When I was about eight years old, I had a wooden-deck skateboard with clear yellow urethane wheels and a GTO sticker near the nose. I used to ride it back and forth on the pebbly sidewalk in front of my grandparents' house, and the way I remember it, I rode kind of fast. But I lost that board when we moved late that year and never rode again.

A few years later, there was a girl in my sixth-grade class -- I think her name was Sam. She had kind of a Davey Jones haircut, wore long OP chords and navy-blue vans, and she carried a board to school every day. I used to love watching her glide on the playground blacktop. It's a cheap, overused word, I know, but she was cool.

Until this weekend at the X Games Global Championship, Sam and the GTO represented the full extent of my up-close experience with skateboarding.

	Getting up on the board was the easy part for our courageous reporter.

Then came last Friday afternoon, and a pipeside view of skateboard vert practice.

These guys were faster than I was on my GTO way back when. Faster, and more vertical ... and horizontal, and in all kinds of other ways orientationally discombobulated. I was impressed. Even more than I had been with Sam once upon a time.

More than impressed, though, I was envious. They moved with such swing. Their relationship to simple things like earth and gravity was so much more limber and liquid than mine. And they hurled themselves into the pipe and into the air with a basic kind of agile courage I could hardly imagine.

Watching them, the plain old gravity-bound way I moved through the Alamo Dome, the world and my life, felt stilted. I wished in the worst way that I could experience some small measure of their flowing motion and easy confidence.

Then came yesterday afternoon and my very own one-on-one private lesson with skateboard superstar Andy Macdonald.

How did this happen? Credit Mr. Macdonald's generous heart and his vast reserves of patience and goodwill. And credit my good luck.

On and off the half-pipe, Andy's been working to bring skateboarding to the people. His Andy Mac shoes, helmets and boards are designed with kids and beginners in mind.

"Getting into it for the first time is the hardest part for a lot of kids," he says. "The whole idea is to make it affordable for them to get started."

On Saturday, I was the beginner kid.

	Coach Macdonald says Eric was a hard-working student.

I wanted first just to learn to glide straight ahead.

"Put your front foot over the screws on the deck, right over the wheels. Put your front foot at an angle and push off with your back foot, then straighten out your front foot, perpendicular to the board, and put your back foot on the tail."

Got it.

"Keep your center of gravity low. Most people fall because they try to stand up. Keep your knees bent, and stay centered over the middle of the board. Imagine a line from the top of your head to the middle of the board, stay on that line."

Right. Gotcha.

"Stay loose. Have fun with it. Relax and breathe."

Yeah. I can do that.

And so I did: deep breath, front foot over the screws, push off with the back foot … fall on my butt. Hard. Arms and legs akimbo. Pride in scraps and shards all over the cement floor. Face sixteen shades of red.

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But my coach stuck with me. He laughed a little, sure, but he stuck with me.

Before long, I was up and moving from point A to point B. Not much in the way of style -- unless of course you count the anxious, groping hands of a blind man stylish -- but I was up. There was way too much wobble and stiffness in me to be sure. But I was up.

This stuff is hard -- the board is a boat deck in a storm, it's a loose steering wheel, amplifying all your smallest, subtlest twitches and leanings. The margin between balance and splay-footed collapse is sliver-thin.

So when I could fend off the fall, the ride was an unmitigated gas, even with my nervous edges. Somewhere in the midst of my goofy beginner's heart was an exhilarated soul. And an appreciative one, too.

The boarders here at X are so accomplished that what they do can look simple or routine. But crouching and inching down the floor on that board, I knew in my knock-knees and waving arms that there's nothing simple or easy about even the simplest and easiest of it.

"You're looking good," Andy lied. "You've got a little flow going," he lied again. "Now let's try a little trick. Let's try a tic-tac."

In a tic-tac, you push back on the tail with your back foot a! nd swing the front of the board from left to right and then back, right to left again.

Maybe it was the rush and glow I had going after managing to ride straight ahead a bit. Maybe it was the encouragement of coach Macdonald. Maybe it was the weird, seventh-grade sense I had that cute girls might be watching me and thinking me hopelessly pathetic if I couldn't pull it off.

