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Yeah! Steady!
Oh, man!
one of my good friends, or best friend from kindergarten,
we actually got in a lot of trouble together.
I think because of that, because of me getting in trouble
and almost getting sent to juvenile hall,
I remember telling my probation officer, saying like,
"I found something that interests me.
And this is something I'm gonna focus on."
You all right?
I was this scrawny little kid with probably size six feet, right?
I wanted to go off the high dive.
I wanted to be one of the best basketball players.
But I just didn't have the size to do that.
And so, when I started skating, it gave me a sense of identity.
It gave me a sense of self-confidence. It gave me a purpose.
when I was growing up,
I was miserable at everything I tried to do. I rode a bike once.
Tried to do a wheelie, the front wheel fell off, I crashed.
Skateboarding, it was the first time I was good at something.
I wasn't horrible at it, which meant I was good at it.
You know, I competed in team sports before
as a young kid, and I think I was playing
for those coaches' dreams.
I don't know. I don't think it was about the kids.
It was about them reliving their childhood, you know?
And I think that kind of just scared me off of team sports.
Skateboarding, I could just do by myself.
I didn't have to have somebody to throw the ball with.
Every sect, every faction in school gave me grief, you know?
It didn't matter. Like, the cool kids, the stoners,
the jocks, fuck it. It was like, "fuck you, man."
It was the only thing I could find sanctuary in, you know?
A sense of peace.
I don't know what was wrong with me,
but teachers would reach out,
"Troubled kid. Is he autistic?"
I don't know. I could never speak.
I went through huge parts of my life not even speaking.
I spoke in whispers. It was weird.
Everyone did in the house, mostly.
Skateboarding, what it represented,
the ability to create, to express myself. It became my voice.
As you can see right here--
we've got 12 riders that are going to go head-to-head.
Now they qualified here today, with the first place qualifier
going up to 12th place qualifier.
Tony Hawk, a local boy, a local favorite here.
In fact, he won the last competition here.
Well, actually, the last three. Who's counting, right?
Here we go. Tony Hawk. Let me hear you.
Big hand for Tony Hawk-- Powell-Peralta!
It wasn't like anything else that had ever existed.
This was like a sort of constructed thing
where you got the best guys
from each of their disciplines.
the Bones Brigade was the best team for a decade.
They weren't just guys who dominated competition,
but they were also skateboarders
who invented some of the most revolutionary maneuvers
out of that entire decade.
When we got into skating, you did not become Rich or famous
if you were good. No one did, no matter how good you were.
It sounds terrible to say, and I don't want to say it this way,
but our group of dudes pioneered
the way to make money at skateboarding.
I'm here in representation of thousands of other kids
who worshipped those guys, as well, and whose lives that those guys changed.
It was one of the raddest things in my life,
and then it was just, like, it's over.
It's done. I was devastated.
It was very, very depressing.
I knew it had to come to an end sometime,
but nobody has held a team as long as Stacy has.
I mean, nobody even half the time.
He was the glue that held us all together.
Ah-ha-ha, and here he is, folks. Come on in and say hi.
Good to have you on the show. Thank you.
May I ask your age? 20.
20. Well, you're very young to be a world's champion, aren't you?
I'm not sure.
I had read about him and looked at his photos.
They had been on my wall.
And I had seen Stacy in a movie.
He was the first guy to say, "You know what?
This can be a profession.
I can take this to the world and show people skateboarding."
I'm trying to put so much energy in it, 'cause I get so stoked.
I get so anxious, it's like this is it.
It's like you feed off of it.
I saw Stacy as one of the most famous skaters
of the '70S. And then when he came to me and said,
"I want to develop an amazing team."
I went, "Wow, you want to make a team?"
He had already started a very small company called Powell Skateboards,
but his company wasn't really on the skateboarding radar yet.
I'm a product designer and that's where my focus was,
building a company that would provide great equipment for skateboarding.
when George and I first started talking, I just liked him.
I trusted him. He wasn't doing this to make a million dollars and retire,
and I wasn't, either.
It was my dream as a kid to get on the Zephyr team.
It was the best thing that could happen to a kid
in the surrounding communities. I got on the team.
the Zephyr team was very aggressive,
very surf-orientated. It was a group of guys compiled that made
a huge impact on skateboarding,
and Stacy, he was one of the guys.
Right the moment that team tasted success,
it blew apart.
Kids looking into it from the magazines,
it was over by the time the magazines showed it.
And it was a crushing, crushing blow and defeat.
And so, when I was a pro skater, I dreamed of having my own skateboard team.
I wanted to create that magic.
And I wanted it to last, though.
I did not want it to end.
I wanted to make something that would last.
Anyone else that was trying to put together a team
was just trying to steal riders that were already established.
Usually, it was a fat man with some brand-new product,
went to the skate park and was like, "hey, I got this new, brand new product.
I'll give you 100 bucks to ride for it," you know?
And took someone else that rode for someone else.
I didn't want any skaters anyone even knew on my team.
I wanted this to be no-name guys that no one had ever seen.
And so I started picking up young amateurs
that I knew I could develop.
not only were they unknown,
they were all picked as a very young crew.
I mean, some were getting out of grade school sort of thing.
Here I am, like 10 years old, and I'm this big.
And these guys are two feet higher than me.
I was probably about 14 years old.
Then Stacy called me and said,
"would you like to join the Bones Brigade?"
I was like, "of course!" you know?
I remember at that competition that he first saw me skate.
I ended up getting fifth place in the competition.
And I was thinking, "well, why does he want me? I got fifth."
Ultimately what I was looking for is,
I was looking for a kid who had fire in him.
Like, the reason I put Tony Hawk on the team is
I saw him walk out of a pool one day,
dragging his board behind him.
And he had such an incredible look of disappointment on his face.
Disappointment at himself. And I went, "I want that kid."
Probably one of the biggest turning points of my skating
was one of the first times I ever figured out how to get to the top of the pool.
I was on this gigantic skateboard,
and I hung up and fell. Got knocked out.
Knocked my front teeth out. I think I was 11 or 12.
It was heavy. I mean, like, my--
You know, I went ambulance. I didn't remember anything.
And I knew right away
that I was not going to quit doing this.
I'm obsessed with this. I love it so much that,
at harm, at risk of my own health,
I'm going to keep doing this.
Somewhere around between the ages of,
I'd say 11 and 15,
I had so many hospital visits, I had a doctor pull me aside
to find out if my parents were beating me.
Childhood is really a tough one for me.
I don't know why. I must have blocked a lot of stuff out.
But my dad left when I was 11 years old.
And so it was just basically me and my mother.
When I did get into skateboarding,
my mom was always like, "watch out, Mijo. Watch out, Mijo.
Be careful, Mijo." you know?
It's like my whole life, is just ingrained in my head,
like, "be careful, you're gonna get hurt."
And I think I went against that.
Caballero was the smallest skateboarder
I've ever seen in my lifetime.
And he was doing things he shouldn't have been able to do.
I saw him skate, and I felt it in my heart.
Just a bolt hit me and I went,
"oh, my God, that kid is unbelievable!"
to be asked to be on the same team as Steve Caballero
was absolutely no question to me that I wanted to be there.
I couldn't believe that I was seen in any sort of similar light to Steve Caballero.
Getting on the Bones Brigade put a fire under me
that I had to be this much better than I was at the time.
Because my coach was considered one of the best of his day,
and he only picks the best talent.
I was a complete moron, I thought,
to everybody else around.
Kids thought we were the Addams family.
They thought we were like the weird family up on top of the hill.
I was in a bagpipe band at the age
of 8 to 10,
or even longer.
I was very isolated. I was in when the streetlights come on.
Couldn't watch TV. We watched the news and Lawrence Welk.
Those were the two shows we could watch when we were kids.
Everything else was the devil's.
It was miserable
until skateboarding came around.
I wasn't very progressive orientated.
And when I got on the team,
I knew the rest of the guys were like,
"Stacy,
are you seriously telling us that you're bringing this dude on?
Johnny joke? Gets last every contest? Ruins the contest?
