If the madness that surrounds the annual meeting between the college football teams from Georgia and Florida is indeed the "World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party," then the game itself is simply the excuse for throwing it.
It's the wedding, the graduation, the reunion, the New Year's Eve. Just another justification for getting juiced.
This past weekend, I spent roughly 24 hours in Jacksonville, Fla. Some of those hours were spent more roughly than others -- and only three of them had much of anything to do with football.
Now, don't get me wrong. The game is important, agonizingly so for many fans. And the partying serves a purpose for the thousands of Georgia backers who, after Saturday's 24-10 loss, have now watched their Bulldogs fall to Florida in 11 of the past 12 seasons. You need some medicine to make the pain go away.
This was my first visit to Georgia-Florida (Florida-Georgia if you live south of the Okefenokee Swamp) and I wanted to experience as much of it as my schedule would allow.
With my Friday night full of high school football, I booked a flight that left for Jacksonville at 8:25 a.m. Saturday. My return flight was set for 6 a.m. Sunday. And no, there was no hotel room in Jacksonville reserved in my name.
My companion and I were prepared to pull an all-nighter. Or, at least, we thought we were.
All I had with me were the clothes on my back and the contents of my pockets: wallet, cell phone, car keys, disposable camera, tape recorder, gum, two rain ponchos -- which we didn't use -- and a small bottle of mouthwash -- which we did.
The one thing I didn't bring with me was a good night's sleep. That would have been useful.
The plane was packed with buoyant Bulldog fans. One used the plane's intercom to recite a poem she had penned for the occasion. "Regardless of the outcome, whether winning sooner or later," she said, "the entire Bulldog Nation remains Gator haters."
A man seated near me had more immediate concerns. His cell phone rang shortly before takeoff. "Y'all got beer?" was the first thing he said.
I'll never know for sure, but I imagine the person on the other end responded, "Yes." Everyone in Jacksonville, it seemed, had beer.
We started our tailgating before 11 a.m. at a parking lot far away from Alltel Stadium, which most folks still refer to as the Gator Bowl. The lots were labeled with letters, but they ran out of alphabet by the time they got out to where we were. Our lot -- more of a construction area, really -- was labeled with dollar signs and lined with large piles of dirt.
A cold wind swirled. Dust Bowl seemed more appropriate than Gator Bowl on this day.
We didn't stay there for long. We wandered our way to a place known as "the party bus." And the name fit. It was both a bus and a party, red and silver with loud black speakers and Georgia fans on top.
Next to the bus, people were dancing in the streets ... and trying not to spill their drinks.
My cell phone didn't work at all on Saturday. And if you were at the game, yours likely didn't work either. Too many people. Too many calls. Too taxing on the telephone towers. All this in the shadow of a stadium named for a communications company.
With no phone, people I planned on meeting went unmet. There were, however, plenty of strangers to take their place. Greet people wearing red and black with a "Go Dogs" and they are your friends for life, or at least until the end of the game.
Oh yeah, the game. It started 10 hours after I had left Gainesville that morning, and nearly 15 hours before my return flight was scheduled to leave the following morning. I was beginning to drag.
I closed my eyes late in the first quarter. When I reopened them it was early in the second. I ate a hot dog and some french fries and caught my second wind.
If you've never seen the inside of the Gator Bowl during Georgia-Florida, you must.
I imagine it's what a football would look like if you sliced it open like a cantaloupe. Half red and black. Half blue and orange. Both sides wanting to take a big bite out of the other. I wonder if Gators ever get sick of the taste of Bulldog.
The colors come together after the game. At The Landing -- an outdoor mall on the banks of the St. John's River -- Bulldogs and Gators party together. A latecomer would find it difficult to determine the outcome of the game.
It's a dancing sea of thousands, a crowd so thick you need to bring along Verron Haynes as your blocker to cut your way through. I felt the bass inside my body and the crunch of empty cups beneath my feet. On my way through the maze of portable toilets, I heard one tired fan sum it all up.
