Skatepark enthusiast

It’s been a long time coming, but signs are pointing to Costa Mesa

finally building a skate park, which would be the first public

skating facility in Newport-Mesa.

At the center of the debate for years has been Costa Mesa resident

and skateboard manufacturer Jim Gray. Still expecting a curveball or

two before a park gets built, Gray talked with Managing Editor S.J.

Cahn about the need for a park and the status of skateboarding.

Why do you think a skatepark is needed in Costa Mesa?

Because there are more skateboarders in this and most cities than

those that play mainstream sports, and we don’t have a facility for

them. If you consider how much more time the average skateboarder

spends on his skateboard compared to, say, your average kid on a

basketball team, soccer team, etc., then the amount of time kids are

spending skateboarding is immense and this just once more highlights

the need for a facility.

Also, Costa Mesa is an epicenter of skateboarding with three of

the 10 or so pro quality manufacturers in the world being located

here, along with pro skaters, and many other companies heavily

involved in skateboarding. We have people from around the world

looking at us as the world leaders in skateboarding, and they are

riding boards made here. Those same folks have no problems getting

skateparks built in Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, etc., and

California now has new skateboard parks opening every week, but we

here in the epicenter are still fighting. It is pretty funny when you

think about it. Funny, but like ha ha.

Do you have any numbers of the how many skaters there are in

Newport-Mesa?

I personally know hundreds, but there are definitely thousands. I

don’t think you could specifically pin down the Newport-Mesa area,

but there are some estimates in the Costa Mesa recreation master

plan. Some general statistics are available, and some of those which

are posted on our Web site are as follows:

Check out the 14-year statistics from 1987 to 2001 from a recent

sports survey. Some of the 14-year average changes in participation

are: football (-17.8%), baseball (-24.5), racquetball (-49.1%),

tennis (-28.6%).

Here are the growth sports: soccer (+23.7), mountain biking

(+309.3), snowboarding (+221.2%), wakeboarding (+37.5), skateboarding

(+14.4%), inline skating (+454.2%, 11-year average), artificial wall

rock climbing (+57.1%).

If someone doesn’t believe me, they can check out a copy of a

recent sports survey report at https://www.sgma.com/

reports/data/2002/sports-part-topline- report2002.pdf. This is

produced by the sporting goods manufactures association. I found this

information on the Web and am not a member, nor do I even know a

member of this association. Skateboarding’s numbers don’t necessarily

look that impressive in growth if you don’t understand that even 14

years ago they showed millions of skaters in the U.S. while many of

the other growth sports are new to the list entirely.

Skateboarding started with 9.2 million participants in 1987 and

ended with 12.4 million in 2001. On the other hand, baseball started

with 15 million participants in 1987 and was down to 11.4 million

participants in 2001. I played baseball most of my life, enjoy the

game, and have nothing against it, but at 40 years old I am still

skateboarding, and have little or no interest in playing baseball

other than an annual softball game my kids do with their tai kwon do

class. The fact that there are trillions of dollars of capital

invested nationwide and billions continuously spent maintaining

fields while there are sports with more participants that have no

facilities is just another highlight that makes it seem so ridiculous

that we have to fight for a skatepark.

I hope that when I grow old and am in a position to do something

about imbalance like this, that I will look at the realities and not

try to just hold on to my personal beliefs of what sports should be.

The youth has spoken, and our cities need to listen. They are our

future, and have shown us which direction they want to go. The want

skateparks, BMX tracks and hockey arenas. Millions will be

skateboarding for years after mom and dad stop forcing them to play

soccer. That is just a fact. I am not trying to put anyone down. My

kids have played soccer, and I’ve coached soccer teams. It’s just a

different reality than some people want to deal with.

The fact is most mainstream sports, which already have a lot of

facilities to use, even if they don’t have enough in this area, still

have more facilities than skateboarding, which has been on a steady

increase yet has zero facilities in our local cities. It just does

not make sense, and our cities are not responding to the needs of

their kids. Someone has got to do something about it. That is what

our skatepark fight is all about.

There is also quite a few statistics in the Costa Mesa recreation

master plan. You can access it on the web at

https://www.ci.costa-mesa.ca.us/ recreation/master_plan.pdf. This is

data collected by a independent consultant. We have nothing to do

with it, yet it clearly supports our position.

Are there any other comparisons to make to other sports?

One thing that cannot be covered by a statistic is how much more

passionate the average skateboarder is than most kids who play

baseball, football, basketball, etc. Some of the best-selling sports

magazines are skateboard magazines, and there are about seven of them

on the newsstands. The best-selling video game for years now has been

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Statistics have shown that more kids know who

Tony Hawk is than any other pro athlete.

