- There are two pillars of the skateboarding community here in the Tampa Bay area.

The Bro Bowl and Skate Park of Tampa, otherwise known as the Spot.

- Everybody that's been in every contest in the last 30 years has been through Tampa.

- There's no other feeling like it.

- If you want to call it a sport, it's a sport.

If you want to call it an art form, it's an art form.

It's a little bit of everything.

- Here in Tampa I mean, this is a skate city, so the scene is very alive and well.

This is like a lifestyle.

[Music] - When most people think of skateboarding.

The first places that come to mind are California or New York.

But Tampa is one of the most influential skateboard cities in the country.

[Music] The Tampa Tribune believe, in the 1960s, actually reported that skateboarding arrived in the city through a USF student.

That USF student was born and raised in Jacksonville, where he surfed.

And when he came to Tampa and learned there were no waves because we had the Gulf.

He started skateboarding to get his fix.

- But people always wonder, where did skateboarding come from?

Did it come from surfing?

Did it come from roller skating?

And in my viewpoint it came from roller skating.

- The skateboard came from skate crates.

Somebody just ripped the bottom board off the skate crates.

It had the wheels on the bottom.

They stood on it and they started skateboarding down the road on them.

- Going back to, like, the '50s, people saw that in back to the future, where they kicked off the top and you just had a piece of like a two by four with roller skate wheels on it.

- Wow!

Look at him go.

- I mean, if it wasn't for roller skating, you wouldn't have skateboarding.

- It's America's newest sport and it's called skateboarding.

- But then quickly, the surfers gave it the influence.

- Form is very similar.

Here's a beautiful turn in surfing.

And here's a beautiful turn in skateboarding.

- Skateboards were homemade or DIY until 1959 when the first commercial skateboards came out.

Skateboards were originally in Tampa, at least used for transportation.

You see the old newspaper articles showing photos of these kids riding them from class to class.

But I think as with anything, when you get teenagers and people in their '20s on a new contraption, they're going to start trying to do tricks.

They started doing things like, look, I can stand on my head.

Look, I can roll down these hills faster than you.

In 1973, when a urethane wheels came out, its popularity really took off.

The wheels could grip the ground better, and it allowed kids to start skateboarding in pools, which really launched skateboarding into another stratosphere.

[Music] - When we moved to Florida, I was eight years old.

I had an older brother.

He had a skateboard.

I wanted to be like him.

He taught us how to ride and tic-tac.

- That's kind of the beauty of skateboarding is everywhere you go, something is skateable.

As soon as I got out of school, it was like straight to the skateboard.

You met up with your friends and then you just ignored the world.

[Music] [laughter] - So, guys, I'm gonna have these out on the table and you guys can come look at all these variables.

- Paul Schmitt is known as the father of the modern skateboard.

[Music] - My dad ran a college theater, and he was a maker and tinkerer.

Build whatever he had to.

So I already knew how to use a table saw, bandsaw, jointer.

So my first product that I made as a kid were rails when I was 14, and they were meant for grabbing.

You do grab your board when you do an air to hang on to it.

'83 is when I started to build boards and sell them.

I came to understand the power of the strength of curves and arcs.

- He was probably in his late teens when Vision Skateboards knew he was making some of the best skateboard decks out of Tampa, Florida, called Schmitt Stix.

- And they started to sell them around the world.

- Paul Schmitt created the upturned nose that allowed people to hook their foot on it and do tricks like ollies.

- To me, it's about having increased the quality of a skateboard and have the design of it meet the needs of skaters.

[Music] - You just got to actually figure out the force and the inertia and whatever you need to get to where you need to go.

Body positioning.

There's so many different factors, supply physics.

You need an outlet.

And that's what skateboarding is really good for.

It's a great outlet for just anything you're going through.

- It's such a unique feeling.

There's no other feeling like it.

[Music] - So the skateboarding world took off in the '70s.

[Music] - The era of the concrete skateparks is definitely 77 to 81.

[Music] - In Tampa, we had Skate Wave and Rainbow Wave.

In Clearwater you had a Clearwater Skate Park, and in St.

Pete you had Earth'n Surfing and Rolling Waves.

- We always had kids skating, but at that time in the '80s, skating wasn't cool.

There was that old commercial in the '80s on the signs of your child might be a Satanist.

- Warning signs of satanic behavior may be apparent.

- And it would list about like, does your child burn incense?

Do they wear black?

Do they listen to heavy metal?

Do they skateboard?

- If you discover items such as these, experts advise you contact your local law enforcement agency at once.

- So all the skate parks were closing down.

[Music] - And when they closed in the 1980s, the only place you had left was a Bro Bowl.

[Music] - My introduction to skate parks was the Bro Bowl actually.

- The skate parks were brand new and they had never existed in history.

So many of them literally went out of business and were torn down within two years, three years of cropping up, only a couple of them survived.

Bro Bowl emerged victorious.

- Bro Bowl is an interesting one because when they built it, it was already sort of outdated.

We finally sort of rediscovered it in the early '80s because we didn't have concrete to ride anymore.

I was like, hey, this this can be fun as it is.

It doesn't have to be a vertical park.

