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The
Mutt: How To Skateboard and Not Kill Yourself
Rodney Mullen with Sean Mortimer
Published by Regan Books
276 pages
Trade paperback
This is a first
of it's kind for Mumble. Sure, we've brought you book excerpts, but
this is a book book excerpt: an actual chapter from an actual
book book that we hope
you'll actually take the time to read.
You've seen Tony
Hawk's Occupation: Skateboarder that was co-written by Sean
Mortimer, right? Well, The Mutt is Sean's second book
published by Regan, and it's a similar teaming up of pro skateboarder
(in this case, Rodney Mullen) and writer (that'd be Sean) to pen a
biography that people like you should be interested in reading. It was
released four years ago and somehow we missed it back in 2004 and just
found out about it a couple of months ago. Perhaps because, like the
story that Rodney tells of his father wishing his love for
skateboarding would go away, for some reason Regan didn't show this
title much love.
But the release
date is irrelevant. If you like skateboarding and it's history, if you
want to know about the dude who invented most of the tricks that have
gone down on skateboards over the past 20 years, and how he almost
didn't get to, you're going to want to read The Mutt.
Here's chapter
12 to whet your whistle...
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CHAPTER
12: STORM WARNING
“With all the talent you
have you could be a major league baseball player or a pro golfer,” my
father reiterated one morning, in one of his bad moods. Sometimes he
made remarks like this, which seemed complimentary but were really
double-edged. True, he was saying I was athletically gifted, but he was
also emphasizing a very different message—that skateboarding was a
waste of my time. He’d often tell me that Sara’s surfer friends, who
used to skate on my old driveway ramp, would grow up to be bums.
With my high school graduation only a year and
a half away, my father began to have serious doubts about my ability to
cope with the world as an adult. He wanted me to get on the “right
path” toward being a doctor, dentist, scientist, or professional
athlete. The parental leash tightened on me.
The scrutiny of my shortcomings suddenly
returned, and once again skateboarding took the blame for any of my
deficiencies. On the one hand, he was proud of my discipline, but on
the other he was annoyed by my success, which was pressuring me to
focus on what he believed to be the wrong pursuit.
FLATGROUND OLLIE-PROP
POP
In 1982, I went to California for the first of
three summer contests, The Rusty Harris contest in Whittier. I opened
my run with a new trick I had learned, the flatground ollie.
Alan Gelfend, another Floridian who skated
ramps and bowls, had invented the first no-handed aerial in
skateboarding’s history back in 1977. It’s impossible to overstate the
importance of this trick, which was named after Alan's nickname,
“Ollie.” To be able to make your board do an air using only your feet
was mind-blowing at the time, and skating might easily have petered out
due to lack of progress if nobody had invented this trick. (This is the
same trick that allowed Tony Hawk to get higher airs by grabbing later.)
I always liked the way the trick looked, and
was impressed by the unique thinking behind it. On ramps you could
scoop your tail and keep your momentum. You still had to guide the
board 180 degrees with just your feet, but I began dissecting the
trick, taking it from a vertical plane to a horizontal plane. The trick
didn’t translate well, because the scooping mechanics of it totally
fell apart when you had to go straight up from a flat surface. But I
noticed that Alan drilled his rear trucks back so that he could hit the
tail of his board quicker. Freestyle boards were so much smaller and
lighter and the tail and wheelbase shorter, so that my tail already hit
the ground fast.
Years earlier, I had invented a set-up trick
that could get me into position on the nose of my board. I popped my
board into the air and drove the front down so that I landed with the
nose resting on the ground and my body leaning forward. That solved my
scooping problem, because I realized that I could already pop my board
up, but it was such a severe see-saw motion that I wasn’t sure how to
level it out at the top of the pop and land on all four wheels.
One Sunday afternoon, after trying different
techniques, I just backed my front foot towards the tail, hit the tail
harder, and dragged my front foot up the board to lift it higher and
slowed down the seesaw motion of the trick, so that by the time I was
descending, it was level. The seesaw motion was the essence of the
trick.
It was easy. Once I had the foot placement
figured out, I practiced doing the trick higher and higher. In less
than an hour I could pop a foot off the ground.