You're bringing that on to our thing?"
You know, Tony's a prodigy. Caballero's a prodigy.
Rodney's a prodigy.
This is where it started with me.
I was 12 or 13. 13 years old?
Yeah.
And at that time,
I'd already won a lot of amateur contests.
Big fish, small pond. Tiny pond.
Mid-summer, my dad was annoyed.
You know, he never wanted me to skate.
And he goes, "Hey, you'll grow up to be a bum,
and look at the culture."
And he goes, "look, you've had every benefit.
You inherited good genes. You're smart so don't waste it."
He was like, "all right, end of the summer, you're growing up.
Skating has to end as soon as school starts.
That's it. Grow up."
"Yes, sir."
So I was skating every day, five hours a day.
Just making the most of it.
There was a skater that I was sponsoring at the time
from Florida named Tim Scroggs.
He called me and said, "you must see this 13-year-old kid in Florida
named Rodney Mullen."
And he encouraged me to bring Rodney out to this contest.
We went to the contest and I remember seeing all these guys
that I had looked up to in the magazines.
And I was just a retarded kid in all the pads.
For the rest of us, it was more like doing different wheelies
or manual variations. Some handstand tricks.
That was freestyle at the time.
I remember, I did my run.
I remember looking at the judges
and they were looking at my board and not me.
It was on a whole 'nother level.
When I first seen him skate, I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Most people stand on the deck and remain on the deck.
Rodney looked the board and went, "I can ride every side of this.
I can ride the nose standing up.
I can ride the tail standing up.
I can ride it upside down. I can ride on the edge."
So I did my run. Well, they gave me scores that, whoa!
They put me in first place!
And I remember driving back, and I had this trophy, going,
"I don't think I deserve this,
but I did what I did."
I did what I meant to do.
And in my heart,
there was closure.
And I was saying goodbye
and--
And flew away.
Then I didn't skate anymore.
You stopped? Yeah.
Yeah, what he says, goes.
And I got a call, Skate News,
some little-- wasn't even a magazine.
Called from California.
And I remember, "Rodney, Rodney, come inside!
Long distance from California.
They want to interview you."
Just, "wow!"
And that's where he said it.
He goes, "hey,
I guess you shouldn't stop now."
Because all the guys lived in different cities
and different states, what would happen is every time there was a contest,
I would fly them into Los Angeles.
And we would drive all over the state of California going to contests.
Coming in from Florida and flying in and seeing the guys,
and seeing what they would do, I would just look at them go.
And just kind of be there, feeling so privileged,
cruising around in the Volvo.
It was like I found a home of misfits.
There was clashes between us, at times.
You know, spending too much time on the road.
I mean, Lance and I butted heads many times.
Mike was bummed I was on the team, and I knew it.
And so I teased him.
We did get in some little quarrels.
But I liked being part of a team.
I liked that feeling of being with a group of guys,
competing against each other, but at the end of the competition,
we're leaving as friends, as a team.
I took care of them.
I was the camp counselor.
When we would go to these contests, I'd work with them.
I'd help them design their runs.
Everything was about competition then.
That's it. I felt like I had to get into a competition mode.
I had to get the tricks I knew that I could make every time.
So it was more of a conservative style of skating for me.
And then once the contest was over,
I was at the park the next day, learning, like, three new tricks.
I wasn't on that same level at all.
That's what it felt like to me.
I don't like mastering tricks.
I don't like practicing them and having them down.
As soon as I have them down, they feel wrong.
They feel old. They feel worthless.
And there's too much effort put in to win.
you know, it was tough at times.
I mean, I remember, you know, competing in Texas,
throwing up behind the ramp.
Go back up. "I'm good."
Couple of kids, you know, saw what was going on.
Why were you throwing up?
I knew if I didn't do well in those contests,
that I was gonna drift away
in that jungle of Florida
that I grew up in trying to skate.
You know, it just wasn't happening.
I was gonna follow my dream.
I have--
I have-- I have--
36 trophies, or had.
I have zero trophies because I threw them away or gave them away.
Because I hate them.
It was like a drug.
I want to keep winning, so how can I keep winning?
I love that it gave me this thrill to be successful.
Whenever I entered a contest,
I always went in thinking I'm going to win.
Always. You have to. Otherwise, what's the fucking point?
I think it was just always I had this thing where I wanted to seek the approval
of the best of the industry.
And the guys that were the best of the best,
they got their picture in the magazines.
These guys were amateurs, but people were looking at them going,
"They're as good as the pros."
There were some just incredible skateboarders.
The talent was undeniable, and that's why I shot them.
It didn't matter whether they were amateurs or not.
I'm not going to shoot a picture of some fucking idiot who can't even ride,
just because he's getting a lot of money.
We dominated the magazines,
not on anything but our sheer talent.
These little guys on my team, these no-names,
were making a gigantic splash in skateboarding.
'Cause no one had ever seen them before,
and no one had ever seen the moves the that they were doing.
I mean, Alan Gelfand invented the "Ollie"
when he was an amateur.
He invents the trick of the century
when he was an amateur.
People didn't understand the Ollie. They thought it was trick photography.
When you hear about this new hot kid
that had this interesting trick that no one even heard of before,
you're gonna be skeptical, and then you see this guy Alan Gelfand,
this little Jewish kid from Hollywood, Florida.
I mean, when we saw the Ollie, it was insane.
I was like, "yo, look at that kid.
He's flying in the air without even touching his board."
Once I saw it, that was it, I had to learn it.
And then, where do we go from there?
I had reached a point in my career
where I had learned every single trick that was ever invented.
And then you start thinking like, "what else can you do?"
Caballero, at 16 years of age, invents the Caballerial.
He takes what Alan Gelfand's done, the Ollie,
and now he does it in the air, 360 Ollie.
When he did the Caballerial, I'm still today, like, blown away,
because I still can't do it.
For me, Caballerials were a game changers,
because he made you realize you can do difficult spinning maneuvers
or technical maneuvers without grabbing your board.
Tony, you know,
to see him develop was really something.
He had all these little, progressive little flip tricks and spins.
And you could tell he was, like, a different type of skateboarder.
More, like, technical.
He got made fun of a lot because of the tricks he did.
he was doing things that at the time people didn't understand.
And so they labeled what he did as circus tricks.
Yeah, I didn't like him, you know? I didn't like his style.
He was just an annoying little fucking kid
with way too many pads on.
And it wasn't like he was this famous,
established guy who could go, "he's gonna have a couple haters."
It was like, here's a guy on the up and up,
and his peers are smacking him down already.
It was a bummer that these guys
I looked up to were like, "he's kind of a joke."
He had a lot of people against him.
And he had a lot of people that didn't like him
because his father was Frank Hawk.
I'm with Frank Hawk.
He's the head of the National Skateboard Association.
Frank, what's up with the NSA this year?
Not only was his dad organizing the contests, his mom was the timekeeper.
People would say a lot of things behind my back
about I got more practice.
You know, the parks I'm good at
are the ones that have the competitions.
"He chose the judges."
And it was hard to deal with, but at the same time,
it wasn't so discouraging that I was gonna quit.
If anything, it got me fired up to really--
It was almost like I just had to prove them wrong.
That was my goal at that time,
was like, "I'm gonna keep doing this until you guys appreciate it."
and that's Tony Hawk.
A little trick music here...
I never even noticed
that he was even gonna be a threat
to anything till I won two of the Whittiers,
and then I needed beer money.
And I figured--
I didn't think I could win again,
'cause I wasn't skating that much,
but I knew I could get in the top five.
And that's when I really noticed that Hawk was--
He was doing some shit that was--
Didn't make any sense to me.
I was getting stronger, just sheerly from skating all the time.
But I was also getting stronger 'cause I was going through puberty.
I was getting taller.
You know, a 10-foot bowl didn't look so intimidating anymore,
'cause suddenly I was over half that height.
And all of a sudden it was like, "oh, I've got this."
When they started to get names for themselves in the sport,
I knew I had to figure out a way to market and advertise them
in a unique way.
That's when Craig Stecyk comes into the picture.
