NORTH COUNTY TIMES
By MICHELLE ESPOSITO
Published June 29, 2009

After running a basketball camp for eight years in Sacramento, Joe Maloof thought the camp was getting stale.

“So we wanted to try something different, and I thought, why don’t we try skateboarding,” said Maloof, co-owner of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings with his brother Gavin. “When I was young, people would throw a baseball and play catch with a football or Frisbee. And now when you look out the window all you see is kids skateboarding.”

Maloof initially planned to create a skateboarding camp in Southern California, but when word got out, he started getting interest from the leading brands in the industry. That inspired Maloof to do something bigger.

The result is the Maloof Money Cup skateboard competition. Now in its second year, the event will be held July 10-12 at the Orange County Fair in Costa Mesa. The event is divided into three competitions —- the Pro Vert Championship, the Pro Street Championship and the U.S. Women’s Pro Street Championship.

Competitors are vying for a piece of the $450,000 prize purse. Expect to see North County skaters Bucky Lasek, Shaun White, Pierre-Luc Gagnon and Bob Burnquist in the vert event and Chris Cole and Corey Duffel in the street event.

Maloof makes no pretenses about his lack of a skateboarding background. So he leaves the important details up to the professionals.

“The most important thing that I learned pretty quickly on was that these guys are individuals that march to their own drum beat,” Maloof said. “What I wanted to do is make this a world championship skateboarding event. Probably the most important decision we made is to let the skateboarders build the course.

“Exactly what they wanted us to do, that’s what we did. So we weren’t coming in there telling them what to do. They told us what to do.”

Carlsbad’s Gagnon, who won the vert discipline at the inaugural event, agreed.

“If they came into the skateboard world trying to act like they’re the best and do everything, then yeah, I’d be skeptical,” Gagnon said. “But that’s not the way it’s been done.”

Gagnon helped design the ramp this year for the vert contest as a member of the advisory board. Fellow North County skaters Burnquist and Jake Brown also helped with the design. Street skateboarder Geoff Rowley designed the street course, which features concrete obstacles situated to re-create an actual city landscape.

“This is seriously the first contest where we had so much freedom to help with the format and design the ramp,” Gagnon said. “At other contests, we always get some sort of input, but it’s never on the level that we’ve been able to get with the Maloofs.”

The result is the first vert contest with a mini mega ramp incorporated into the design. In a traditional mega ramp, riders skate down a huge roll-in and jump over a massive 75-foot gap while spinning and grabbing their boards. The landing leads to a quarterpipe, which allows the skater one final trick. In the upcoming Maloof Money Cup, the ramp is scaled down in size with a 20-foot jump and the landing leads to one of the walls of the vert ramp.

“We always had a vision of it would be pretty cool to be able to hit the mini mega ramp and then keep going after that, so that it doesn’t end after those first tricks,” Gagnon said. “That way you can do more of a run where you can hit the quarterpipe and keep going.”

The design of this ramp also incorporates a rainbow rail, creating another obstacle and increasing the possibilities for vert skaters. This is a welcome change in a sport that some may consider in danger of extinction. The X Games initially cancelled the vert event last year citing low viewership, among other reasons, but then reinstated the competition after an uproar from the athletes.

“That’s why we’re doing this,” Gagnon said. “There’s always 15-20 vert contests a year, and if it’s always the same ramp with the same guys then it gets kind of repetitive. The audience wants to see something new, something that they haven’t seen and the way to achieve that is by bringing in new designs.”

It also helps when you have someone with deep pockets backing you up.

“It’s really hard to build ramps like that and have someone to have the budget,” Gagnon said. “With the Maloofs, they’re able to help us achieve pretty much our dream design. It’s a vision we had for a long time, but it’s really expensive to build something like that. I’m really excited to skate something so unique. That’s like history right there.”