"Go Dogs. Go Gators," he sighed. "Aw, it really doesn't matter."
At 1 a.m. -- five hours to flight time -- we crashed the lobby of the brand new Adam's Mark Hotel. Its couches looked comfy. We weren't the only ones who felt that way. Hundreds followed.
Soon the hotel was a frat house. One young man fell asleep at my feet. A bellhop walked by, shaking his head in disgust.
The elevators broke that night. And the bathroom sink was filled with vomit. I saw my first fight at 2 a.m. The fire alarm went off shortly after that.
I'm not sure if the Adam's Mark Hotel was ready for its first Georgia-Florida weekend.
And as I lay on my makeshift bed on the floor of the Jacksonville airport at 3 a.m., I was wondering the same about myself.
Part One: Twilight in tiny Toomsuba
I suppose the skeptical Northerner in me was expecting something different.
I was stranded in a small town in the Deep South. Bad things were bound to happen.
For every act of kindness, I expected a catch. Sure, someone would patch up our broken-down pickup truck. We'd eventually leave Mississippi, and again be bound for that bumper pool table awaiting us in Baton Rouge, La.
But it would come at a cost.
"So, how much do we owe you?" we would ask our makeshift mechanic.
"Well," he'd say through a shoe-shined sneer, "how much y'all got?"
In tiny Toomsuba, however, it wasn't like that at all. Fellow road-tripper Richmond Eustis and I were met with acts of such genuine generosity that I found myself scanning our surroundings for television cameras, Rod Serling, Allen Funt.
Surely this was some sort of hoax. But it wasn't. It was real.
I needed this. Just four days earlier, I had watched the Twin Towers turn to fire and fall to the ground. I had seen the evil that man could do. My belief in benevolence had taken a beating.
But little Toomsuba took me in its arms and consoled me, told me everything was going to be OK. At times, it seemed Toomsuba would never let go.
The Toomsuba I experienced was not seething with racism or ignorance, like small towns in Mississippi are often depicted. Of course, I didn't experience much more of the town than its Food Mart Texaco, just off I-59. Of course, I'm not sure if there's much more of the town to experience than that.
Every Toomsuban -- if that, indeed, is what a person from Toomsuba is called -- stopped by the Texaco at some point during the day, it seemed. Some filled their trucks with gas. Many ate a meal -- prepared by Pee Wees Nos. 1 and 2 -- at the Chester Fried Chicken. Several simply stood outside and shot the breeze.
It was my observation that everybody in Toomsuba knew everybody in Toomsuba. No one walked through the doors of that Texaco without being recognized. As far as I could tell, people in Toomsuba liked one another, and were long accustomed to each other's peculiarities.
Before long, I was made to feel like one of the gang.
It was not yet noon on a Saturday. I was a white thru-traveler standing next to a truck with out-of-state plates. They were middle-aged black men going through their daily routine. None of that appeared to matter.
I was simply a person in need of help. And they were willing -- no, anxious -- to give me some. A truck on the blink is a beacon for this bunch.
It was their day off, but they all wore work clothes. The oldest of the group had few teeth and carried a cane wrapped in duct tape.
"What's the matter with it?" asked a man with "Terrell" embroidered on his shirt. He had a riding lawnmower in the back of his pickup truck.
I figured "It's broke" wouldn't work as an answer here, but I was easily the most mechanically-challenged man in Toomsuba on this day. Richmond was on his way to the Autozone with Pee Wee No. 2, so I pieced together a series of phrases that had been bandied about earlier.
Clutch problems. Bleeding the line. Slave cylinder. Late for Louisiana. (I didn't say anything about a bumper pool table.)
Terrell stared eagerly at the truck. So did his six friends. For them, fixing a stranger's truck was a fine way to fill a Saturday.
"Do you mind?" Terrell asked.
"Not at all," I said. "But my friend's got the keys."