Craig Stecyk's a writer, a photographer, and he's a conceptual artist.
But the unusual thing about Craig is,
Craig was a political pyrotechnician.
I would love to be able to tell you I'm wearing women's underwear.
And I don't know why I'm wearing women's underwear, but I'm not.
But I'd like to tell you I was wearing women's underwear, and believe that I was.
Everybody was like, "who is that weirdo?"
When you first meet Craig, you're just like,
this dude pops out, spits out some weird fortune cookie thing
that makes no sense, recedes back in there.
His sentences were so fragmented.
Everything he was saying, like a paragraph,
meant 60 different things.
And you had to decipher, like, "okay, what the fuck
is Stecyk talking about right now?"
They're more alike than two absolutely dissimilar people
that aren't like anybody on Earth could be.
But they're completely different people.
You know, I can't imagine
that people will watch this movie
and see Craig on the screen for a few moments
and not realize that it will probably be 10 hours worth of interviews
before he answers each question.
Uh, you know, no, I mean, I don't know.
I had-- you know, I mean, I--
You know, I mean, it's not even,
there's not anything particularly interes--
I get up and I draw and I, you know, I write dumb songs
and stutter and mumble
my way through life.
Stacy said, "I'm going to bring this guy Craig Stecyk in.
He's gonna art direct."
I wasn't sure what art directing was,
but Craig's idea of being at this photo shoot was
to produce a bottle of Mezcal
with a worm in it,
and drink the entire bottle during the photo shoot.
And so Craig's in the back making mystical comments.
I'm going like, "do we need this? Is he really adding to this?"
Stecyk and I are spit-balling ideas one day.
I'm telling him, I'm sitting here telling him,
I go, "I don't want to call this a team.
And I don't want the word 'skateboarding' in the name of it."
Craig looks at me and he goes, "Bones Brigade."
Well, at first, I thought you guys were crazy.
I remember going to Stecyk's house and we were going to shoot an ad.
"What do we need to do? Are we going to skate something?"
And we thought, "oh, right, we're gonna have a cool skate picture."
I remember like, "Oh, stand over here
next to this taillight of a Cadillac."
I just sit there, and I'm like, "and that's gonna be the ad?"
Craig wanted to burn a car.
And so George's parents lived in a very upscale area.
And I don't know why we ended up doing it in front of his mother and father's house,
but we cut a Cadillac in half
and we lit the car on fire.
Yeah, I remember that 'cause the police came.
I looked, pointed at the woman that owned the house and said,
"It's her car. We're just trying to put the fire out, officer."
I mean, George's parents are looking at him going, "what business are you in?
What are you doing? Why would you do this in front of our house?"
What?! What?!
This is a skateboard ad?
"I don't understand this."
I mean, skateboarding ads were these generic,
boring product shots.
I wanted something that was not skateboarding.
And Craig was vehemently against ever,
ever putting a skateboarding picture in an ad.
His philosophy was let the magazines show skateboarding.
We show ideas and images.
You look at some of those early ads, they have nothing--
Not only do they not have anything to do with skating,
they were like just-- it's wtf.
You're just look at it half the time like, "'what the fuck is this'
sort of thing." I remember when I talked to Tony and Cab and stuff,
they would be like, "can't we just have a skating shot in our ad and stuff?"
Like, they did not get it.
That was one of my advantages.
We'd show up for an advertising shoot
at Craig's place, and they were like,
"Cab, can you hold this dead dog for an ad?"
And he was like, "I don't want to do it." "I'll do it."
And I got all the--
I was Mikey that got all the cool stuff that they thought was lame.
Stacy said, "we're gonna paint your face
to look like your graphic."
And I was like, "I don't see how that's gonna work."
and when you saw the ads, they never had an ad like,
"Rodney Mullen, two first place trophies." never.
The Bones Brigade had that ad with a car burning
and there's quote from another rider saying
why he didn't want to ride for that company.
New kids, new product, new advertising.
And people knew who they were because a full-page ad
in Skateboarder was like, "okay, you've arrived. This is who you are."
We were starting to make a splash and moving up really fast.
In about two and a half years,
we grow probably 50%.
But then what happened is,
skateboarding started to dive.
It was just so sudden.
Not only the fact that monetarily the bottom fell out,
but the popularity on the mainstream level
was all of a sudden yanked out from underneath us.
The parks were closing. The shops were closing.
And by 1982, Skateboarder magazine,
which was the Bible of our industry,
it went out of business.
Instantly when skateboarding fell apart,
all the dudes that we loved and thought were amazing were gone.
All of the pros in the '70s couldn't make money anymore,
and so they were deserting the sport.
You're world champion one day, and then you're like,
"Well, now what are you going to do with your life?"
I went back to school because I didn't know what I was gonna do for a living.
A lot of cats couldn't deal with it, I don't think
and kind of went off,
did drugs, sold drugs.
I was scrambling. I was living in a car.
I had to do a jewel heist to get to have a place to live at one point.
And I was, you know, on this side of the tracks.
I'm supposedly some great skateboarder,
and over here I don't know where the fuck
I'm gonna get my next meal.
everyone was getting hit by it, so it was just like,
"All right, it's obvious that skateboarding is dead."
But the question is more like,
"Why did it collapse?"
99% of the skate parks that were designed were designed improperly
because nobody knew how to make them yet.
The physics was wrong.
The curves were wrong. The distances were wrong.
Was there ever a skate park design that was as good
as an average sewer or a curb? No.
These parks didn't work,
and they closed across the board.
And skateboarders got turned off to skateboarding because of it.
We call those the dark ages, because skateboarding virtually disappeared.
I was so young that all I knew
was that my friends had quit skating,
all skate parks were closing, but I wasn't gonna quit.
I still had a skateboard. That's all I needed.
With the loss of the skate parks and a terrain
that kind of dictated where and what you had to do, in a way,
with those gone, it took skateboarding to another era.
I pleaded with my dad's boss who owned a sod company.
"Can I just build a ramp here?"
He finally said, "Yeah, go ahead, Mike."
People started building half-pipes out of necessity.
But very few ever lasted, you know? Every once in a while,
another one would pop up, and you'd have to hit it while you could
because the neighbors were gonna complain and tear it down.
And that was a great thing. We'd seek everything out.
We'd drive three hours to go skate some shitty ramp in some kid's backyard.
The ramps and the backyard facilities really became,
in a certain way, like missions.
And they were situated around the country and around the state.
And guys would come together like a religion.
They were at the service of the vert.
as all this was going on,
Craig and I would brainstorm with Fausto Vitello.
Fausto Vitello owned independent trucks.
And we decided, "let's have contests.
Let's have 'professional contests'
where kids skateboard."
I felt like, "where the fuck are we going?"
I couldn't tell you, to this day, where the hell we drove to get to this contest.
All of a sudden, there's a ramp in the middle
of this dust bowl of a parking lot.
We held these contests all over the country.
This kid, Rich Flowerday in Nebraska, his parents said,
"sure, bring the California kids to us. Have an event."
I'm not sure they were expecting what they got.
All these guys were here from out of town,
and they were cool. It was just like going to
a big punk rock show.
No authority. Complete chaos of 15-, 16-
and 17-year-olders doing whatever they want, however they want.
And we'd be drinking beers and just hanging out,
and everybody's on the decks and sitting on the roof.
Be careful of that gutter, Bob.
Be careful.
I mean, I remember looking for anyone in charge.
"Am I first? Is he going first? What's going on?"
And there'd just be one guy with a sheet of paper.
Kevin Thatcher. It was like, "yeah, yeah,
we're gonna do something pretty soon."
The environment of skateboard contests prior to that
was so controlled. Everything was timed.
But then it went into these backyards where we were like,
"we own this. We are this,
and no one can tell us what to do here."
people were skating just for skating's sake.
There was no future for a professional skateboarder.
All of our companies were making so little money.
Tony Hawk got a royalty check for one of his boards
for 85 cents from us.
The first prize money for a pro contest was $150,
but I was 14-years-old.
150 bucks-- sign me up!
Whoo! I'm cashing in.
