Butler, 225 Smith Street, Brooklyn; l (718) 855-4295.
Vans sneakers, $45; shop.vans.com.
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