Terrell sat in the driver's seat and pumped the clutch. He retrieved some tools from his truck, and clanked around under the hood for a few minutes. Then he got on his back and slid underneath the Chevy S-10.
The rest of us watched and talked -- about everything from weather to war.
"So how big of a town is Toomsuba?" I asked one of the guys. He had large sunglasses, a long goatee and graying jheri curls that stuck out the back of his baseball cap.
"Well, there ain't no red light," he said. "You've got to stop to cross the railroad tracks right over there, but that's it."
Terrell had some doubts that a new slave cylinder was going to solve our problems. But he couldn't know for sure until he started the car. And he couldn't do that without the keys.
The men waited more than 30 minutes for Richmond to return, but he didn't. They had to get going, and seemed rather upset that they weren't going to be able to help us get on our way.
"Well, all right, partner. Good luck," the man with the jheri curls said. "We may be back through here later on."
I continued to stand by the truck, hood up. All passers-by expressed concern and offered an opinion on the root of the problem. "I hope y'all have luck," several said.
Was Toomsuba a mecca for mechanics, I wondered? Are gearheads to Toomsuba what poultry is to Gainesville? If Toomsuba did indeed have a center of town, would I find a marble monument topped with a bronze wrench there?
I went inside to Pee Wee No. 1, behind the counter at Chester Fried, and asked.
"Everybody in this town has to learn how to make a living," Pee Wee No. 1 said. "We work. We're mechanics. You do what you can when you're poor."
Richmond returned after 1 p.m., more than 2.5 hours since we first turned off at Toomsuba for gas. He had with him a new slave cylinder for his truck, and stories of Pee Wee No. 2's celebrity in the Meridian metro area.
Perhaps Pee Wee No. 2, also known as Eddie Ruttley, was Spike Lee's inspiration for the Mookie character in "Do The Right Thing." Pee Wee No. 2 knew everybody along the way to the Autozone.
"Pee Wee!" folks would call out to his truck. "What are you cookin' today?"
Richmond gave Pee Wee No. 2 $20 for playing the role of chauffeur, but Pee Wee wasn't expecting a thing.
"I'm a friendly guy," he said. "Who knows? Maybe I'll be broken down some day and need your help."
Al Folks actually apologized for not arriving sooner. Al, mechanic at Bunyard's Transmission and husband of the girl behind the counter at the Texaco station, was there to put the new slave cylinder on Richmond's truck. He carried a cardboard box full of tools.
"You're sorry?" Richmond said to Al, who wore blue jeans, a blue cap and a single gold earring. "We're just happy we could get someone to work on such short notice on a Saturday."
"Ah," Al said with a shrug of his shoulders, "I just had to close up my shop. We weren't doing anything that couldn't wait until Monday. I didn't mind closing up and coming out here."
Pee Wee No. 1's grand plan looked as though it was going to come to pass. Richmond and I sat down and enjoyed lunch at Chester Fried. It looked as though we'd be bound for Baton Rouge, after all. Life was good.
But 45 minutes later, we learned that Al was going to have to open up his shop again. To run again, Richmond's truck needed a new manual transmission -- "tran-mission," according to Al.
I enjoyed my first three hours in Toomsuba, I really did. It was charming. It was refreshing. Still, I felt as though three hours were enough. I really like ice cream, too, but too much of it can make me sick.
Besides, there was a bumper pool table down the road that I really wanted to buy.
As Al loaded Richmond's truck onto his wrecker, I offered Pee Wee No. 1 $20 for his troubles.
"No," he refused. "Absolutely not."
I offered it again, and he took it.
Bunyard's Transmission is a small garage at the end of a curvy dirt driveway behind a cluster of mobile homes. A landscape of abandoned cars, and their many abandoned parts, gave the surrounding yard a certain Mad Max appeal.
We squeezed into Al's truck and drove to Meridian to buy a new clutch. He was quite talkative, tackling the topic of terrorism before settling on local auto racing.
