This is film shot in Waikiki from 1913, and shows several men surfing. My research, years ago for a zine, found that there was a small group of watermen in Waikiki, Hawaii, that brought back the ancient sport of surfing around 1900. A half Irish, half Hawaiian named George Freeth was said to be sort of leader of this group. The man most people know as the Father of Modern Surfing, Duke Kahanamoku, was part of the group, but a few years younger than George. The modern roots of today's action sports go all the way back to the late 1800's, and early 1900's, and even earlier, in some cases.
As I've mentioned many times in my blogs, I got into BMX in high school, and started learning tricks on my bike in late 1982 and early 1983, when it was "trick riding," not really BMX freestyle yet. Freestyle looked like this then. I ran cross country as well that year, poorly, and goofed around on my skateboard a little. That skateboard was was a hand built one, made out of a solid oak board. I bought it at a flea market in Mansfield, Ohio, 1978 for $2.
As time went on, BMX freestyle became my thing, and I spent two or three hours every day doing it. As a dorky kid who had always sucked at sports, I finally found something I actually was good at, largely because almost no one else was doing it. There were three of us freestylers in Boise then, Jay Bickel, Wayne Moore, and me. Riding grew in importance in my life, and over the next couple years, it led to publishing a zine, then a magazine job, and a few years in the BMX and skateboard industries.
By the late 1980's, BMX, skateboarding, and inline skating were all blowing up, following the earlier sports of surfing and motocross into the mainstream consciousness. Mountain biking and snowboarding were just gaining some traction among small groups of people, and there were some rock climbers, at Yosemite, and a few other places, pushing the limits there. It was then that I began to recognize that all these alternative "sports" had things in common. Unlike the "real" sports of the day, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey, these alternative sports were not team sports, they were all individual oriented. While all of our alternative sports had competitions, those weren't the most important thing. Just going out every day and riding (or surfing, or skating, etc...), and having a session, was what was important.
By the late 1980's, we were just figuring out that it was really all about progression, continually improving. I first heard that in an interview I dubbed while working at Unreel Productions. It was Tony Hawk, that said the word "progression," in an interview that was never used in a video. But sitting in my little workroom, I thought, "He's right, that's what these sports are really all about." Even if there were no contests at all, riders and skaters would keep progressing, and learning new tricks and moves, that was the real nature of the alternative sports.
Back then, before the internet, and the dissemination of thousands of terrabytes of all kinds of information about nearly everything, we didn't know the real history of our sports.
The reality is that snow skiiing may go back thousands of years. What we call cross country skiing was being used in Scandinavia for hunting, transportation, and warfare, by the early 1600's. Ski jumping and downhill skiing both began in the 1800's. Skiing bred hotdogging in the 1970's, then freestyle skiing, which has progressed now to halfpipe skiing, slopestyle, and big air, along with traditional moguls and good old powder skiing, and some cliff jumping as well.
It's well known that surfing was done hundreds of years ago, by the ancient Hawaiian kings. Surfing on waves, in some way or another, goes back at least a few thousand years. No one truly knows the true history of surfing. In Hawaii, it was nearly abolished by the white missionaries to the Sandwich Islands, as the Hawaiian Islands were called by outsiders, in the1800's. But around 1900, a small group of watermen, some seen in the top video from 1913, brought the sport back. George Freeth, a half Irish, half Hawaiian was one of the leaders, and Duke Kahanamoku was a younger waterman in that group. After Freeth died in the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918, Duke Kahanamoku continued to take the sport of surfing around the world. Duke went on to become the father of modern surfing, spreading the stoke worldwide. Now, in 2023, we have big wave surfing, longboard surfing, and shortboard surfing, airs, river wave surfing, and even ship wake surfing.
People have been climbing mountains, at least to traverse over high passes, for millenia. Mountaineering, specifically climbing to the peaks of mountains, goes back at least 200 years. This may have been more steep hiking that technical rock climbing, depending on the peak. Rock climbing, climbing more technical sections of rock, goes back over 150 years. Naturalist John Muir climbed Cathedral Peak in Toulumne Meadows, in 1869, in hiking boots. Google a photo of that mountain, that is definitely rock climbing. The rock climbing morphed into it's own thing in the 150 years since. Now there is mounatineering, big wall climbing, ice climbing, real rock sport climbing, climbing gym sport climbing, real rock bouldering, climbing gym bouldering, free soloing, deep water soloing, buildering, and probably some other variations I haven't heard of.