You know, I'm gonna buy a moped.
It was such an intoxicating place to be
that these backyard ramp events
started growing the sport again.
My general feeling is that skateboarding
has nothing to do with competition or sport.
if it doesn't have anything to do with sport,
then what does it have to do with?
It has to do with trying
to stay as immature as you can for the rest of your life.
Pretty much.
You know, it's kind of this lame thing to say,
but it really is.
That's what I think.
You don't mean "Irresponsible"? Nope. Not irresponsible.
I probably was more responsible than any of them.
I had a lot more responsibilities than them.
Which is probably another reason why I went into it, being a mental case.
You know?
Lance was that classic comedian guy.
He's the classic comedian that has that very dark side.
There was a contest in Alabama where Lance,
in the middle of his run, he just got so worked up,
he took his board and he threw it at the crowd.
And he didn't do it to hit somebody.
I don't know what he did it for.
But it ended up, like, tagging somebody.
And this guy, at the end of the contest, walked right up to him and just...
Knocked Lance over.
Yeah, but I didn't think it was that big of an outbreak.
That was a small outbreak.
That was a very small outbreak.
There's a lot more that I had outbreaks.
I remember being so pissed at Del Mar that I just jumped into the pool.
Like, I was so mad,
and I was a baby.
I'm a vindictive Person.
I'm a selfish Person.
I'm a total goofball.
Almost all my motivation is from fear.
And those are my good things.
Those are the bad traits in me,
but those are the driving places,
because I'm like, I am gonna have fun
and I'm gonna do what I want, even if I have to be miserable doing it.
I dislike it in myself,
but I don't know any other way.
And that stems from being the kid
that was not good at anything.
No one came along and said, "hey, I believe in you.
I think you're the guy. I think you're good."
Stacy had his group of dudes
and I saw how he interacted with them.
It seemed like he expected those things out of those guys.
And actually, I felt like he never expected that out of me.
I originally put Lance on the team
with the idea that he would, like, be my assistant some day.
As kind of assistant team manager.
He was a good skater,
but I didn't expect him to become a great skater.
I think the idea of grooming me to do what he did
came up really quickly. My mom asked Stacy, like,
"How could Lance still be involved in skateboarding?
He wants to do what you did."
So, yeah, it was on the radar, for sure.
I always knew that.
At the same time, too, I was like under a bunch of pressures
'cause I was trying to raise a family and make a living.
All of a sudden, he's a father.
He's a husband, and he's got to provide for them
and make a place for them to live, and he's still a kid.
I worked jobs.
I worked a union job. I silk-screened boards.
I did all this stuff while I was pro, to be pro.
And I was jealous. These dudes were skateboarding.
They were skateboarders.
They were the number one dudes.
And I was working jobs so I could be a skateboarder.
And I was thought of as a second rate skateboarder
and a clown and a blah-blah-blah.
And so it was that struggle of how do
I join this world of winning
and being the best and being progressive?
And when you guys gave me the opportunity to be in that first video,
it clicked.
We dreamt up the idea of let's make a skateboarding video.
You know, an hour-long homemade movie of the Bones Brigade.
And so I went to Craig and I said, "do you want to do this?"
And I could make movies all day long for virtually no money.
That just seemed like a logical thing to do.
He's gonna skim along the top and he's gonna jump from here down.
Okay, okay, I'm rolling.
Okay, man. Clear away, Stacy!
I can't. I have to be here to get catch his-- okay.
People were just getting the first videocassette recorders in their homes.
Up till then, the only voice of skateboarding
were the magazines. You didn't see stuff in action.
Where we made the first video thinking,
you know, we'll probably sell 300.
We sold, I think, 30,000.
It was unbelievable. They became manifestos.
If it would have just been Rodney Mullen and Steve Caballero
and Tony Hawk in the video,
I might have went, "damn, skating is tough! It's hard.
I'll never be that good."
But Lance Mountain presented skating as something accessible.
That looked fun, the way he was doing it.
And I could see myself doing the kinds of things he was doing.
Like, Lance would let you say it's okay to be a crappy skater.
And I don't mean Lance was a crappy skater.
But you can love skating, and that's enough.
But it was like, "wait a minute, you live by Stacy?
I live 3,000 miles away. Why do you get to go over to his house and"--
You know, he's the star of Bones Brigade.
You know, it was kind of tough for me to see that.
Most of the skaters were like, "man, you're getting twice as much coverage as me."
And I was thinking like, "but it's not coverage based on I'm being good.
It's like, it was dorking around. It was goofing around."
That's kind of what I thought. So there's that weird dynamic.
But because of that, that changed everything for me.
And all of a sudden, I was gonna have a board.
Yeahhhhhhh!!!
That's when Lance became a star.
By saying, "I'll do this."
I did understand that I had a different thing to offer.
You know? Skateboarding's still just playing around
and can't be all just being good.
My mom, she was a concert pianist
when she was a little kid. And I grew up around music, classical music.
So I grew up hearing it and reading about these guys, these great composers.
And Beethoven's music always struck me. Always.
He had this fire, you know?
I remember reading the story of him going deaf
and pushing himself into self-isolation.
And that's where he became himself.
And to me, that was, "wow!
Don't let anything poison your individuality."
Be away, break away,
and look in, not outward.
What makes us all do what we do at a high level
is an inspiration that comes so deep.
It's all so like a controlled desperation.
If you can't tap into that, then it just extinguishes.
And you can't do it through here, it has to seep way down in there.
to his dad's benefit,
he built Rodney this little space, if he'd promise to wear his pads.
So he built him a little concrete pad
and little shed roof over it
and lights.
So Rodney would go out and he'd skate from 2:00 to 5:00 in the morning.
That was his time to skate.
It was cool. 'Cause it was super hot.
It was so hot and so humid in Florida where they lived
that they actually built their dogs
an air conditioned dog house.
My biggest blessing was being in isolation.
That was my blessing.
Maybe if I were somewhere else, out here, I would have been like them.
At that time, you either skated freestyle,
which instantly made you, like, a nerd
or you skated pools. That was it.
There was no middle ground.
Freestyle was, you know, small boards, tight shorts.
Goofy, total goofy attire.
We all hated freestyle. But here came Rodney, and we'd all stop.
Everyone would stop. The whole skate park would stop.
All the vert skaters would stop.
Everybody would go watch Rodney. Didn't matter.
'Cause you knew you were in for a show.
He was so far advanced than all of us.
every time we would meet up in California,
he would always have new tricks,
on a level that nobody could match.
I used to film a lot of those contests and go home and analyze them.
We'd try to slow it down and, "how did he do that?"
You know? And so then everyone started trying some of Rodney's tricks.
I would watch him and go, "I gotta figure out how
to flip my board like that." if something's been done, it's so much easier
to learn than if it's never been done before.
If someone else has made it, then you just, in your head,
"It's possible you can do it."
Belief is at the heart of everything.
All I have to do is have an acknowledgement,
a switch that goes off, to see it.
It's, "oh, wow. Oh, yeah, I can do that, too."
It's all convincing yourself.
Every trick that I'd never done before
was a matter of telling myself, "You are capable of doing this.
This is possible. Go do it."
Tony and Rodney were both outsiders from the beginning.
And for a long time, what they were doing was considered odd.
They would do it. You would bring your friends.
"Hey, come to the park, see what Tony's doing.
Come out behind the building, I'll show you what Rodney's doing."
And they would go, "look at that. That's like a freak show."
But don't get me wrong.
I learned a lot of basic tricks that I pick up from everywhere else.
But I try to absorb them
so that I can build something else out of them.
'Cause the joy isn't creating something,
the joy is what comes out of you.
That's what keeps me going.
Rodney Mullen inventing the flatland Ollie
would change everything.
I have to give props to Rodney Mullen adapting it
to the street in such an art form to where you can't skate without it.
And it was interesting because, even though he did that trick,
very few people did it for a long time.
When that happened, we didn't think,
"oh yeah, that's going to be a trick
that's going to set the precedent of skateboarding for generations to come."