"Now, I know you guys are in a hurry," he said. "But you should really check the races out some time. Next Saturday night you're through here, pull up to any gas station and ask for directions to the Queen City Speedway. They'll know where it is."
"Al, what's the population of Toomsuba," I asked.
"I don't know," Al replied. "But I do know that it was named after an Indian and his horse."
"Which one was 'Toom' and which one was 'Suba'?" I pressed.
"I don't know," Al said. "I've been wondering that for years."
When we returned, Al smoked cigarettes, sang country songs and worked on Richmond's car. Occasionally, he'd emit a lengthy groan, making Richmond and I wonder whether we should start making calls about a hotel room.
We passed some of the time by playing gin rummy. For about an hour, I rested my head in my hands and concentrated on forming a large puddle of spit on the ground below me, just like I used to do on the bench during baseball games back in high school.
I was somewhat bored.
"Is that a horse?" I asked.
It was obviously a horse, but the fact that a horse was milling about the junkyard caught me off guard. It was brown and fed upon a random tuft of grass between two stranded sedans.
"Sorry it's taking so long," Al said. "But we're not charging you no more than we would if it were normal business hours. With everything that's going on, I'd like to help out anybody. But we're like that anyway."
Roughly five hours and $375 worth of parts and labor later, Al was finished and the truck appeared to be back in working order. We thanked Al profusely and bid a fond farewell to Toomsuba.
It was nearly 7 p.m. Original plans were long lost. We decided to head straight for New Orleans, and pick up the bumper pool table in Baton Rouge on Sunday.
A few miles down the road, Richmond's "Service Engine Soon" light lit up, but Richmond assured me that it was a common occurrence. Once we merged onto the interstate, the truck began to vibrate -- loudly. Again and again.
We looked at each other and laughed. Then we turned the truck around and headed back to Bunyard's Transmission. Perhaps, I wondered, we should begin looking into time-shares in Toomsuba.
But another hour with good ol' Al had us saying our good-byes again. We turned the radio up loud this time, and ignored all noises. Nothing was going to stop us now.
And nothing did.
We arrived in New Orleans at 12:30 a.m. We spent most of our 10 hours there sleeping. And on Sunday afternoon in Baton Rouge, Jennifer Tonguis was just as eager to get rid of her husband's bumper pool table as she would have been on Saturday. She finally had room for a dining table in her dining room.
The bumper pool table's heavy slate playing surface made Richmond's Chevy sag a bit as we headed home to Georgia. We were tired, and our rural route didn't offer much incentive to stay awake. It was easy for highway hypnosis to set in. From state to state, the road rarely changed.
When there were exits, it looked as though they led to nowhere. We likely would have thought as much about the off-ramp marked "Toomsuba," had we not known different. But Toomsuba is somewhere, somewhere special. When I have doubts about humanity, I now think of the people I met there.
Richmond and I shared a smile -- but kept on driving. We didn't want to push our luck.
It was 2:30 a.m. on Monday when we pulled into Gainesville with a $100 bumper pool table that, by my calculations, ended up costing Richmond and me more than $700.
It was 4:30 a.m. by the time we figured out how to get it into my house.
Richmond Eustis didn't know what he was getting himself into.
Back in August, I e-mailed him the following question: "How long of a road trip would you be willing to make for a bumper pool table?"
Richmond had just returned from a long vacation in Turkey. Perhaps he was still jetlagged, his mind still in a trans-Atlantic trance. Because his reply was quick and left much open to my interpretation: Richmond was willing to travel as far as I thought "prudent" for a bumper pool table. And I now had it in writing.
Richmond did, however, go on to warn me that his truck had "limited capacity" and "chancy reliability."
"By the way," he wrote in closing, "this is one of the most ominous questions anyone has ever asked me by e-mail."
Ominous. An interesting word choice, no? And Richmond wrote it long before we were stranded in Toomsuba, Miss.
I'm not sure what exactly prompted my pursuit of a bumper pool table. But the seeds were likely planted back in my hometown of Bloomsburg, Pa. Most seeds inside me were planted there.
