ScottOlson

Scott Olson

By Robert " Burnson

Every culture has its creation myth. Even inline skating.

According to one popular telling of the story, inline skating was invented by a young Minnesota hockey player in search of a way to continue training in the summer.

According to some tellings of this story, the hockey player and his brother invented the inline skate in their garage. They named it the Rollerblade, founded a company to sell it, and then became fabulously rich selling the company to inventors with the money to take the Rollerblade worldwide.

If only it were so neat and nice and happy!

In fact, the story goes more like this: The first inline skates appeared hundreds of years ago, in the Netherlands. For hundreds of years, inventors tried to perfect the inline skate. But their designs fell short. They simply didn't have the materials and technologies available that would allow them to reach the Holy Grail of inline design: creating a skate that reproduced the felling and ease of ice skating.

Then Scott Olson, the young hockey player, rolled onto the scene. For a couple years, he was a distributor of an inline skate made by a California company. Then he started making his own skates based on design he had licensed from a Chicago company and with some improvements of his own. He also aggressively and creatively marketed the skate that people were calling the Rollerblade.

Sales grew exponentially. Inline skating started to take off. Scott Olson br

An aggressive and creative marketer, the skates started sellingThen he got the right to mor an inline skate company out of California. But they never caught on, despite the efforts of dozens and dozens of inventors who produced inline skate designs. (Probably the reason that all the early inline skates failed is because they weren't much good and were unable to mimic the Holy Grail of inline design: the reproduction of the ease of ice skating.) The young Minnesota hockey player, Scott Olson, arrived just as the technology was becoming available that would allow the creation of the modern inline skate.

Olson started out sellin. But but

I like this story -- and have found it to be close to the truth in a mythic sort of way. But I know now, after weeks of research and interviews, that it can't be taken literally, and that much of the popular history of inline skating should, in fact, be rewritten.

The young man in the story is, of course, Scott Olson, who founded Rollerblade. Olson is often credited with the invention of the inline skate. But this, of course, is ridiculous. The first pair of inline skates is believed to have been invented in the Netherlands in the early-1700s, more than two hundred years before Olson was born. The first patent for an inline skate design was issued in Paris in 1817. The first U.S. patent for an inline skate was issued in 1960. And between then and 1979, when Scott Olson rolled onto the scene, scores of patents were issued for inline skates in the United States alone.

patented inline skate And by the time Scott Olson By the time Olson rolled onto the scene (wearing a pair of inline skates made by Super Skate Inc. of California) in 1979, he quickly found that he could easily

Many people believe he also invented the inline skate. But this In many of the tellings of the story, Scott OMany of the stories share the credit for the inventioHis brother Brennan He is often shares the credits in this myth with his youngest brother Brennan, although this appears to be a joined in this myth by his younger brother Brennan, who you will see, was looking for a way to continue his training in the summer.a young hockey player in Minnesota, in search of the inline skater was inventing by Scott Olson is often credited as the inventor of the inline skate, which is of course a mistake. According to one version of this inline creation myth, Olson and his brother Brennan happened upon a pair of antique inline skates at a sporting goods store. They took the skates home and modified themto spot an inline skate when day when he was browsing around in the back of a sporting goods store. He wsa so inspired, in a sporting goods store and hen retu spotted an inline skate in a sporting goods store and But that of course, is not true. The inline skate was invented in the early 1700s, more than two hundred years before Scott was born. As far as I know, Scott has never taken credit for inline skates. When asked about his role in their development, he explains that he was the founder of Rollerblade, the company that popularized inline skates.

But it seems to me that Scott is selling himself short. True, he did not invent the inline skate. But he did more than start a company: he gave birth to a new sport: inline skating, which, according to the most recent figures, is practiced by 19 million people in the United States alone.

Before Scott rolled along, dozen of inventors had patented inline skate designs and numerous attempts had been made to bring them to the public. But it took Scott, a young hockey player from Minnesota who loved to skate, to get them on people's feet.

Over the course of several interviews, I asked Scott repeatedly for his thoughts on why he had been able to get the sport going while others had failed. "Maybe I loved it more than those other guys," he told me at one point. But then, apparently reflecting on his years as an inventor, he changed his mind. "No, I can't say that," he said. "They must have loved it a lot, too, to be able to get their products to the market."

No doubt there were lots of reasons for the success of Rollerblade and inline skating. But any way you look at it, Scott Olson was one of them. He only survived six years in the industry before he was unceremoniously ousted by Rollerblade. But in those few years, he put together all the ingredients for the inline skate that the public would adore: the bouncy urethane wheels, the plastic boots for ample ankle support, and the heel brakes that made it possible for even beginners to stop. And that's what got people skating and e had created the Rollerblade, and the world was ready.

I decided to interview Scott after noticing that Rollerblade is hailing 2005 as its 25th anniversary. I'm not sure how it arrived at this date. According to Scott, he started the business that became Rollerblade in 1979, which would make the company 26 years old. (By the way, Scott was ousted from Rollerblade in 1986, just as the company started making its first millions.)