I was happy that I had solved a problem, but I
wasn’t that impressed with the trick. It was neat, but it was also sort
of boring. To me, it served as a key that opened the door to an
unlimited number of new tricks. Now, if I could pop high enough and
give myself enough time, I could complete tricks airborne—and that
offered a world of opportunity. It was as if I’d been given a whole new
perspective on skating because the plane on which I could skate had
just doubled.
Years later, people credited the flat ground
ollie with sparking street skating, since it allowed you to pop up
curbs and keep cruising down the streets uninterrupted. More
importantly, the flatland ollie was a bridge between freestyle and
vert, and when you mixed the two, modern street skating became
possible. I was blown away when Tony wrote in his autobiography that
“Rodney Mullen figured out how to ollie on the flat ground and street
skating wouldn’t exist without the ollie. Every time you ollie you
should get on your knees and thank Rodney or take him out to eat if you
see him skating around Los Angeles.”
In 1982, nobody had even coined the term street
skating. At first it was actually called “street style.”
I never named it the flat ground ollie, and
when it appeared in Thrasher magazine as a Trick Tip, it was called an
“Ollie prop-pop.”
I remember showing it to Stacy before the
Whittier contest. He made me do it over and over again so that he could
figure it out for himself. As usual, he laughed.
After winning the contest, Stacy congratulated
me and asked me if I wanted to ride for Independent trucks. He had
ridden for Tracker, as I was at the time, but he wanted to spread his
team out between the two largest truck companies to avoid the
impression that he was affiliated with one of them. I didn’t care.
Whatever Stacy wanted was fine with me, plus Indy made really good
trucks.
He took me on a trip to San Francisco, where
Indy was based. I had a chance to meet Fausto, the owner of Indy. (He
was also the owner of Thrasher magazine.) Fausto always wore a
fedora—his trademark—and was surrounded by shady rumors of Mafia
connections. Mofo, Thrasher’s head photographer, shot a picture of me
popping an ollie, and in a few months it was on the cover of the most
popular skateboard periodical in the world.
Transworld Skateboarding would become the other
main skating magazine. It was started by Larry Balma, who also owned
Tracker trucks. Transworld was preparing its first issue that summer,
and a rivalry began to grow between the two magazines and truck
companies. Adding fuel to the fire, Tracker was out of San Diego, in
Southern California, while Indy was located in San Francisco. So there
was a bit of Nor Cal vs. So Cal attitude floating around.
I was paid a staggering fifty bucks a month by
Indy, but to me it was pure gravy. I deposited my Powell checks and
spent my Indy checks. After saving up for a few months, I carefully
studied the models at Radio Shack and finally bought a medium-sized
ghetto blaster.
PORN MAGS, 360S, AND
RADIO STATIONS
I went home after winning a contest in Pomona,
California, but a week after my fifteenth birthday I flew back to
California to skate in the last pro freestyle contest of the year. It
was held toward the end of the summer at Del Mar skatepark, Tony Hawk’s
home park since Oasis had been shut down. Tony was the youngest kid on
the Bones Brigade, a year younger than me, and his parents offered to
let me stay at their house during the Del Mar contest. I flew into L.A.
and hooked up with Stacy, who put me on a train heading south, where
the Hawks picked me up. In the two years since the Oasis contest where
me and Steve had watched him learning ollie to grab airs, Tony had
turned pro, along the way developing the longest list of tricks in vert
skateboarding. I watched him goof around at the park, and immediately I
was blown away by the progress he had made in such a short time. He was
peerless now.
I recognized that he was the future. You could
spot his genius in seconds; he looked so fluid and relaxed, while other
skaters seemed forced and unnatural on their boards. I couldn’t believe
that anyone could achieve such mastery as a skater, never mind in such
a short period of time. He was an extremely smart guy, and you could
see that skating was an extension of his intelligence just by watching
the way he learned a trick.
Apart from winning contests, Tony and I had a
lot in common. We were both called robots, and we both felt like
outsiders in skateboarding. Being outcasts, we related to each other
immediately, and I quickly discovered how smart he was. His whole
family was sharp: his mom was on her way to earning her doctorate and
his dad was a jack of all trades. Tony also had a self-deprecating
sense of humor that always made me laugh—especially from a guy who
seemed so gifted.
Academics and intelligence were such focal
points in my house that I automatically zeroed in on those aspects in
other people. Here was a kid who recited the lyrics of songs he’d heard
on the radio after hearing them only once, and who did math problems
for fun. Even before I knew he had a 144 IQ (I read this in his book,
he never told me) I could tell he was different from the average
talented skater.