My first introduction to the game came at the Pursel family farmhouse. The Pursels were my next-door neighbors growing up, and I attended many a family gathering at their big house in the country. There was a bumper pool table there. I'd often play on it -- but only after sweating through several hours of "kill" on the Pursels' low-enough-to-dunk-on basketball hoop outside.
It was at the Painted Pony Saloon -- located in the basement of Hess' Tavern on Main Street in Bloomsburg -- where bumper pool became a serious endeavor for my group of friends. We'd spend many a school break around that table during college, many a Christmas break there after college.
The table at the saloon is gone now, however, and the Painted Pony painted its walls purple. Going home will never be the same.
This summer, I decided I wanted -- no, needed -- a bumper pool table of my own. I cleared a spot for it in the back room of my house by selling the exercise equipment that was gathering dust there. Then I made a few phone calls, and realized that a new bumper pool table was way out of my price range.
A used one would be better anyway, I thought. More character. More like the tables I grew up playing on.
I bid on a couple on eBay. I was out of my league. I concluded that most bumper pool aficionados were either wealthy or obsessed, or both.
On to the online classifieds. I almost bought a table for $10 from a lady in Wilton, Conn., back in July, but couldn't find an affordable way to get it packaged and shipped down to Gainesville. I went and looked at a table in Cumming, but the price and the product weren't to my liking.
Then, in late August, I happened upon apparent perfection. The classified ad said the table's playing surface was felt-covered slate -- what any billiards buff demands. The table was rectangular -- some folks try to pass octagonal tables off as legitimate (they aren't, by the way). The table was affordable -- just $100.
One problem: The table was in Baton Rouge, La. Is a 600-mile, one-way trip "prudent" for a bumper pool table? In my world it is.
To inspect the table, I enlisted an LSU student named Ian. He gave it a thumbs up.
And so, early on the morning of Saturday, Sept. 15, Richmond and I were off, heading west from Atlanta on I-20 in a 1991 Chevy S-10 pickup truck.
Some of you may remember Richmond as a Times reporter. He covered city government here, and now has the Georgia Supreme Court beat for the Fulton County Daily Report, Atlanta's legal newspaper.
If you have a chance to catch ESPN's "Sports Century" piece on Ray Lewis -- Baltimore Ravens linebacker and one-time post-Super Bowl murder suspect in Atlanta -- Richmond is one of the show's primary commentators. He was interviewed at length, with the gold lighting, the fake bookshelf in the background, and everything.
Richmond and I were making very good time. Too good, it turned out. Roads were eerily empty. It was just four days after the terrorist attacks on the United States. People were holed up in their homes. There were no Southeastern Conference football games to travel to.
We entered Alabama at 8 a.m., and then it was 7 a.m. all over again. We passed our first fireworks store at 7:05.
We hammered through the Yellowhammer State. At this pace, we'd have the table in the truck and be at Richmond's parents' house in New Orleans for dinner. We decided to stop for gas at an exit marked "Toomsuba," just across the Mississippi line.
It was just after 10:30 a.m. We'd still be in Toomsuba when the sun went down.
I stepped out of the truck, and immediately knew I was no longer in Gainesville. I couldn't understand a word that was being said around me. I'm pretty sure it was English, but it was all bells and whistles on my end.
There, at the Toomsuba Food Mart Texaco, I gained an understanding of Times sports writer and Alabama-native Robert Watson. There actually are other people out there who speak like him.
I finished pumping the gas, and Richmond started the car. Well, he tried to start the car. It squealed. It lurched. It took a spastic skip forward. And then it did nothing.
In the hours that followed, Richmond and I went through a strange series of starts and stops similar to that old S-10. Our prospects would at once look promising, and then profoundly grim.
Richmond called AAA -- and found out that his membership had expired. I called AAA -- and was told that I had gone over my limit of emergency calls for the year.
