JAY SMITH AND THE HOLY ART OF LEANING TOO FAR

A Pope of Love Sermon From the Church of Concrete, Urethane and Beautiful Bad Ideas

There are two kinds of people in this world.

Those who look at a wall and see a wall.

And those who look at a wall and wonder whether they can ride a skateboard up it.

Civilization depends heavily upon the first group.

Human progress depends suspiciously often upon the second.

Jay Smith belonged to the second group.

Not merely because he was a skateboarder.

Lots of people ride skateboards.

Jay Smith belonged to that smaller and stranger brotherhood of humans who discover that the accepted way of doing something is only one possibility among several thousand, most of which haven't been attempted because sensible people have mortgages.

Jay Smith leaned backward.

That sounds like a small thing.

It was not.

He leaned backward until the human skeleton began filing paperwork.

He leaned backward until gravity checked the rulebook.

He leaned backward over pool coping with one hand scraping concrete and four urethane wheels grinding beneath him, transforming the ordinary act of turning a skateboard into something halfway between surfing, sculpture, vandalism and prayer.

They called him Rubberman.

Appropriately.

Because Jay Smith seemed constructed from materials unavailable at ordinary hardware stores.

And somewhere inside those impossible laybacks is a lesson that extends far beyond skateboarding.

The world is always trying to teach us the proper angle at which a person should stand.

Jay Smith chose another angle.

Welcome to church.

BEFORE SKATEBOARDING KNEW WHAT IT WAS

Go back to Southern California in the late 1970s.

Skateboarding was still young enough to have dirt beneath its fingernails.

It hadn't become an industry large enough to require marketing departments explaining authenticity to teenagers.

There were no Olympic medals.

No gigantic shoe contracts.

No video-game franchises.

No carefully engineered social-media campaigns informing you that rebellion was available in three colorways.

Skateboarding was still mutating.

Its earliest language came from surfing.

Carve the pavement.

Lean.

Turn.

Flow.

Pretend asphalt is water.

Then came urethane wheels.

Better trucks.

Empty swimming pools.

Purpose-built concrete skateparks.

And suddenly the skateboard encountered the vertical wall.

This changed everything.

Because once skateboarders discovered they could ride up walls, skateboarding stopped merely imitating surfing.

It began inventing its own universe.

The swimming pool became one of humanity's great accidental laboratories.

A homeowner saw recreation.

A skateboarder saw architecture begging for reinterpretation.

This is worth remembering.

Creativity often begins when somebody refuses to use an object for its intended purpose.

A staircase becomes a spot.

A drainage ditch becomes a skatepark.

A parking block becomes a grind.

An empty swimming pool becomes a cathedral.

And the people who built these things rarely saw any of that coming.

That is the delicious secret hiding inside human invention:

The designer builds one thing.

The weirdo discovers another.

THE CHURCH OF MARINA DEL REY

One of those laboratories was the Marina del Rey Skatepark.

Places like Marina were not merely recreational facilities.

They were evolutionary pressure cookers.

Skaters watched other skaters.

Someone tried something.

Someone else pushed it farther.

Then someone arrived who didn't understand that the previous version was supposed to be the limit.

That person is frequently where history becomes interesting.

Jay Smith became one of Marina's distinctive creatures.

His signature maneuver was the layback grind.

The basic idea sounds simple enough.

Approach the coping frontside.

Lean backward.

Plant your trailing hand.

Allow the board to grind along the lip while your body swings dramatically beneath it.

Simple.

In approximately the same sense that playing saxophone is blowing into a pipe.

The mechanics describe almost nothing.

Style describes everything.

Smith stretched the layback farther and farther until the maneuver became unmistakably his.

Look at photographs of Jay Smith skating and you don't necessarily need to see his face.

The silhouette gives him away.

Body folded backward.

Arm extended.

Board locked into coping.

Human anatomy temporarily redesigned according to the requirements of style.

That's important.

Because there is a difference between performing a trick and owning a movement.

Plenty of people can play the same three chords.

Only some of them start a band you remember forty years later.

STYLE IS THE THING THEY CAN'T STANDARDIZE

Modern culture likes measurement.

Numbers are tidy.

How high?

How fast?

How many?

How much?

Who won?

How difficult was the trick?

How many rotations?

How many stairs?

How many followers?

How many views?

Fine.

Numbers have their uses.

But numbers fail catastrophically when confronted with style.

Style refuses the spreadsheet.

You can measure the height of an air.

You cannot measure how it feels.

You can count rotations.

You cannot calculate swagger.

You can document that two skateboarders performed the same maneuver and still find yourself watching one of them twenty times.

That inexplicable remainder is style.

And style may be skateboarding's most sacred currency.

Jay Smith understood this instinctively.

His contribution wasn't simply:

I can do a layback.

It was:

This is what a layback looks like when Jay Smith does it.

That distinction is enormous.

Because every great skateboarder eventually faces the same question every artist faces:

Are you trying to perform correctly?

Or are you trying to become recognizable?

One produces competence.

The other produces a voice.

