Ouch: this is so painfully close to the truth. The idea of having a carefully written out list of tricks to master was no fiction. My hunch is that a lot of people had such things. Their five year plan. Or one month in this case. As usual Gavin was writing about a deeper truth.

I’m also intrigued to find him recommending Siberian Ginseng — far more obscure than the Korean equivalent. Gavin knew a lot about a remarkable range of things, but health supplements for skateboarders as used by Russian athletes? At the time I probably only checked that he wasn’t suggesting something weird and shrugged. Fifteen years later I find myself taking it too and doing a bit of work for a company which sells it. Spooky. Maybe I’d better find out about Juniper body oil as well!

Days 5-7: Wednesday 26th – Friday 28th June Now the regime really starts. For the next three days you’re going to be watching your videos and reading your magazines. You’re going to train your mind. You’re going to analyse each frame. You’re going to write down every trick. You’re going to observe everything those skaters are doing. You’re going to flick through the magazines you bought stopping at every rad trick and working out in your mind just how that was achieved. You’re going to watch each movement on the screen, freeze frame, and mimic it on your bed with your board. Step by tedious step.
You’re going to absorb all that is humanly possible with those fast edit features. You’re going to get inside the heads of these skaters and you’re going to live each trick. You’re going to obtain the brain of a top street skater. The ability will follow.
By the end of the sixth day you should get a pad and write down the twenty best tricks. Then you will number them from 1 to 20 in order of difficulty and split up tricks into their component (ie Ollie-???-???). From the knowledge you’ve gained in the past few days, write instructions by each trick on the ideal way to execute it.
Don’t be tempted to add more tricks: your aim is to win the Münster Street Competition and with a maximum of two minutes for a run you will not need a bigger pool of tricks.
What you are writing will form your schedule for the coming week. At the end of the third day, close the magazines, press ‘”eject’ and say goodbye to your tv. Bed; sweet dreams. You can do it.
Day 8-14: Saturday, 29th June – Friday, 5th July. First thing in the morning go to a health food shop and buy a bottle of Siberian Ginseng capsules and some Juniper body oil. From now on take 3 capsules of Ginseng after your exercise in the morning and rub yourself in the Juniper body oil. This will give your body the stamina and flexibility it requires. Your body will feel good, your mind will be alert, and now it’s time to put theory into practise.
For the next seven days you will be skating from morning to night. Wear as much protection as the skating allows — I know it’s uncool and often unnecessary, but you’ll be trying things you never thought possible, so you will need to be relaxed and confident. You’re going to fall a lot in the next few days: if you fall and don’t hurt yourself the fear factor that holds you back will fade.
Go out and work your way through your trick list starting at 1. Don’t go on to 2 before you have made trick 1 five times in a row. You will spend hours upon hours in the first few days desperately trying to go from, say, trick 7 to trick 8. Something which appeared so simple on video will now seem unachievable. It isn’t: they can do it — and so can you.
Keep going: this is a week of hard work and destiny. Something amazing will happen this week. It may happen on day 4, it may happen on day 6, but it will happen: something will click. Suddenly you’ll find that you’ve got through three or four tricks in a couple of hours. What’s been in your brain for a while now will suddenly transform into what your body’s able to do. Like a rush from the Tao, like a chuckle from the Buddha — synchronisity will occur. You will feel excited, you’ll feel triumphant. Tap this feeling and turn it into strength. You have achieved much.
Now complete the trick-list. Know that it’s not just me telling you that you can do it — you know that you can do it.

Next Page: How to be the Worlds Greatest Street Skater – More on How to Become…

IRELAND: IN A SENSE ABROAD

by Gavin Hills

“The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time.”
W.B. YEATS

NORTH

Someone once mentioned that everything in Ireland is a lot greener. I certainly was — me, along with the rolling hills and sheep-clad fields. To travel to Northern Ireland is to travel through history, and history in this case is a nightmare they are all trying to awake from.

I was green: I assumed I was there to cover a forgotten scene and give it the oxygen of publicity, so to speak. However the fact is that the area’s skaters and their spirit force you to add the context to their scene — for they are the first to point out the shit that’s there for any stranger to step in.

“RAD! Painted curbs!” I shouted as Rab’s car took us from Belfast station to Steve Barrow’s welcoming Antrim home. “Yes, there’s plenty of them round here…” was the reply. And indeed there was — naive I was. Northern Ireland is a mecca for painted curbs. Yet here they do not symbolise street skating fun, they, like the painted lamp-posts, walls, the odd tree trunk and occasional sheep, they symbolise territory.

In Northern Ireland estates, areas and towns shout their alliegances loud: in some places the curbs are red, white and blue, in others they are green, white and gold. In case you don’t get the message, flags will fly and graffiti will inform: Catholic/Protestant, IRA/UVF, Republican/Loyalist, Celtic/Rangers. I did not realise sectarianism had such a physical face. Yet ugliness like beauty is only skin deep, and I was later to learn that most rise above this bigoted facade.

