Well I might not be a pro but I know a few things about one of the greatest growing sports in the world, skateboarding.
Skateboarding wasn't a big hit until the late fifty's early sixty's but before that kids used to take roller skate wheels and attach them to two by fours and try to ride them. Not until the late fifty's when surfers encountered bad waves did skateboarding become more popular. Surfers started experimenting with surfboards and mounting them on wheels to keep them selves occupied.
In 1959 the first roller derby skateboard was for sale and sidewalk surfing began to boom. The first professional boards were designed in 1963 by Makaha and a team was formed to sell the products.
The first skateboard contest was held at the Pier Avenue Junior School in Hermosa, California in 1963.
In 1964 Hobie Alter and Vita-Pakt juice company teamed up to start Hobie Skateboards. .
By 1965 kids really started getting crazy about skateboarding and even some started skating empty swimming pools. This is when movies started coming out and a magazine "The Quarterly Skateboarder" were getting all so popular.
More than fifty million boards were sold within the three year period but all of a sudden skateboarding died in the fall of 1965. This was when the first crash of skateboarding took place because of to much producing and not enough tests on the products. When people started getting hurt and a few fatal accidents took place states started to ban skateboarding because of health and safety reasons. It was like skateboarding had just went blank from everyones mind.
Over the next decade or so skateboarding was mostly underground until a former surfer Frank Nasworthy visited a friend at a plastic company who produced urethane wheels for roller skaters. He found out that the wheels would fit his skateboard so he decided to develop skateboard wheels out of urethane. Once the word got around how wonderful the wheels actually worked skateboarding started to boom again.