Word: skateboarding
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Southern California, the launching pad of fads, is in the grip of a revival as frenetic as any ever whipped up by an evangelist. The skateboard has returned as the favorite platform of the well-balanced athlete. After ten years in the recreational limbo reserved for Hula-Hoops and yo-yos, the surfboard on wheels is already the preferred mode of propulsion-and sleight of foot-for an estimated 2 million Southern Californians, and their numbers are increasing by as many as 5,000 a day. The skateboarding craze may already claim around 30 million enthusiasts nationwide. Los Angeles manufacturers...
...Some skateboarding tricks can only be done on land: jumping from a fast-moving skateboard over a 4-ft. bar and landing back on the board, for example. A World Skateboard Pro-Am Championship at the Los Angeles Sports Arena last month attracted 37 teams of pros, including Top Star Denis Schufeldt, 24, a San Diego yoga teacher who claims to use "yoga and body control" to retain his title as the fastest downhill racer...
...Skateboarders have been clocked on Sunset Boulevard at more than 42 m.p.h., and claim to reach speeds of 60 m.p.h. Southern California hospitals reported a 100% increase last summer in admissions of teen-agers with broken or fractured limbs, particularly "skateboard elbow," caused by landing funny-bone-first. To cut down the carnage rate, Long Beach, San Diego and other communities have banned skateboarding in the streets and parks; Hollywood Hills' celebrated "Toilet Bowl," a vast, saucer-like storm drain that attracts thousands of skateboard stunters each week, has been modified with antispeed bumps to slow the action; some...
...contained the innovative use of actual acrobats on stage playing the roles of acrobats and interspersing gymnastics with the dialogue, Acrobats offered little of lasting value. Similarly It's Called the Sugar Plum, a comedy about a Harvard student who kills another student when he accidentally slips off his skateboard under the wheels of a moving car on Mt. Auburn St. is too limited. Sugar Plum is a character sketch using an improbable occurrence to draw out very familiar character types...
...novel will be made into a movie next year. That should surprise no one, since it is seeded with cinematic possibilities, including a chase by a legless beggar on a skateboard. The film ought to be shot in black and white, since that is what the book is about...