Grindin Getdown Contest Report - 06/04/06

March 4, 2006. The day of the Grindin Getdown finally arrived and it couldn’t have been a better day. If you were to look at the weather report predicting the date of the contest a week before the actual day all you would see was rain and more rain. We even thought about postponing the contest to the following weekend to avoid the rain, but instead decided to go through with our original plans. So anyways, like I was saying, the big day finally came and it couldn’t have been a better day. Open the window and sunny skies as far as you could look, from that point I knew the day was going to be great. We planned on having the spots at the white staired ledges in the city of Pittsburg, CA but unfortunately they were really chunked. So I called up vinny that morning and we decided, about 2 hours before the contest, to go fix the ledges so we could have them as a spot. I went to Wal-Mart and purchased some Bondo. Bondo is actually used to repair dents on cars but also works great to fixed chunked ledges. So we drove to the spot and repaired the white ledges than painted them again with some paint that I took from my house. We now set off to the meeting spot. Already 15 minutes late, but you know how rollerbladers are, always late. The meeting spot was at the local skate park. When we arrived we were greeted by some friendly policeman who told us we couldn’t skate there because we didn’t have any helmets. We than decided to go to Deer Valley high school to start off the contest. After a couple nice grinds from Quinn Feldman , Joey Ihara, and Sneaky we were again greeted by the policeman who didn’t appreciate there being over 100 rollerbladers on campus. Off to the white ledges we went, that were, just 2 hours before the contest chunked more than expired milk. Oh ya during the whole deer valley spot I had to run to radioshak to purchase a new megaphone because the one we had really sucked, that put me out 100 bucks. We started driving to Pittsburg with a herd of cars so big that the buffalos roaming the continent centuries ago would look like a row of marching ants. I must have received about 20 calls in a 10-minute drive from people who had strayed away from the pack. So we arrived at the spot and I pulled out my grinder in order to grind the lock off so we wouldn’t have the pack hopping fences. The round kicked off with about 40 competitors and about a hundred people watching. People like Casey Bogazzi, Hoang Phung, Victor Arias, Ross Kuhn and tons more laced some ridiculous grinds on the ledges. Round M.V.P. goes to Casey in my opinion, he killed these ledges, true front torque to true spin savannah anyone? And tons of other deals too hard to even try and type. But you’ll see all these and more in our next DVD. We ventured off to the next spot. A down rail with shitty runway but thanks to the boards of Scott Moore this spot was successful. Highlights of this round were Steven Tassels’ true top porn, Victor’s fence to grind, Casey’s abundance of tricks, Shawn Oberg’s hot deals and some more from Will Cosgrove, Derrick Kennedy and Quinn Feldman. The past 2 spots were bust free which gave everyone a lot of time to show off their stuff. Final round was than moved onto Antioch High School, some down rails that are rather high and have a huge crack before them. The final round consisted of Casey Bogazzi, Derrick Kennedy, Will Cosgrove, Victor Arias, Steven Tassel, and Shawn Oberg. The round kicked off with some warm up grinds from everyone but Casey decided to heat things up with an ao miszou to forward royale. After that everyone started getting juiced off each other and laced some dope grinds. Victor did a clean front torque down the rail which was followed by a regular and switch sweaty by Quinn Feldman. After some Ao toporns, some kind grinds, some true spin kind grinds by Steven tassel the contest was looking like it was at its peak. Derrick followed up with a truespin top porn to forward royale down the rail and Shawn Oberg laced tons of switchups like front torque to top soul to ttsoyale and also backslide. Than Quinn decided to get a little dizzy and 360 soul the rail. After that we were greeted by the policeman again so the finals had an abrupt ending right when things were looking like they were gona explode. We set off to the skate park to announce the winners of the contest. The crowd decided that Quinn Feldman was the champion of this years grinding Getdown, the runners up were Shawn Oberg and Derrick Kennedy, Honorable mention goes out to Casey B. who unfortunately nutted the last rail which disabled him to keep on killing the contest. www.humblebeings.com So the winner this year was Quinn Feldman, after announcing the winner we had the biggest prize toss known to mankind. Everyone walked away with something, or mostly everyone at least. Thanks to all the sponsors who supported the contest. Able, Aggressive mall, Eulogy, Roller Warehouse, Valo, Heat, Identity Clothing, Bemag, Daily Bread, and Second Regime. Without their support no one would have walked away with anything. The most important thing of course is the skaters who came out to skate and watch because without everyone’s love for rolling none of this would be possible. Look for a high quality edit in our next DVD dropping xmas 06.

Peace

- Ivan Narez

Photos: Joey Hajnal

Top Left: Casey Bagozzi: Tr Mistral
Middle Right: Shawn Storm: Tr Topsoul

Vitor Arias: Fencedrop to Rail

James St Ours: Rocket Fishbrain

Tags: casey baggozzi grindin getdown james st ours joey hajnal pittsburg quinn feldman shawn storm victor arias