So we sat there at the Texaco in Toomsuba and tried to determine our next move. Turns out it was determined for us. A truck with its hood up draws a crowd in Smalltown, U.S.A.
We were first approached by James Nance, a jolly little man known as Pee Wee No. 1 (his co-worker at the Chester Fried Chicken restaurant inside the Texaco station is Pee Wee No. 2). He showed considerable concern for us.
"It's going to be tough to find a mechanic working on a Saturday around here," Pee Wee No. 1 said. "Everybody is hunting or fishing or watching football. But I think I might know a guy who can help y'all."
He went back in the store, to get us a phone number, we assumed. He came out with Lawrence Lard, a man with large forearms and a paper bag containing two cans of beer.
Lawrence went to his car to get his tools. His wife stayed in the passenger seat the entire time. Seemed like she was used to Lawrence doing this sort of thing.
First, Lawrence thought we might have air in our clutch. He tried to "bleed" the line. So I could better understand the process, Pee Wee No. 1 described bleeding the line to me in Toomsuba terms.
"It's like when you get bit by a snake," he said. "You slit your wrist and bleed the venom out."
Both concepts were equally foreign to me. And, it should be noted, I've been told by snake experts that bleeding is no longer the preferred method of treating venomous snake bites.
As it turned out, our problem required more than just bleeding the line. We needed a new slave cylinder, Lawrence diagnosed. Still, that didn't appear to be a major problem. Pee Wee No. 1 had the whole plan worked out.
Pee Wee No. 2 would drive Richmond to the Autozone in Meridian, about 14 miles away. Then the husband of the girl working behind the counter would put the new part on for us. Simple as that.
"That guy is going to take y'all to get your part," Lawrence said. "And another guy is going to put it on for you. Y'all are going to get back toward New Orleans today. How 'bout that?"
We paid Lawrence $40 for his help -- seemed like a bargain at the time -- and he headed back to his car, and his wife.
"How 'bout that?" Lawrence repeated through his car window as he drove off. "Y'all in business now."
That's what we thought at the time, too.
Richmond and I were in agreement: If you must have car problems while driving through the Deep South, hope that it happens in Toomsuba. It will reaffirm your faith in human kind.
But Richmond was having second thoughts about one thing: road-tripping with a newspaper columnist.
"Bad things seem to happen to columnists," Richmond said. "Just so they can get a story."
"Not bad things," I corrected. "Colorful things."
It only got more colorful from there.
Part Two: Baton Rouge or bust
Kristian Svitak and his skateboard were flying. They launched and landed. They soared above cement. They did so as one.
This has always baffled me, the way board and boarder stay connected in midair. There are no straps or adhesives. I watch and wait, always expecting the two to separate, gravity to ground both with a clank and a thud. But it never happens.
I'm sure there's a law of physics that explains all of this, but I never paid attention much in science class.
Svitak described the move to me in skating terms: It's called an "ollie," involves subtle movements of both feet, and is the basis for most skating tricks.
I had no time for tricks, however. You see, I was having enough trouble getting the board to stay beneath me while we were both on the ground.
Svitak is a professional skateboarder. He's 26 years old and has been skating seriously for half his life. He recently made a guest appearance at the grand opening of the new Vans Skatepark at the Mall of Georgia in Buford, 30 minutes north of Atlanta -- and inherited the difficult duty of teaching me how to skate.
I am 27 years old, and about the time that Svitak was first embracing the skating lifestyle, I was passing it off as a fleeting craze. I never owned a pair of Vans growing up, never owned an album by the Dead Milkmen, never tried a 720 judo air off a curb.
Maybe I should have.
"Skating is bigger now than it ever has been," said Svitak, a Cleveland, Ohio native who now calls Oceanside, Calif., home. "It's really popular. And it's more accepted than when I started out in '88. There's a lot of money in the industry right now."
The Vans Skatepark chain is testament to that. The more than 30,000-square-foot, multi-million dollar Mall of Georgia park is the ninth to open nationwide in the past three years. Three more locations -- Orlando, Phoenix and Detroit -- are under construction.
