True Skate Stories - Frontside Chin Slide Body Slam

Check out that mean green tie-died skating machine!

That was me aged eighteen popping Ollies over suitcases and a grass bank in the local Kwiksave car park. If I remember rightly, that picture on the far right, was the first time that I landed a frontside 180 Ollie over that grass bank.

Ahhh, happy days,life was simpler then.

I had just moved out of my family home after having a massive argument with one of the lodgers who seemed to think it was her responsibility to tell me to do my chores and clean the house.

I believe my exact words were, 'fck off, you're not my mother.'

Teenagers ehh!

My mother told me the next day that I needed to grow up and gave me an ultimatum to sort out my behavior, or find somewhere else to live. I'm pretty sure that she didn't realize I would call her bluff. Within three days I had found a shared house to live in with two friends.

The house was owned by one of my friends who's parents had died when he was fifteen. He'd inherited quite a lot of money with his brothers and being a sensible sort, invested in some shares and bought a house and a car. There were three of us living in the house and we all basically lived in a teenage dreamland of questionable hygiene, fumigating the house with copious amounts of cannabis smoke.

Money wasn't really an issue for me at the time. How do I put this delicately, as a teenager and young man I was something of an entrepreneur. A wandering salesman, if you will... of all-natural herbal remedies.

When I wasn't out on my bike making deliveries, my mornings were spent building electronic music on my housemates PC. He was a keen music producer and had bought a bunch of sound engineering equipment including an analogue synth, sound module, mixer and a decent PC to use for production. I would spend hours learning how to use Cubase to build drum and bass music. I've been digging through my catalog of back-up DVD's today but couldn't find any of the music I made. It is somewhere in that collection of more than 100 DVD's so I'll find it one day and share some of those tracks.

During that time, any day that was sunny would be spent at the Kwiksave car park with a few of my friends who also enjoyed throwing themselves off, over and down things on a plank of wood with wheels on it. I became quite obsessional between the ages of 18 - 22 before a major injury cooled my zeal. During that first year I built up my skating foundations in the Kwiksave car park, jumping longer distances and higher objects. I also learned Pop Shove-Its and developed my front side and back side 180 Ollie skills.

I have to be honest, I was never a natural at skateboarding. It took me over 4 years to learn how to do a kickflip but the joy for me was tearing around the streets of Liverpool at high speed, and eventually in the latter days finding flow through the concrete playground of the city. Flowing from grinds to jumping up kerbs before carving down a hill and ending with a big Ollie down a set of stairs. This was my favorite style.

Skateboarding has a creative side to it that a lot of people don't understand. It's sort of like painting a tapestry of motion across the urban landscape. After a certain amount of time as a skater, you start to view the city in a different way. As you drive through the city features of the streets become a potential jigsaw puzzle of trick-able objects. When you're not skating, you're thinking about skating.

I honestly think that skateboarding provides an outlet for the nervous energy that the synthetic environment brings, especially for teenagers and young adults. I once had a long conversation about this with a couple of mountain bike police who had just chased some skaters away from the pier head (a famous Liverpool skate spot). Their point was that the damage done to ledges etc was costing the council money; my point was that the money the council saved on smashed bus shelters, pointless graffiti tagging and police time dealing with violent anti-social behavior was worth the pay-off maintaining the ledges. They didn't agree or disagree with what I was saying, they simply told me they had to enforce the law. Make no mistake, at least half of the younger skateboarders in most cities would be up to some other type of shenanigans if they didn't skate. Skateboarding attracts a certain type of bloody-minded, pissed off (usually) young male 😆 Skateboarding is a positive outlet for people who would otherwise take out that energy and angst in a different way.

The same police chased me a week later to try and enforce a fine for skating that spot. They never caught me as there was a handy network of back streets near to the pier head and law courts where everyone skated. I had to stop skateboarding due to injuries, and to this day I can't walk through an airport metal detector without setting it off due to the pins in my elbow.

But that's enough of my theories about the sociological benefits of skateboarding... time for my true skate story. This story is about one of the lesser slams I took during my crazy days skating Liverpool's concrete playground.

Frontside Chin Slide Body Slam at the Pier Head

It was a Saturday in the summer of 2003. The sun was blazing so the best spot to skate was the pier head right next to the river. A breeze was flowing off the Mersey estuary cooling my face and keeping me pumped to skate in the heat. In my ears was a skate mix including Roni Size, Wu Tang Clan and DJ Shadow. If my memory serves me DJ Shadow's Organ Donor was playing.

I had moved a bench to the end of a long run leading up to a 4-set of steps facing the river. The bench was placed on the slope of the 4-set to make a sloped object to grind either up or down. It was around 2pm in the afternoon and I had just returned from a quick trip into the city center to buy some lunch after a long morning practicing grinding up-slope on the bench.

Everything had been going smooth in the morning with me finding my flow and no slams. When I left to get lunch the edges of the bench were well waxed and upon returning no one had moved it from the 4-set. I didn't bother checking it and did a few warm up runs grinding the lower ledges before lining up for the long run up to grind the bench down the 4-set at the end.

I powered up as much as I could, pumping my foot for speed and as I approached the bench I noticed a rather worried looking old couple had paused their walk to watch me. The woman seemed to be shaking her head while the man just watched on interested in what was going to happen. I tried to put this distraction out of my mind, focusing on the music and narrowing my focus in on the edge of the bench where I wanted to land a simple 50-50 (flat) grind and slide it out.

This is where everything went wrong. As my skateboard hit the bench edge it stuck straight away, jamming up and launching me through the air with four sharp edged steps below me. Sometimes when you slam, things sort of happen in a strange autopilot blur without you knowing what you're really doing. Your instincts take over and the body automatically rights itself to take the least damage.

That autopilot definitely saved me this time as the windmilling of my arms kept me reasonably level in my flight and I hit the concrete with my hands/palms, stomach and chest first, with the chin ricocheting a little as I slid toward the two horrified pensioners looking on.

I was well and truly winded. I lay there focusing on where the pain was worse and I couldn't speak or move for some time. All of the pain was in my chest and lower abdomen, with that horrible nausea you get when you can barely breath after winding yourself. After about a minute of focusing on keeping my dinner down, I noticed the old couple stood over me, concern on their faces asking if I was OK?

In my experience the best way to get over a slam like that, providing no bones are broken, is to get up and ride it out. It's OK to take a brief break, and to down the intensity of your session, but if you just stop altogether things cramp up badly.

I guess that the slam looked pretty bad! The couple were asking if I needed an ambulance as I scraped myself up off the floor, thanked them for their concern and retrieved my skateboard from where it was still stuck on the bench. I can still remember the look on the old geezer's face as I climbed up the 4-set of stairs, jogged off and dropped in to my board to ride away to the other end of the pier head.

Thanks for reading.

_{#truestories is a curation initiative by @slobberchops to encourage us all to share true stories from our past. He is actively curating the tag with the intention of encouraging more entertaining, none steem related content. You can check out his announcement post here.}