Roller skates go way back to 1760, possibly inline originally, I don't think anyone's sure. But inline skates go back to at least 1819, as seen in this skate history video. I'm not sure how aggressive those skaters were, but that's over 160 years before Rollerblade made inline skates so hockey players could crosstrain outside in the summer. In the 1980's, aggressive inline blew up into things like this, and this. there was even this crazy TV show called Blade Warriors in the early 1990's, that I worked on as a crew guy. After a couple of decades, aggressive inline has largely died down. But there are some booters out there still fruiting in 2023.
Pedal driven bicycles, as we know them now, were invented around 1875. In the late 1880's, Thomas Edison and a partner invented the Kinetiscope, the first movie camera. In 1899 and 1901, we have these films of the two coming together, film footage of bicycle trick riding. BMX racing, kids on Schwinn Stingrays racing like motocross riders, began in 1970 in Southern California. Member of the legendary York, PA riding crew, Mark Eaton, made the best overall documentary about BMX, Joe Kid on a Stingray in 2005. It was only a few years of BMX racing before BMX bikes were taken into pools and skateparks. Even so, Thomas Edison's film of bicycle trick riding was a full 75 years before Bob Haro, and the beginning of BMX freestyle, as us 1980's riders knew it.
BMX freestyle blended two of the root action sports. The bikes were bicycles designed to go offroad, like motocross riders, but it began with kids riding in swimming pools in the mid-1970's, like in this video, which is labeled as 1980, but is really from about 1983, judging by the equipment and tricks. Pool skating began with skateboarders mimicing surfers, a pool was seen as a stationary wave to ride. So BMX freestyle actually began as a weird blend of both motocross and surfing vibes, and later morphed into flatland, vert, park, street, and absorbed BMX dirt jumping. Then there are the DIY events like Swamp Jam 2023, BMXin', chaos, fire, and fun.
The first production motorcycle came out in 1894, according to this documentary, 8 years after the invention of the first motorcycle. Races for these new vehicles began almost immediately. Scrambles, offroad races generally believed to be the roots of modern motocross racing, began in the 1920's, in the United Kingdom. The scrambles eventually morphed into the beginning of motocross in the 1950's, as seen in this video. The courses and equipment evolved over the next couple of decades, and motocross jumped the pond over to the U.S..
Bruce Brown's 1971 movie, On Any Sunday introduced motocross, and other forms of motorcycle racing, to a much wider audience. In the same period, Evel Kneivel's distance jumps, and crashes, along with a handful of other jumpers, showed motorcyle daredevil stunts worldwide on TV and in films. While free riding on motorcycles was always a thing, the first Crusty Demons of Dirt video, which came out in 1994, lit a fire under motocross jumpers, and quickly led to Freestyle Motocross, or FSMX becoming a competitive sport within a few years. Seth Enslow's insane 4th gear step down crash in the Crusty video jump started distance jumping again, and motorcycle riders have now jumped more than twice as far as Evel Knievel did in his day (about 165 feet), though on much, much better bikes.
Water skiing began in 1922, on a wide area of the Mississippi River, according to this video. Lake Pepin, barely 50 miles downstream from Minneapolis, was the sight of the new idea, tried out by a young man named Ralph Samuelson. He skied on water, the first person known to have tried and succeded at the feat. It took a while to take off, but water skiing was being done for recreation, and in demos, by the 1940's and the 1950's. It took about 40 years for bored surfers to invent a sidestance version, the Scurfer, and another decade after that for Scurfing to morph into wakeboarding, which is now more popular than water skiing.
