Try an ollie
From the time I was ten years old until I reached about thirteen, my parents had tried their hand at putting me into various sports. I failed at all of them. Standing at nearly six feet tall by my early teens, I heard the question “Do you play basketball?”, enough to fill two lifetimes. Eventually, I would simply reply with a passive and tired “yeah”, but it purely was a lie. Although I had in the past, the truth was that I couldn’t make a basket to save my life. I had poor eyesight resulting in me having to wear prescription sports goggles. My standard pair of thin-rimmed skeleton frames kept falling off when I would sweat. Impressing girls at games in the school gym wasn’t landing itself as any kind of reality. Not only was I an imposter at the sporting life, but I also looked like a dork, and, worse yet, I knew it.
I had discovered that with soccer and my long legs, I could run fast, and was fairly decent at kicking the ball. The first time I scored a goal and heard the sound of the parents clapping along the sidelines, was this crazy new sound to me. For a moment, I wondered if I had finally found a sport I was good at. However, on the drive home after the game, when I mentioned to my father that I believed this was something I could excel at, how this was a sport I could play with some remote sense confidence, he responded with the exclamation that soccer was the least “manly” of all sports. That was all he would say concerning the subject. The sound of disappointment in his voice was so thick I could feel it throughout my entire body. So, naturally, I never played again.
Before giving up entirely, I did try my luck at football once, likely still searching out for my father’s full approval. This proved as equally terrifying as it was humiliating. I weighed 90 pounds, an extra 10 with my gear on, and I was so scrawny my friends nicknamed me Gumby. I didn’t understand the rules, between you and me, I didn’t want to. I hated it with a passion. This was my last experience with any conventional form of athleticism, because, during the first practice I snuck off with a friend to walk around the building and talk. But I hadn’t the slightest inclination that minutes later my life would take a drastic turn.
Across the street, in the distance, I saw a kid tooling around on a skateboard. As I got closer, I became increasingly enamored with the visual motion of the board spinning and flipping under his feet. I couldn’t look away. It was entrancing. Eventually the kid skateboarding noticed us, and we sheepishly introduced ourselves--still in our football practice gear. I noticed that his clothes were different than the usual group of friends I was used to seeing. Baggy jeans, a red “Deftones” t-shirt and spiked hair with way too much gel in it. I’m not gonna lie though, I thought he was the coolest shit I had ever seen.
I asked him about the skateboard, how long he had been doing it, and more importantly, if I could try it myself. “What do I do?”
“Just try standing on it without falling off”, He told me.
I stepped onto the grip-tape in my football cleats. It began moving, but I didn’t fall. “Now what?”
“Try an Ollie.”
I didn’t know what that was, and just asked him to show me, which he did with perfect execution. His back foot popped the tail, and it made a quick snapping sound on the asphalt. At the same moment, his knees were bent with his body two feet into the air and the board was still under his feet. When he was done, he walked me through the steps of how to pop with my back foot and drag my front foot up toward the nose of the board. I got back on. Four tries later, I landed it. My first successful Ollie. The feeling was so organic that I didn’t know it was something that generally took months of practice. He told me I was a natural. I didn’t really believe him until he pointed out that he’d never seen someone learn to Ollie in football cleats before. I wrote down his phone number before heading back to the football field. As I waited for my mother to arrive to pick me up, I was lost in a repetitive thought cycle of the steps required to land an Ollie. Bend the knees. Pop the tail with back foot. Turn front foot to the side and drag it up to the nose. Level out. Bend. Pop. Turn. Drag. Again. And again. I was obsessed. I was reborn.
Years would pass. I was completely consumed by “skate culture”. I ditched all the efforts I had previously invested in the “bro-centric lifestyle” of conventional sports I once felt pressure to pursue. I made new friends, learned new tricks, even received a sponsorship offer by a local skate spark, and managed to forge a rigid and frustrating relationship with the police. They knew me by name, and had kicked me out of nearly every business parking lot in town. I always went back. I didn’t give a shit.
I felt that the skateboarding community was a place for outcasts. Those who couldn’t make it in sports, looked different, maybe grew up in dysfunctional homes, maybe didn’t know where else they belonged, or maybe none of these things - it didn’t matter - if you loved to skate, if you were willing to bleed, you were one of us. We learned persistence in a way we couldn’t with anything else. The courage, dedication, and flat-out bravery it took to clear a set of stairs without knowing if you’d end up in a hospital bed by the end of the night set apart the real ones from the ones who wore our shoes as a nothing more than a fashion statement. What we attempted defied logic. We knew it was insane. And we loved it.
Skateboarding brought more to culture for me than just the act itself. The music scene around it was one of its biggest impacts on me too. I discovered a lot of music I still love today simply from watching skate videos as a kid. I bought my first underground skate video in a local shop. It was called, “Photosynthesis”, a video put out by Alien Workshop in 2000 and had a big influence on me in particular.
It was my first introduction to Iggy Pop & The Stooges, Radiohead, and especially its opening song, “I am Waiting”, by the Rolling Stones. This would become an essential soundtrack to my youth, and I forever associate that music with the greatest skate videos ever made. The two things are forever linked in my mind. We even began making our own videos. My mother had a giant Sony video camera you had to hold on your shoulder that only recorded on full size VHS tapes. We used it till it broke. Filming clips with your friends is an integral part of the skate community, and equally as addictive as skateboarding itself.
For a time in my life, I actually gave up skateboarding for music and picked up the guitar, but it came flooding back in my late twenties in the most perfect way imaginable. My son saw a skate video and came to me, wanting to try it for himself. It stirred the passion I always had for it and breathed an even greater life into it once again, reminding me of everything I always loved. More importantly, it became a bonding experience with my son that allowed him to experience the same patience and determination I had to carry to reach new levels in the craft. It gives him a reason to set goals, and it allows me to set goals myself. I thought about the time with my dad in the car, after the soccer game, but without any anger or melancholy. I love my dad, we were just different. Now, I’m the dad, and I’m thankful I get to share something I love with my son.
All the old tricks look different in your thirties. You don’t take the risks you once did. Gotta be able to go to work in the morning. But even the smaller stuff is still a risk when the youthfulness is slowly fading from your body. That being said, I’ve still managed to teach myself quite a few tricks at thirty-two that I hadn’t been able to land even as a teenager, so there’s that. Spending an afternoon skating around with my son reminds me of the communal spirit of skateboarding that transcends any age, race, or gender. Perhaps, it was best summed up by one of the most legendary skaters of all time, Rodney Mullen, when he said, “Skateboarding is a meditation”. The return of what first entranced me when I discovered it. The cycle: Bend. Pop. Turn. Drag. Level out. Bend. Pop. Turn. Drag. Level out. I need it more than ever.
