Cool Russ Howell interview at Old Man army

[skategeezer]

[gorillabiscuits]

sounds like he is a little bitter about the dogtown guys and their popularity.

[Directive0]

personally, I have always thought the zephyr team was over-emphasized. But I wasn't there.

[shapeshifter]

i was skating at the time they became the focus. good or bad, that's just how it went down and that left a lot of people out of the loop. on the other hand the anarchic situation made skateboarding a more open opportunity for someone not entrenched in the system to rise up through the ranks.

[BobLoftin]

To me, the real legacy of the DT guys involves the work of Stacy with Powell-Peralta and his mentoring of some of the best skaters ever, and the support of Alva Skates for tons of successful, great skaters that Alva sponsored over the years.

[rawls]

Dogtown was more a product of the media. We read every word about those guys and DogTown was typically focus and it issued in the pool era and the park pools. You go with what the primary media showed. we had no videos, no internet, just still photos. the scene you saw, was the scene you strived for. SKateboarder was totally dogtown and that was the big magazine. Skateboard World was 50/50 Dogtown. But, Wild World was only about 10% dogtown. then Skaterider, east coast mag, had virtually no dogtown, except for plumer who was from florida.

Its no different than the current media focus of today and the old guys are finding fault with it, saying there is whole lot more to this.

I liked Russ Howell's comments. People have to realize there was other things out there. You get a real slanted view when the history is lost. Documentaries, when the history has been lost, become the effective history. Sometimes there is an undue bias that really fogs things.

Skateboarding is not that old.
Many of the true pioneers (like Russ) are still available and can paint the real picture.

[mangels]

I hafta kinda agree with Howell's comment that the whole reason the world ever found out about the Z-Boys at all was Craig Stecyk. I wouldn't call his articles "fiction" ... maybe I would go with "stories based on real events". The Z-Boys were good skaters and all that, but they never would have become the superstars they did without Stecyk's words and photos. A lot of credit always goes to Skip Engbloom and Jeff Ho for making the Z-Boys, but I always thought it was more the work of Stecyk. In a way, Stecyk also was responsible for introducing Skip and Ho to the world.

[stevie]

I was in the area at the time and remember it well. Ho and the Zephyr shop were major fixtures in the local surf scene long before the skateboarding took on a life of its own. I primarily remember the Zephyr guys for keeping us out of POP. The movie focuses on the cove, but there was an even better left on the north side that was also heavily localized. There weren't any beat-downs that I recall, but they would all drop in on us South Bay folk. We got em back when they came to surf Indicator . Mike Purpus wrote an article in the Easy Reader a few years ago about the Z-Boys hype and how the South Bay had many surfers and skaters that were at least as good.

I hafta kinda agree with Howell's comment that the whole reason the world ever found out about the Z-Boys at all was Craig Stecyk. I wouldn't call his articles "fiction" ... maybe I would go with "stories based on real events". The Z-Boys were good skaters and all that, but they never would have become the superstars they did without Stecyk's words and photos. A lot of credit always goes to Skip Engbloom and Jeff Ho for making the Z-Boys, but I always thought it was more the work of Stecyk. In a way, Stecyk also was responsible for introducing Skip and Ho to the world.

[dkj]

There weren't any beat-downs that I recall, but they would all drop in on us South Bay folk.

Omigod! Sounds brutal.
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