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All this high-caliber excitement has led Michael Brooke, author of "The Concrete Wave: The History of Skateboarding," to speculate that we may be witnessing a renaissance in the sport, a rediscovery of its rich but
nowadays often neglected traditions. "Somewhere, somehow," Brooke says, "there is a rebirth of the old.  There is a joy, a soulfulness found in slalom, along with simply cruising and bombing hills and grinding pools, that you can't really replicate."  At least not, he explains, with the kinds of stunts -- some of them destructive of
equipment and public property -- commonly practiced by younger skaters and by their aggressively marketed idols.
"The radio dial," says Brooke, "is finally being turned to a new station."

If so, the change has been a long time coming.
The rise of "street" or "newschool" skating, the now-dominant incarnation of the sport, can be traced to two isolated phenomena of the late 1970's.  In southern California, a scruffy young man named Tony Alva began practicing a brash new version of skating that was not so much sport as performance art: teenage angst and aggression acted out kinetically, body on board on concrete, choreographed to the then-new rhythms of punk rock.
At roughly the same time, on the far side of the continent, a scrawny Jewish kid named Alan Gelfand discovered a new way of making the skateboard move: instead of rolling along the pavement, you could jump on the tail and then leap up upward, thus performing allow-altitude aerial stunt that came to be known as the ollie.
>From these two unrelated events, as in one of those cartoon chemistry mishaps where you mix this and that together, then BOOM -- only more gradually, over the decade of the 1980's -- the strange newschool fusion arose.  Gelfand's little trick became the basis of a still-expanding repertoire of board-based stunts, variations on the theme of jumping into the air and doing something your mom would not approve of.  And Alva's bad-boy persona -- propagated by Fausto Vitelli's "Thrasher" magazine and embraced by legions of hormone-addled adolescents -- swept skateboarding far from its origins as a wholesome, Everykid activity.  Or to put it another way, far from the days when a 7-year-old like Russ Howell could jump on a
piece of wood with rollerskate wheels nailed to it, and hum "Surfin' USA" while rattling happily down the sidewalk.

"Beach boys, surfing and skateboarding -- a nice way to grow up," reminisces Kim Kimball, executive director of the Morro Bay Chamber of Commerce.  "One of the favorite memories I have is watching my daredevil brother skate down Avalon Street in Morro Bay with our German shepherd on a leash running full speed ahead.  Not quite what has become of skate boarding today!" Kimball's nostalgia for a more innocent era of skateboarding -- made the more poignant by his daredevil brother's death a few years ago -- might explain his readiness to sign on to the notion of a World Slalom Championship in the two-stoplight town of Morro Bay.  Located on California's Middle Coast about equidistant from San Francisco and L.A., the place is sufficiently picturesque that the skateboard event will be competing for scanty hotel and parking space with a new Rob Reiner film,
whose script calls for location shots in "some quaint harbor town."
The scheme was put to Kimball by Jack Lee Smith, a resident of nearby San Luis Obispo whose connections with skateboarding, and record of dreaming up media-friendly happenings, go all the way back to the Day.
"In 1976," Smith has written, "myself and two friends decided to become the first skaters to cross the country by skateboard."  He managed to line up a
sponsor who donated cash and equipment for this improbable venture, and board-pumped his way from Lebanon, Oregon, to Williamsburg, Virginia, in a mere 32 days.  In 1984 he retraced the journey with skate pros Bob Denike, Gary Fluitt and Paul Dunn, this time slashing the transit time to 26 days and using the occasion to raise money for the fight against multiple
sclerosis.

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