Anyone reading this can take a test to prove it. If you know a kid

who plays Little League baseball, ask them to name as many pro

baseball players as they can. If they come up with 10, I’d be amazed,

actually I’d be really amazed. Now go out and ask a kid you know who

is into skateboarding, or even just grab one riding down the

sidewalk, and ask him how many pro skaters he can name. I’ll be

surprised if he came up with less than 20, and a whole lot would be

able to come up with a 50 or more.

Is TeWinkle Park your first choice?

No, because I live on the complete opposite side of the city in

Newport Heights. I’d personally rather see it at Lions Park, or

Fairview Park, but as far as size, compatibility with its surrounding

area, proximity to population, size of available space and usability,

it is a great spot. I think it is good because it will be accessible

to a lot of people, with a relatively low impact on the neighborhood.

How do you respond to people who worry that a skate park will draw

a “bad element?”

Take a drive to a local public skatepark. My first park I’d direct

them to is the park in Laguna Niguel, because it is most similar to

what we’d like to see here. Irvine would work, Brea, Fullerton, etc.

Go down there, watch the Mercedes wagons and SUV’s drop off and pick

up kids all day long, and then go ahead and tell us about all the bad

element you saw there. I don’t really think anyone could come away

from there saying there is a bad element. That’s the real world about

modern day public skateparks, and that is what we want. It doesn’t

look much different than moms dropping off their kids for soccer, or

at the Bay Club for their sailing lesson for that matter. There is

just a few people who don’t want to see that because it is not

something they grew up doing, and they’d like to stop it. I like to

call them rebels without a clue.

Some of these “bad element” people probably just remember some

kid, angry ‘cause he’s getting kicked out of the only place he could

find to skate, having a bit of a bad attitude. You might be [upset]

too if the only thing you like to do is considered illegal, your city

won’t do anything to acknowledge you, and it is full of empty

“legitimate” sports fields, and there are a whole group just like you

simply baffled by the way they are treated. There is bound to be

someone coming out of that environment with a bad attitude, but a bad

attitude isn’t a bad element, and that is so much more of the

exception than the rule.

If 25% of all boys under 18 ride skateboards, then some of them

are going to be from the so-called bad element. It’s just a

statistical reality. One bad apple in a really, really huge bunch

should not spoil the whole bunch, unless you want to see it that way.

There are bad baseball players, bad football players, bad soccer

players, but we don’t find one drunk high school football player and

try to shut down the whole football program. That is not realistic. I

guarantee there is more drinking going on at the basketball courts

and baseball fields in Costa Mesa than will ever take place at the

skatepark. If you doubt this, just go look in the trash cans near all

these fields, or ask the city workers who clean it up, and come out

from under your rock for while and live in the real world.

A bad element usually means drinking, drugs, and gangs. I don’t

know anyone who skates who is in a gang, but I am sure there is

someone, somewhere. I have never seen a drinking or drug problem at a

public skatepark, and though I am sure it’s happened, it also happens

at the beach, the park, school, in someone’s car, etc. Public

skateparks are recreation facilities. They are not a magnet for the

bad element. They are relatively self policed by the kids and adults

who skate there. Anyone who is using the scare tactic “bad element”

word is just grasping at straws. There is no concrete evidence to

support that, yet there is a lot of evidence against that theory, but

the people throwing that word around don’t want to look at that. They

need to wake up and face some of the real problems that they are busy

looking the other way on. I am betting someone consumed a beer at

TeWinkle park somewhere today. Maybe we should close the whole park,

or maybe we should lighten up and deal with the skateboard facility

the way we do with any other and keep a regular patrol checking it

out on a consistent rotation.

In some corners, including the Pilot, the debate about a skate

park at TeWinkle has been simplified to a “children vs. dogs”

argument because of the Costa Mesa Bark Park also being at TeWinkle.

Do you think that’s a fair way to characterize the debate?

The only argument that has lingered in any way about the skatepark

debate after the recreation master plan was complete was the

“location” issue. When the residents of the area, together with the

city recreation people, came up with plans for a elements which

included a skatepark at TeWinkle, we were very pleased. We didn’t

even attend those meetings and had nothing to do with their choice.

