Rollerbladers stay on the grind

By Barry Gabay
Edited by Jackie Alexander
Date posted: April 22, 2009

Jason Mosley shakes his head and surveys the empty stone plaza outside the Strom Thurmond Federal Building in downtown Columbia.

"It feels weird being here," he said of the area that was once a rollerblading mecca. "Man, I miss this place."

The small community of Columbia rollerbladers hopes the opening of a new Midlands skate park and the arrival of the Carolina Mega Session rollerblading event this month will revive a sport nearly forgotten.

The Mega Session, a day of rollerblading spread primarily through word-of-mouth, was to stop in Columbia on Saturday, a month after a Charlotte event attracted 50 rollerbladers.

"We just wanted to get all the rollerbladers in the Carolinas together for one big day of skating," organizer David Dodge said.

He expected about 40 to 50 skaters to attend, but was withholding the location until the last minute to lessen the likelihood that police would be called.

"Rollerblading," the popular term for in-line skating, gets its name from the first company to produce in-line skates. The skaters who will attend the Mega Session are called "aggressive" rollerbladers in some circles. Instead of skating long distances on flat surfaces, these skaters grind their wheels down handrails, leap off staircases and travel 20 feet in the air before landing on their skates.

Jim Demarest, director of facilities services at the University of South Carolina, said skating on public property is a nuisance.

"Skaters will jump on and scrape handrails, and break planters and benches," he said. "Repeated skating in a particular area can really cause eyesores."

While Dodge, a Greenville resident, has high hopes for the Mega Session, the event has a different meaning for the few rollerbladers who call Columbia home.

From the late 1990s to 2005, about 10 Columbia skaters would congregate in the federal building courtyard every Sunday, Mosley said. The area also regularly attracted skaters from Greenville, Charlotte, Charleston, Atlanta and Augusta, Ga., and professionals from as far as London visited, he said.

"If you were in Columbia and you wanted to skate, you went to Strom," Dodge said. "It was just a really cool spot. It was really hard to get hurt there; it didn't require lots of skill. No one bothered you or kicked you out. And it was wide open so you could have a lot of people hanging out."

But after September 11, security increased in federal buildings nationwide, said Mike Quinn, former chairman of the federal executive council at the Strom Thurmond Building. By 2005, the area was a dead zone for anyone who did not work there. Skaters risked arrest for trespassing or destruction of federal property.

"Everyone either moved away or just stopped skating," Mosley said. Mosley's roommates David Benke, 23, and Brandon Nessler, 21, have both skated for 10 years. Mosley, 28, has 16 years of rollerblading under his belt.

"If there was anyone else around here, we'd know about them," Benke says. "We're a pretty tight bunch."

Rollerbladers worldwide have become more tight-knit since the sport was outcast from the action sports community, Nessler said. For a decade, skateboarders saw rollerblading as a mainstream hobby riding their coattails. ESPN's X Games finally removed rollerblading in 2004, and the sport's sponsorships disappeared. In 1998, 27 million people used in-line skates; now only 9.3 million do, according to the National Sporting Goods Association.

But Nessler says the exile from the X Games wasn't such a bad thing.

"The sport's got a much stronger foundation now," he said. "We've gone more underground, and we've got an identity."

Mosley, Benke and Nessler wear clothes by rollerblading sponsors, and their Olympia home is covered with rollerblading posters. All have skating scars. They met each other through rollerblading and have remained active skaters.