I mean, it really started changing the landscape of skateboarding,
going away from being all based on vert, really,
to really taking it into the streets
and putting it in the hands of every kid.
watching Tommy's part in future primitive,
and he ollied over the bushes.
That was it. I was like, "you can really Ollie over things.
Over obstacles. You don't need a ramp."
Tommy Guerrero was the first street skater I put on the team.
To be a pro street skater was, you know, just completely new. 1985.
it was the moment where skateboarding
became skateboarding. It was no longer something
that was derivative of surfing.
It was put on the table, "this is skateboarding."
You know, the place of skateboard is in a skateboard park
and not the streets. It's in a safe place. Right.
We're making movies. Are you filming this?
Yeah.
We lived in a dead-end town with nowhere to go.
And then when skateboarding came along,
especially street skating, it made our town bearable.
It made our town livable, because it blew it wide open, you know?
It's like, the possibilities were suddenly endless in a town
that once felt like we had nowhere to go.
Suddenly it was like, "this place ain't so bad.
'Cause there's a curb and there's a bench
and there's some stairs and there's a wall."
It was like everything was redefined.
These weren't things that confined and defined our lives.
They were things we were now defining.
I felt completely smothered by conservative society
in South Carolina, but skateboarding was a way out
of what I just considered
this very, very homogenous way of doing things.
And when future primitive said,
"you guys are over here. We're over here."
I was like, "yeah, that's right. I know which team I'm on."
It just felt like we were onto something
and into something that spoke to us,
that no one else understood.
It brought that sense of community
to what is incredibly individual.
I loved the first Bones Brigade.
You got a couple shots of the girls at Lance's ramp watching,
throwing in a couple, "wows!"
But then on the second one, you got them dressed up as girls out there.
It just made so much sense. It made it cooler.
The videos added a human element.
We weren't just this untouchable elite crew of skaters.
That we were silly and we fall.
Medic! Medic!
Throughout all these different videos,
there's always, I forget, 12, 13 guys or whatever at some given point.
We were always given, us six or whatever,
were always given, kind of like, top billing.
At the same time,
those other guys that weren't given top billing,
they're trying to take our position.
I've got all sorts of amateurs up behind them.
And those guys want to take the top slot.
Just because you're on the Bones Brigade doesn't mean--
How many members did we have of the actual Bones Brigade?
What, 30, 50? Those five or six guys
that were the elite guys,
I mean, every one of those guys had to step up
and put themself on the line.
Seeing guys like my heroes Alan Gelfand invent the Ollie.
I mean, that was, you know, "wow!"
You know, that's a legacy for him.
And then Caballero doing the Caballerial.
I'm like, "wow, that's great!"
You know? "What am I gonna do?"
Everybody had heard that Mike had invented this trick.
It was a really big deal. Everybody was talking about it.
If you didn't see it, you couldn't grasp it.
You're like, "what? What are you talking? McTwist.
Oh, he flips into-- what are you talking about?"
I just remember this, looking at my arms and the goose bumps.
I just witnessed history.
This-- you know-- speechless.
And I remember thinking,
"that right there, that is,
that's neck-breaking material."
Rodney, Mike McGill and Lance Mountain had gone to teach
at a skateboarding camp in Sweden.
And that's where Mike learned the trick.
I thought about, you know, doing a 540 for,
you know, almost about six or seven months
when I seen, you know, a roller-skater do it.
A lot of us were trying 540s.
And I was trying them with him at the bottom of the ramp, halfway up.
Gator and dale smith and a lot of people were trying to do them,
halfway up the ramp.
You couldn't do it below the ramp.
You had to commit yourself in a very dangerous position.
You know, it took a lot of courage.
'Cause, you know, I didn't necessarily do that kind of thing.
I mean, of course, you know, I skated as hard as I could,
but I didn't take that kind of a risk, but I want to do this.
And I just thought, "you know what? I'm gonna do it."
I would go back and forth and watch him.
And he would just push and push and push.
And I'm thinking, "oh, my God,
he's gonna do this."
He came back. He came back to me with, "guess what I made."
I was like, "oh, you made one. Rad."
I was going, "rad."
Sliding around on-- dragging everything on the ground.
I'm sure it was just terrible, thinking in my head.
"Oh, come see, come see."
Come see. Drops in and does a six-foot air.
Does a 540 over my head.
And I'm like,
"what the heck just happened?"
I'm thinking, "oh, my God,
this is gonna be an infrastructure change in what they do.
It will be a dividing line."
And immediately, my first--
Rotten thing to say, but it's ever so honest,
is a selfish one of, "I'm so glad I don't do what he does."
I'll be honest. Like, when he did that, I was like, "I'm a jerk.
Like, that guy is-- the most respect for that dude.
And I been, you know, digging at him and everything."
But I was like, "no, it's like, I'm not on that level.
I'm not even close to that type of person."
I made it right in front of Lance.
And he started skating and immediately tried this trick.
And I just couldn't believe that he went after it that hard
and tried it and poor Lance just spun out.
And his body just cracked the top of the coping,
and that was it for Lance.
I remember crying that night.
I remember crying, thinking like, "great. Gotta go back to the union job.
Sucks. You can't make ends meet.
You're gonna get pushed out of skateboarding.
It's horrible. It's lame."
I remember thinking that.
And I went home and I tried that thing for a month straight.
And I remember landing it
and walking over to the brick wall
and smashing my board into pieces.
Just smashing it. Like, I wasn't even happy that I made it.
I was pissed that it took me a month.
I was pissed that it had to be that much of a battle to do.
I wasn't even like, "woo-hoo!"
there was only a handful of people that would even try it.
I started just trying to fling myself like that out of the pool.
And I was like, "this is crazy. I don't understand how this works at all."
I couldn't spin fast enough.
And I was scared to death to be that high, spinning blindly.
That definitely put a wrench in my winning career, when that move came out.
I remember when those guys learned it.
I had to try to figure out other tricks to learn to try to compete.
And that's what I love about being a part of the Bones Brigade
was just this group collective of skaters
that pushed each other to higher levels.
we all rooted for each other.
If one of us did well, then everyone else was stoked on it.
You know, I remember there was one contest where we all
wore each other's shirts as support.
But there's a part of it that I think
that most guys will attest to,
is that we want to make Stacy happy, you know?
For me, the fun part was hearing him laugh.
I knew when he was laughing, either you were doing something amazing
on your skateboard or you really were being funny on camera.
He never would tackle you and give you a hug and go, "that was awesome!"
Like, "you're the best!" he would giggle.
That's the only way they would tell me that they knew
whether he was impressed with a trick or something.
You'd show him and he'd have the Stacy giggle.
I think anyone who's had any degree of fame becomes very sensitive
to pelting you with praise.
And too much of it
can have the weight of a tombstone.
And Stacy never did that. It was--
See, fires are combustible
not because of the gas, but because of the vapors.
And his laugh was quite like those vapors.
If you're doing something so far
beyond the possibility of working,
you have to have someone that believes in you or pretends to believe in you.
No other team, no other company had that guy.
I loved seeing these guys succeed.
They were so talented.
I loved it more than I loved my own career.
Damn!
First of all, you're talking about kids.
They're 15, 16 years old.
And they're already world class athletes.
The things they were doing, many of the tricks belonged to them.
They invented them.
I hate the word "coach,"
but I had this affinity for coaching them,
for being there for them.
Kids are not taught to be competitors.
They're not taught to be professional athletes.
It's like, I learned early on from my own generation,
one of the worst things you can do to a teenager
is give them too much attention and money.
It destroys their perception of themselves.
And I can't tell you how many casualties there were from my generation.
Of these guys of, "I could have been a contender."
And they have to live with that failed career, that shattered dream,
the rest of their lives.
Looking back, going, "God, I could have done it."
I remember Stacy coming down hard on me for falling in the prelims
at the great desert ramp battle in Palmdale.
That's a bad break, 'cause that was definitely a bionic run.
I think Stacy kind of felt like I wasn't really into skating.
'Cause at that time, I was in a band called the faction
and I was playing a lot of punk rock music.
And I was starting to look the look.