The site that was proposed was suitable for our needs, didn’t have

any realistic obstacles to overcome, etc. so we were happy to see if

we might finally get our ever-so-elusive location off the table so

there would be no more arguments that could be used to sweep us under

the rug again. Then out of the blue, the Bark Park people showed up

with more whining than the maternity ward at Hoag. “There were

back-door deals, we weren’t consulted (nor did they show up at the

publicly advertised TeWinkle Park master plan meetings), this was a

back door deal,” and so on and so forth. These were just some of the

things they cried about. None of which were true, and especially from

our side. We’d been fighting the city forever, so suddenly us doing

backdoor deals with the recreation people? That was pretty far

fetched, but it worked enough for them to get our item set aside to

give the Bark Park people a chance to talk.

Great, we’d never been able to hold up a meeting before so we

could talk, even though I attended every recreation master plan

meeting, every Fairview Park meeting, etc., but now suddenly the Bark

Park people are demanding they be heard out. OK, so if that wasn’t

ridiculous enough, I went and looked at their Web site, and they had

posted requests for anyone interested in expanding the Bark Park or

anyone “against a skatepark” to show up to this meeting.

That got me a little irritated, and I think that’s when the dogs

versus kids thing started. I was able to use that to get more people

than usual to show up to the recreation meeting to show support for

the skatepark. They actually helped us a lot, by giving us something

ludicrous to battle. They came up and spewed ideas about dogs biting

kids in the common parking lot, even though no design had been

submitted, and no one on our side would ever recommend sharing a

parking lot with the dog folks. And they continued that argument at

the Planning Commission meeting.

I was starting to think maybe we should close the dog park if the

dogs that are going there are so vicious that the Bark Park people

are so convinced they are going to attack all the kids a hundred

yards away on the other side of the fence. How many people on the

tennis courts have they broken free and ran over to attack?

Then they said the horses that live a couple hundred yards away,

next to the roadside, next to the speedway race track, were going to

be scared of the kids on their skateboards. I mean they were just

grasping for straws. Those horses will hear more ducks quacking in

the pond than skateboarders. It was pretty sad. They should have just

been big enough to say that they just really wanted to expand their

dog park at anyone’s expense, and we were standing in their way. It

really could not have had anything really to do with the skatepark.

They must have just realized that if that corner is developed,

they’ll never be able to expand their dog park at that location.

Besides the obvious benefits to those who skate, are there other

“pluses” to building a skate park?

Kids putting down the Playstation controller and exercising.

Working toward getting the kids off the school grounds, out of the

retail and industrial centers, and into a positive place that

acknowledges what they really like to do, not what someone tells them

they should do. Nearby restaurants will gain business, and obvious

things like that, but nothing is more important than giving one of

the cities largest sports groups a place to have some fun.

What are you expecting from the City Council meeting when the park

at TeWinkle is discussed?

Actually, from experience, I am expecting some sort of curveball.

I expect that they will suddenly come up with another spot and try

and push the skatepark to another location. I don’t really care, as

long as it is a good and appropriate location, but if it starts up a

whole process of public hearings and such, I will be a pretty

disappointed. I am at least happy the we now have an undisputed

“location” option, so that we can’t get pushed aside if one of the

expected curveballs does not work. I guess I am getting used to

having to battle, even when it shouldn’t be necessary. It doesn’t

matter what happens, we are just going to keep pushing till we make

it happen, and then we are going after Newport Beach. Even with all

the problems we’ve had in Costa Mesa, they’ve acted like ambassadors

to skateboarding compared to Newport. It is amazing how wealthy,

supposedly educated people could be so ignorant when it comes to

issues going on in their own backyard.

What features would you like to see in a skate park?

If the city is going to spend capital, we need to assure that it

will be ridden for the next 30 years no matter what trends are

happening in the skateboard world. It has to have an area just for

small kids that is separated from the other areas so it’s not taken

over by the older kids. It needs to be built to minimize the possible

collisions, and have enough real street elements to encourage a kid

who has only skated in a real street setting to be able to and enjoy

adapting into a skatepark environment.

It has to give everyone a chance to have something to grow into.

It would be nice to just have a flat area of concrete for kids to

practice their flatland tricks as well. Plus, I think we need to

allow for shaded areas for rest, viewing areas for parents and

families, and maybe even things like special obstacles for stretching

out before you skate.

I’ve been to at least 50 pubic skateparks and I really believe the

one upside of waiting too long for a skatepark is that we get to

learn from all that has worked and not worked.... I love

skateboarding too much to let a bad skatepark get built with our

taxpayers money.

And, finally, what’s your best trick?

Tricks are for kids. I just want to go so fast it will scare you.

That’s my favorite trick. I am 40 now, and at my age, best is

whatever gets you through the day with a smile on your face.