Texas (or former Texas) heads... what exactly happened to Sun City Skatepark?

[grimcity]

A number of years ago me and a couple of friends drove over to Houston for a weekend of park skating. We hit the Vans park on the first night, then the next morning we hit Sun City and then Southside (this is before the bowl) and then EZ-7. We had such a good time at Sun City that we hit it again the next morning before coming back home.

I heard rumor that some rollerbladers burned it down, and also heard that it might have been burned down for insurance. This is all old shit, but in the Ed Hardy skateboards thread the subject of Birch came up, and every time I think of Birch I think of that place.

Slightly related note: we unfortunately never saw Todd Falcon there, but we did try Falconesque tricks on the micro mini they had there.

[Sleazy]

sun city was sick

not sure who burned it down but the ramps ended up at my homie derek's house. he has a personal tf\skatepark that his parents built for him on the side of his house because they live out in the middle of no where and there were not spots for him to skate. they ended up getting some of the old hubbas and ramps and putting them there for him to skate. derek was rumored to skate his park like 5 hours a day and got real good: http://theskateboardmag.com/watch/derek-simon/

i'd say they ended up in a good place

[sparksandblood]

Damn I forgot all about that park. I remember going there when I first started skating, but yeah definatly burned down.  Firehouse pizza was right around the block, yum.

[grimcity]

sun city was sick

Yeah, we really loved that place. It was huge, too... we lucked out in that the place was pretty grom-free the times we hit it. We met and skated with a Texas Ranger (cop, not baseball player) who was a bit older, but slashing shit up.

[Sleazy]

yeah the locals there all ripped and there wasn't a lot of kids and the spacing was really nice. i used to hit it up after work. hate to say it but dan mcfarlan used to brutalize that place.

[grimcity]

This may be a stupid question, but is Dan looked down on? I haven't heard his name in forever. I knew he was good, but never knew much about him.

ps

I remember first seeing Chaz... he was a seven or eight year old butterball doing insane shit in the Van's bowl. We couldn't believe what we were seeing!

[wake and bacon]

I got lucky enough to skate there the last weekend it was around before the fire... still bummed it's gone. That mini-mini was the bomb. Good memories out there...

[Sleazy]

This may be a stupid question, but is Dan looked down on? I haven't heard his name in forever. I knew he was good, but never knew much about him.

ps

I remember first seeing Chaz... he was a seven or eight year old butterball doing insane shit in the Van's bowl. We couldn't believe what we were seeing!

dan's a polerizing guy. he's kind of like the local doug brown except if doug actaully did real tricks. the whole thing was him being pro and whether he was a real pro or not. he started his own company and turned himself pro so people would always poke fun at him for being a fake pro and dan ended up carrying around these printed out stats that showed that he placed in this pro contest and was a pro for vision to prove he was a real pro. he also was very serious about contest and i know that most of the houston heads can't stand the guy and i think it's because of the contest jock kind of vibe they were picking up from him. for a while it was either dan or jason womack that'd win every contest in houston and dan was the ronson lambert to jason's busenitz. jason skates super fast with tons of power and great style while dan was more tech, doing different lines each run and all that. well dan would always get pissed when jason would beat him which was most of the time. finally they had a contest with out of town judges at southside and dan won and so he grabbed the microphone and basically called out all the heads and vibed everyone about how in his mind this was the first time a contest had ben judged fairly. but really it was just people prefering style and power over tech. i tried to explain that to dan one time and he said "what style? you mean the way he bends his knee?" it was kind of funny. i always liked jasons runs better but tried to be diplomatic about it and not get myself involved in houston skate politics that happened long before i ever lived there.


first time i went to vans i saw a chubby little kid hauling ass through the park and i was thinking "oh lord, this kids going to kill himself" and he proceeded to shred the whole park. he had me thinking all the ramps were super easy and then when i got out there i almost killed myself before i realized all the transition in that place was on the "you may as well skate vert' level. it was cool seeing chaz grow up and make the park rate to atv destroyer transformation. i used to chill with chaz a lot when he got older and i remember when ben rayborn first showed up on the scene that i was thinking he was looking to chaz and thinking he was the next guy to blow up like that. they had tons of guys blowing up in houston at the time but no one that really would get the kind of reactions that chaz would. every time he'd skate there would be a crowd of people hooting and hollering the whole time. darrell didn't even get that kind of love when he skated the parks. but it definitely worked out that way for ben. that kid blew up and made the park rat to ripper transformation too. it was also cool that both of them were completely out of touch with skating when they first started ripping. their fashion and everything was all over the place. they weren't at all like the kids that you can tell their favorite video by looking at how they dress. they were more like the kids i grew up skating with who fell in love with it long before they ever knew about the videos and magazines.