July 8, 2007

Fullerton researcher picks up on the skateboarding vibe
An ex-coach delves into the psychology of extreme athletes.
By MARLA JO FISHER
The Orange County Register

Mike Boyd was sitting on a bench behind a bus depot in San Francisco, watching a skateboarder repeatedly try to master a jump.

He crashed and scraped himself up. A friend rushed up and asked if he was OK.

"And the guy answered: 'Yeah, I'm all right. I've been working on this trick for a year, and I'm going to get it yet.' "

At that moment, Boyd became fascinated with the psychology of skateboarding, one of the world's most renegade sports, even though about 12 million people practice it.

Boyd, 53, a former football coach at Katella High School in Anaheim, started studying skateboarders partly because he liked their determination in the face of widespread rejection and scorn by authority.

The Cal State Fullerton researcher and lecturer is one of only a handful of people who conduct academic research on the brains of board riders.

"They are cool characters," Boyd said. "They have high vigor. They will never give up."

In a recent article in the Journal of Sport Behavior, Boyd contrasted the mental attitudes of skateboarders with those of more traditional sports players.

He was curious to know how skateboarders would fare on a famous measure of sports psychology. The "Iceberg Profile" gets its name from the big spike in the middle of a graph that appears when data on top athletes are plotted.

Psychological surveys of top athletes tend to show they have certain traits in common, including low rates of depression, tension, fatigue, confusion and anger.

The athletes also show high vigor, the ability to bounce back and persevere in the face of adversity as well as to push through mediocrity and excel by determination.

The most successful athletes also have "high task orientation," which means they want to excel because of an internal need to see how well they can do, rather than a desire to compare themselves with others.

Boyd knows a lot about how athletes think. He coached football at Katella, his alma mater, for seven years. Initially he aspired to become a head football coach.

Then he became interested in what makes people tick while working part time as a bartender at Big Daddy's, a now defunct Orange County disco.

"It was a natural psychology lab," Boyd said. "I heard every pickup line in the business."

After earning his masters and Ph.D., Boyd began teaching at Cal State Fullerton, with stints at other universities along the way.

Boyd's recently published paper on the psychology of skateboarding with co-author Mi-Sook Kim, an associate professor of sport and exercise psychology at San Francisco State University, is among a relative few done on the sport.

In 2001, Boyd started hanging out at two well-known San Francisco skateboarding spots, Pier 7 and a bus yard at Third and Army streets, and offered skateboarders $2 each to answer a mood questionnaire.

He remembers a group of homeless skateboarders who took the $10 he paid five of them and used the money to buy meat to make sandwiches.

"Skateboarders get a bum rap," Boyd said. "People kick them out of places. These guys never say die. They are like artists. They never give up."

Extreme skateboarding and snowboarding, skiing and surfing are sensation-seeking sports that mix the thrill of danger with exhilaration. Most extreme sports enthusiasts are under 28.

"Golf is not a sensation-seeking sport," Boyd said.

Does he engage in any extreme sports?

"No. I'm past 28," he said with a smile.

Boyd's study, published in March, describes how the skateboarders who are sensation-seekers and focus on improvement fit the Iceberg Profile of Olympic and other successful athletes.

Skateboarding can be a good sport for kids as long as they take only risks that are on par with their skill level, said Boyd, who runs clinics for coaches on youth sports.

"It's a noncompetitive activity," Boyd said. "It's not who won or lost. Competition drives a lot of kids away from sports after the age of 12."

Boyd has been one of only a handful of researchers in the field. Skateboarding has received little attention from academia over the years, and few studies have been published.

"I was surprised at how little (literature) was out there," said Deirdre Kelly, a professor at the University of British Columbia who studied girl skateboarders. "Just speculating, maybe it has something to do with skateboarding's being a nontraditional sport and its association with nonconformity."

Iain Borden, a professor at University College London who wrote a book on skateboarders and public space, said he's unsure why there has been so little attention.

"It might be to do with some kind of general perception that skateboarding is somehow still a children's activity and therefore somehow not worthy of academic study," Borden said. "Although, of course, I would argue that neither of these things are actually the case."

These days, Boyd is looking at the psychology of other extreme sports such as surfing and snowboarding. He and his graduate students have hung out near the Huntington Beach Pier, talking to surfers.

"We been trying to interview big-wave surfers about what it feels like on the edge and what is the rush," Boyd said. "But we're having a hard time, because they can't explain it."