There's a book out there that I've seen, with a photo of a snowboard in Europe made in about 1935. I've heard another reference to a snowboard made in 1910 or 1911. So sidestance "surfing on snow" has been around at least 85-90 years. But what we now call snowboarding really began about 1965 with the Snurfer toy. A main pioneer of the sport, Tom Sims, made a handbuilt board (which I've actually seen in person), in 7th grade shop class, in 1963. So his rough first snowboard predates the Snurfer, though it wasn't known at the time. Snowboarding blew up in the late 1980's and 1990's, as early videos like this, and this, along with early magazines, got the word out, and it began to really grow in popularity. It actually helped prop up a slowing ski resort industry at the time. Snowboarding has since evolved into halfpipe, slopestyle, big air, heli-boarding, street boarding, boardercross, and knuckle hucking, along with alpine racing events. But the best part is, of course, freeriding some deep powder, or maybe jumping cliffs for the crazier boarders.
What is now known as parkour and freerunning has its origins with Raymond Belle in the late 1940's and 1950's. As told in this short history, he excelled at physical fitness at an early age to try and avoid abuse at an orphanage. He would sneak out at night to practice his skills on the obstacle course. His natural method of movement was adopted by his son, David Belle, whose skills were later dubbed parkour by a friend. The basic idea was to be able to move through an environment as quickly and efficiently as possible. As parkour grew, some people started adding flips and other tricks to it, which is often called freerunning now. Like many people, I first heard of parkour from when I looked up the running chase scene in the 2006 remake of the James Bond movie, Casino Royale, starring Daniel Craig. Even actor and dancer Dick Van Dyke and crew did some early rooftop freerunning, in the classic 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins. Like all the action sports, parkour, freerunning, and tricking continue to progress. In a somewhat similar, though later evolution, martial arts forms moves, like this routine from Matt Emig, later evolved into martial arts tricking, led by Matt and several others, in the 2010's. Tricking uses some similar movements to freerunning, many of which go back to circus acrobats of years past.
Sailboarding, better known as windsurfing, was invented somewhere around the 1950's to the 1960's, and has evolved since, particularly in big wave windsurfing.
Skateboarding, as we know it today, began in the late 1950's, again, with bored surfers who wanted to surf when the waves were flat. In this quick history of skateboarding video, you can see the main highlights of the sport. The first big wave of skateboarding popularity exploded in 1965-1966, and urethane wheels came in the early 1970's, which opened up far more terrain to skateboarding. Now we have freestyle skating (back from the dead), pool skating, vert skating, park skating, technical street skating, big gap and drop street skating, longboard skating, and Rodney Mullen, who is pretty much his own genre' at this point. Rodney also gives TED Talks about creativity and perseverance. Really.
While Leonardo DaVinci is famous for sketching the idea of a parachute in the 14th century, for jumping out of a burning building, the first functional parachute jump, and the word "parachute," happened in 1783-1785. Recreational parachuting and skydiving seems to have evolved after World War II, a hobby for former paratroopers looking for an adrenaline rush, perhaps. BASE jumping, jumping from fixed locations, began in 1966. The shortlived sport of skysurfing was an X-Games sport, in the late 1990's, and my downstairs neighbor at the time, Troy Hartman, was the top guy in it. Myself and the other neighbors in the had no idea he even jumped out of airplanes. He managed to take his skydiving skills, and get a TV show that was back to back with Jackass for a season, doing stupid things like this, and this, and this. Wingsuit flying really got going in the 1990's, and led to proximity flying, a cross between BASE jumping and wingsuit flying. Taking freefall and parachuting in another direction, straight up, was this World Record freefall attempt, and that record was already ridiculously high. Felix Baungertner not only set a new record, he also became the first human to break the sound barrier outside of an aircraft. Think about that one for a minute.
What we now call mountain biking is generally believed to have begun in the 1970's in Marin County, California. Like many action sports, there are competing claims to the origin. But I'll begin with this story, it's the first I heard, way back in the 1980's. You've all seen the world famous Golden Gate Bridge heading north out of San Francisco. Marin County is the wealthy, more rural place, on the north side of the bridge, across the bay from San Francisco. Some crazy guys started bombing down the fire trails on Mount Tamalpais, on single speed, coaster brake bikes they called clunkers. Much like the BMX riders in Southern California which had also just started, the bikes were not up to the challenge. So the guys started modiying their bikes any way they could come up with.
