October 2, 2001 — 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.