The Importance of Jay Adams

Growing up in rural Iowa in the early 1980s, I was really into superheroes. I ran around the farmstead where I lived imagining super powers for myself and using them to defeat invisible bad guys. Around fourth grade I discovered Marvel comic books through a classmate, and soon couldn’t get enough of them. J.J. had inherited piles of 1970s era comic books from his older brothers that he doled out to three or four of us at school. I would sometimes sleep over at J.J.’s house over the weekends, where he would grab stacks of magazines from his brothers’ bedrooms for me to pick and choose from. Amongst the comic books were other magazines from the same era, including Mad (which I didn’t understand at all), Rolling Stone (which I had been led to believe was Satanic) and Skateboarder. The only thing I knew about skateboarding was that it had been invented by Marty McFly. Flipping through the pages of Skateboarder to see what it was all about, I came across this picture:

I was enthralled and confused. Somehow, this wasn’t a picture of a kid falling down. It was only after imagining the photo as a comic book drawing that I realized I’d seen that pose before- from Spider-Man. The incidental old man seemingly sinking into the pavement in the distance provided the perfect contrast to this death-defying kid. The only photograph I had seen with this combination of grace, skill and determination was a poster of Dr. J our principal had hanging in his office. I had to find out who this person was.

The picture was from a series of articles by Craig Stecyk III about a group of skateboarders in southern California called the Z-Boys. Stecyk was the graphic artist at Zephr surfboard shop, which was located in the rough slums of South Santa Monica known as Dogtown. Instead of rainbows and sun rays, Stecyk put graffiti-influenced designs onto surfboards handmade by Jeff Ho and sold them to the hoodlums from both South Santa Monica and Venice who surfed a cove containing the remains of an abandoned amusement park and frequently broke their boards on the pier pylons they maneuvered through.

When the waves died down, some of the surfers practiced their surf moves on skateboards. The owners of the shop promoted themselves by organizing first a surfing team and, in 1974, a skateboard team, to participate in competitions. Skip Engblom, co-owner of the Zephyr shop, set up a practice schedule for the members to follow. They slalomed down a street near the shop, skated at local school playgrounds with sloping concrete banks and in whatever abandoned and empty swimming pools they could find around town.

The signature style of the Z-Boys, as the skateboarders on Zephr Skate Team were called, was to emulate surfers by staying crouched low to the ground; not shying away from touching it. Stacy Peralta and Tony Alva would eventually move on from this group to become the first famous skateboarders. Although their hand dragging style did not ever wholly catch on, the Z-Boys changed the focus of the sport toward riding bowls, performing vertical jumps (Alva is generally credited with completing the first aerial) and street skating. Beyond these seminal contributions, there was one other essential thing that transformed the hobby of skateboarding into a multi-billion dollar industry, and that contribution came not from Peralta or Alva but rather another one of the original Z-Boys- Jay Adams.

Skateboarding had been a fad in the early ‘60s, but the thrill of standing on a piece of wood with wheels attached had quickly worn off, especially after parents started organizing to ban skateboards for being dangerous. But in 1973, a new type of wheel was invented that greatly increased the skateboard’s maneuverability and durability, and because of that, by 1975, growing interest had convinced organizers to hold the first national skateboarding competition of that decade. The chosen location for the event was in Del Mar, California, conveniently located just two hours from Dogtown.

Freestyle refers to skateboarding on flat ground. The Z-Boys didn’t do freestyle. Today, nobody except Rodney Mullen does freestyle, and even he mostly does street skating now. Back then, freestyle skateboarding was nothing other than a gymnastics routine with a prop, like what gymnasts still do today with ribbons, rubber balls and hula hoops. At Del Mar, freestyle was not only the main event, but the only event other than downhill slalom.

In 1975, Jay Adams was fourteen years-old but small enough to pass for younger. Like many of the other Z-Boys, he had flowing blonde hair. He was the first of the Z-Boys to compete, doing freestyle. The Zephyr Skate Team wore matching outfits, so everyone in attendance expected him to set the tone for the entire team. The first thing he did was ride his board across the platform at top speed and then slide by planting his hands behind him to keep from flying off the edge. The Z-Boys called this a “Bert,” which they had named after surfer Larry Bertlemann, who would often run his hands in the water as he surfed and was the biggest stylistic influence on the Z-Boys. Of course, nobody outside of the team would have even considered this a trick.

Then, in what was presumably an attempt to emulate something he had just seen from another competitor, he tried standing up straight while riding backward on one end of the board- and promptly fell on his ass.