THE FIRST BONES BRIGADE

Now we reach one of the great wrinkles in Jay Smith's story.

Mention the Bones Brigade and most skateboarders immediately picture the famous lineup:

Tony Hawk.

Rodney Mullen.

Steve Caballero.

Mike McGill.

Lance Mountain.

Tommy Guerrero.

The videos.

The Chin Ramp.

The skeleton graphics.

The peculiar suburban wonderland of 1980s skateboarding.

But mythology has a habit of beginning stories halfway through.

Before the famous Bones Brigade existed, there was an earlier version.

Call it Bones Brigade: Garage Demo Era.

Around 1979, Stacy Peralta was assembling an extraordinary collection of skateboarders for Powell.

Jay Smith was among that early crew.

That makes him an important bridge between two worlds.

Behind him:

The raw concrete skatepark culture of the 1970s.

Ahead of him:

The Powell-Peralta machine that would help define skateboarding in the 1980s.

Jay Smith stood on the hinge.

He was there before skate videos became mythology factories.

Before professional skateboarding became even remotely sustainable.

Before the industry figured out how to sell not only skateboards but identities.

This is how history usually works.

Before the famous movement arrives, there are people standing around in parking lots accidentally inventing it.

They rarely know they're doing anything historic.

They're just trying to skate.

THEN THERE WERE THE BOARDS

Jay Smith's skateboard decks are glorious artifacts from an era when skateboard shapes looked less like standardized sporting equipment and more like individual species discovered on different islands.

Modern decks are remarkably symmetrical.

Many older skateboards were not.

They had giant tails.

Tiny noses.

Odd wheelbases.

Strange widths.

Unexpected concaves.

Shapes designed around particular terrain and particular riders.

Smith's Powell decks could be around ten inches wide with long wheelbases and remarkably short noses.

One famous version had a nose around two inches long.

Two inches.

That's not a nose.

That's a rumor of a nose.

The board looked as though someone started designing the front and got distracted.

But that strange shape tells you exactly what skateboarding was doing at the time.

Jay wasn't worried about switch kickflipping a loading dock.

The board existed for:

Speed.

Pools.

Walls.

Coping.

Carves.

Grinds.

Transition.

It was a purpose-built machine.

A ten-inch-wide wooden declaration that everything ahead of you should probably move.

And this is why old skateboard shapes fascinate me.

They are evolutionary fossils.

Look carefully and you can see what skateboarders valued.

Wide boards tell you something.

Short noses tell you something.

Wheelbase tells you something.

Concave tells you something.

Every shape contains an argument about what skateboarding is supposed to be.

And then another generation comes along and changes the argument.

PUNK ROCK ENTERS THROUGH THE SIDE DOOR

Something else was happening around Jay Smith.

Punk was arriving.

Today the marriage between punk rock and skateboarding feels so natural that separating them requires historical surgery.

But they were not born together.

Early skate culture inherited much of its image from surfing.

Sunshine.

Beaches.

California.

Athleticism.

Then punk crawled through the window wearing torn clothes and carrying records nobody's parents enjoyed.

Punk brought something skateboarding desperately needed:

Permission.

Permission to look ugly.

Permission to sound wrong.

Permission to distrust authority.

Permission to make your own magazine.

Permission to make your own music.

Permission to print your own graphics.

Permission to start before somebody tells you you're qualified.

That last one may be punk's greatest contribution to civilization.

The punk ethos essentially says:

You do not need permission to participate in culture.

You can make culture.

Skateboarding understood immediately.

Jay Smith embraced this emerging punk sensibility.

His imagery became darker.

Iron crosses.

Skulls.

Aggressive graphics.

Pushead even created an early punk-skull graphic concept associated with Smith that Powell reportedly didn't use.

Which is wonderfully funny in retrospect.

Because skateboard graphics soon became populated by enough skulls, skeletons, demons, dragons, rats, severed limbs and supernatural monsters to make Hieronymus Bosch consider taking up watercolor landscapes.

The gate had opened.

Skateboarding entered.

THE WEIRDOS MOVE CULTURE FORWARD

Here is today's sermon.

Every culture contains people whose job seems to be making everyone else slightly uncomfortable.

They dress incorrectly.

Talk incorrectly.

Create incorrectly.

Believe strange things.

Use equipment incorrectly.

Ask unnecessary questions.

Try ideas that sensible people have already concluded will not work.

They are often dismissed as weird.

This may be premature.

Because weirdness is frequently research and development performed by human beings.

Society needs normal behavior.

Obviously.

You don't want an airline pilot announcing that today's landing procedure will involve interpretive experimentation.

There are places for standards.

There are also places where standards become cages.

Art is one.

Music is one.

Science is one.

Skateboarding is definitely one.

The skateboarder looks at civilization's carefully constructed environment and asks a wonderfully antisocial question:

What else could this be?

Handrail?

No.

Grind.

Staircase?

No.

Gap.

Pool?

No.

Bowl.

Drainage ditch?

No.

Snake run.

Parking lot?

No.

Spot.

Suddenly the city reveals a second hidden architecture.