I noticed how most pro skaters didn’t always
embrace Tony as one of the guys. Here was this kid—literally a kid—who
was destroying older skaters with his peerless vert skating. And that
had to hurt the seasoned pros. Nobody could keep up with the tricks he
created and he cranked out one after another. He’d think of tricks
while he was going to sleep and make a list of ones that he had to
figure out how to land.
I also met one of Tony’s friends, Greg Smith,
who was an amateur freestyler. In my mind, Greg personified the
California kid—he had dyed blue hair and wore quicksilver Jam shorts
that went past the knee, which were quite avant-garde in comparison to
the Daisy Dukes most skaters wore at the time. His mom was an awesome
half-Cherokee woman, one of the most giving and supportive persons I’ve
ever met.
Greg eventually turned pro and became a
successful chemical engineer later on, but what really blew me away
back then was his porn collection. Penthouses stacked next to
Thrashers; XXX videos stacked neatly beside his TV—right out in the
open. Greg reasoned that everybody liked it, so why should he have to
hide it away? Steve, Tony, and Greg all had a sort of freedom that I
had never dreamed of. Granted, the porn collection seemed to be taking
it a bit far—I cringed when his mom would walk right by it—but the way
they lived seemed unbelievable to me. Whenever I noticed that
free-spiritedness of theirs, I felt like a fish inside a tank, looking
out with curiosity at them.
Tony’s home life was the opposite of mine. The
condo his parents owned seemed like Disneyland to me, with people
always laughing, cracking jokes, and poking fun at each other. (They
all possessed an acute sense of black humor.) But more than anything
else, the house was permeated with support. If Tony had been obsessed
with lawn bowling instead of skating, his parents would have been
behind him 100 percent. His mom even seemed happy that I was skating
well.
To me it was the perfect family. The Hawk condo
didn’t have the Wild West feel that Steve’s house did, but it was a
free, open, wholesome place. I loved how the Hawk family members talked
to each other. They seemed like friends talking, all of them on the
same level, giving each other equal consideration.
His parents loved the fact that I was obsessed
with skating, but they noticed what was going on underneath my surface.
Mrs. Hawk once said, “Rodney was the most stressed-looking boy I ever
saw.” She did everything she could to make my time at her house
relaxing. She also went to every skateboard contest she could and
watched her son win that Del Mar vert contest and me win the freestyle
contest.
Transworld Skateboarding covered the contest in
their first issue. “Then came THE MUTT to give another clinic,” they
wrote. “One judge gave him a perfect 100. The rest gave him 98s and
99s. A voice in the crowd asked what he did wrong. As a trend setter
making all the new moves—which he created—he should have been given the
‘Comaneci’ score.”
Don’t ask me what “Comaneci” means. I had to
look it up in the dictionary but still couldn’t find it. Steve placed
second and Kevin Harris third.
Going home after the contest sucked, but I was
getting used to regularly visiting California, which was like a massive
decompression chamber for me. So long as I had the California carrot
dangling in front of my nose every few months, the stress at home was
easier to deal with.
Before I left for Florida, I recorded a few
audio tapes at Tony’s house of the local radio stations, commercials
and all, so I could play them at home as I went to sleep or when I
skated.
My father wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about my
summer of victories. It reminded him that I was aiming my talents in
the wrong direction.
“You’re a big fish in a really small pond,
Rodney,” he said. “I know it means a lot to you, but before it gets too
late, I think you should set your sights on something else.”
That summer was the first time the life of a
priest became attractive to me. I knew I could handle the discipline
required of the priesthood, and I figured it would be possible to
transfer my passion for skateboarding over to the church. I had already
read the Bible three times, and the idea of studying all the time,
obeying a strict code, and having all the extraneous stuff taken care
of while I dedicated myself to God fit me well. What attracted me most
though was the idea of not having to deal with anybody, being able to
totally focus on my faith. I imagined I could just study, constantly
intensifying my biblical interest, analyzing each page down to a
microscopic level. That’s what I’ve always loved—studying. Whether it’s
skateboarding, the bible, or math problems, I love focusing in until
the rest of my world fades away. I figured I’d take my Casio watch with
me, the only remainder from my past life.
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