At this point, the cameraman filming the event for posterity actually turns away in disappointment… but Jay Adams gets back on the board and skates backwards again- this time his way. Crouched down, he grabs the board on either side and angrily hops up and down.

And with that outburst, skateboarding is changed forever.

It is the perfect embodiment of the old way of skateboarding being replaced. Because it is so completely unintentional, it is beyond what anybody could have scripted. For the rest of the brief routine, he stays so close to the ground it’s difficult to differentiate whether he’s sliding on the board or on the ground- in actuality he’s simultaneously doing a little of both. He ends by jumping off the end of the platform.

Jay Adams had dared to thrust aggression into a sport where simply demonstrating balance and acrobatic prowess had been the only point. Suddenly, skateboarding had attitude, and not just any attitude- it had Jay Adam’s attitude. Whereas Peralta was a mild-mannered and disciplined pretty boy and Alva came across as a self-centered prick, being a skateboarder would come to mean being raw, brazen, authentic, flawed and stubbornly determined regardless of ability or success. Adams was comparable to Janis Joplin or John Coltrane in not overtly seeking to innovate but doing so anyway by being obsessed with finding their voice. But if you’re going to compare him to a musician, it would surely be Iggy Pop, whose band The Stooges had broken up the year before but whose legend and popularity were continuing to grow. Adams embodied, and because of him, skateboarding represented what would become known as punk.

The competitors other than the Z-Boys hated Jay’s performance. Adams wasn’t particularly thrilled by it either. His reaction to anybody else’s opinion about his skating tended to vacillate between anger, indifference and disgust, which was proof that he was not a caricature, persona or act. He probably decided right then that competitive skateboarding was bullshit.

After Del Mar, sponsors came crawling out of the woodwork to capitalize on the allure of the Z-Boys, and the Zephyr Skate Team soon dissolved as the members ran after money and fame. Adams didn’t go anywhere, but instead became part of a team organized by his abusive step-father. The next few decades would not be good ones for Adams.

The Bones Brigade videos would herald a new preferred media for being able to watch skateboarders from afar, but there really was something special about imagining what might be possible from trying to decipher a still photo. There are three photographs from my childhood that even as an adult my mind wanders back to: a National Geographic cover of a Afghan woman with haunted green eyes, a lone man standing in front of a row of tanks at Tiananmen Square and Jay Adams slaloming down a hill.

Well, that’s sort of true. When I was in high school, I went searching for the picture of Jay Adams that had inspired me so many years prior, and found this one instead:

Now, I think of both photographs like one of those holograms where you see different poses when you look at it from different angles.

For those of you still wondering what’s the big deal about some rebellious kid bouncing up and down on a skateboard, let me try and frame it another way. Without Jay Adams, this picture certainly wouldn’t have the same connotations, and probably wouldn’t even exist:

Jay Adams: Born, February 3, 1961; Died, August 15, 2014

Act Up

“I think that we're showing the proper compassion and concern, so I can't tell you where [the widespread feeling that our administration is not doing enough about AIDS is] coming from, but I am very much concerned about AIDS and I believe that we’ve got the best researchers in the world out there at NIH working the problem. We're funding them- I wish there was more money, but we're funding them far more than anytime in the past.... So I think the appeal is, 'Yes, we care,' and the other thing is, part of AIDS it’s one of the few diseases where behavior matters, and I once called on somebody, ‘Well, change your behavior- if the behavior you’re using [is] prone to cause AIDS, change the behavior.’ The next thing I know one of these Act Up groups is out saying, ‘Bush ought to change his behavior.’ You can’t talk about it rationally!” - George Bush, first presidential debate, 1992


I grew up in a Pentecostal church, which surrounded me with dedicated people holding strong convictions. I also grew up in America in the 80’s, when millions of lives were being lost to the AIDS epidemic. At that time, my church and my government had the same policy: AIDS wasn’t the problem, homosexuality was.

My church preached that AIDS had been allowed by God as a punishment upon immoral sinners. The only cure was for these sinners to turn from their wicked ways and accept Jesus as their eternally loving and forgiving savior. Church-goers prayed, not for the disease to be cured, but for homosexuals to stop being gay.

It seems absurd that I should even have to explain how this is totally psychotic.

I don’t know how many of these people ever got to know anyone with full-blown AIDS. I have, and let me tell you, the symptoms of the disease are absolutely appalling. You don’t sit at their bedside and think, “I hope they don’t die.” Instead, you mortifyingly find yourself thinking, “How aren’t they dead yet?” and realize death isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The experience is profound, sad and humbling. AIDS is a disease you want not wish upon your greatest enemy… unless you were totally heartless.

