Jay Smith: The Rubberman Who Bent Skateboarding Sideways

There are skateboarders who collect trophies.

There are skateboarders who invent tricks.

There are skateboarders who become corporations, action figures, video-game avatars, breakfast-cereal-adjacent celebrities, and household names recognized by people whose closest encounter with a skateboard was stepping on one accidentally in a garage.

And then there are skateboarders like Jay Smith.

Jay Smith belongs to another species entirely.

He is one of those half-mythical creatures lurking in the sedimentary layers of skateboarding history, down beneath the Tony Hawk fossils and the Bones Brigade merchandise, where the concrete is cracked, the pools are empty, the trucks are loose, and somebody has spray-painted something obscene on the wall.

Smith was there when skateboarding was still deciding what kind of animal it wanted to become.

And he helped bend it into shape.

Literally.

Because Jay Smith could bend.

Good Lord, could Jay Smith bend.

They called him Rubberman, and one look at his famous layback grinds explains why.

Smith would charge a wall, reach the coping, throw his body backward, fold himself into some anatomical question mark, plant a hand near the lip and drag the skateboard around beneath him while apparently negotiating a temporary suspension of vertebrate law.

The result was half surfing, half gymnastics, half punk-rock possession.

Yes, that is three halves.

Jay Smith skated in a world where arithmetic was negotiable.

Before Skateboarding Became Skateboarding

To understand Jay Smith, you have to go back to Southern California in the late 1970s, when skateboarding was undergoing one of its periodic mutations.

Early skateboarders were essentially surfers stranded on dry land.

Sidewalk surfing was exactly what the name implied.

Carve.

Lean.

Turn.

Imagine the pavement is water and try not to smash your skull into a Buick.

Then urethane wheels arrived.

Then empty swimming pools.

Then concrete skateparks.

Suddenly skateboarders discovered vertical walls.

And vertical walls changed everything.

The skateboard stopped pretending to be a surfboard.

It became something else.

A vehicle for attacking architecture.

California filled with strange concrete playgrounds designed like the dreams of deranged civil engineers: bowls, banks, snake runs, pipes, transitions and vertical walls.

One of the important laboratories of this new movement was the Marina del Rey Skatepark.

Jay Smith became one of its local sorcerers.

This was before the modern skate video made every new trick instantly visible across the planet. Skateboarding culture traveled largely through magazines, rumors and photographs.

A single image could cross the country and rearrange the imagination of a kid in Massachusetts, Ohio or Nebraska.

And photographs of Jay Smith were particularly powerful because his skating produced such spectacular silhouettes.

You didn’t even need to see his face.

You could recognize him by the geometry.

The impossible backward lean.

The hand stretched toward concrete.

The board grinding beneath him.

The whole human body becoming punctuation.

Jay Smith turned himself into an exclamation point.

The Layback

The layback grind already contained skateboarding’s surfing DNA.

Ride toward the coping frontside.

Lean backward.

Plant your trailing hand.

Let the board grind around the lip while your body swings beneath the movement.

Elegant when done correctly.

Catastrophic when done incorrectly.

Jay Smith pushed the movement farther.

And farther.

And farther.

His laybacks became exaggerated almost beyond usefulness.

Which is precisely why they became art.

There is always a moment in the development of any craft when practicality gives way to style.

A chair only needs four legs.

A sentence only needs enough words to communicate an idea.

A skateboarder only needs to complete the trick.

But humans are rarely satisfied with need.

We decorate cathedral ceilings.

We put fins on Cadillacs.

We embroider jackets nobody needed embroidered.

And Jay Smith took a functional skateboard maneuver and stretched it until it became sculpture.

That matters.

Because skateboarding is often described as a collection of tricks when it is actually something closer to handwriting performed with the entire body.

Two people can execute exactly the same maneuver and somehow perform completely different sentences.

Smith’s handwriting was enormous.

Bones Brigade Before the Bones Brigade

Here is where Jay Smith becomes particularly interesting.

Most people hear Bones Brigade and immediately summon the familiar pantheon:

Tony Hawk.

Rodney Mullen.

Steve Caballero.

Mike McGill.

Lance Mountain.

Tommy Guerrero.

The videos.

The screaming skulls.

The suburban ramps.

The Search for Animal Chin.

But before the Bones Brigade became the Bones Brigade, there was another version.

A rough draft.

A primordial soup.

Stacy Peralta began assembling Powell’s skate team around 1979, and Jay Smith was among the earliest riders associated with what became the Bones Brigade.

That puts Smith in a strange historical position.

He stands with one foot in the vanished skatepark civilization of the 1970s and another in the emerging Powell-Peralta empire that would define much of the next decade.

He was there before skateboarding figured out how to package itself.

Before the videos.

Before the mythology became polished.

Before Tony Hawk became Tony Hawk™.

Jay Smith belonged to Bones Brigade 1.0.

The garage-band version.

The demo tape.

The moment before the record contract.

The Boards Were Beautifully Weird

Jay Smith’s skateboard decks tell almost as much of the story as his skating.

Modern skateboarders are accustomed to noses and tails that resemble one another.

Flip the board around and, at a glance, you might need a moment to determine which end is which.

Not Jay Smith’s boards.

Those things had opinions.

Some of his Powell decks were roughly ten inches wide and thirty-one inches long with long wheelbases and short noses.

Translation:

These were not polite little popsicle sticks designed for performing switch tre flips outside a bank.

These were concrete weapons.

Pool sleds.

Coping barges.

Machines built for charging walls at speed.

One famous Smith shape had a nose roughly two inches long.

Two inches!

Calling that a nose is charitable.

It was more like the board had considered growing a nose and changed its mind.

