Cover story in Miami Herald 04

Anyone who has ever skateboarded, plus a good many who lack the balance, knows the ollie.

It's a jump, fundamental to the sport, in which the board is kicked against the ground and into the air, useful for crossing obstacles such

as curbs or elevating above a half-pipe's lip.

What almost no one knows, though, is that there is an Ollie behind the ollie, a primordial ollie-r for whom the trick is named. He is 41 and runs a Volkswagen repair shop off a quiet street in Hollywood. He maintains a hidden skate park in a converted warehouse next door.

His name has just entered the Oxford English Dictionary as noun and intransitive verb.

Not as good as having a nation named in one's honor, but better than dibs on a disease which might, after all, get cured.

''Once you're in there,'' Alan ''Ollie'' Gelfand said one recent night, ``they can't take you out. That's the funk, the definitive version of the whole language.''

Gelfand was dubbed Ollie as a young teen, for reasons having to do with a neat rhyme with his hometown of Hollywood and an eponymous deluxe hamburger. The name stuck, and before its Oxfordization, was trademarked.

Now, three nights a week after work, Gelfand and a dozen skating buddies head to the warehouse. Everyone wears pads and baggy shorts. Everyone is approaching middle age.

A SKATER'S DREAM

Sometime in the hazy past, the warehouse's 5,000 square feet were filled with auto parts and women's handbags. When Gelfand got his hands on the place two years ago, he ripped out its guts. He installed a 1,000-watt sound system and powerful air conditioners and cleared the floor to make way for an enormous, deep and graciously sloped bowl.

The bowl, which took a team of workers two weeks to assemble, fills the warehouse except for a surrounding deck and a small never-used space that Gelfand calls, quixotically, a ``study room.''

The bowl resembles nothing so much as a swimming pool, which is what Gelfand and his friends sometimes skated in the old, old days, before skate parks mushroomed in Florida in the mid-70s. But it was in the parks -- SkateBoard USA and Solid Surf, places long ago built over for parking lots and fast-food restaurants -- that Gelfand won fame.

FAMOUS TEENAGER

In 1977, Gelfand was spotted by Stacy Peralta, a touring pro who later became a well-known skateboard designer. ''I saw him pop the board around and it just blew me away,'' Peralta said in a phone interview.

''It's the most revolutionary trick of the 20th century,'' he said. ``It changed how you interpret terrain: all of a sudden, curbs, garbage cans, fire hydrants are part of the ride.''

For the next three years, Gelfand toured the world and appeared regularly in skate magazines, earning up to $1,000 a month. Photos show crowds watching a boy of 15 or 16, short, lithe, often airborne, dressed in a style that can only be described as High Dork -- too-tight shorts, knee socks and bulky pads.

Ollie was famous, and so was the ollie.

Gelfand's ''developments, the ollie pop and the subsequent no-handed ollie aerial, rank as two of the hottest moves on the vanguard scene,'' SkateBoarder Magazine noted in 1979.

But Gelfand walked away from the sport in 1982, beset by knee problems and tired of constant competition. He joined a professional go-cart circuit, raced cars, discovered he could earn a living at neither and opened his repair shop nine years ago.

He met a young woman, Sharon Israel, fell in love and got engaged. She's a substitute teacher in Broward County schools, a casual skater who happens to have a master's degree in elementary education.

Israel read a book on skateboarding history a few years ago and got to thinking: ``Where's ollie? It's unbelievable, the number of times I've seen this word used.''

She began an e-mail campaign, polite but persistent, informing dictionaries and encyclopedias of this gap in their entries and presenting numerous instances of the ollie in print.

The lexicographers were curious, but unswayed: The term was more jargon than lingua franca, they argued. Years passed. Israel thought she had a chance with Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Edition but was disappointed, when it came out last year, to find no entry.

Then Oxford called.

They wanted it.

''We think this term is known to people other than skateboarders,'' said Jesse Sheidlower, the North American editor, who happens not to be a skateboarder himself. ''But you know, I've read some things about it,'' he said in a phone interview.

DEFINITION EMERGES

For months, expert research was done, and publications from around the world were scoured for citations, such as the following: ``Harri was complaining he couldn't ollie properly because of a thigh injury, which he picked up whilst filming a steep rail.''

A definition emerged: ``A jump executed by pressing the foot down on the tail of the board to rebound the deck off the ground.''

An origin was given: 'The name of Alan `Ollie' Gelfand (b. 1963), U.S. skateboarder, who invented the jump in 1976.''

The word now appears in the OED's online version, snug between Ollendorffian and Ollier, which refers not to a boarder who launches himself into the air, but a certain congenital disorder.

The listing confers no privileges upon Gelfand, not even a free dictionary. Nothing, perhaps, beyond a slight kind of immortality, because Gelfand was right -- once you're in the OED, they can't take you out.

''I won't speculate how ollie will be used in 500 years,'' said Sheidlower, the editor. ``But it will be in the OED.''