Heartless is a term we use the way we do because Aristotle thought the heart controlled our sensory-perceptions and movements (and that the brain regulated blood temperature), and consequently our heart both evaluated our environment and determined our actions. In fact, the single reason why Western medical practices didn’t evolve for centuries was because of a persistent, unquestioning faith in Aristotle’s works on anatomy and medicine, which, it turns out, were completely wrong. When a solution to a problem is presented by a highly regarded source, it never occurs to most to question or validate that solution, even when it is completely unfounded or doesn’t actually solve anything.

The constitutional government of the United States of America, being a direct result of the Age of Enlightenment, understood this, and was designed with a system of checks and balances in order to force it to question itself and not rely on any single authority, including religious authority. In fact, the First Amendment forbids any law to be made as a result of religious bias and grants all individuals the right to practice whatever religion they choose, as opposed to officially declaring one superior to another. There is a very simple reason why this is a good thing, and it was incidentally stated by my mother when I mentioned I was writing this: Religions do not offer the possibility that they can be wrong. This explains both why religious people don’t understand how everybody doesn’t agree with them and why non-religious people don’t understand how religious people are so persistent. (It is worth noting that the framers of the Constitution were understandably less concerned with authoritarianism than in another rebellion. Hence, it was also designed to avoid mob rule.)

There is nothing greater to be feared than an entity that does not concede the possibility it can be wrong, except for those willing to unreservedly accept its teaching. Blind obedience to authority is the quickest route to committing abominable acts, because when we are simply following orders, we do not feel as culpable for our own actions. This is not simply my opinion: it is a well-researched psychological fact demonstrated, for example, by the Milgram experiments.

Pickpockets don’t steal by distracting you from your valuables; they do it by drawing your attention to something seemingly more important than your valuables. We are incapable of perceiving things outside of our focus. The simplest method for bringing about human cruelty is to distract humans from empathy by presenting something seemingly more important.

There is a documentary by Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, the premise of which is to ask his daughter the same five questions on each of her birthdays. This seems innocent enough, except this was being done during a time when it was illegal to shoot home movies in the Soviet Union. Mikhalkov justifies his subversion because he is convinced of the importance of an honest, uncensored understanding of how government policies affect the views of (at least one of) its citizens. At one point, however, he begrudgingly scraps the project, realizing it could be putting his daughter in danger. His explanation of this decision is sublime: “No idea is worth life of child.”

I feel the most important thing for everyone to understand is that none of our beliefs, ideologies, notions, actions, activities, pursuits, assumptions, theories, etc. should ever be considered more important or valid than any single living human being. When a human life is in the balance, every opinion is always less important than that life, and that life takes priority over every opinion. You don’t have to approve of a lifestyle, relate to a culture or agree with a point of view in order to evince unconditional respect and solidarity for humankind.

I recently heard contempt defined as displaying moral superiority, and that is precisely the person I find most contemptible. (Interestingly, the judicial use of contempt refers to someone who blatantly disregards authority.) This is a paradox I find myself struggling to reconcile, because I would have to honestly admit that I feel I am morally superior to those who feel they are morally superior. Perhaps this demonstrates a truth that we should all be wary of: everyone is capable of not only justifying but actually committing atrocities. None of us are immune to conviction’s ability to blind. I don’t know whether evil exists, but I am convinced its antonym is informed empowerment.

Dogmatic, socially conservative and exploitative people, to name a few, tend to fear education. Unfamiliar culture, art, literature, language, music, sport and food are avoided and disdained by those who want to maintain the status quo. This sort of egocentricity should never be trusted, because it is always guided by ulterior motives. It is, in fact, NOT a small world, but a diverse and complicated one, and that scares the crap out of a lot of people.

Judging the American generation that came after the baby boomers as having no wars to fight is skewed. The reality is that the privilege to choose whether or not to join in the battles their generation faced was offered to a wider percentage of Americans, especially white, middle-class, non-socialist, heterosexual males. There will always be those whose greatest concern is to avoid confrontation. There is a word for those people: cowards. This does not apply to subversives who skillfully avoid getting caught. Tact is an admirable trait that appreciates the importance of understanding the appropriate time for action. Too often, however, days, weeks, years, decades and even centuries go by with nary a person riling against a wrong. Cowards are those who feel every problem can be circumvented by patting themselves and others on the back and saying, “good job!”

Heroes, on the other hand, are those in groups like Act Up, who, in defiance of authority, sought out and negotiated ways to expedite the search for AIDS treatments, ultimately saving millions of lives.