But I remember him, for the very first time, came down on me like a dad,
like a father figure and that is the first time
that I had ever had someone so serious saying like,
"what's wrong with you?
Don't you care about skateboarding?"
And he had never yelled at me before.
And I was really upset, you know?
I think I almost started crying.
And I just thought to myself, I'm like, "I'm gonna show him.
I do care."
And I remember I ended up winning that contest.
backside air. In the air. Here he goes.
Oh! Forget about that.
They thought he was going to lose that one. Unbelievable.
The only time I would get on their case is if they showed up
and they weren't respecting their talent and they were being frivolous.
It wasn't about winning. It was about showing up and doing your best.
I want to hear some screaming for this guy.
Rodney Mullen!
Rodney was absolute perfectionist.
The fiercest competitor ever.
I mean, he knew
every single minute thing he was going to do.
Exactly what his feet were going to do, the order it was going to happen.
If Rodney stepped off his board or anything like that,
he'd probably be devastated.
Rodney was a competitor
on an Olympic scale that I've never witnessed in my life.
He was flawless, Perfect, every time.
Getting second to him was like getting first.
Nobody deserved to ever take his spot.
And that's when the rumors flew that he was practicing nine hours a day.
And we're going, "nine hours a day? How's that possible?"
When we would go on tour, he would just go out.
2:00 in the morning, we'd arrive at hotel.
"I'm going skating." "Okay, dude."
You know, we'd wake up whenever to get to the demo.
and he'd be creeping in.
And we're like, "so did you find a place to skate?"
And he's all like, "yeah, and I learned a couple tricks, too."
Makes 500 new tricks up, you know?
And the next demo, you're like, "you just did all these tricks I've never seen you do before,
and I've been on this road with you for a month."
Sure seems like you're unbeatable.
Can you tell us what's it take to be a championship freestyler?
I don't know. Just my mind.
Rodney is a really bright sensitive person, but he was really cowed.
I mean, he was almost like a beaten dog,
and his nickname was "mutt."
He was pretty quiet. To himself. Introvert.
Rodney was fucking crazy. Completely. But in the genius way.
Like, the mad genius way? The way, you know, those über smart people are crazy?
He could tell, you know, some historical facts,
but he literally couldn't-- you know, "how do you open this door?"
He stayed in the corner and did his own thing.
And every once in a while, he would have this outburst of--
We couldn't figure out what was going wrong with him.
And I remember traveling with him,
one of the many, many tours in the middle of literally nowhere.
Trying to get to a demo, as always. Late, probably, you know?
"I think-- I think I'm sick. I think I'm gonna throw up."
"What are you, rod, motion sick? What, did you eat something bad?"
"All the above. I'm gonna throw up."
So he's doubled over. He's holding his stomach or he's feeling sick.
He gets out and we think he's gonna puke or something.
He takes off. He fucking takes off down the road,
gone, out of sight.
Did he have to go to the bathroom?
Where did Rodney go?
We just waited and waited and waited. I don't know how long it was.
It was quite some time.
I think the sun had gone down. I don't know.
But I remember seeing the van.
Those dudes were all looking at me like--
Fairly unforgettable look.
and then Rodney comes walking up, "hey, guys."
You know, that Rodney way, "hey, guys."
And you're like, "Hey, Rodney. Feel better?"
"Yeah." "okay, we got to go."
Shut the door, and we go.
No one said a word!
Rodney, to me,
was this guy that I couldn't relate to.
Tony could relate to him, 'cause he's very progressive.
And my best memories were flying in,
going to Tony's, hanging out. Seeing what he did.
This freakish alien, you know?
That's what it was. You know, X-Men.
Look at his crazy-- thinking we're all mutants
and look at his super powers.
And I would look at him in amazement.
As the guys started making a little bit of money,
what Tony did is Tony took his money and he bought a home.
And he basically had a skateboard park built at his home.
When I would shoot the videos,
Tony would have so many brand-new tricks per video,
it was difficult for me to fit them all in.
I was totally possessed by it.
I couldn't sit still. What's next?
What's the next thing? How do we make this trick better?
How do we combine these two things
to do something even more impressive?
I think that was it, I just wanted to be more impressive.
Tony took the McTwist,
and all of a sudden, he's doing one-foot McTwists.
Then he's doing board-varial McTwists.
And then he does the absolute unthinkable,
which is the Ollie McTwist.
He does the McTwist, not even grabbing his board.
and I don't think Tony did it for fame.
I don't think he ever did it to be famous
or to be like this big-- he was not the rock star guy.
Like, with the Alva posse and stuff, these guys were animals.
They were just, like, dreadlocks, leather jacket, beer in their hand.
You know, they'd just probably smoked a joint in the parking lot.
You know, my guys were the rock star guys.
And that's why my guys were so, like, just, man!
Aggro over Tony Hawk.
They were cursing under their breath when they saw him take a run.
Tony Hawk did not have a beautiful surf style.
He was gangly. He didn't look pretty.
He looked fantastic, but he didn't look pretty.
He's not a pretty skater.
He's not a beautiful stylist.
And so one of his main rivals was Christian Hosoi.
And Christian Hosoi, he was as beautiful a skater
as there has been in the history of the sport,
and he was powerful, and he was exotic looking.
And like Alva, he was a rock star.
Let's hear it for Christian Hosoi!
Let's hear some noise. Let's go!
whoo! Yeah!
And everyone, the punks, the hardcore, loved Christian.
And if they're gonna love Christian, they're gonna hate Tony.
Put your hands together for Christian Hosoi!
I mean, the fans were crazy.
That rivalry that they created,
it pushed us to be even more competitive.
They would always battle.
They would have these total battles that were just epic.
Just insane.
Polar opposite styles and approaches to skating,
but nonetheless both just as good.
I mean, Christian was more amplitude, style,
grace and power. Tony was like pump up the volume
and throw some, you know, like robotic,
like, technicality into it.
and they said, "you don't have style. You just have tricks."
That's all I wanted. I just wanted new tricks.
You know, I would have to go higher at the next event,
because he'd make up three new tricks.
This is it! Do or die for both skaters.
How many times, guys, it comes down to these two,
Christian and Tony?
McTwist! Yeah!
Skating hard up here.
Christian going for the jugular right here.
720!
Ladies and gentlemen, it's my pleasure to introduce the winner--
Tony Hawk! Yeah!
I was winning most of the events.
I was winning all the overall series titles.
And it got to the point where people were telling me, like,
the people I was skating against were telling me,
"I just hope I get second place."
And I just didn't like what it was doing to me.
I didn't like that-- it was just kind of--
It was crushing mentally
because I wasn't enjoying it.
I would win. It was like, "yeah, I won.
That's what you expected of me.
I did it. There you go."
And then, on the flip side of that,
if I didn't win, you know,
let's say I got second place, they said, "oh, you suck now.
You didn't win."
It was too much for me at the time.
It was really draining on me.
And I wasn't enjoying skating as much, because of it.
I think you'd have to be a robot
to not be affected by some of the negative things that were said.
The guys used to spit on Tony, back in the day.
I mean, the punk kids used to spit on him.
They hated him.
He won everything or close to it.
That creates so much more pressure,
because there's no gratification in winning.
There's only upholding something so that you don't lose it.
And it is staggering.
It usurps the joy.
It's like a Kafka short story.
You build something, but you can't live in the house
because you sit around guarding it.
I think he was 16 or 17 years old.
And I got a call from Tony's brother Steve, his older brother
and said, "I need to come up and talk to you with Tony.
Something's not right."
And Tony's not an emotional kid,
or at least he doesn't show his emotion.
And this was the very first time I'd ever seen Tony emotional.
This kid had completely kind of collapsed.
And Steve did all the talking for him
and was telling me, "Tony's really disturbed and upset.
And he feels he can't compete anymore.
He doesn't want to compete anymore."
You know, first he told me, "well, I understand that,
and I can understand how you're feeling.
But what can you do? Because it's all about competition."
It really was at the time. It was all about your competition record.
If you weren't competing, no one's gonna put you in the magazines.
