Z-Boys

The Zephyr Competition Team (or Z-Boys) was a group of skateboarders in the mid-1970s from Santa Monica and Venice, California. The aerial and sliding skate moves that the Z-Boys invented were the basis for aerial skateboarding today.

The crew, who began as a surf team, derived their name from the Zephyr surfboard shop in Santa Monica. Jeff Ho, Skip Engblom and Craig Stecyk opened the Santa Monica shop as Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions in 1971. The Z-Boys represented the shop in surf competitions, with the first member being fourteen-year-old Nathan Pratt. Pratt also worked at the shop and became an apprentice surfboard maker under Ho, Engblom and Stecyk. According to Pratt:

In 1974, Allen Sarlo, Jay Adams, Tony Alva, Chris Cahill and Stacy Peralta, joined the surf team. The place that the team spent most of their time surfing was the Cove at Pacific Ocean Park. Once a thriving amusement park atop a pier, POP was now abandoned, run down and nicknamed "Dogtown" by the locals. With large tilted, wood pilings jutting from the water, and not enough room for everyone who wanted to surf there, the Cove was an incredibly dangerous place to surf. The Z-Boys surfed it anyway, the hazardous conditions only driving them on. They would surf in the mornings, when the waves were the highest. When the pier waves died down after the early morning, they would hang out at the Zephyr shop, running errands, doing homework, skating and flirting with passing girls. At that time, the Z-Boys saw skating as a hobby, something to do after surfing, but it quickly grew from a hobby into a new way to express themselves.

In 1975, Cahill, Pratt, Adams, Sarlo, Peralta and Alva asked Jeff Ho and Skip Engblom to start a skate team separate from the surf team. Soon after, local skaters Bob Biniak, Paul Constantineau, Jim Muir, Peggy Oki, Shogo Kubo and Wentzle Ruml would join the Zephyr skate team, growing to 12 members in all. The team would practice a lot of the times at Bicknell Hill. Bicknell Hill ran straight down from the Jeff Ho and Zephyr Surfboard Productions shop. There, the Z-Boys would set up cones and practice all day. They would skate low, riding the concrete like they were riding a wave and drag their hands on the pavement like Larry Bertlemann, a professional surfer who would touch the wave when surfing, dragging his fingers across it. To the Zephyr team, style was everything and they pulled all their inspiration from surfing. There were also four grade schools in the Dogtown area that the team picked for skating because they all had sloping asphalt banks in their playgrounds. Soon, the Z-Boys were carving real waves in the morning and asphalt the rest of the day.

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