On Saturday I rose with a bowl of Crunchy Nut, dragged Jay and Wurzel out of bed and we all bundled in Rab’s car towards (London)Derry. It must be said that the country-side in these parts is the stuff of ballads and purple prose. Cliches easily roll through hill and bog. The other views are there though, like Wild West style towns with Fort Apache where the police station should be, army check-points on quiet roads, red white and blue sheep — that sort of the thing.

We arrived in Derry in one piece and set about finding a rumoured street comp. Eventually we discovered it in a small park on fourth street. I soon realised that Munster this wasn’t — but enthusiasm and good will seemed readily available even if organisation and sanity were in short supply. The competition got under way and Wurzel and I started to judge the all-comers’ antics over a selection of mini brick banks and small slide bars.

Captions: Fundamental streets of Dublin stuff, Ollie grab from Rosie

Behind the windows at the top of the banks they lecture on the theory of molecular motion, while outside they get practical

All the pictures were taken by Vernon Adams, a.k.a Jay Podesta

Now stop for just a moment. Go back again and read that lot. It’s no more true than the first piece. There’s an inifite number of choices — and you don’t even have to choose one. Just skate. Remember the last words of the Old Man of the Mountains:

“Nothing is true,
Everything is permitted.”

And that’s another theme which underlies the whole history of R.a.D. The quotation is from Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell’s film “Performance” — there were plenty more scattered through R.a.D over the years. I’d sneak them in whenever I could.

And perhaps they’re right. The freestyling and racing heroes of the sixties and mid seventies were supplanted by the vertical stars of the late seventies and eighties. Now we have pros who have established their name on the streets. That would have seemed ridiculous at the beginning of eighties, but as skating grows, new areas, new aspects of skating, are opening up all the time.

The mini-ramp has brought a whole new style of skating to a new generation. New, different: not better, not worse. The lines of the mini- ramp wizard are not the direction based lines of the park skaters, they have more in common with the trick based lines of the freestyler. But nobody feels a need to slag off freestylers because all they do are ‘tricks’ or a slalomer because all they do is wiggle through cones.
If you can only see lines in terms of travelling over concrete, or flowing patterns the width of a big vert ramp, then you’re the one with the blinkers, you’re the one trapped in the mental tramlines. And if you’re spending time worrying about it, that’s your problem, not the bloke who is actually skating on the mini.

Do you get pissed off with people coming on better than you on the grounds that their skating (or type of skating) is better than yours? It’s fashionable to take the piss out of kids who get hung up about who can do what tricks. But the people who take the piss are careful to maintain their particular status. It’s not how high you can Ollie, for them, but the point remains the same — ‘I’m better than you’. In this case because ‘I’ am into a ‘better’ form of skating.
This prejudiced view has established a set hierarchy: concrete, good; big vert ramps, nearly as good; mini-ramps, bad. Just as some do-gooders insist that skateboard graphics are the work of devil, so some skaters carry on as if satan had come up with the idea of the mini. They forget that skating is constantly changing: that when they first took to riding back yard pools most ‘skaters’ were more into spinning 360s or racing down hills. Or maybe they don’t forget? Maybe deep down they fear the new?

STOP RIGHT HERE

Now go back, read that stuff again but this time and ask yourself whether you agree. Beneath all the standard ‘open your eyes and your mind’ stuff we usually trot out, is the assumption that a particular style of skating is ‘bad’.
Why?

Conformity breeds stagnation which spreads like a plague of death and destruction, and napalms our very souls. Instead of going for the latest trick, go for a new line. Tramlines may be in vogue in skinny haircuts on young hippety-hoppity heads, but at least they’re showing variety. Take a leaf out of their book: I saw these photos from some New York barber’s the other day — there was a Mickey Mouse on a skateboard. That barber had the lines sussed.
Tramlines? Leave them in Blackpool, mate, leave them in Blackpool.

Everyone’s got a line in them unfortunately today more and more are choosing tramlines. They’re stuck in a groove and won’t break out.
Mini-ramps have brought many good things into skating, but on the down side they’ve given many skaters a tramline which they lay down everywhere. Ramps, reservoirs, parks and even pools are now becoming just mini-ramp substitutes as the tramlines are laid down across them. Back and forth everyone goes with aerobic style routines.
All terrain contains an infinite number of lines, so why not ignore the squashed circle most have chosen? BREAK FREE! Go back and forth, up and down, round and round, crave figures of eight even. Crave figures that if you drew them would look like some Dada drugs experiment.
Find a line, hide it, find a new one. Then get your old one out and show off. Lines are as much a part of the creative side of skating as tricks: a creative skater can find lines that enhance his skating.