Relentless

Skating Pools in South Africa.

These days skating is alive and well in South Africa. But it's not always been that way. Thanks to military service and international isolation, bowl riding all but vanished for a whole decade as the country grappled with the policies of a racist government in its last throes.

The original art of deep-transition skateboarding has a small and dedicated following in South Africa. Mental sessions go down regularly, and like any place where urethane meets cement, the traditions of Dogtown pervade in SA. Find it. Drain it. Skate it. Get bust and chased away, or have a killer session and escape unhindered.

But despite the obvious connections with skate’s Southern Californian roots, the road to a thriving skate scene in South Africa has been anything but smooth. In this peculiar nation, where the developing and developed worlds merge and collide, even skateboarding has fallen victim to history.

While skating took off in South Africa at roughly the same time the Z-Boys were ripping up their pools, it slowly fell behind and almost disappeared completely thanks to politics.

In the early seventies a handful of South Africans such as Gary Stevens and Gary Smith were fully sponsored by the likes of Sims and Pepsi, and for a while travelled the country doing demos on the insanely over-vert half pipes of the day.

When not pioneering backyard pools, these early pros were riding the purpose-built skate park walls at Honeydew or Cresta in Johannesburg. Indeed, the fate of Cresta is a metaphor for the stunted growth of skating in SA. All but a few of its transitions were covered in fibreglass after a couple of years to make a water slide funpark. Not long after that, attention was further diverted as the early eighties craze of BMX racing grabbed the attention of the country’s kids.

Thus, skateboarding’s fluctuations in popularity, especially in the US, were total swings of the pendulum here. The sport itself, let alone pool riding, all but vanished a few times. In the lean years, it remained the preserve of literally a handful of fully committed diehards.

This might seem strange, but the fact that there was no Internet and our rulers were a bunch of fascist freaks explains a lot. Thanks to them, we became increasingly isolated from the world in the eighties. Equipment was hard to come by, making your own board was far from uncommon and magazines and videos were nearly impossible to find. So, understandably, things moved slowly.

Like every good subculture, skating spread from the grassroots up. I remember first stealing runs from an older, Dogtown-esque local skate crew, carving a backyard pool near the beach, barefoot, on a plastic board. It was somewhere around ’83, and I can still feel the stoke of getting up to the light, as well as the pain of the requisite slams.

All along the coast, in Cape Town and Durban, scenes like this were prospering. But the real spiritual homes of South African pool and bowl skateboarding (and, de facto, SA skateboarding in general) were two concrete surfaces in landlocked Johannesburg. One was the now-abandoned water park Cresta, stripped of the fibreglass layers by a new generation to reveal the perfect concrete waves beneath. The other was a derelict pool called the Banana Bowl. Without the ocean and beach to distract them, Jo’burg skaters in the early eighties were altogether a more dedicated bunch than their cousins on the coast. They were a tight crew, who helped progress the sport rapidly in these two bowled nirvanas, before spreading the gospel far and wide.

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