Scott's story is a little painful. He loved skating and in the midst of the first big . over theApparently, it Scott founded the company that would How it arrived at this date, I haven't been able to figure out. When thing I quickly learned is that 2005 is not, as far as I can determine, the 25th anniversary.

What is? ... Hard to say. Probably a better date for the birth of the company would be 1979. That's when Scott started selling the Super Street Skate, which was an inline hockey skate made by a California company. At that time, Scott was calling his company Ole's Sports Shop -- and there was no shop or business license for that matter. Just Scott, a semi-professional hockey player, two years out of high school, selling somebody else's inline skate.

Scott was born in March 1959 up north in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. He was the third of seven children: six boys, one girl. His family moved to the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington when he was five. There's was an outdoor ice rink next door, so Scott started ice skating young -- "pretty much right of the chute," he said. "I love it. I couldn't wait for the ice to form every winter and I hated to see it go every spring."

As a boy, Scott played baseball and hunted, but his favorite sport was hockey. He was a goalie and his nickname was "Ole" (from Olson), so his friends called him "Ole the Goalie."

He was an adventurous teen-ager. He hitched-hiked around the country, and spent three months hopping freight trains between his junior and senior years in high school.

At St. Louis Park High School, he was a mediocre student. "I graduated on the bottom of my class," he says -- an irony, considering his later success, that he seems to enjoy.

Where he really excelled was hockey. He was good enough after high school to spend a few years as a goalie in semi-professional hockey in the United States and Canada.

It was as a hockey player that he first became away of inline skates. In one of the hockey magazines he read he would see an ad for inline skates. But they didn't interested him, he said.

At the end of the hockey season, Scott would return to his parents' home in Bloomington. He was there one day in the spring of 1979 when his younger brother Brennan came home with a pair of inline skates, which he had bought at a local sporting goods store. Scott was intrigued. "I put them on real quick and instantly fell in love with them because of the way they duplicated ice skating," he said.

The skates were the 4-wheel Super Street Skates, made by Super Skates Inc., of Marina Del Rey, Calif. "The next day, I went down and bought my own pair," Scott said.

Scott didn't like the Super Street Skate boot. He says it was poorly made and provided little ankle support. So he had the shop keeper remove the frames from the Super Street Skates and put them on a pair of his old hockey skates.

Scott put on his modified Super Street Skates and took them for a test roll though a nearby nature park. When he came to a sharp turn and realized he needed to slow down, he tried to do a hockey stop (by abruptly placing the blades perpendicular to the direction of travel) and got his first lesson about what not to do on inline skates: hockey stops. But despite falling, he loved the experience of inline skating. "I remember thinking, It's incredible to be skating when it's 80 degrees outside," he said.

Scott spent much of the next five or six years on skates -- much like an early day Eddy Matzger, except instead of racing, Scott was promoting.

The night he bought his Super Street Skates, he attended a party with his friends, most of whom were home from college for the summer. Scott rolled up to the party on his inline skates and "was the star of the party," he said. "After that all my friends wanted them, and that's when the entreprenuerial spirit took hold."

He returned to the sporting goods store, bought up its entire stock of Super Street Skates and "within a week sold them all," Scott said. He returned to store and asked the owner for the telephone number of the company that sold the skates. The owner told Scott that he hadn't done business with the company since he bought the skates five years earlier and didn't know if he still had the phone number.

"Luckily, there wasn't much traffic in the store," Scott said. "So he went into the back and dug around and finally came up with the number for the guy. ... I don't know what I would have done if he hadn't been able to find that number. I don't know whether I would have taken it to the next step."

Back at home, Scott called the company in California and the boss' secretary answered the phone. "I said, 'This is Ole's Sport Shop in Minnesota, looking to buy some of your product." Scott made up the name of his company, which he later changed to Ole's Innovative Sports, on the spur of the moment. Why "Ole's?" "Because Ole was my nickname," he explained. "Ole the Goalie."

A few days later, $300 worth of Super Street Skates arrived at the house in Bloomington. He had to borrow the money to pay them from his father. But he was confident he could sell them. "I thought, This is going to be great. I'll just sell them to the 200 hockey shops in Minnesota," he said. "But in about three days. I figured out that wasn't' going to work because the hockey shops didn't want to have anything to do with them. ... So that's when I decided to go direct with them."

And that did work, although it wasn't easy. Most of Scott's early customers were hockey players, who were accustomed to wearing a quality boot. Scott didn't think they would be happy with the low-quality boot that came with the Super Street Skate. So he sold only the frames and wheels.

"What I would do is take their old skates home with me, take off their ice blades and put on their Super Street Skate frames. And I would tell them, "If you don't like them, you have five days to return them, and I'll put your ice blades back on and give you your money back."

Hockey players liked to use the skates so they would have a way to practice during the off-season. But Scott says that the "deal clincher" was that the fact that most hockey players hang on to their old skates, even years after they buy a new pair. "That helped them justify the purchase," Scott said. "If they had had to buy a whole new boot and frame, that could have killed the whole deal."