Photographs of my hobby skateboarding. That's me upside down doing my old school handstand trick...

Nice photos

I expect it's not you on the skate board......

But your female selection.........looks very nice too!

Actually it is me on the skateboard!! I was on late show with David Letterman, and appeared in a now defunct magazine, etc.

google huntington beach handstand man,

or search youtube for handstand man 01. Please ignore the remarks of some ugly hater kid. I lost the password to handstandmann and have been unable to remove them. my style is old school, and a lot of the young kids who do street skating are on meth and other drugs, unfortunately it affects their behavior. I say live and let live, I have been skating off and on for about 30 years, and enjoy all styles.

Handstand Man at www.friedmanarchives.com under skateboarding. Gary Friedman is an excellent pro photographer who I hired for some of my shots.

Pretty cool video. I don't think I could have stood on my hands without the skateboard at any time in my life. I did manage to stand on my head on a skateboard but that only lasted a fraction of a second and was somewhere between standing on my feet on the skateboard and ending up on the ground. Had it been video taped it might have been more approprate for America's funniest video's than for youtube.

LOL!! At least you tried. A lot of young people when they first start trying to skateboard do not realize how brutal the sport can be. Hit a very small pebble or sand when you are doing a trick or moving along at speed and you will be hitting the concrete or asphalt in a split second. Believe me it's not forgiving and a skateboarding accident can be like a car crash but without the car to protect you.

My worst accident had me in the ER after suffering a broken wrist, very bad head concussion, severely ruptured patella (my kneecap was a few inches north of where it should have been and had to be reattached) and very bad road rash on my back. After major reconstructive surgery to repair my knee unfortunately there was MRSA in there due to unclean hospital. Three more surgeries and tons of expensive antibiotics over a year to save my leg from amputation.

The specialized nurse who had to thread a tube into the vein in my arm to my heart so that the Vancomycin would empty out near my heart was having a very bad day so there was a huge puddle of blood on the table and all over my arm after that procedure. The young female students in pre-med who had been invited to watch almost passed out while I just laughed.

The surgeon did not listen to my infectious disease specialist who is a professor at USC and was the best ID Doctor in So Cal. So the bonehead had drillen holes into my shin bone and kneecap to insert a supporting wire on the second major operation. In effect he introduced the deadly staph bug into the bone. Great going Doc, thanks for not listening to the other Doc. Having your bone drilled into is real fun. Five days of Morphine and sweating like insane because of the Vancomycin.

The moral of the story is do not think that skateboarding cannot be very deadly. Even the great Tony Hawk broke his collarbone in a cork screw at Bob Burnquist's compound in Encinitas a few years ago. It took him a year to get back to skating at his previous level. Danny Way (the guy who jumped the Great Wall of China) has an artificial knee he had to get in Europe because it was not approved by FDA here.

I often times see young boys and girls who first try to skate and the board shoots out like a rocket from under them, they hit the pavement and start crying. Many give up and throw away their boards. Can't say that I blame them.

It makes me glad I never got any further with skate boards that trying out my kids boards a few times after which I decided my feet were better off on the ground. Sounds like you went through some tough expeirences.

I had to do my physical rehab all over again on three separate occasions because the staph infection kept coming back. staph is an amazing super bug. The surgeon had inserted a wire through my knee cap and through my shin bone (like a rectangular support structure for the patella tendons which go from the shin bone up and over the knee cap) but he failed to listen to the infections disease specialist and he did not remove it prior to sending me to rehab. My blood work came back that I was free of the staph. well the problem with staph is that it can cling in a dormant state to a wire or any synthetic sutures or anything else plastic or synthetic. So then when I went to rehab and doing the required exercises to be able to first walk again, and then possibly run again, the blood came into contact with the wire and the staph munched down on the blood and came right back to life!!

This happened twice more because the knuckle head surgeon then agreed to remove one of the synthetic sutures after it reinfected, BUT HE NEGLECTED TO REMOVE THE OTHER ONE!

So one more reinfection and the fourth surgery and finally after enough time elapsed the ID Doctor declared me free of staph and I was able to learn to walk again and then worked up to an old man shuffle and eventually a quick jog.

It was a lot of misery while going through it but I really thank providence that my leg was saved and everything worked out in the end. A few years after that I had gotten back in good enough shape to make it onto Letterman.

I really do appreciate that I had overall a pretty good surgeon (a complete knee reconstruction is very difficult) and an outstanding ID doctor. My surgeon admitted to me that he had learned a lot about what needs to be done when a patient has staph and I'm sure he's a much better surgeon now.

They say that what does not kill you makes you stronger and it is somewhat true. I am just very happy and fortunate that I can walk, jog and do some sports. I cannot perform skateboarding as well as before because there is enormous amounts of scar tissue in the tendons of the knee and the geometry of reconstruction was not perfect so the knee binds sometimes. Small price to pay for what could have been much worse.

Tony Hawk will be skating at this event. Even though he is about 45 years old he just placed 4th at a competition recently at the Block at Orange -- Vans -- Skatepark in Orange CA.

That's pretty impressive because skateboarding is really a teenager to maybe about 32 year old sport as far as being at ones peak physically, as a man. Women peak at younger ages.

http://play.converse.com/blog/2011/07/26/coastal-carnage-2011/