Skating to success

Joe Maloof, the owner of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings and the Palms Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, is not a skateboarder.

The successful 53-year-old businessman tried the sport once as a kid growing up in Albuquerque, N.M., in the late 1960s. The way he tells it, he tried rolling down a cement ramp into a parking garage, hit a drainage grate, went flying through the air and badly skinned his face.

“That’s the last time I ever got on a skateboard. I took up tennis after that,” Maloof said.

Although Maloof’s skateboarding talent is questionable at best, it’s hard to question his business acumen.

When the mogul sees an opportunity, he pounces on it, and that’s just how the Maloof Money Cup skateboarding competition was born last year at the Orange County Fair.

Billed as the tournament with the biggest prize pool in the sport — roughly $450,000 in total prize money, of which $100,000 goes to the winner of the street competition — it’s coming back for a second year, July 10 to 12.

Riding around in a car and looking out the window, Maloof said he was taken aback by the amount of kids skateboarding in the streets, and that’s where the idea was hatched.

His partner in the venture, Etnies skateboard merchandise company founder Pierre Senizergues, says Maloof’s observation is more than just an anecdote.

More kids skateboard these days than play baseball, according to Senizergues.

“I always had this dream that some day it would happen — that skateboarding would become popular,” Senizergues said in his thick French accent.

Senizergues started down the path of success in the skateboarding industry after he began to get noticed after winning two world championships, but he wasn’t always working in a meticulously kept office complex.

He moved to America from Paris and for a while was homeless. He began doing skateboard tricks on the boardwalk at Venice Beach for tips.

So in the same way that Maloof comes at the sport as an eager, energetic dilettante, Senizergues has stuck with it his whole life, through the thinnest and thickest of times.

Before last year’s inaugural event, both men were nervous. What if nobody showed up? What if skaters viewed the competition as a corporate money-making ploy?

“I was really worried. I didn’t know what to expect,” Maloof said.