But that strange proportion tells us something important about skateboard evolution.

Early pool riders did not require large noses because skating had not yet become dominated by the ollie-based vocabulary that would eventually produce modern street skating.

They wanted width.

Stability.

Wheelbase.

Tail leverage.

Enough lumber beneath the feet to feel confident while hurtling toward concrete.

Jay Smith’s decks are therefore archaeological artifacts.

You can practically watch skateboard evolution happening in the wood.

When Punk Crawled Onto the Skateboard

Smith also occupied another fascinating crossroads.

The collision between punk rock and skateboarding.

That combination now feels inevitable.

Skateboarding without punk would be like hot sauce without peppers.

But it was not always so.

Early skateboarding still carried substantial surf culture baggage: sunshine, California, athleticism, beach mythology.

Then punk arrived with torn clothes, cheap guitars, aggressive graphics and a philosophical recommendation that society might occasionally benefit from having something thrown through its window.

Skateboarders understood immediately.

Jay Smith embraced that emerging punk sensibility.

The graphics surrounding him became darker and harder.

Iron crosses.

Skulls.

Aggressive imagery.

Artist Pushead even created an early punk-skull concept for Smith that Powell reportedly rejected.

Which is wonderfully ironic considering what happened next.

Within a few years, skateboard graphics would become a carnival of skulls, bones, rats, demons, flames, skeletons, dragons and creatures apparently rejected from medieval manuscripts for behavioral problems.

The respectable athletic image of skateboarding had been mugged behind a record store.

And skateboarding was better for it.

Smith stood close to that cultural fault line.

Then Skateboarding Almost Died Again

There is one cruel fact running through early skateboard history.

The sport repeatedly exploded in popularity and then collapsed.

Boom.

Bust.

Boom.

Bust.

Every generation seemed convinced skateboarding had finally arrived.

Then suddenly the parks closed, sponsors disappeared and parents began wondering why their garages contained twelve useless pieces of maple.

By the end of the 1970s, the giant skatepark boom began falling apart.

Insurance costs rose.

Parks disappeared.

Mainstream fascination evaporated.

Professional opportunities shrank.

For skaters like Jay Smith, this presented an entirely reasonable question:

Is there actually a future in this?

Many talented skaters concluded that there was not.

Some moved on.

Others hung around long enough for skateboarding to resurrect itself yet again.

That timing explains part of the reason Jay Smith never became as famous as the generation immediately after him.

When skateboarding returned in the 1980s, the world had changed.

Halfpipes were spreading.

Street skating was emerging.

Ollies were transforming everything.

Skate videos were becoming powerful engines of mythology.

Tony Hawk and the later Bones Brigade appeared at precisely the moment skateboarding discovered mass media.

Jay Smith had already done much of his work.

History turned the page while he was still standing in the previous chapter.

Style Outlives Statistics

This is where Jay Smith’s story becomes larger than Jay Smith.

Sports history tends to be obsessed with measurable achievement.

Who won?

Who invented what?

Who jumped highest?

Who sold the most boards?

Who appeared on the most magazine covers?

Useful questions.

But skateboarding has always contained another category that refuses measurement.

Style.

Style is skateboarding’s ghost currency.

Nobody can quite define it.

Everybody recognizes it.

A skateboarder can perform the hardest trick in the world and somehow make it look like accounting.

Another skater can perform a simple carve and make you want to rearrange your entire life.

Jay Smith belonged to the second category.

His great contribution was not merely the mechanics of the layback grind.

It was demonstrating how completely a skater could inhabit a movement.

How far a body could exaggerate a turn.

How a maneuver could acquire personality.

How skateboarding could become physical self-expression.

Tony Alva brought aggression.

Duane Peters brought danger.

Christian Hosoi would later bring enormous theatrical amplitude.

Mark Gonzales would make unpredictability itself beautiful.

Jay Smith brought elasticity.

He made transition skating look as though gravity had become temporarily confused.

The Historical Correction

Over time, skateboarding began remembering Jay Smith properly.

He was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame in 2022, recognizing his importance to the culture and development of late-1970s skateboarding.

For longtime skaters, though, the recognition was hardly surprising.

Smith had remained a deeply respected figure among people who knew the history.

The famous photographs never disappeared.

The old Powell decks became artifacts.

The laybacks remained unmistakable.

And his name continued appearing whenever skaters started talking seriously about the origins of transition style.

That is perhaps the strangest kind of immortality.

Not celebrity.

Recognition.

There is a difference.

Celebrity means everyone knows your name.

Recognition means the right people understand what you changed.

Jay Smith changed something.

The Rubberman’s Lesson

There is a temptation when studying skateboard history to imagine progress as a straight line.

Primitive board.

Better board.

Ollie.

Kickflip.

Handrail.

Mega ramp.

Olympics.

Done.

But skateboarding never moved in a straight line.

It wandered.

It borrowed.

It rebelled.

It forgot things and rediscovered them thirty years later.

It evolved through hardware, geography, accidents, personalities and peculiar people who decided that everybody else was leaning the wrong direction.

Jay Smith belongs among those people.

His skating reminds us that innovation does not always mean inventing a new maneuver.

Sometimes innovation means taking something that already exists and asking:

What happens if I push this farther?

Farther toward the coping.

Farther toward danger.

Farther toward absurdity.

Farther until a maneuver stops looking merely athletic and begins looking like art.

That is the beauty of Jay Smith.

The Rubberman didn’t merely ride the concrete.

He argued with it.

And for one strange, glorious fraction of a second at the top of the wall, bent backward over the coping with four urethane wheels grinding beneath him, it occasionally appeared that the concrete had lost the argument.