The parks look like something out of the X Games. There's more than 17,000 square feet of street course. It's wood and cement, with ramps and rails everywhere.
There are also three vertical ramps, the pits where skaters make like pendulums, going back and forth, picking up more speed and air with each run. They have beginner, intermediate and professional vert ramps at the Vans Skatepark in Buford, and I had no business going near any of them.
That's because I was still learning how to stand on the board. Once I got that down, I had to make it move.
"Can you push?" Svitak asked.
Oh, I can push. It's just what happens after that -- the actual riding -- that gives me some problems. Svitak saw that right away.
"Whoa," he said. Then he said it again.
"Now I'm going to push you. Slow. So you don't die."
That I could handle, slow rolling in a straight line. But I'd eventually have to stop, turn or start again. And those were the moments that prompted Svitak to chuckle and ask, "Are you all right?"
I wore pads on my knees and elbows and a helmet on my head, but my unpadded parts always seemed to hit the ground first.
The park was virtually empty at this point -- the official grand opening was still a few hours away -- and for that I was thankful. But for those in the building making final preparations, I believe I provided some comic relief.
I got to where the laughs -- and the falls -- became less frequent. I could get the board moving and make broad turns. For me, the ramps and rails were just obstacles to skate around.
"You can't expect much more for a while," Svitak said. "It's a slow process."
It was never so slow for Svitak.
"I don't even remember the point where it was hard for me to even stand on a skateboard," Svitak said. "As long as I can remember, I've always been able to stand on a skateboard and skate on the street."
Svitak makes his living skating the street course, but he prefers the actual street. Curbs, parking blocks, hand rails -- that's where he got his start.
It was July 2, 1988. Svitak remembers the date exactly. He was wandering through a summer carnival in the Cleveland suburb of Garfield Heights. He was carrying a skateboard.
A picnic table full of older teens -- wearing "mohawks and crazy gear" -- called him over. They were going to go skate at a church. They asked 13-year-old Svitak if he wanted to come along. And he did.
"They started doing tricks," Svitak remembered. "It was the most amazing thing. I never knew this even went on."
The guys taught Svitak a trick or two, and then went off and huddled as a group. They came back and asked Svitak if he wanted to join Team Insanity (imagine a biker gang without the bikes).
"I was like, 'Yeah,'" Svitak said. "Instantly, I was part of this thing.
"I remember one of the guys said, 'Just remember, if you make it big, don't forget us.' I was like, 'What are you talking about?'
"It's always a dream for every kid to become a pro, but I grew up in Ohio."
Svitak did make it big -- kids now buy skateboards and T-shirts that bear his name. And he didn't forget his roots -- he's got "T.I.," for Team Insanity, tattooed on his wrist. Right next to that mark is another tattoo, the logo for Black Label, the team that turned him pro 2.5 years ago.
In June, Svitak returned to Cleveland to compete in the Mountain Dew Nationals. He delighted his hometown crowd with a second-place finish in the street course, earning himself spots at the X Games in Philadelphia in August and the Vans Triple Crown in Oceanside this weekend.
But contests, Svitak said, aren't that important.
"Skateboarding is such a non-competitive thing," said Svitak, who plays drums and guitar for the punk-rock band The Heartaches when he's not skating. "A lot of skaters, they don't even really care.
"That mentality is not there in skateboarding. That's why we skateboard. That's why we didn't play football and baseball and stuff like that. It's a totally different deal.
"This is skateboarding. It should be fun."
Svitak is small and unassuming. He doesn't drink or smoke. He speaks softly, and a good portion of his face hides behind a stringy mop of blonde hair. A crooked nose is the only sign that this guy makes a living crashing his body into concrete.
When I got tired of rolling around in circles, I watched Svitak at work.
This is surfing without the surf, ballet with a board.
And it's beautiful, in its own rugged, unrefined way.