A bruised Brown makes X Games appearance

LOS ANGELES -- Skateboarder Jake Brown made an appearance at the X Games Saturday night, two days after a towering drop that made TV and Web video watchers gasp and left him with a bruised lung and liver and a pair of broken bones.

Fresh from the hospital and walking with a cane, Brown appeared briefly between motorcycle races at the Home Depot Center.

"I'm doing great, I'm still walking, that's more than I can ask for,'' Brown told the crowd. "I can't wait to come back.''

Brown and ESPN's Sal Masekela laughed as the video of Brown's fall played on the stadium's big screen, drawing fresh cringes from the crowd.

Brown had pulled off an improbable 720 over the mega ramp's 70-foot gap on Thursday night, but plunged about 40 feet to the ramp's base during his second trick. The impact knocked off his shoes.

He was released from the hospital earlier Saturday after being treated for a broken wrist and a fractured vertebra, his manager said.

Bob Burnquist, who won gold in the event and has one of the behemoth Big Air ramps in his back yard, said Brown may not have been as out-of-control as he looked when he headed face-first toward the floor then flipped over as though he was lying down.

"It was a mix of skill, of knowing how to fall, of knowing just to relax instead of trying to stiffen up, and luck,'' Burnquist said. "He knows he shouldn't try to stand it up, because he's going to break himself, so what he did was the best he could've done and I probably would have done the same thing, just to try to lay down.''

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On the smaller vert ramp, skaters try to get a foot down or go to their kneepads when they fall, but that can mean snapped limbs on the Big Air ramp.

So they take a technique from skydivers and attempt instead to go to their side and roll when they hit the ground.

"In parachuting you've got the P.L.F., the parachute landing fall,'' Burnquist said. "You kind of want to do that a little bit.''

Skateboarders have long referred to falling after a broken-down trick as "bailing,'' suggesting an act of will rather than an accident.

Burnquist said that however lucky Brown was to have avoided paralysis or life-threatening injury, he might be second-guessing his technique.

"Now in retrospect, he's probably thinking he could have fallen even better,'' Burnquist said.

Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press

Source: ESPN.com