WORLD WAR III.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO WIN A WORLD WAR in the 21st century? Sure you gotta drop some big bombs, but you better be able to back it up with some technical wizardry and tactical attacks on all the designated targets. This is what the 20 skaters qualifying into Sunday's finals had to do. With the judges scoring on difficulty, innovation and combinations, and with $50,000 up for grabs-$20,00l going to the winner alone (the biggest, single prize purse to date), there was plenty to fight over.

Hosted by World Industries, the WWIII best trick contest was part of the Huntington Beach Philips Fusion Beach Festival. With skaters being judged on only their landed tricks on each obstacle, the standards were high-tricks and combinations usually only seen in videos these days were being thrown down by everyone; skaters pushed and upped each other, often with five- to 10-bangers going back to back as each skater threw down something psyched by the previous guy.

The arena consisted of five creative obstacles that skaters would session together for 20 minutes a piece. The obstacles ranged from small to huge with every assortment of hips, ledges, gaps, stairs, and rails imaginable. It was controlled chaos as the skaters would rotate from one obstacle to the other starting on the smallest piece and ending on the body-breaking big piece last.

While everyone was throwing down tricks on the real, life-size obstacles only a few had true hammers on all the obstacles. They were the ones taking home the big cash. Rowley was a favorite from early on qualifying in 1st and taking it all the way to the finals. He put together the biggest list of tricks on all the obstacles while still using the time to put in some stylish manual variations.

Hopefully we'll be seeing more of these types of contests-more organized than your average best trick contest but loose enough and on good enough obstacles to keep the skaters pumped and crowd captivated-pulling more of an audience than all the surfing, inline and other side-show, beach circus acts going on at the same time.

OBSTACLE 1, Main box-two kickers with a flat bar across. Rowley: Backside 360 ollie over the whole box; heelflip varial over. Fabrizio: One-footed k-grind across flat bar; big frontside flip over the whole box to flat. Lambert: Backside flip over the whole box to flat. OBSTACLE 2, Five-foot high box with hip, rails, ledges. Fernandez: Noseblunt slide down the rail; kickflip back lip up the bank onto the flat rail; frontside noseslide the high ledge. Chris Cole: From the bank-up onto the big flat ledge (over waist high) kickflip backside tailslide; backside tailslide bigspin out.

OBSTACLE 3, Bank to step up gap with UCI ledges and gap to rails. Rowley: 360 flip up gap to manual pop off out over gap; kickflip up gap to nose manual to 180 nollie pop out over gap; frontside flip down gap onto bank. Anthony Mosely: Kickflip noseslide down rail onto bank; backside lipslide gap to rail. Ryan Sheckler: Kickflip down into bank. OBSTACLE 4, Eight-foot high piece with full-size rails and ledges. Gailea Momolu: Switch frontside tailslide the huge ledge. Rowley and Appleyard, back to back on the big ledge: Rowley-Frontside 180 nosegrind, and Appleyard with the switch 180 to 5-O.

Just missing the cut was Ryan Carpenter, charging hard, breaking his body until he landed his tricks. Dayne Brummet came up with possibly the most diverse tricks per obstacle. But it was Rowley that skated lines while others were doing one off tricks.