austin skate notes

The Broken Neck Ramp broke Dave Watigny’s spleen, and this Friday it has the opportunity to make amends by hosting a fundraising event planned to help defray his overwhelming medical debt stemming from the injury. Last I checked, it has exceeded $70,000.

On the roster for this Friday:

7:00 art auction
9:00 Video Premiere- Pray For Me: Jason Jessee

This is the first public screening of the Jason Jessee documentary in Austin. It’s a very interesting glimpse into the life of an colorful character. Many questions are answered. Many more are begging to be asked. Here’s the trailer. And here’s an odd follow-up interview with Jessee where he complains about a falling-out he’s had with the guy who made Pray for Me.

Broken Neck, 4701 Redbluff

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Patterson Park Mini Ramp is currently on lock-down in order to provide an opportunity for the grass to grow on the dirt berms and other disturbed areas. It’s doing well in spite of the heat. Trespassing on the site doesn’t help get the ramp opened any faster and in fact creates a real problem for the volunteers working to get the project completed and turned over to the city.

Due to staffing issues at the engineering firm creating the construction documents for Austin’s next full-blown public skatepark, the project has been slowed down a few months. It’s looking like an early-spring build now.

Those Michael Sieben shoes are hovering around $75. Ouch. That’s three pairs of Trujillos at the Round Rock outlet mall. I suppose Addidas isn’t doing anything different than the other shoe companies. Charge $80 for shoes it costs $5 to make in Asia.

Famed early-nineties pro, Justin Lynch, posted some comments on an old ASN story. Nice to get a clarification from him. I miss his alley-oop backside face-high ollies.

Tony Hawk stopped by the new public skatepark in Houston the other day.

People have been pretty respectful of the PPMR. I go out there a few times each day to water the grass seeds and people have been using the trash can and so forth. Thanks.

Get your sessions in quick. A meeting with the city this morning resulted in a decision to temporarily fence off the mini ramp to ensure that sod will take root and grow on the berms to stabilize the soil. Funds are also being raised privately to install stairs on each corner of the ramp to provide an easy climb up to the decks. The fence will likely go up before the end of this week.

Consumer beware: Home Depot is gouging rental customers by charging a $5.00 gas surcharge regardless of how much gas you have in the tank of rental equipment you return.

Another PPMR volunteer has suffered a serious injury. Lee Brooks was visiting Orcas Island on a skate trip last week and broke his foot while just taking a step off his board. The report I heard indicated that he underwent surgery for the injury.

Cary Jackson, Dave Reynolds, and I poured the flatbottom on the Patterson Park Miniramp wednesday morning. In spite of a threatening thunderstorm, the pour turned out great. We gave it a day to cure, then unwrapped it Friday, July 4th for a session. The news spread like a virus and we had guys coming down from Round Rock to check it out.

Basically, it’s open for skating at this point. The site is still under construction as we have to bring in some topsoil, spread it, and plant grass. If you visit, please be gentle on the orange fencing, pick up your trash, and generally respect the park and other visitors. The ramp was built entirely with donated funds for materials and volunteer labor.

While setting up for one of his trademark backside smith grinds on the broken neck mini-ramp, Dave Watigny caught a piece of wood and slammed into the oncoming transition Friday evening. With the wind knocked out of him, he sat down away from the ramp to recover. An hour later, he found himself increasingly dazed and unable to even tell people what his name was. He didn’t hit his head in the fall, but his friends took him to the hospital emergency room. An x-ray identified that during the impact, his body landed on his elbow, which pressed below his ribcage. The pressure caused his spleen to rupture which in turn began re-routing his blood from its typical course into his abdominal cavity. He had internally lost 2.6 litres of blood. The doctors performed an emergency operation to remove his spleen and clean up the mess inside his stomach.

Now he’s recovering in Brackenridge with a morphine drip, a cup of ice cubes, and a foot-long incision down his belly. It’s expected that he’ll be able to leave the hospital in a few days, but he won’t be able to lift things (i.e. work) for as long as two months while he recuperates. Lacking insurance, he has been racking up a horrific debt to his care provider.

I asked him if this was the worst injury he’s suffered through skateboarding. He hesitated and then didn’t really give me a conclusive answer. He referenced a hernia he received while jumping down a set of 12 stairs some years ago. I think he said this was the most expensive. Then there was some talk about how painful catheter insertion is.

In the years before he volunteered at Patterson helping pour concrete, Dave has been building skate spots, backyard ramps, skateparks, and scenes in Austin and around the country. It’s rather ironic that someone who has given so much to skateboarding would have to pay such a high price while enjoying skateboarding. Hopefully, skateboarders will step up to support Dave with fundraisers as he has stepped up to help others so many times in the past. (more…)

Since the demise of the Skatepark of Houston on Orange Grove, it’s been a difficult sell to get me to visit Houston. Even the grand opening of Grindline’s recently completed mammoth public skatepark was a ‘maybe.’ In the late eighties, I’d drive from Lake Charles, Louisiana, to Houston in the rain just to skate the indoor mini-ramp. But with all the cool stuff around Austin to skate, there hasn’t been much of an incentive for me to take a skate roadtrip in a while. Closer than Amarillo and Orcas Island, the new public skatepark in Houston has now returned Bushwick Bill’s hometown to the top of my skate roadtrip destinations list.

This $2.75 million concrete skate behemoth is the largest privately fundraised public skatepark in the nation. It’s also Houston’s first concrete public skatepark (as opposed to its many prefab crap facilities), which has introduced much hysteria and concern on the part of city officials. As a response, Houston’s Parks and Recreation Department is running it like a public swimming pool and is staffing the skatepark with supervisors who will enforce a rule requiring visitors to wear helmets. Even so, it’s an amazing facility complete with lights for evening skating (closes at 10:00 PM) and a great view of the downtown Houston skyline. Although street purists will fault the facility’s lack of a plaza aesthetic, the layout does have a wide variety of terrain. There are banks, hips, quarterpipes, bank-to-jersey barriers, sloped manual pads, rails, mellow bowls, godzilla bowls, cradles, and a very accessible kidney pool replica.

In spite of the typically brutal Houston heat, the grand opening ceremony was phenomenal. A bunch of pro skaters on the Independent 30th Anniversary Tour showed up along with most of the Black Label team and an unknown number of ripping amateurs and old-timey Texas pro skaters. It was cool to see Hosoi snap backside ollie tailgrabs in the kidney pool, but I was more impressed to see the family reunion session of Ken Fillion, Jason Espeseth, Gene Hare, Troy Chasen, Bryan Pennington, Dave Donaldson, and Chris Gentry all skating together in the Kahuna-esque combi-bowl.

I came back with a ton of content, which I’ll add to ASN as I get it all edited. For now, I’ve posted a video teaser from the kidney bowl session and a few photos over on the APSAC website.

Before visiting, you’ll want to check the directions, hours, and rules for the Houston Public Skatepark.

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The Skatepark of San Marcos is holding it’s first birthday party this Saturday. Stop by to skate June 7th to enjoy free hotdogs, gatorade, and cake.
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