No one's gonna put you in videos.
You had to prove yourself
that you're better than everyone else in the rankings.
And then he also told me, "look, Rodney Mullen said
the same thing to me last year."
I remember having at the Del Mar contest,
I had to walk across the skate park to a trampoline area and sit down with him.
I could feel he needed somebody.
And I could sense that from him.
I can't leave this kid's side today.
This kid, he's got something going on.
He's not telling me what it is, but he's showing me everything it is.
And so I tried to be as tender and ginger as possible with him.
But I'm a kid and I'm trying to sense what this kid's going through.
I don't have that many skills.
But I sensed enough that it was not right.
It was a Del Mar contest, right?
And I was talking to him after his run, telling him how great he did.
And he says, "yeah, well, that's the last contest I'm doing.
I'm quitting. This is it for me."
I said, "you've got to give me your autograph before you leave."
So he wrote it on a little business card, "bye-bye, Rodney Mullen."
And I was thinking, "how in the world could this guy
be the world champion"--
And he was winning every single contest he entered, by the way--
And just walk away from it and not come back?"
My dad, maybe a week,
two weeks before the contest,
before then, he goes,
"just so you know, this will be your last one."
It was always lingering, but he really meant it.
And things had been getting bad around the home.
Real bad. Real bad.
And so I--
My sister had gotten anorexic,
and I had started to go down a path that way
and--
I was just mad, mad.
He just said, "that's it."
And he goes, "you're going nowhere in life and I'm doing this to save you.
Stop. I think the skateboarding is making you crazy."
And so...
I couldn't focus.
That's the only contest I lost.
My mind was gone.
I just--
When I came back, having lost, he goes,
"you know, I wanna see how you bounce back from this.
How you handle this is what will define you."
I remember, I came-- I was super thin.
And I was falling apart in school 'cause I really didn't care anymore.
And I remember he couldn't do anything about it.
It wasn't acting out.
You don't do that in the house. You don't do that.
But the thing is,
is I withered in a way that you could not control.
And I was spinning.
I remember the teachers and stuff, like, going to counseling.
"What's wrong? We know something's wrong at home. Eat!"
My dad is not some evil man.
Like, he was trying to do the best he could,
for what he had, with what he had with me.
But those are those formative years.
You know, teenager, when things start to hurt in a different way.
When I found skateboarding, it was the first thing I loved.
I mean, I loved it.
And that being pulled away from me
hardened something inside of me,
where nothing mattered.
He came to me. I was in the garage.
And he goes, "you know, I think that this has been hard on you."
This is months afterwards.
He goes, "you can skate,
because I think you need that.
But I think that,
in a sense, what's wrong with you
has to do with the pressure of contests.
So you can't compete."
Really? Your father said that? Yeah.
Contests gave me
the ability to continue
to do what defined me,
but what they came to represent was,
"don't fail."
During my brief competition hiatus,
when I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to do,
I missed it immensely.
And I did get to, you know,
have a couple of pretty heavy conversations with Rodney about it.
He had come back to competition already, and I said, "how did you do it?"
And he said, "I just came back with a different approach,
that I didn't care as much of the results.
I enjoy it. I enjoy the skating.
If I don't win, I don't win."
I stopped worrying that I needed that
perfect competition record to thrive, and I didn't.
You know, I started placing first a lot.
Sometimes I would place fifth, and it was fun.
It actually became way more fun after that.
Everything I am today, somehow is probably fed
by my need for acceptance.
With my dad, that's not necessarily an acceptance sons are hoping for.
You know, "hey, it's good that you did this,
but do you get the point? You're dominating something that really doesn't matter
and apply yourself to something meaningful."
But because of Tony and Caballero and these guys,
that gave me a sense of acceptance and belonging.
It was like reciprocated and bounced back
and churned in a synergistic way.
And that's what created the Bones Brigade.
From my perspective, I was like, I don't know, like 13, 14, 15 when,
you know, the first Bones Brigade video came out
and future primitive and animal chin, and we loved them.
Me and my friends would quote the videos.
It became part of our language.
Especially animal chin.
We had heard about it.
You saw the ad. You were, "It's coming." everybody knew it was coming.
Every skater I knew, knew that this video was coming.
And there was a buzz. There was pictures.
Remember, there was pictures. There was the ramp.
And you're like, "what the fuck is this? This is gonna be crazy."
And it was.
In the last 30 years since that time, I've bumped into more kids
of the generation after me that, even after they saw the Dogtown film,
were just like, "what about Animal Chin?"
And I said, "are you fucking kidding me? Animal Chin?"
And they're like, "are you kidding me? That's the greatest video!"
I said, "I mean, that's damn near homo-erotic."
Okay, fellas, that's room number seven.
What are you guys doing? Goodbye, boys.
I can't go any other way. I mean, Animal Chin was just like--
It was an embarrassment to me as a skateboarder.
I just remember my initial instinct that it was like, "why is this"--
You know, Stacy telling this story of these guys, and it's so fucking corny.
Why is he making skateboarders look like
even softer than they could ever possibly be?
Method air and one-flip air,
and through the air and comb your hair.
and rocket airs, guys. Breathe out.
Once more. That was hysterical.
I love the comb the hair. Keep doing the same one.
That is hysterical. Everybody say it, too.
I'm embarrassed by my filmmaking qualities.
Terribly. It's awful.
And it's actually everything I hate in films.
It's so B-movie and clichéd and corny.
Check it out. No way.
It's like a skate God must have skated on this thing or something.
Check it out. It's some kind of Chinese symbol or something.
Ugh! God, when people tell me they like it,
I just look at them, I'm going, "I'm embarrassed about it."
You know, I think that it was the presentation of the video, first off.
You know, I liked the way, you know, there was--
It wasn't just a straight skateboard video.
It told this kind of story.
Good evening. Tonight's top story.
Legendary skater, won ton animal chin has been reported missing
by friends and relatives.
Well, we're really looking for this chin guy. Have you seen him?
Buck chin, the realtor? Nancy chin, the manicurist?
For some reason,
I'm dressed up like 130 year-old elderly Asian gentleman.
It's unfortunate when you have a male my age who's never actually had a job.
But I'm thinking about changing this, and I hope to.
So if you're watching this, give me a paper route or something. I'll start over.
You guys are looking for animal chin?
When you talk about a message with skating, it has to be cheesy.
Because if you don't, then it gets sentimental, or then you start getting pompous.
You want it to be this weird-- like, Lance falling.
That stupid thing where he falls and his head is in the ground.
It's so bad and cheesy.
Lance, are you okay? Oh, yeah. It wasn't even a bad slam. Don't worry.
The whole video to me represented skating,
because they were trying to talk about this message and you had horrible acting.
Hey, you guys, you think chin was really here?
Horrible songs.
Awesome skating.
It's Chin! Steve, check it out.
It's Chin.
No way.
Useless.
Was it okay? Yeah, try it again, though.
Not that we didn't sign up for it, but we never expected
to be actors because we skate.
Okay, look this way. Now react to someone over there.
Yes. Whoo!
We want stoked reactions. Really stoked.
Oh, yeah! Big one, Mike.
Oh, yeah! Come on, Mike. Water bullet!
Air bullet, go, go, go! Go on, do it!
Yeah! All right.
You know, you had a lot of characters on the team and a lot of personalities.
So when you got five dudes together like that,
and you put them in a room for hours on end,
or made them do shit that, you know, "do it again, do it again, do it again,"
it's either gonna come out as anger or laughter.
And most of the time, it came out as laughter.
You know, just like, "oh, you've got to make fun of the situation."
I don't care what I said, do what I say. Is that funny?
Is that funny?
of course, to see them as a group was cool.
But also to know that they were individual personalities
with their own idiosyncrasies.
There were many teams that you didn't know their personalities.
The companies didn't give them a chance to shine like that.
You started picking your favorite Bones Brigade guys.
So I'd get to be cab.
Somebody else would get to be Tony.
Somebody else would be Lance. You know, "Lance is my guy!"
We'd pretend we were them.
you started to realize the effect that you had on people.
