‘Skateboarding is art’: Locals give away limited edition Long Beach-themed decks

On a hot summer day, Sunni Baughman meets up with Hector Torres at the Orizaba skatepark in Long Beach’s Zaferia neighborhood. They’re on the lookout for young skaters in need of a bless up. The spot is dead, so the pair move to McBride skatepark.

A skateboarding demo was wrapping up and a few kids stuck around to skate the blistering concrete. Baughman, aka Bill Breaker, talks to the locals, while Torres pulls out his own board for some casual riding around the skatepark. Neither sees what they’re looking for: a kid needing a new board.

Finally, two fresh faces arrive. They drop in and begin clearing gaps and grinding rails. One of the boys notices two pristine decks sitting to the side, picks one up and walks away. After the fact, he notices Baughman — who had missed the incident — standing in the shade and inquires about the board.

Baughman asks him how old he is and if he can see the bottom of the board he had been riding. Sheepishly, the boy turns the board over. Satisfied, Baughman tells him to keep the new deck — free of charge.

“You gonna skate it or put it up on the wall?" Baughman recalls asking him. The 17-year-old looks down and responds: “Yeah dude, you see this thing? I’mma skate it.”

The decks are part of Push For Peace, a project by Baughman that sells limited edition boards designed by local artists. For each board sold, one is given to a young skater.

In 2020, Baughman started a social media page called The Daily Diddy (a name he now laments in the wake of Sean “Diddy” Combs sex trafficking allegations).

“I was tired of doing street stuff with the homies, so I just decided to do something positive for the community,” Baughman said.

Through the page, he helped organize a protest in Long Beach following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. After outsiders arrived and night fell, the protest devolved into a riot.

“It blew up and the city burned down,” Baughman said, adding that the event reignited a desire to turn toward the nonprofit world to serve the community.

Baughman founded OCEAN (One Current Ebbing All Nations), a nonprofit dedicated to fostering safe and creative spaces for youth, artists and entrepreneurs. As part of the organization, he started Push For Peace in July 2020 to promote unity among the local skateboarding community.

As protests — and riots — continued across the country for months in the summer of 2020, “Push For Peace was a way to calm everything down,” Baughman said, adding that he wanted to “raise money for the kids for proactive social justice,” rather than the “reactionary” protests.

At the time, many, including skateboarders, didn't understand how giving free decks to youth was “social justice,” with some demanding skateboarding be “left out of politics,” Baughman said. But he was determined.

“It took politics to get all these skateparks out here,” he said.

The organization announced an art contest for deck designs. The idea was to create limited edition decks that promote local artists. Submissions rolled in but then Long Beach artists Cuxillos and Cazal put their design into the mix.

“We had to pull it out of the contest because nothing compared to this,” Baughman said of the alien-topped design with a bright palette and Long Beach-themed imagery.

The program was a success — with hundreds of boards with several designs sold and given away — but as the pandemic dragged on, wreaking havoc on the supply chain, manufacturers were backed up for months. Ultimately, Baughman had to pull the plug in June 2022 for financial reasons.

Now, years later, Baughman and Torres came together to revive Push For Peace. The pair grew up together, Torres said.

“We’re from the same hood. Me and him were just knuckleheads out there,” said Torres, who now works with the Long Beach Unified School District putting on after-school programs at various schools as well as his own program called Skate-A-Steem that focuses on social-emotional learning through skateboarding.

Baughman and Torres ordered 70 of the original design — which have almost sold out — for the resurrected organization, with plans for another design drop before the end of the year following the conclusion of a fresh art contest that’s running through Aug. 7.

“The thing about the Playanese people is we are an actual culture,” Baughman said, using a slang term for a person from Long Beach. “It’s damn near an ethnicity with how people f—ing rep Long Beach.”

The designs of the decks are meant to appeal to people’s loyalty and love of the city, Baughman explained. If you want to support youth, he said, and love art and Long Beach, the decks are for you — whether you skate or not.

“Skateboarding is art,” Baughman said. “We’re creating art that is centered around Long Beach so the general public will buy it.”

Baughman said he wants to grow Push For Peace beyond selling and giving away decks. His ultimate goal, he said, is for the organization to mentor youth who want to get into skateboarding, not only as a sport, but as a business. He noted that the skateboarding industry incorporates various art mediums, including video production and graphic design, music, marketing and more.

Growing up in Long Beach, Baughman ran with gangs and often found himself in trouble. He tries to use those experiences today to steer kids onto a better path. He recalled one kid who had a penchant for tagging. Baughman explained to the 13-year-old that when he was younger, tagging in Signal Hill with his friends, a cop rolled them and he was arrested.

“I was on probation from the time I was 14 to the time I was 19 and it halted a lot of my stuff,” Baughman said.

Now, Baughman can get young taggers in contact with people with blank walls they can legally spray and encourage creativity in a positive way, he said.

“All of them are flirting with crime,” Baughman said, adding that the city has done well in building skateparks since he was a kid and public skating was “criminalized.”

“If I didn’t have a skateboard, I was smoking, I was tagging, I was gang banging, I was robbing people, I was selling drugs” he said. “Skateboarding always saved me. Plus, it keeps you fit and active.”

While he acknowledges it can have its flaws when it comes to drug and alcohol abuse, skateboarding culture is all about community, Baughman said. Growing up, he always saw older skaters taking care of the younger generation, giving them decks and clothes.

“The skatepark is the church,” Baughman said. “When you’re a skateboarder, ‘blessed’ is part of the culture. That’s where we learned the term.”

For his work with OCEAN, Push For Peace and other ventures like the Long Beach County brand, Baughman has a screen-printing machine, a wide-format printer and other equipment to make apparel, stickers and more.

Next on the list of equipment purchases is a heat transfer machine, laminator and a DTG printer so the group can print on decks themselves, Baughman said.

An unintended consequence of making and giving boards out for free, Baughman said, is that it takes business away from skate shops. But that’s kind of the point, he added.

“They’re not from here and you have people … that try to co-op the Push For Peace movement but they don’t have any programs and they don’t give out any boards,” Baughman said. “You don’t see anything back from it.”

He said he hopes that it gets to a point where “skate shops don’t sell Baker, Zero or anything like that. It’s all local product.”

Baughman said he has asked local shops if locals could sell their boards there and was told no.

“Y’all are gonna get with the program,” Baughman said of the shops. “Your loyalty is going to change because, if not, you’re going to have to deal with somebody that is willing to sleep in the sewer and f—ing spend all their money destroying your business — in a positive way.”