Whatever it was, I kind of pulled it off. Awkward? Yes. Utterly graceless? Sure. But would you have to concede, technically, that it was a tic-tac? Damn straight you would.

"Everyone has their own style, their own flair," Andy said. "Five different guys do the same trick and it will look five different ways."

Maybe so, but I bet it's never before looked quite the way I made it look.

	Coach Macdonald shows Eric how to pull off an ollie.

Still, at this point, I was ready to buy a board, ready to follow Andy anywhere, ready to spend hours on my patio, tic-tacking from sunrise to sundown, ready to shout at my little girl, "Look at Daddy! Look what he can do!"

"You look ready for an ollie. You ready for an ollie?" Andy asked. "Somebody said you wanted to try an ollie."

The skate gods giveth and the skate gods taketh away.

An ollie is a jump. Check that. An ollie is a jump in which you lift the front of the board up by popping the tail and jumping straight up in the air as you do so, then (there is no then, actually; it's everything all at once) push the front of the deck down with the outer edge of your leading foot, bringing the back of the board up, and then landing on the board, center-cut and balanced. Check that. An ollie is impossible. It's a figment. A trick with mirrors. Some sort of CG gimmick from LucasArts, you know what I'm saying? An ollie, says my friend Loren, an EXPN producer, "is magic." (Wanna see some magic, kids? Look here.)

I tried an ollie. Tried dozens of 'em actually. Tried the parts of an ollie (which, Andy tells me, shouldn't really be thought of as parts, but as a whole, a concert, a, you know, an ollie). Tried popping the tail, jumping, pushing. Tried not to kill myself. Tried not to send a shock of shame straight from my gangling, puppet-on-a-string, Rob-Petry-stumbling-over-the-ottoman body to the hearts and minds of everyone I'm related to, everyone I've ever known, and everyone I've ever even brushed up against on a crowded street.

I was not successful. On any count.

My best effort involved me in the air and the board on the floor, waiting on my sorry albatross frame to come down. This was my best effort.

	With a little more practice, maybe Eric will one day finish his ollie.

Andy was patient. He's good people, that Andy.

And I'm not just saying that because he works with kids, or because he pulled off a run in the skateboard vert competition Saturday night that was so clean and creative it made folks weep and swell with pride at what we mortals are capable of, or even because he made time for little old me in the midst of his very busy day and loaned me his personal board for these shenanigans.

No, I'm saying that because, as I stood there blaspheming the good name and sweet look of the ollie with every move I made, he didn't cringe or mock me or take me out back and put me out of my ollie-mangling misery. He did none of that. In fact, he just kept encouraging me, kept telling me somewhere deep down inside I might just have an ollie in me.

I'd have to be patient. I'd probably have to practice six or seven hours a day for the next year or six, but I might could do it yet.

I don't quite believe this. I can't quite imagine it.

That's the thing: the ollie is an act of imagination. You have to picture, feel and execute the ollie. You have to be the ollie. I was thinking my way through the ollie and that will never do.

Andy did several of them for me Saturday afternoon, just to give me a sense of what they looked like, how they rose up off the floor and settled back down.

He looked absurdly, unconsciously natural doing them, of course. He'd gone way past imagining such a thing and was working at the deepest levels of knowing it.

Saturday night, during the vert final, as I watched coach Macdonald, my new flow hero, and Bucky Lasek, Sandro Dias, Bob Burnquist, and the rest of the competitors, I was thinking that their skills, balance and composure were impressive ... forget impressive, they were jaw-dropping; the kind of thing that makes you shout out loud without thinking about it.

But at the end of the day, with my botched ollie and tentative but tantalizing runs at riding and tic-tacking still fresh in my mind, I was thinking most about the imagination these riders are working every time out.

"We're nowhere near the limits," Andy said. "We're not even close. There are infinite variations of what you can do with your board. And when you think you've exhausted those, now you've got to do them all backwards …"

Guys are showing you what they've seen, what they're looking for, and glimpses of what doesn't yet exist. That's what makes their sport so compelling, what inspires anybody watching not just to clap and shout, but to free their minds.

Now, if only I can get my ollie to follow…

Eric Neel is a regular columnist for Page 2.