Fort Worth Weekly - News, Entertainment, Restaurants, Music

Just before noon on a recent Sunday morning, several cars pulled up in front of a nice but unremarkable house in Arlington. The drivers - all men in their 30s, 40s, and 50s - got out, grabbed their gear, and headed through the garage and out to the backyard.

"Oh, man, this is great!" said one.

Another wasn't quite so enthusiastic. "I don't know if my back is up to it," he said.

"The heck with your back," said a third member of the crew. "What about my broken toe?"

The men stretched; some put on knee pads, a couple put on helmets. They looked admiringly at the empty concrete swimming pool.

"She's a beauty, isn't she?" someone said.

Suddenly, one of them stepped down the three stairs into the shallow end, dropped a skateboard, stepped on, pushed off, and began racing toward the 11-foot wall less than 40 feet away. In a split-second maneuver that meant the difference between slamming into the wall or climbing it, the skater tipped his board and shifted his weight at the moment of impact, his speed propelling him up the wall, his body horizontal. He made a right-angle turn near the top, then another a moment later to zoom back down the wall. Transitioning again from horizontal to vertical at the bottom, he flew back up the pool to the shallow end.

"This is gonna be a great day. I feel it," he said to no one in particular.

At an age when most athletes decide they like fishing or watching sports rather than playing them, these guys and hundreds like them around Texas are still skateboarding, still routinely risking life and limb for the few seconds it takes to skate a pool or run a drainage ditch or catch air on a vertical ramp. To a man they'll tell you that those few seconds are indescribably delicious. Some even say that the moment when everything can go wrong, that moment when their body and board must work as a unit to prevent calamity, is akin to the high of meditation.

Over the course of the next two hours, the nine men, one teenager, and one guy's 8-year-old son took turns flying around that pool. Nobody's turn lasted more than 10 or 15 seconds - pool etiquette, combined with the physical difficulty of maintaining sufficient speed, set the limits. Once every few runs, someone would reach the pool's coping, the top edge, and run his rear axle along it, making a screeching sound and sending sparks flying. The move is called grinding and for a lot of skateboarders is the ultimate high. Each time someone did it, the others would cheer or clap with the enthusiasm of home team fans.

More frequently someone would try a trick move that ended with the quick thud of a body hitting concrete. Most of the falls produced scratched-up knees or elbows. Sometimes it's worse. Nearly all the nine older skaters could list broken bones, surgeries, and concussions suffered on the unforgiving concrete surfaces they like to skate. But they all said it was worth it - even the guy with the stiff back.

"It's the greatest feeling in the world," he said.

Though they don't think of themselves as high-caliber athletes, the crew gathered in Arlington that Sunday morning certainly were. Most of them still get at least some sponsorship as emissaries for the sport. One of the Sunday skaters, John Comer, made a good living as a pro for several years. And though they all now have day jobs, they still find the time to skate several times a week.

"I couldn't live without it," said Greg Stubbs, a 42-year-old who co-owns a legal document search firm in Dallas. "I watch other people running on the treadmill and think I'd go crazy if I had to do that. I'd rather skate. You don't need anything but your board and a place to skate."

Those places include skate parks, malls after closing, drainage ditches, highway underpasses and - when they're lucky - a pool like this one.

"We're too old to be jumping fences or sneaking into backyards and using pools when people go on vacation," Stubbs said. "So what we do is try to find someone with a pool they're not using, and we ask them if we can skate it. We offer them a little money for the privilege. Some people think we're crazy or are going to rob them, but some people, like this family, say OK. We've used this pool several times." The boarders sign liability wavers for such pay-to-play pools, said Stubbs, who has been skateboarding as long as he can remember.

Pools are his preferred venue. "Every pool is different, so each one has its challenges," he said. "This one has that 11-foot monster wall; others have different shapes. This is definitely one of my favorites because you go from about three feet to 11 feet so quickly and then have to make that little adjustment that allows you to climb, rather than just slam into that thing."

Chance Lehman, at 35 one of the youngest members skating that day, agreed. "Pools and ditches are pretty much all I skate these days," he said. "I'm more about carving lines than doing all the tricks that a lot of guys do. Some guys love those vertical ramps you've seen on television, the ones that look like huge three-dimensional U's. I just get bored with the back-and-forthness of that."

Lehman, who works as a materials designer for intra-ocular lenses (used in cataract surgery), is one of those who used to jump fences to borrow pools. "I fit into that category. You find an empty pool and skate it 'til you get run off. My dad was a cop in Arlington - I grew up in North Richland Hills - so I got away with some things because I knew a lot of [the officers]. I also knew how to talk to them and how not to run my mouth."

Even now, he admitted, an empty pool is hard to resist. "But these days when the cops come, they just can't quite believe they're looking at someone who's probably older than a lot of them. They generally just tell you you've got to go, because you're not damaging anything."

Mike Nieman, 39, drove up from Houston with his son, Matt, for the pool skate. He was in the first wave of street skating in Texas, which means he rode on streets, curbs, building railings, anything his skateboard could roll on. "I've ridden everything - pools, ramps, rails. You'd hear about something and go search it out. The 'permission' pool is pretty rare. Usually it's trespassing in pools in houses that have been foreclosed. You'd see a pool with black water and pump it out, clean it up, and then skate for 15 to 20 minutes, until the authorities came. I've been busted three times, but each time I was just told to get out of there."

Lou Statman, 41, was one of the few who bothered with a helmet on Sunday. "Just last year some of us were riding a drainage ditch out toward D/FW airport. The police showed up, and the oldest cop was probably 38. We probably averaged 44," he recalled, laughing. "There was just a dazed look on their faces as they asked us to leave. Which we did."

More recently he was stopped by law enforcement officers when he and others were riding hills on a highway during a sunrise run near Weatherford. "I told him we were under the speed limit, but we still had to go."