Z BOY’S CHRISTIAN HOSOI AND TONY ALVA
Legends of the U.S. Skate scene Tony Alva and Christian Hosoi have been hanging out with each other for some 40 years now and are old pro’s when it comes to the subject. One of the original Z Boy’s (a group of skateboarders from Santa Monica in the 1970’s who are credited with popularizing skateboarding and creating the punk/skater subculture), Alva is one of the most significant figures and pioneers of the skate scene as it is known today. With a big and full on ‘fuck you’ attitude and the skills to back it up Alva made skateboarding Rock and Roll.
Hosoi was a skateboarding pro and idol of the 80’s but crashed and burned after his lifestyle bombed with a series of set backs during the 90’s. A serious federal offence in early 2000: trafficking narcotics across state lines, from LA to Hawaii, left him facing a potential 10 year mandatory prison sentence. Now out of prison, fully reformed and a born again Christian he is happy to be a skateboarding role model to the new generation. We asked them to reminisce about DogTown days gone by and the urethane wheeled revolution.
Christian: Tony Alva’s one of my idols. He’s always be been a bro, but we haven’t hung out in a long time. Just experiencing thirty years of skateboarding for myself has been just truly amazing and such a gift.
Tony: We just get to come over and basically judge the contest and just skate for our own enjoyment and that’s pretty rare. It’s reminiscent of what it was like back when we were kids, cause that’s how it all started for us anyway. We never really planned this out. It’s just spontaneous the way our lifestyle kind of turned out to be beneficial to both of us. I’m just stoked that I’m still skating professionally at the age of 48 years old.
It all started for us back in Santa Monica, and for Christian in
Venice, Marina del Ray Skate Park and the backyards of a lot of pools in Beverly Hills. We all started looking around for empty pools when there was a drought in the seventies, that’s kind of how we got into being vertical skateboarders as well as street skaters. We started out as street skaters and took it to the schoolyards, and then from the schoolyards we took into the backyard pools. We’re not just limiting ourselves to skating skate parks or half pipes – we basically skate everything and that’s why I think a lot of people have respect for where we came from.
That’s always been our attitude towards skateboarding: to not be a one-dimensional skateboarder, to be multi-dimensional and to have the ability to ride anything and everything that’s skateable. That’s the Dogtown spirit basically. We all came from the West Side of L.A., so there was a surf influence from the very beginning and that’s why our style’s really important when it comes to skateboarding, whether it be on flat ground, banks or vertical. I think that’s why the next decade after my decade, Christian was one of the foremost stylist skateboarders out of that era and out of that area as well, because he was influenced by all the surfers and all the hardcore old-school skateboarders like myself.
C: All I remember is being a sidewalk surfer before I even thought about going to the skate park. All I did was carve down the sidewalks thinking ‘I’m going down the line’, and then hitting a bush and getting barrelled, getting my hair all full of leaves, and I think that’s where style was the main influence in why we did it. There was a flow, a grace involved, and finesse. What these guys do today is completely different. There are some guys that still have some style. When you forget about style that’s when it gets mechanical. I think that’s what separated “surf-influenced” and straight hardcore skateboarders. We love skateboarding, no matter what we’re respectful of all the different types of skateboarding. I always love doing a frontside grind, a snap off the lip, a layback and just carving super fast. That’s really what I love to do, I know that Tony probably feels the same way. I’ve seen you out there today ripping. This bowl is the perfect place for us to do what we love. It’s just amazing that they build structures like this for us to be able to show, really, where the style came from.
T: Skating pools have always been something that helped us to take it to the next level. I never really planned on ever taking it to that level myself, it just happened spontaneously. I just started doing aerials by accident. Just cause we were hitting the lip so hard I started popping out and making aerials that kind of blew everyone away, cause no one had ever done an aerial before and actually landed it. So, I was there in the right place at the right time. I’ve got a couple of photos Glen Friedman took of me and Craig Stecyk. Then people realised that you could actually do an aerial, land it, pull it off. That was the beginning of a new era. It’s a “grace under pressure” thing. It’s really difficult and when you make it look easy – that’s what the whole object of it – to make something really difficult look easy. That’s how you epitomise good style.
C: Thanks to you Tony, we have style. Because of you doing the first aerial, it helped me to do what I do – to take it to the point where I was doing ten-foot aerials. It was because of you influencing me which is influencing other guys to take it to the next level.
First appeared in Fused magazine issue 28