So you go somewhere and some guy's wearing suspenders like Stevie.
You know? The haircuts. Tony Hawk, I mean, that haircut?
The squeeb-- how many kids had that? Everyone.
It's that time between childhood and adulthood where you're trying to find yourself,
and you need to find a voice.
And that's how we identified ourselves.
Animal Chin raised our profile beyond anything
we could ever have known, but at the same time,
I would come back and just be smack into reality again.
You're in high school. You're going to history.
And I was still, like, kind of the nerdy kid.
It was this weird paradox that I lived in.
And then, once I graduated high school,
I literally was out of high school
and straight onto gleaming the cube set.
There's a time that we were going from, like you know,
all these Hollywood things, one from another.
I'm not even sure how any of that happened.
It was just so bizarre.
And I remember Stacy telling us, "hey, you guys,
people are gonna be running up to you
and asking for your autograph."
And we were like, "right, Stacy, come on."
I went all over the US, Europe,
Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand.
We were rock stars. We'd show up at demos,
thousands and thousands of kids.
It felt like skateboard mania.
We seriously fled several times, like scared.
We were in a van once. We were frightened that they were going to tip the van over.
Like, "we gotta get the fuck outta here! These kids are gonna kill us!"
They're like, "we love you!" "Wait a second, man.
Let us get out of the van before you tip it over and light it on fire."
We were at a demo in London and some kid comes up.
And he's like, "would you guys like to come over for dinner?"
And this other guy came up behind him and said, "that's George Harrison's son.
You guys might want to take him up on that offer."
So they sent a driver over, picked us up, and we went to the castle.
I'm not kidding, a castle. What are we doing there?
We're like the scum of the earth skaters.
We're at a Beatle's house.
I mean, that was the coolest thing that had ever happened up until that point in my life.
It was unheard of. The kids at the school would just freak out when I told them this,
and they won't really believe me.
Hawk just got bigger and bigger.
Every time I came out of jail, I mean, it was like, whoa.
I was pushing this shopping cart, Hawk was on a fucking Slurpee cup.
To me, that was just as huge as you could get.
It was just unheard of, the things that we were doing.
We didn't care about being well-known for it.
And so when we did become well known for it, it was like, "really?
You guys like us 'cause we do this?
'Cause you guys really used to make fun of us for doing this."
In the early '80s, it was not looked at as a career or a job.
When the money started rolling in, people thought differently.
Each of these skaters was paid by the amount of boards
we're selling each month.
We were paid per board. And it was basically a dollar a board.
I remember, my first check was 1980.
I remember getting $300.
I went from making eighty-five cents to making 20 grand a month.
The business was growing extremely fast.
In the early '80s, we went from, I think, eight employees
to by the mid to late '80s, we had 150 employees.
The company had grown from a tiny local shop.
To a manufacturer known to the ends of the skateboard world.
Twenty-five years ago, I started out as one more of those California fads.
Now it's the sleeper gift of Christmas '87.
Santa Barbara based Powell-Peralta is producing 2,000 boards a day
to meet the Christmas demand and could sell twice that number.
The sport's really taken off in the last six months,
much faster than anybody expected.
As a result, our demand is much more than our ability to produce.
These kids were making more than Stacy and me.
Yeah. It didn't bother me to pay the money, 'cause we were successful.
But it was hard to sell to the team.
My team, of the company.
I have to tell my 40-old professionals
that this 16-year-old kid needs to make five times what they're making.
Here I am getting out of high school,
all my classmates are trying to figure out where they're gonna go to college,
what they're gonna study, what they're gonna be.
And I was making the kind of money
that was reserved for top-end jobs.
That was big money for us to-- what were we gonna spend it on? You know, I lived at home.
I was making money and I had a checking account.
Didn't buy anything, didn't have a car. Nothing.
It was just getting larger and larger and larger.
And I just kept putting the money in the bank.
You couldn't find a nicer group of fucking boy scouts
than the Bones Brigade.
I didn't like the way they dressed.
I didn't like their haircuts.
You know, I wanted to, like, throw dirt on them or get them dirty a little or something.
They were too nice.
You know, they never got angry or anything, you know?
And I thought they were like little boy scouts.
Hell, no, we weren't boy scouts.
But I don't know.
We didn't really get into alcohol or drugs or anything like that.
I mean, skateboarding was our way of letting loose, I guess.
traveling with them, it was all the other pros,
they were drinking and partying with all the locals.
The Bones Brigade had their little skateboards in their beds,
sleeping with their boards.
The drinking, the partying, the girls,
all that stuff is when you're coming to a head
that you're like, "this isn't fulfilling me. I can't be fulfilled by it.
It's not rad enough. It's not good enough." that's why you do that stuff.
So for them to say, "you guys were straight and lame,
and we're partying and having a good time,"
No, no. You're partying and having a good time
'cause you cannot compete with Caballero.
Man up. Man up and beat us.
Not me, personally, they always beat me.
But man up and beat my boys.
And you know, it was really, like, hard to believe.
'Cause, I mean, here are these little soft kids,
but all their integrity and all their heart was in skateboarding.
I started sponsoring most of these guys
when they were 13-years-old, and by 1990, they were 26-years-old.
They were in their mid-twenties.
And they had gone from very young,
little ne'er-do-well amateurs
to world class professional skateboarders.
We were doing close to $30 million a year in business.
At the same time,
there was issues and fissures developing between George and I.
Now that we had become successful,
we weren't seeing things the same way anymore.
Stacy's team was his life.
It was his dream. He was their mentor.
He was their brother, their dad.
And I think that was really where we started
to have the central issue, probably, between us.
I could see there were changes being made in the skateboarding industry.
It was changing from a big company industry
to a small, nimble company industry.
And I wanted us to fund companies
for the guys on our team,
like Tony and Lance and Tommy and Mike.
I wanted to make the Tony Hawk company, the Lance Mountain company,
and I wanted us to manufacture
and make them and put them in business and have a piece of it,
but it's their business. They can do it wherever they want.
And that way, it would give us a connection to evolve with these guys.
Because I knew they were gonna do it anyways.
They were eventually gonna go off and start their own businesses.
They saw me do it. Of course they're gonna do it.
Things were evolving, and we were evolving.
And I was considering moving on
and doing something else. But the one person I didn't want to disappoint was Stacy.
In my mind, I'm thinking Stacy's trying
to look out for his team, and I'm trying to look out for the company.
I'm going like, "that's not being partners in Powell-Peralta.
Then what are you doing?" and I think this just created a grinding.
It's like needing to go one way and needing to go another.
And it created a lot of animosity between us.
It was coming to an end. Wasn't gonna last.
What it was couldn't be.
It was the end of what we all did together.
In some ways, it was very devastating because we had,
in our heart, in our hopes, in our dreams, that we were gonna do this forever.
And it came to an end.
It was pretty heavy, actually.
My whole life, I saw dudes I loved come and go.
Come and--
I shouldn't even have been
in a position to have it,
much less fade away.
How do you give that opportunity back?
I mean, all you guys gave me that opportunity.
I shouldn't even have been in it, in my opinion.
I just look back on my life,
and I feel so blessed
to be a part of this whole scene.
the people we've affected.
Just because it's a passion that we have.
I spend a lot of time in the stacks in the libraries,
and you're looking at these stacks of unreadable masterpieces
that men devoted their lives, standing on the shoulders of geniuses before them.
Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica,
and all these things that-- who will read those?
How will they change society? How do they really factor into things?
And me? I was able to contribute with a lot of tricks.
Those tricks now have names.
And those tricks factor into what everybody else does.
In a very meaningful way, I have helped create
a vocabulary by which this community communicates.
I mean, you can hear people chat, listen to how skaters talk.
These are all words and expressions.
Things that we created. It's our language,
but it's also physical.
And it helps define us as individuals,
how we fit within that framework,
and it helps define the community itself.
And so, when I look and I think of the contribution
of all these geniuses,
and the smell
and the browning paper of these dusty books that no one will read,
I think that I am so rich
and what I have done has meaning.
So I don't know what that answers.
Where did we start?