Ready for Action

By Pete Thomas

Aug. 4, 2004 12 AM PT

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Times Staff Writer

Like many of her teen-age contemporaries in sports such as golf and tennis, Lyn-Z Adams Hawkins has an air of confidence, a requisite when you travel the world to compete, often against people nearly twice your age.

But Adams Hawkins, 14, is from a mold quite different than that of the typical top amateur athlete.

Her training is on her own terms. Her competitors are often close friends who openly root for each other. Her sport involves no bats, balls, rackets or clubs.

Adams Hawkins is an “action sports” athlete, a skateboarder who will compete in ESPN’s X Games Thursday through Sunday at Staples Center and other Southland venues.

The X Games, originally a made-for-TV event, are 10 years old, nearly as old as a few of its competitors. And it has survived, in fact thrived, despite significant skepticism.

Adams Hawkins, even in her short career, is used to the criticism offered by many sports purists: Skateboarding is not a real sport and, therefore, she is not a real athlete. Same goes for the other events, surfing, wakeboarding, BMX riding, inline skating and Moto X, or freestyle motorcycle riding -- circus acts of no legitimacy conjured up by networks such as ESPN.

Nowadays, though, organizers of action sports events don’t get mad. Instead, they point out a few facts: Programming is up. Prize money is up. Participation is up.

Not only have action sports gained a strong foothold, but they’ve flourished at a time when interest in some traditional sports is sagging. They’re becoming better organized and top athletes -- even girls or young women, though they’re in the minority -- are enjoying lucrative careers.

They remain largely a young person’s game, but that has only helped them become a powerful force in society.

“Action sports have increasingly made it onto the mainstream sports scene because they offer a vehicle for corporations to reach young men, teens and boys, and do so at a time when traditional stick-and-ball sports are seen as less compelling by these groups,” said David M. Carter, a Los Angeles-based sports marketing consultant.

“Until about a decade ago, [the thinking was] that those kids riding their skateboards off curbs and over railings were simply crazy. They were, but now their athletic feats are not only recognized, but truly hailed as incredible athletic prowess by a generation of sports fans that appears to care more about snowboarding and motocross than snow-skiing and cycling.”

And if anyone cares to argue otherwise, Adams Hawkins says, let them try to execute a kickflip-to-Indy, a difficult maneuver she may showcase this week.

A decade ago, the X Games provided a forum for some of the crazy things people were doing back then, including barefoot water-skiing, bungee-jumping, street luge and speed-climbing. Today, the games have been streamlined to include only sports that are able to survive on their own.

Only instead of being found on just one network, they are found on many.

Fox Sports has Fuel, its action sports network, which profiles action sports activities and athletes.

NBC Sports has the Gravity Games, which this summer will be broadcast by the Outdoor Life Network.

Next spring, NBC and Clear Channel will debut the Dew Action Sports Tour, featuring skateboarding, BMX and freestyle motocross, with five major events and a format similar to that utilized by the Professional Golfers’ Assn. tour.

“The biggest change in the past 10 years is that rebellious sports have now become more mainstream and acceptable,” said C.J. Olivares, vice president of programming and marketing for Fuel. “You now have moms driving their kids to skate parks and making sure they get enough time on them. You have kids aspiring to be professional skaters, pro surfers and skateboarders. These are now viewed as legitimate directions to take.”

This would have seemed laughable in the 1980s, about the time Tony Hawk, now 36, was beginning to almost single-handedly lift skateboarding out of the back alleys. An exceptional talent with uncanny business savvy, Hawk turned pro at 14 and earned $70,000, through winnings and endorsement deals, while a senior in high school. Kids wanted to be like him. They still do.

That was also when Mat “the Condor” Hoffman was gaining fame as a fearless BMX freestyle rider, performing tricks on ramps and rails that seemed unimaginable to others.

“The bikes back then were not designed for the abuse we were putting them through,” said Hoffman, now 32, with a wife and two children. “A few trips to the hospital made me start my own company.”

Hawk and Hoffman, who still perform in exhibitions, both have become successful businessmen and influential forces within their respective industries. Their sports are becoming better organized with universal ranking systems, and Hawk, who is vice president of Skateboarding USA, said that discussions were underway to have skateboarding as a demonstration sport in the Olympics, perhaps as soon as 2008.

“We have a much stronger foundation than we had 10 years ago,” Hawk said, citing increased community support through the building of skate parks, regular TV coverage and other factors.

Snowboarding, like skateboarding, was an action sport once thought to breed rebelliousness, drug use and vandalism. It is now a Winter X Games staple and in 2006 will make its third appearance in the Winter Olympics. It has also replaced skiing as the most popular activity at resorts around the world.