Bikes and riders began to evolve and progress, the continual theme of all action sports. Another area claiming the start of mountain biking is the North Shore region, outside of Vancouver, British Columbina, Canada. A completely different style of riding, differentiated by the terrain and trail building, evolved on the North Shore. In the spirit of the early klunker riders, the Mammoth Mountain Kamikaze downhill was a major race in the late 1980's, as seen in this 1988 TV show. Many former BMX riders led the charge, already highly skilled in riding on dirt, down the mountainside in those days, on multi-speed bikes with no suspension. Mountain biking was also big in Whistler, B.C., just up the coast from the North Shore, by that time. Mountain biking's competitive discipline's at the time were cross-country, downhill, trials, and dual slalom. I actually competed in the trials at this event, on my BMX freestyle bike. I was sent there as a video cameraman, but decided to have some fun as well. They wanted me to compete against Ot Pi and Hans Rey, since I had 20 inch wheels. But after lengthy discussion, they let me compete as a beginner, since I'd never done trials riding before. Hans' and Ot's skills were amazing at the time, setting the stage for MTB trials in later years. I was the only person who bunnyhopped the creek, though, which was cool. Even cooler, was watching the rest of the events, including the Kamikaze downhill. In 1998 there were still single speed riders there, screaming that riding multi-speed bikes downhill "wasn't real mountain biking."
By 1989, the bicycle industry declared BMX and BMX freestyle "dead," and went all in on mountain bikes, which blew up in popularity, finding a much more widespread following, in the 1990s. In the late 90's and into the early 2000's, as MTB spread, and places like Moab became known for great riding, there was the craziest mountain biker you've never heard of, Josh Bender, living and riding alone in Utah. He looked for, and found, terrain and drops no one ever thought were possible to do on a bike, and then hucked off them. Mountain biking continued to evolve and progress in the 21st century. Now it's 2023, and "mountain biking" conjures up images of things like Ray's MTB in Cleveland, Danny MacAskill, Dylan Stark, Red Bull Joy Ride in Whistler, Red Bull Rampage in Utah, Fabio Wibmer, and Brandon Semenuk.
These are just the best known of the action sports. Then there's body boarding/Boogie boarding, #bikelife, skimboarding, kite surfing, snow skating, urban wakeboarding, wake skating, urban free ride MX, parkour wall running, Oompa Loompa street skating, and whatever other action sports that have been developed in the last few years that I've never heard of. Each root sport keeps evolving and progressing, and all of those variations bleed over and influence the other sports, until you wind up with weird ass combination shit like motocross surfing.
In the 21st century, a big new theme in action sports has been the draw of girls and women into these sports. From early pioneers like Carabeth Burnside, Mercedes Gonzales and Sue Fish, Lynn Hill, Krys Dauchy, Tina Basich, Elissa Steamer, and a relatively small number of others, the number of women in these activities grew slowly. Now we have many great professional female action sports athletes, like Sky Brown, Angie Marino, Ashley Fiolek, Bethany Hamilton and Alana Blanchard, Lyn-Z Adams Hawkins Pastrana, Margo Hayes, Jesse Gregory, Leticia Bufoni and many others in more recent years.
This post is by no means an official timeline or history of action sports. My point here is that many of the root sports, like surfing, skiing, and mountain climbing, go back hundreds of years, maybe more. Even the more recent seeming sports, like trick riding on bikes or motorcycles, goes back decades, maybe 100 years or more. The early forms of action sports were around a long time before they really began to blow up in popularity in the 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's.
As a hardcore, and reasonably good, BMX freestyler in the late 1980's, I worked at Vision Skateboard's video company, Unreel Productions. I rode and knew a bunch of pro skaters, along with most of the top BMX freestylers of the day. I was the cameraman for a snowboard tuning video in 1988, working with Tom Sims himself for a couple of days. On the second day, he brought in the snowboard he made in 7th grade shop class, in 1963. This thing:
While I wasn't a pro caliber freestyler, by any means, I knew and rode with most of the best riders at some point. Working in video, and later TV, I met several top skateboarders, snowboarders, and a few inline skaters. I was living in Huntington Beach, surrounded by surfers of all ages. I began to see more things in common among these sports than differences.