The skateboarder sees a city inside the city.

And once you see that, something changes.

You understand that many things presented to us as fixed are simply arrangements someone chose.

That doesn't mean every rule should be broken.

It means every rule can be examined.

That difference is the beginning of intellectual freedom.

THEN THE WORLD ENDED

Or at least skateboarding's world did.

Again.

The late-1970s skateboard boom collapsed.

Skateparks closed.

Insurance became expensive.

Sponsors disappeared.

Magazine coverage shrank.

The culture retreated underground.

Imagine being a brilliant professional skateboarder during that period.

You have devoted years to mastering something.

You're one of the best in the world.

And suddenly the world says:

That's nice.

Anyway...

Many skateboarders moved on.

Perfectly reasonable.

A skateboard cannot pay rent merely by being radical.

Some skaters remained.

Some disappeared from view.

Some returned later.

And when skateboarding exploded again during the 1980s, the landscape had changed.

Halfpipes.

Backyard ramps.

Street skating.

Ollies.

Skate videos.

New magazines.

New companies.

New stars.

The Bones Brigade became famous.

Tony Hawk became Tony Hawk.

Rodney Mullen began rewriting the physics textbook.

And people like Jay Smith became part of skateboarding's deeper archaeological layer.

Still important.

Less visible.

Which teaches another uncomfortable lesson.

History does not necessarily remember people according to their influence.

History often remembers whoever happened to be standing nearest the camera when the technology improved.

FAME AND IMPORTANCE ARE NOT THE SAME THING

This is one of the great scams of modern life.

We confuse visibility with significance.

They are not remotely identical.

The most famous person is not necessarily the person who changed the most.

The loudest voice isn't necessarily the smartest.

The person with the most followers isn't necessarily being followed anywhere worth going.

Jay Smith is a useful antidote to this confusion.

Ask a random person about skateboarding and they'll probably know Tony Hawk.

Ask someone who seriously knows skateboard history about Jay Smith and the expression changes.

Now we're talking lineage.

Influence.

Style.

Roots.

The stuff underneath the floorboards.

Jay Smith eventually received formal recognition, including induction into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame in 2022.

But his greatest monument isn't a trophy.

It's the surviving photographs.

That impossible lean.

Those ridiculous angles.

That board grinding while Smith appears to be falling backward into another dimension.

You look at those pictures decades later and immediately understand:

This guy had something.

THE RELIGION OF THE UNNECESSARY

Perhaps that is the strangest thing about skateboarding.

Almost none of it is necessary.

Human beings can survive perfectly well without layback grinds.

Civilizations have risen and fallen without kickflips.

No ancient empire collapsed because its citizens lacked frontside airs.

And yet unnecessary things are often where human beings become most human.

Music is unnecessary.

Poetry is unnecessary.

Painting is unnecessary.

Dancing is unnecessary.

Skateboarding is unnecessary.

Love, if we're being brutally practical, tends to make a mess of schedules.

Yet imagine removing all of these things from civilization.

You would still have survival.

You would no longer have much of a reason for surviving.

The unnecessary is where we decorate existence.

Jay Smith decorated gravity.

THE POPE OF LOVE'S FIRST COMMANDMENT OF SKATEBOARDING

Here it is.

Thou shalt not confuse the established way with the only way.

This applies to skateboards.

Religion.

Politics.

Art.

Technology.

Relationships.

Education.

Business.

Your own identity.

Someone somewhere invented the conventional method.

That person may have been brilliant.

That does not mean the method became holy.

Every generation inherits structures from the previous generation.

Some deserve preservation.

Some deserve repair.

Some deserve improvement.

Some deserve to be lovingly thanked for their service and thrown into the historical recycling bin.

The difficult part is knowing which is which.

That requires curiosity.

And curiosity always contains a tiny act of rebellion.

You must be willing to ask:

What if everybody is leaning the wrong way?

Jay Smith answered with his body.

LEAN FARTHER

There is a photograph somewhere in the great visual scripture of skateboarding.

Jay Smith reaches the coping.

His wheels grind.

His body folds backward.

His arm drops toward the concrete.

For a fraction of a second he appears to have leaned farther than a person is supposed to lean.

That is the moment.

Not because everyone should imitate Jay Smith.

That would miss the entire point.

The lesson isn't:

Lean exactly as Jay leaned.

The lesson is:

Find your angle.

There is some place in your life where you've been standing the way everyone told you to stand.

There may be another position.

Another method.

Another interpretation.

Another road.

Another song.

Another shape.

Another church.

Another way to roll through the world.

You may fall.

Probably occasionally.

Concrete remains famously unsympathetic to personal growth.

But sometimes you lean farther than expected and discover something.

A trick.

A style.

A movement.

A culture.

Maybe even a different version of yourself.

Jay Smith did not become immortal because he obeyed gravity beautifully.

He became unforgettable because he negotiated with it.

And therefore, beloved congregation of cracked concrete and scraped elbows, today's benediction is simple:

Find the wall.

Question the angle.

Respect the coping.

And every now and then,

lean farther.