On his street, where the 26-year-old bunks with his parents, you couldn't jump from one rooftop to another unless you had wings. There are palm tree trunks to plant a foot against and the faux stucco wall to vault. But Beverly Hills isn't Paris or London when it comes to close quarters or vertical challenges.
So Kravit's passion--le parkour, which roughly translated from the French means obstacle course--can seem out of place. Southern California tends to build outward rather than upward, and parkour is about conquering buildings or stairwells or trash bins or other physical barriers to efficient movement. It was in the streets of Lisses, south of Paris, that parkour was created by childhood friends David Belle and Sebastien Foucan in the late '80s, and it was in bustling London that the sport exploded into a phenomenon four years ago, after television viewers, teenagers in particular, were blown away by a BBC commercial called "Rush Hour" that showed Belle flipping and leaping, no strings attached, across the city, using edifices as tall as 100 feet as catapults.
The first time you see the commercial or the British documentaries "Jump Britain" and "Jump London," you are more or less shocked because you can't believe human beings can do that. Cliff Kravit did believe, and tried it himself. Now he's a godfather of a sport that, if you listen to some devotees, can't truly be practiced in the sprawl of metropolitan L.A.
This is how British parkour promoter Paul "EZ" Corkery, the founder of Urban Freeflow Ltd., put it during a visit last year: "For a city to be good for parkour, you need the architecture to be more inspiring."
This is the printable part of Kravit's response: "Mr. Corkery is limited in his vision."
When Kravit does a saut de chat over a handrail at MOCA, or executes a saut de detente between rooftops eight feet apart at Cal State Northridge, you see what he means.
Kravit is short and muscular, with long brown hair often pulled back into a ponytail. A computer support technician at UCLA Medical Center with a degree in computer engineering from UC Irvine, he lives with his folks, Stephen, an entertainment attorney, and Shelley, a nurse. Older brother Alan decamped awhile back for San Diego and law school, allowing Cliff to convert Alan's room into his "second wing." He runs www.pkcali.com from here, and oversees its organization on his desktop computer.