Me carving the Nude Bowl on my Auburn, rocking the Vision Street Wear, in 1990.
All of these sports were about the session. Yes, there were competitions, but it was the day to day sessions that really made it worth while for all of us. These were all individual sports. There were no fat coaches in shorts, blowing whistles and yelling at us, like in traditional team sports. I never had to run a wind sprint in BMX. There were no referees. You couldn't cheat, either you landed a trick or you didn't. You may land sketchy, but you landed it. We could try anything we could think up, and had the huevos to try. The sports, all of them, were athletic, but creative at the same time. Style always mattered. Most of all, every sport was constantly evolving. These sports were all about progression, both your own, and the sport as a whole. By the late 1980'sI began to wonder, "Why are all these sports getting popular? Why are they all getting popular now?
For Christmas in 1989, my parents wanted the family together, so they flew me to their latest house, they'd wound up living in North Carolina. I knew I'd be pretty bored most of the time, since I wasn't taking my bike. So I bought a book to read, called The Great Depression of 1990. Yeah, back then I was already interested in business and economics. The book was written by economist Ravi Batra, whose family was from India. While most of the book was about long term economic cycles, and why he thought we were about to have a great depression, one chapter was about a social theory from a guy named P.R. Sarkar, from India. It was called The Law of Social Cycle.
Sarkar's theory claimed there were four basic mentalities in any society, The Intellectuals, The Acquisitors, The Laborers, and The Warriors. According to his thinking, at any given time, one of those mentalities dominated the society. That mentality is what most people looked up to, and it shaped all of society. The Intellectuals made their living as smart people, such as teachers, engineers, scientists, or writers. The Acquisitors were also smart, but focused on making money, they made their living running large businesses, or as landlords. The Laborers were the great mass of working class people, and they worked for other people's businesses. The Warriors made their living with courage and physical abilities, they were the soldiers, police, firefighters, and professional athletes.
The key to this theory is that the dominant mentality stays in control for decades, even centuries. But when they lose power, the next group rises to power. There is an order to how the mentalities rise up. They always go in the same order. Batra studied the U.S., and concluded that we have been in the Acquisitor Age, with the businessmen (and a few women) dominating American society, since the colonial days in the 1600's.
He also believed we were near the end of the Acquisitor Age, when business, in general became increasingly corrupt. Eventually, the Laborers get sick of getting the shaft, and they rise up in a populist movement. That chaotic period is called the Acquisitor cum Laborer era, and can last for many years. Eventually the working people force the corrupt business people out of power. It's a real chaotic time. But Laborers, by their nature, are not leaders. So then the Warrior mentality rises up to take over, unless the country or society gets invaded by some other country. The Warrior mentailty people look to courage and physicial fitness, but also are very individualistic. The sports of the Warrior Age tend to be more indiviualistic in nature.
I read the whole book over that Christmas week in1989, then headed back home to California. Sarkar's theory, The Law of Social Cycle made a lot of sense to me. In this theory, people could change, and move from one category to another, by will and hard work. A Laborer could go to college, and become a scientist, an Intellectual. Or an smart kid could workout, and become a martial artist or soldier, part of the Warrior mentality. A Warrior could open a busniess, and grow and become an Acquisitor. It just made sense to me, So the theory stuck in the back of my brain.
Within a few months, the U.S. went into the long recession of the early 1990's. While we didn't have a full great depression, most of what Ravi Batra predicted came true, it just wasn't as deep of a recession as he forecast. The first part of the Law of Social Cycle was actually playing out. According to what I'd read, that meant we would someday have a populist uprising in the U.S., as corruption grew, and took advantage of working class people. As most of you probably know, real wages, adjusted for inflation, have stayed about the same for 40 years now. Life has been getting tougher for everyday working people for several decades.
By the mid-1990s, I realized that if this theory played out, the U.S. would get even more corrupt in the late 90's and early 2000's, then the workers would rise up, in some kind of revolt. After that, the Warrior mentality would rise to power. So where did the Warrior mentality people come from? In older civilizations, they were mostly the soldiers, but in today's world they could be police, firefighters, professional athletes, and others who looked up to courage and physical abilities. Suddenly it dawned on me, what if all these action sports people, pretty much all my friends at the time, were a new aspect of the Warrior mentality?
