The Disposable Skateboard Bible
This may put me on both sides of the wrong age too old to today's generation and too young to the skaters of the 80s but as a seven-year-old runt in 1987, I would travel down to Milwaukee's Turf Skatepark with my mom and my older brother, Than, and split time watching him do scratcher grinds in the ice-slick deep bowl or slamming around a joystick while attempting to out-run bees in the video game 720º;. All I did was kneeboard then, but I liked the smell of the Turf lobby and would spend a good deal of time admiring the fluorescent wheels, board graphics - namely, the Tony Hawk Powell-Peralta Bird Skull graphic - or the griptape art (Even the pre-cut Nash circular saw grip design seemed awesome to me at the time).When I finally started skateboarding in 1995, the first mid nineties memory that comes to mind is the girl who modeled for Teabag clothing. She was gorgeous in a way reserved only for a boy on the verge of pubescence and she graced the pages of Big Brother magazine, where Sean Cliver worked.I didn't take much notice at the time, but when Sean Cliver wrote Disposable: A History of Skateboard Art in 2005, it brought a lot of my memories back, not just from the perfect storm that was Big Brother, but of those years at the Turf all those memories that each wheel, board graphic or piece of torn griptape held. Now, I am not and probably never will be a skateboard collector, but his most recent follow-up book, The Disposable Skateboard Bible broadens the years of nostalgia and is an amazing read for anyone who holds their greatest memories in the very thing they have spent their life destroying. It's out now and is available through Gingko Press or Amazon.com . --ESPN.com