- And it had a, you know, a downhill entrance to it so you could have speed.

- The Bro Bowl really hit the national scene in 2003 when it was featured in Tony Hawk's underground video game.

- If you can knock down all the bottles by grinding in one combo, I'll put in a good word for you.

- We have contests.

People will come from out of state to go to that dinky little bowl, but it was really about community.

It's a place for your community to come together to do what you do.

- The Bro Bowl is really what solidified Tampa's stance in the skating scene.

In 2013, the Bro Bowl was named to the National Register of Historic Places.

[Music] [Music] Local skateboarders were furious when they found out the original Bro Bowl was going to be demolished.

- It's a part of history.

It's a part of Tampa history, skateboarding history in general, Florida skateboarding history.

[Music] - And the city of Tampa heard them and built a new one.

- Three.

Two.

One.

[Applause] - The new Bro Bowl is basically located right next to where the old one was, right inside Perry Harvey Park.

- Derick is about to ollie over the mayor.

Nah, I think I got it.

[Music] - If it wasn't for the uproar of the local skating community over the demolition of the first Bro Bowl, the second one never would have been created.

[Music] - I felt really lucky growing up in Florida.

We had Alan Gelfand inventor of the ollie.

[Music] Mike McGill lived in New Port Richey.

He made the McTwist.

[Music] Rodney Mullen, the king of freestyle and street skating out of Gainesville.

- Rodney Mullen, early '80s, created the flat-ground ollie.

That's when people started, like taking tricks from ramps and like trying to figure out how to do them in the streets.

That gave birth to street skating like as a whole.

[Music] - While I was 13 and 14 and my parents used to take us to skate the Bro Bowl, my dad felt as though it was a little dangerous for us kids, and he came home and dug a hole in our backyard and poured a cement bowl, very similar to the Bro Bowl, a little smaller.

And then later came a half pipe.

The same template crossed over into the Skatepark of Tampa in 1993.

[Music] - They survived through a lot of crazy downturns in skateboarding.

When vert ramps were disappearing, they had a vert ramp, so people would literally come in from all over the country to skate the Spot vert ramp, and you had a lot of heart behind it.

- Here's another bird's eye view of the pro course in the main warehouse.

- Brian Schaffer is one of the most instrumental individuals in the history of not just Tampa skateboarding, skateboarding.

He created the Pro.

He created the Am.

- Skateboarding needed a cool backyard pro contest, so we decided to just do it on our own.

The Tampa Am is like the International Skateboarding finals, the Super Bowl of skateboarding.

The Pro is the best street skateboarding contest in the world, the longest running contest in the world.

Even Tony Hawk or even the best Olympian wants that gold.

But they also want the hardcore street bragging rights of winning Tampa Am or Tampa Pro.

- Everybody that's been in every contest in the last 30 years has been through Tampa.

- The craziest thing I saw at Pro was us building the loop in 2001 and watching so many people skate it.

[Music] Bob Burnquist in the rain after the awards were happening, he went out there and did the loop switch.

The twitch is you're - you're standing on the opposite side of the board.

- First ever switch loop in the world.

[Music] - In the rain.

It was crazy.

- So I participated in it.

And of course, I had a crazy fall and accident.

[Music] [Music] - It was scary.

Once he hit, dead silence.

He didn't move.

Blood... blood on the ramp.

It was pretty trying for everybody.

- Fortunately, as I walk away with just a few metacarpals broken.

I spent a night in the hospital and a week sleeping.

[Music] - Life's going to constantly kick you down, but just because you fail doesn't mean you don't have the chance to get back up.

I'm extremely blessed for the discipline that I learned from skating.

[Music] - You know, to me, skateboarding, it is to you what it is to you.

If you want to call it a sport, it's a sport.

If you want to call it an art form, it's an art form and it's a little bit of everything.

- It's an expression of what you like.

- That's the point of skateboarding, is to do it in our own way.

You don't have to be good at skateboarding to be having fun and loving it.

[Music] - I had a hard home life growing up, so for me it was a really good escape.

And just like the learning to fall, and get back up, like it teaches you a lot about life when you're young.

- I can honestly say multiple times skateboarding literally has saved my life.

[Music] [Applause] - Hi from Tampa.

- A lot of us older guys can go back in and kind of give back to like the younger versions of us.

But in today's world, - I'm just measuring them so we get the right size for each kid.

- We're stoked that you're here.

So everybody put your hands together.

The concept of Boards for Bros is giving skateboards to kids, or giving skateboards to those that can't afford them.

- It encourages kids to skate that maybe never would have skated, or they want to skate, but they can't afford to skate.

Skaters have always been that way.

Like when I was a kid, if you didn't like, if you broke your board, your friend either just gave you an old deck or like sold you one for five bucks.

- Seeing them leave and they put their personal art and their name on their board.

Uh, it's priceless for us.

- It's about the next generation finding their fun.

- If I could pass something on to the next generation of skaters, it would be just don't let skateboarding die off at its core.

- Skateboarding is about taking risks.

It's about community.

It's an art form.

- Yeah.

Just keep skateboarding true to what it is.

And it's creative, and it's innovative, and it's infinite.

[Music]