League's Format and Prizes Transform Street Skating The first official street skateboarding contest, held in San Francisco in 1983, took place on an actual street. The course consisted of a few small wooden ramps and a parking block. Sixteen of the best street skaters alive competed for a first-place prize of $200. Competitive street skating has changed quite a bit in the last 30 years. Action-sport festivals like the X Games and the Dew Tour professionalized the genre, with five-figure prize purses and broadcasts of the contests on ESPN and NBC. More recently, the Maloof Money Cup - founded by Joe and Gavin Maloof, whose family sold its stake in the Sacramento Kings in May - transformed the street contest format by building courses that resembled urban street skating environments. But the Street League, whose Super Crown World Championship will be broadcast live on ESPN2 on Sunday night, has elevated street skating contests to dizzying new heights. "The Street League finals is basically the Super Bowl of skateboarding," said Paul Rodriguez, 28, a four-time gold medalist at the X Games and a top contender for the Super Crown title. It's done in such a way that makes street skating feel like a proper sport - as opposed to, like, a circus sideshow. The last of the seven events in the 2013 Street League Skateboarding Nike SB World Tour, the Super Crown will take place on a custom-built, 10,000-square-foot concrete course inside Prudential Center in Newark. Eight of the best street skaters in the world will compete for a grand prize of $200,000, as well as a $100,000 Nixon watch and ring set. Of course, many skateboarders, mindful of the sport's countercultural roots, would prefer it if skateboarding retained its sideshow identity. Some argue that skateboarding is not a sport at all and should not be treated as if it were basketball or football. But if street skating contests are going to exist, others say, they might as well be exciting and accessible to nonskateboarders. Before 2010, the year the Street League was founded, the most common street contest format - known as the jam format - involved a group of competitors all skating the course at the same time. This had obvious hazards. "Dudes would be fully slamming into each other in midair," said Chris Cole, 31, one of the eight finalists in the Super Crown. I once saw a dude get knocked out at the bottom of a handrail, so whoever went right behind him had to avoid the carcass laying there on the ground. The chaotic nature of those contests often makes it hard to know who won, and why. There was no easy way to follow the contests as a fan or to know what was required to win as a competing skateboarder, said Rob Dyrdek, the professional skateboarder who founded the Street League. "The contest would be over, and the judges would tell you who won five minutes later," he said. To fix the problem, Dyrdek, now 39, introduced the concept of instant scoring, in which points are awarded on a trick-by-trick basis and are visible on an arena's Jumbotron. At last year's Super Crown, for instance, Rodriguez needed a score of 7.3 on his final trick to beat Nyjah Huston. With the crowd of around 7,000 on its feet, Rodriguez fell, finishing fourth over all. In the Street League, one skater is allowed on the course at a time. The contest is divided into three heats: a 45-second run, a best-trick competition and a so-called Big Section, in which skaters try to land a difficult trick on the course's largest obstacle. Dyrdek conceived the basic idea for the Street League about a decade ago. An entrepreneur and reality TV star (his show "Ridiculousness" is now in its third season on MTV), he took inspiration from the Ultimate Fighting Championship, whose founders applied a professional boxing model to mixed martial arts and made fighters sign exclusive contracts with the league. Similarly, Dyrdek persuaded 24 of the world's best street skaters to sign with the Street League, but he still allowed them to participate in another contest of their choice each year. As a veteran pro street skater, he gained other skaters" trust in a way the Maloof brothers and other corporate entities could not. "A lot of the top pros in the world don't go to the X Games or the Dew Tour because they don't think those contests connect with actual skaters," said Brian Atlas, the general manager of the Street League. The Street League's courses, designed by California Skateparks to mimic urban skate spots, provided another enticement. The company builds entire concrete skate plazas - complete with handrails, staircases, ledges and the occasional shrubbery - in just three days, varying the arrangement each time. "The courses are insane," said Huston, 18, who has won four events on the 2013 world tour. It feels just like you're skating on the street, only way cleaner. And then there is the prize money, which has more than doubled in the last three years. In March, the Street League became the official sport organizer for all men's street skating competitions at the X Games in Brazil, Germany, Spain and Los Angeles, expanding the Street League tour to seven stops, from four, in all. A month later, the league announced a multiyear partnership with Nike SB. The deals pushed the total prize purse for this year's tour to $2.095 million, up from $1 million in 2010. An earlier version of this article misstated the place Paul Rodriguez earned at the Super Crown World Championship in 2012. He came in fourth place, not second place.