When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Interesting bits in here…

• The overview of what we described as ‘the streetstyle device‘: state of the art at the time was: ‘Bank, quarter-pipe and mini-handrail all in one unit.” Now you see things like that all over the place. They’ve become a standard item in public and commercial parks. In 1988 this seemed like a first to us: “You could do three moves in one hit.”
• Quote of the street-style event: “Oh well, I guess I’ll make up for that in my second run…” Mike Vallely after his ‘first’ qualifier. They had one run each.
• Stuart Dryden, from Southsea, who came over from Southsea and entered in the days when travelling to competitions like this was beyond the reach of most people.

These were the killer things which lodged in Shane [O'Brien's] memory. Gonzales’ Ollie Stalefish Method 180 and Railslide regular footed [we were amazed by switch-stance then]. Cab’s Backside 180 Ollies off the jump ramp. Vallely’s 360 Frontside Hand-plant on the double-sided jump ramp. And Hosoi’s Frontside Wall-ride when his back foot slipped leaving him hanging off the top of the wall with his front foot keeping hold of the board. After a few sweaty moments, he shuffled the board back up and rode out. Delirium

Somebody sent me a link to a picture showing Tony Hawk at a 2008 Retro-contest, complete with a R.a.D sticker on the ramp and Mike Manzoori filming in the background. But I can’t find it now. Most strange.

Oh dear. Back in the days before desktop publishing you did not know what things would look like until you got the magazines back from the printers. Unless you could afford proofs, which we could not. So the yellow tint behind some of this worked OK, but the magenta one makes it impossible to read the text. Such was life back then.

The sidebar at the bottom is about an incident I had long forgotten. On the day of the finals neither Christian Hosoi nor Eric Dressen showed up. Both were still asleep. Somehow someone woke up Hosoi and got him to the hall. Eric Dressen slept on. There were murmurs that this was because Hosoi was considered the bigger ’star’ by the organisers and the feelings came to head with a bit of a fight at the post-contest party.