Zaturdays: Tampa Pro 1995

I wasn’t just at the first Tampa Pro, I skated in it. But it’s funny, considering how much significance the contest has taken on over the years I have only a handful of clear memories from it: Mike V skating in the Powell hockey jersey and finishing his run with a kickflip backside 50-50 on the box for the win. And then over on the vert ramp Tas Pappas getting his foot stuck in the rafters on a kickflip mute. And finally, Danny Way showing up after recovering from his broken neck to win vert and just barely missing out on the street win too. That’s the extent of it. 21 years later and that’s all I’ve got, time will do that to you. After some serious digging through the archives recently I uncovered the OG issue of Thrasher with the coverage from that first Tampa Pro, dating to July 1995. What a find. Sure it’s a time capsule to another era in skating, but it feels more like a window to another world. The cover story is about longboarding for starters. There are pictures of snowboarding, there’s a surf ad, and despite vert supposedly having died around 1990, there are loads of photos halfpiping. But back to the coverage of the Pro. The first thing that jumped out was the name of the contest itself. If you didn’t know what you were looking for you wouldn’t even realize that it was the first Tampa Pro, because instead of being called The First Tampa Pro or something like that, it was called the Sean Miller Memorial SPoT Pro Contest. I’d definitely forgotten that part of it. Sean Miller was an absolute power-house of an east coast vert pro in the early ‘90s, and one of Schaefer’s closest friends. He died getting thrown out of the back of a moving pickup truck and Schaefer wanted to help preserve the memory of Sean and did it by way of the contest. The banners around the park tell a good story on their own. Airwalk, Sophisto, Think, Tracker, even Columbus, the short lived clothing brand out of SPoT were all pretty heavily represented. One super rad part of the coverage though is that Bryce Kanights shot the photos. Bryce is still in the game killing it, and with so many of the people from back then no longer really around, it’s rad to see someone who has stuck it out and prospered. Oh, and Salman Agah, founder of Pizzanista and the original Switch God, wrote the article. I don’t know if Salman was pressed for time or experimenting with abstract forms of writing or what, but the thing reads like the stream of consciousness ramblings of someone with severe ADD. I love it. One more thing I remember about that first Tampa Pro? I didn’t get anywhere close to making the top 10. -Paul Zitzer