This is the key - and I think you'll be alright.
I've been a skateboarder for most of my life. Through that, I've been able to travel around a good chunk of the world, and quite often I've had a camera (usually a film rangefinder) with me. I've had some stuff printed in magazines or published/used on websites, but wouldn't consider myself a "professional skateboard photographer". I personally know a few folks who have earned that title, though. And although a few of them do use autofocus, digital, and flash, it's not uncommon to still see guys shooting film in that world. And a lot of them don't bother with autofocus at all - it's just too unreliable (lag, hunting, etc.); the key has always been, and likely will always be, to know where the action is going to happen and pre-focus or zone-focus. Of course, this means you can use anything from a brand new M11 all the way back to a fixed-lens Leica I, as long as you're as familiar with the equipment as you are with the subject.
Anyway, the point I'm getting at is that I can always tell when flicking through skate photos if the photographer was a skateboarder or not. I see so many photos of skateboarding on here, Flickr, Instagram, Mastodon etc. that really miss the key moment of the trick (or the trick was obviously "bailed"/missed by the skater). Knowing what you're looking at (and for!) makes a huge difference, and I imagine the same is true of golf.
Here's some of my personal favourites from flicking through my Lightroom, along with the camera and lens I used and some notes/thoughts. Some of them have been in the "What's YOUR sport" thread, but I don't think they all have:
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Leica IIIf, Canon 35/1.8, Fomapan 400 in ID11; Canada. This was an easy one - "hey Dan, can you do that invert on this exact spot?" Timing it with the ride behind was the tough part, and that's as much down to the skateboarder as it is the photographer. It took a few goes to get right.
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Leica IIIf, Summar, APX 100 (the OG Agfa stock) in Rodinal; France. Another easy one - "Harry, do that trick exactly on that spot". He doesn't roll at all for this trick, so I didn't have to follow him around - composition was easy, so it was only timing I had to worry about. The lack of electronics really help on something like this;
any lag in the camera will miss the "crucial moment". You need to know that the millisecond you want to trip the shutter, it'll trip without hesitation, because this trick is over in the blink of an eye.
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Leica IIIg, Summar, Fomapan 400 in Rodinal; Germany. This one was almost pure chance; it was at an international competition held in an industrial museum in Brandenburg. I was exploring the gantries when I heard some noise way away from the event space, looked down, and saw this guy practicing. I asked him to do something through the space under the lights and waited until he hit the perfect spot.
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Leica Ic (i.e. no rangefinder), Voigtlander 28mm Color Skopar, Rollei Retro 400S in LC29; Wales. Shooting downhill skateboarding (or, in this case, street luge) is hard. You wait for ages, they whip past you in a second, and then you wait another five minutes for something else to happen. Again, I'd hate to be dealing with autofocus in this situation. Knowing the racing line and where they'll be is key - just pre-focus, check your DoF is enough, and shoot.
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Leica IIIg, 21mm Voigtlander Color Skopar, Fomapan 100 in Rodinal; England. This was at an event that I was asked to cover by a website. All the skaters were hitting this one end of the bowl, so it was obvious where to position myself, but every single run by every single rider involved a different trick in a different place, so there was absolutely zero predictability, and a lot of quick focusing and framing on the fly. Figuring out where to aim in the chaos was tough, but this was easily my favourite out of the results - if only because the framing gives you a prime view of the classy English graffiti behind the skater.
