Pontus sent me the photo of David’s dad skating a board with a panther graphic together with a first recreation of the board for David’s pro graphic and asked me “What do you think about this?”. The board that Tobba was riding was from the brand also named New Sport House. There also was an crazy indoor space with a full pipe, called New Sport House, in Stockholm.

I recognized the model, cause I used to have one of their other models. So I told Pontus that isn’t a graphic, but maybe a sticker. When I zoomed in on the photo i could kinda tell that the stripes on the tail are just electrical tape. When it came to the panther, I tried to turn and tweak the photo to get a flat version so we could re-create the panther. I did two tries and we were almost getting there, but then I was all like “Let me just reach out to some people, cause I think I’ve seen this before”.

I reached out to Hazze Lindgren, the freestyler, one of the original New Deal riders. He told me about David’s dad cutting down his boards, to get real short, wide boards. He knew nothing about the artwork, but he led me to another old friend, Martin Willners. He’s the guy that kind of got Swedish skateboarding going in the 70’s. Making sure there was contests, a Swedish Championship, the Swedish Cup, and also doing a great job of documenting it all.

There were some Swedish skateboard magazines back then in the late 70s. I asked him if he still had some of those magazines around so we might be able to find an ad or any other leads on what it was from. He recognized and remembered it too. So he got back to me and was like “Sorry, I could not find anything in the magazines I have, but walking back from the garage, I started thinking about my sticker collection”. So he went for his sticker collection and it turned out that he had the original sticker, which was from a roller skate brand.

I think those guys had the roller skate brand going and then they were making skateboards, but more like penny boards. But yeah, I got the sticker and I reached out to a friend here in Gothenburg and he actually has one of those penny boards – with a leopard pattern on it that has the sticker as a graphic.