California skateboarder Eddie Elguera is in Birmingham, Alabama—not exactly the skateboarding capital of the world.
But atop an 11-foot-high skateboard ramp, he is right at home. To skateboarders throughout the country (who like to call themselves “skaters,” for short), he is something of a legend. They call him El Gato, the cat, because when it comes to pulling off daring skateboard tricks, he always lands on his feet.
Elguera, 30, perched like a cat, peers over the edge of his skateboard, rests his hands on his knees, and concentrates, as a crowd of Birmingham youths look on.
On the stage below, a fellow skateboarder, microphone in hand, asks for quiet, explaining that Eddie is about to do a 720° Elguerial—“spinning two times in the air and landing backwards.”
The music stops. The crowd falls silent. Eddie takes a quick look below, moves his right foot to the front of the board, and plunges—board and all—straight down. Atop the opposite end of the wooden half-pipe, he attempts the trick he created 12 years ago.
He flips up to a right handstand. Grabbing the ramp’s edge, his board and body flying over his head, he pivots two full rotations. Then, like a cat, Eddie lands smoothly back on the ramp.
The hard-to-please audience of youths now erupts. Eddie smiles bashfully and takes the microphone.
“When I first met him he could hardly speak,” explains his pastor, Jim Cobrae. “Even now, you can tell by his personality that he is shy—until you give him a microphone.”
The crowd is quiet. “A lot of you might know me and a lot of you might not,” Eddie begins. “But in 1979 and 1980 I was the world champion and …” The audience interrupts him with applause. He smiles, shakes his head slightly, and waves their cheers away.
“If you build your house on sand,” he continues, “when the storms come, they will blow the sand away. That’s what I did with my skateboarding.” He recounts to the group his past bouts with alcohol and drugs.
“I came to the point where there was no one else to turn to but God. And right now I’m building my career on Jesus Christ, ’cause I tried to do it alone and I failed. A lot of you have that same choice right now. You can go out and try to make it on your own. But I can guarantee that if you don’t put Jesus Christ first, you will fail.”
A Cat’S New Life
Eddie tells young people his story whenever possible, from the Birmingham event sponsored by the John Guest Evangelistic Team, to an outreach in Charleston, South Carolina, to last summer’s Cornerstone Festival in Illinois.
He takes his ramp to schools and churches throughout the country—anywhere he can use his skating talent to help tell young people about God.
Much like a church planter, he has started a number of church skate clubs so that after he leaves, the kids can continue to hear about God—in a nonthreatening place (and one to which they will want to return).
“We were both in awe and pleased at the difference he made in the children’s and youth out-reaches,” John Guest says of Eddie’s role in Guest’s Birmingham crusade. “His skating ability is only surpassed by his mature love for the Lord and his desire to serve and plant the seeds of salvation.”
When he is not on the road, Eddie hangs out at the Skate Underground skatepark in Moreno Valley, California, a few miles from his house.
Eddie walks into the park’s skate shop, its walls lined with decks, trucks, wheels, rails, grip tape, risers, and bearings—every kind of skate product imaginable.
He greets the man behind the counter and a couple of kids he recognizes, then joins some guys gearing up to skate.
He is right in his element. Like the other skaters, he wears high-top shoes; dark, baggy shorts; knee and elbow pads; and an oversized, long-sleeve T-shirt.
“What’s up?” Eddie asks a guy standing by the pinball machine as he walks outside and puts on his helmet, which bears the large, black-lettered inscription: JESUS CHRIST THE RIGHTEOUS ONE.
It is one message Eddie is very bold about.
And even in public schools, where he does not explicitly talk about God, he talks frankly about some of the biggest problems he and his wife, Dawna, the parents of two boys, see young people face: “Peer pressure, a lot of drugs, and a lot of sex,” he says.
Eddie knows where these kids are coming from. They tend to be antiestablishment and countercultural, but ironically, some are as product-consumptive as the rest of society; many are into hard-core rock, punk, or rap music, and a lot of their iconography glamorizes and celebrates the absurd, if not macabre.
Before he became a Christian, his first love was skateboarding. Eddie honed his talent during the 1970s, a golden age for the sport, ft was a period Thrasher magazine calls the “skatepark era,” when skaters could be seen in their Hobie® shorts and striped, over-the-calf tube socks, practicing in empty swimming pools and concrete skateparks (there were over 200) throughout the country.
Eddie stacked up titles in contests throughout California and developed a reputation as an innovator, creating a number of maneuvers.
By 1979 he had been voted skater of the year by readers of Skateboarder magazine, and the following year he was the Overall Gold Cup Series winner. But he was still unsatisfied, and within months he burned out and quit skateboarding.
“I reached pretty much where I could go in skateboarding, and I didn’t have any real fulfillment,” he explains. “I thought, What’s left?”
After living in Mexico for eight months, he moved back to the U.S. where his bouts with drugs and alcohol only worsened. But one day a feisty, Bible-toting woman walked into his brother’s restaurant, gave him the gospel, and his life changed.
Because Eddie has been at the bottom and the top, he relates to people that a lot of churches don’t. And it seems he is no less an innovator as a Christian than he was as a skater.
He says it is a matter of being “willing to go against the grain and say, ‘Yes, we want these kids. We don’t care what the world says.’ The world says [skaters] are a bunch of losers, but God takes the foolish things of this world and confounds the wise.”
Eddie’s pastor notes that most people in the skateboarding culture “are not going to come into church and listen to me, an old fuddy-duddy preacher. But they are going to listen to Eddie. They are not going to hear the gospel from me. But they are going to hear the gospel from Eddie.”
The Cat’S Quarters
It’s a warm, breezy, early spring day in Southern California. A faint layer of smog softens the blue of an almost cloudless sky. The stereo at Skate Undergroud is blaring The Cure, a progressive rock band. “Skaters are really into their music,” Eddie says, climbing the platform to survey the park.
He patiently waits while two guys finish their skating, then takes his turn. They watch intently as the Cat performs Elguerials, fakie Ollies, inverts, and flips. Another skater joins the group and returns to Eddie a borrowed video of Eddie’s maneuvers.
“Thanks.”
As the skater takes a turn, Eddie offers him some pointers.
When he can, Eddie offers spiritual pointers, too. Laurence Mundy was 14 years old and had been skating two years when he met Eddie at a Wisconsin skate camp last summer. As Eddie coached him in skating, Mundy recalls, he also “shared a lot of common-sense stuff about life.” “It wouldn’t have made that much of a difference if it was someone else,” Mundy says. “But he was very influential because he’s a pro.” Laurence ended up asking himself some hard questions, and eventually he made a commitment to Christ.
Eddie didn’t stop there. “Accepting the Lord is the most important time,” he says. “But then there is the follow-up. I try to keep up with them—be their friend and love them for who they are.”
He gave Laurence a Bible and encouraged him to find a church when he went home, something Laurence said he “definitely” planned to do. “You can’t just get them saved and then let them fall back into the cracks” says Eddie. “Satan comes around and steals the Word right away. You need to be spiritually nourished.”
How does he stay nourished? “By keeping things focused on God and the Bible. And being vigilant.”
Like a cat.
By Thomas S. Giles in Moreno Valley, California.