In the modern urban world, we aren't under constant threat of being attacked by lions or tigers or bears or other tribes of people. We don't have to physically fight for our lives, on a day to day basis. But there's still that urge in many people to push themselves physically, to find a way to prove themselves, to show courage. Action sports fit the bill. I began to see the rise of all the action sports in the 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's as a new part of the Warrior mentality, rising up, and growing in society. It's not the only people with the Warrior mentality, but a new part of that group, in addition to soldiers, sailors, police, fire fighters, and traditional pro athletes.
At the same time these action sports were rising up in U.S. culture, we've also seen a big growth in the popularity of traditional martial arts, and the emergence and growth of mixed martial arts. There has also been a major growth in popularity of fitness in general, as running, yoga, gyms, and other finess trends have spread in the last few decades.
My belief is that as the Acquistor Age , the busniess people's era is nearing its end, and the Laborers are begininng to rise up. I think the populist movement began with Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and has grown since. The popularity of both Bernie Sanders on the Left, and Donald Trump on the Right, in the 2016 presidential election, is another example. While they battled each other, they were both populist candidates. I think the populist sentiment in the U.S., continues to grow.
This whole time, the Warrior mentality has been growing in U.S. society. The exponential growth of action sports, all of the action sports, is a part of the Warrior mentality growing in our society. So is the growth of martial arts, MMA, and even things like adventure racing and Crossfit. For several decades now, it's becoming more and more cool to be physically fit, and to do courageous activities, like BMX, skateboarding, surfing, rock climbing, and all of the other action sports.
In 1998, I put this basic idea into a zine called, The Rise of the Warrior Sports. I handed out about 40 of these zines, most of them at the 1998 X-Games in San Diego. The one I gave to photographer Mark Losey got snagged by BMX pro, Dennis McCoy. A year later, I was on the deck of the vert ramp at the X-Games in San Francisco during BMX practice. Dennis flew out, and stodd on the deck near me. He told me he really liked that zine. I had to ask what zine, it had been a year since I passed them out. He said, "the warrior thing." That's about as cool as it gets for a zine publisher. When you write a little, selfpublished zine that DEnnis McCoy remembers a year later, that's a solid compliment. What's Dennis McCoy doing now ? He's still a pro vert rider. He's still hucking 900's. And he's 56 years-old. Warrior mentality? Check.
So this is my personal theory of why action sports, many of which already existed for decades or centuries, have become so popular since the 1960's, and why they keep growing, spreading, and progressing so fast. Like I said, my thinking is based on P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle, and Ravi Batra's analysis of the U.S. in that cycle. Riding a skateboard doesn't make you a "warrior," that's a different thing, and many people have different definitions of what that means. But if you're a hardcore action sports person, I believe you have the "warrior mentality" that P.R. Sarkar spoke of. Maybe this makes sense to you, maybe it doesn't. Don't worry about it. Just go ride, skate, surf, climb, or do what you do, and keep progressing. That's what matters. If you're doing that, then you are part of this much larger trend in society overall, the rise of the Warrior mentality.
Dennis McCoy with a barspin 540, Anaheim, California B3 contest, 2000, I believe. Video still from my 2001 lurktographer video, Animals.
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Blogger's note: For those that know me... Yes, I'm a really fat, sketchy looking, 5-year-old homeless guy these days. A ridiculously prolific blogger, an Intellectual, in Sarkar's theory. But I spent 20 years of my life riding my BMX bike nearly every day, most of that time just for fun. I could ride a skateboard well enough to have a little fun, and I went out bouldering (low altitude rock climbing w/o ropes) on a regular basis, for about ten years. I wasn't great, but I had fun. I also worked in the BMX and skateboard industries for a few years, and edited or produced 15 low-budget BMX, skate, and snowboard videos. Then I got fat working as a taxi driver for years, and haven't recovered and got back to riding again. My thoughts on action sports come from all those years that I did do them.
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