I feel a lot of people got interesteĭ in skateboarding because of the Rodney Mullen videos in the Tony Hawk video games. I was mid-pogo and heard someone say to his friend, “Wow, why don’t we practice that trick?” And his friend says, “Because it will look lame.” That was the end of the conversation, and I landed my pogo. I was skating at a skate plaza and I was doing pogos and other freestyle tricks. Well, I am not sure that I am able to compete at a pro street level yet. But if we throw you into that mix, you can compete on their level as a top pro street skater and you can pull 15 360s. If you take 300 of the best street skaters in the world, there is no way any of them are doing 10. Nobody’s counting at a street contest – they’re just like “Oh, he’s spinning … oh, he’s stopped spinning.” Sometimes it’s just satisfying to be able to go into a street contest and spin 10 360s. It’s all about being able to do anything that you feel like you should be able to do. Can you explain to me as a teenager facing a tremendous amount of peer pressure, you chose to do things that many in the core street skating world would consider uncool – including wearing a helmet. I’ve been involved with skateboarding since 1975, and I think that’s where the growth is going to have come from. The reason is I find the magazine industry seems to be focused on core street skating, and Concrete Wave is way more open to all types of terrain and types of skaters. I chose to conduct this interview on behalf of Concrete Wave, but I could have done it with my own magazine (Concrete), and I chose not to. And when they come off the board and don’t hurt themselves, they feel great and much more confident. Some are reluctant but eventually they do it. I try and get all my students to jump off their board and fall properly. A lot of kids want to skate, but they don’t want to fall – and that’s not really an option with skateboarding. When I teach a kid how to skate, I am showing him or her how to push, but also how to slow down and how to bail. In fact, it took a 13-year-old introvert to create the flatland ollie. You teach skateboarding what do you show that first-timer?Ī lot of people don’t realize that it took skateboarders 30 years to invent the ollie. An ollie is a hard trick, and it takes time to learn. Being Canadian and with hockey in our blood here, I know that when you put a kid on the ice on the first time, he’s not going to put the puck in the net. [ Do you think the industry has portrayed skateboarding as being rather difficult to get into? I mean, just take a look at what’s out there on YouTube. But I think people have a hard time calling themselves a skater until they can ollie. Or you can choose to longboard and do it for speed – you may never learn to ollie or kickflip. Before that you just ride around for fun. I think that if you are riding a popsicle-shaped board, you feel pressured to learn ollies and kickflips, and you have a hard time calling yourself a skateboarder until you can do those things. But your story shows that you don’t have to succumb to what the crowd wants. The first thing that comes to mind is that almost 100% of skaters out there feel that you have to learn to ollie first. It wasn’t until I was 8 that I could ollie, but I was flying out of the bowl 6 or 7 feet high when I was 7 years old. This is where I really got the feeling of the board, and it stayed this way for a number of years. So my first tricks were tick-tacks and learning how balance the nose and tail. With respect to my first tricks, I was thinking kickflips and ollies, but my body couldn’t really perform those kinds of movements on an adult-size skateboard. Well, when I started skateboarding I was only 4 years old. You can be old school, new school – you seem to adapt to everything. You are the most all-around skater I’ve ever seen. It was because of the park, but I visually got to see skateboarding at a young age. So, did they take you because of the skatepark or because of the park? Andy Anderson Picks up his Fingerboard at Blade Fingerboard Park. There was a nice park around the bowl as well. It wasn’t there to skate – I think it was more of a subconscious thing. I was born in North Vancouver and my parents took me to the Griffin Bowl when I was 2. I want to talk to you about where skateboarding is and where it is going and how you are going to play a part in it. For me, Andy truly personifies the best of what skateboarding represents: freedom to ride, freedom to explore, but most of all the freedom to be yourself. When Kevin told me about Andy Anderson, a skater who effortlessly blends street, freestyle and vert skating into one incredible package, I was amazed. Kevin was instrumental in helping bring my book The Concrete Wave: The History of Skateboarding to life, and we’ve been friends ever since. Hard to believe that’s almost 20 years ago. I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin Harris back in 1997.
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