“The Olympics, the Winter Games in particular, have added events such as snowboarding because they feel they need to be made more contemporary in order to attract broad audiences and remain relevant to the next generation of fans and consumers,” Carter said. “Even the Olympics appreciates that it must continue to reinvent itself or run the risk of losing millions of fans and dollars by not televising those emerging sports in demand.”

Action sports is the strongest area of growth within the sporting goods industry, according to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Assn. There are 19 million inline skaters in the United States, 10 million skateboarders, 8 million snowboarders, more than 3 million wakeboarders, 3 million BMX bike riders and 3 million surfers.

By comparison, baseball in the last 10 years has lost nearly 16 million participants, to fewer than 11 million in 2003, according to the SGMA.

While only a fraction of action sports athletes compete on a high level, this represents a considerable fan base from which to draw and helps explain why television is behind events such as the X Games, Gravity Games, Vans Triple Crown (carried by NBC and Fox Sports Net), and the upcoming LG Action Sports Championships at Fairplex in Pomona (Fox Sports Net).

For participants, the appeal has to do with several factors. Action sports lack the structure and discipline associated with team sports, allowing for more creativity on the part of the athletes who in contests are judged on degree of difficulty and execution. This enables individual continuous evolution.

For spectators, the appeal is the thrill of watching the spectacular, whether it be a hit or a miss. Ten years ago, back flips on motorcycles and BMX bikes were unheard of. Today, riders are executing them with impunity.

“If you can’t land a back flip you probably can’t even place in the top five in any of these events,” said Rick Bratman, president of ASA Events, a production company specializing in action sports.

Wakeboarders are spinning inverted 360s while passing the handle from hand to hand. Skateboarding has something new to unveil this week: the Mega Ramp, a progression of vert skating from the standard quarterpipe to a 60- to 70-foot roll-in ramp to a jump that sends the riders over a 50- to 70-foot gap and onto another roll-in ramp leading to a 30-foot quarterpipe.

“That’s the beauty of skateboarding -- limitless progression in all areas,” said Danny Way, 30, the oft-injured Mega Ramp creator and an expert in street skating -- tricks performed on rails, sliding boxes and other features -- and vert skating.

Action sports athletes are largely self-coached. They feed off each other and have only themselves, and perhaps their corporate sponsors, to answer to in the case of failure.

“In skating, you can fall and it’s fine and you kind of get another chance and nobody’s mad at you or anything,” said Adams Hawkins, who gave up soccer for skateboarding. “But in regular sports if you make an error, you’re letting the whole team down.”

Gregg Bennett, assistant professor of Sport Management in the University of Florida’s College of Health and Human Performance, is researching why Generation Y, the children of baby boomers born between 1979 and 1994, has moved so strongly into this area.

“Most children want to emphasize things other than winning and [learning] a variety of play options,” Bennett said. “They certainly want to have fun and I’m afraid that the objectives of many youth sports programs do not meet the expectations of children. A natural outcome of this circumstance is a movement toward play activities where there is little influence from parents or other authority figures.”

With action sports, he added, “There is no coach or pressure to perform. They learn tricks and skills with their peers, and it develops fraternal relationships.”

Chris Stiepock, X Games general manager, said ESPN arrived to the same conclusion.

“A high school kid age 15 is confronted with a choice,” Stiepock said. “I can go and play football, basketball or baseball in a structured environment with coaches telling me what to do, with parents meddling in the affairs and with mandatory practices and mandatory outfits ...

“And then over here is a legitimate activity that is equally athletic, but I wear what I want to wear and my biggest competition is against myself. There is no learning curve other than what I place on myself, and it’s me against the curb and pavement for as long as I’m willing to take the punishment. I can keep doing this, and I can do it wearing shorts and with my buddies -- and with headphones on.”

That’s a perfect world, as far as Adams Hawkins is concerned.

“Sometimes I skate eight hours a day at the skate park, when I’m not studying or competing,” she said. “I’m not skating the whole, whole time. I’ll stop and, like, chill and go talk to people, or go grab a snack. But then I’ll come back and skate some more.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

X Games Schedule

THURSDAY

At Staples Center

* 1-2 p.m.: Skateboard Street men’s practice.

* 1-3 p.m.: Bike Stunt Park practice.

* 1-4 p.m.: Skateboard Big Air practice.

* 2-4 p.m.: Skateboard Street men’s finals.

* 5-7:30 p.m.: Skateboard Vert men’s finals.

* 7-8:30 p.m.: Moto X Best Trick finals.

FRIDAY

At Staples Center