The JFA Skateboard Team Tribute

With the passing of Donnie Ho, his business model of putting out small runs of boards whenever we get off our ass and do it will remain the norm at AZPX. The boss and I decided it was time. I wanted to put out another run of the new Brian Brannon Signature Shape. Tara wanted to do a classic AZPX board. We put our heads together and come up with a combination of our all-time best-selling graphic on Brian’s new, awesome shape. Sam Esmoer was commissioned somewhere around 2004-05 to create some original graphics for AZPX, one being Poolside Sacrifice. Sam was also an original member of the JFA Skateboards Team. Brian suggested we put Sam’s graphic on his shape as a tribute to the Team…

-Rob Locker

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The JFA Skateboard Team

In the 1980s, being a punk rocker was an ass-kicking offense and any shit-kicker, jock, metalhead, preppy, rocker, burnout, cop, urban cowboy, Camaro hippy, BMX dufus, golfer, surfer brah, muscleman, beardo, weirdo, aunt, dad, suburban housewife or hopped up grandma was happy to throw a punch.

Being a skateboarder and a punker was even worse because anywhere you rode, except for a ramp in some rich dude’s backyard that was well within city code, meant that you would also be arrested.

Skateparks were dead, and basically, so was skateboarding.

You had to be insane to be a punker and/or a skater.

It was the Golden era of Skate Punk.

JFA Skateboards were ridden throughout the uncivilized world and JFA stickers were on every suburban beater clunking down the highway.

The boards came in three sizes: huge, gigantic and WTF? The Mini was 10” x 29”, the Pool Board was 10.5” x 30.5”, and the Pipe Board was 11” x 32”. They had no noses to speak of and the concave was so deep you could eat cereal out of them. There were also the Don Lincoln and Street Scorpion models, but those are stories for another time.

Of course, JFA Skateboards had to have a team, but it wasn’t really what you’d normally think of as a team – more like a gang. No, they weren’t that organized – more like a conundrum of crazed stuntwood hooligans.

That said, the team was pretty much a who’s who of Phoenix individual gnarlers known for their backyard pool, giant pipe, and janky ditch finesse.

Along with the band (Brian Brannon, Don Redondo, Mike “Bam Bam” Sversvold and Michael Cornelius), the team included Steve Shelton, Todd Joseph, Sam Esmoer, Jon Haas, Doug Perry, Charles Amparan, Richard Zuccarello, Pete Johnston, Danny Moped, Mike Pendleton, Scott Braniff, Chad Stewart, Tim Miles, Pat McGinnis, Steve Pingleton and Thalia Zelnick.

Chris Livingston should have been on the team but he made up for it by trading up a G&S board he won in a contest for a JFA board. (Orlando Baker might have been on the team and should have been if he wasn’t, as well).

Between them all, Team JFA had four Thrasher covers:  Shelton (December 1983), Brannon (April 1987 and April 1989), and Esmoer (September 1988).

They were definitely not contest skaters, though they rode a few (the Flagstaff contest at Brian Harper’s mini-ramp and the one at Nienaber’s ramp featured in the video Placebo Underground Music Hallucination: JFA Live at CBGB’s come to mind).

Then there were all the official, unofficial team riders across the land that ripped it up on JFA sticks.

But and still, the JFA Team was a force to be reckoned with and they left no stone unturned, no coping unground, and the upper regions of no pipe unexplored.

The JFA Team Tribute Board goes out to all of them.

Ride on.