Slug Gone Bad
On most of my adventures, nobody gets their teeth knocked out.
The Bones Brigade odyssey as portrayed in Animal Chin was just for fun. These summer tours had some sense of that, but these guys were working; working really hard.
I got to see them over an extended period of time, earning their keep. Back in Santa Barbara, you might think that there would be people working at the Powell manufacturing facilities who would resent the kind of money the professional riders were making. At this time, Tony Hawk was making over $100,000 a year, mostly from getting a cut of those hawk skull logo decks sold. I'm not sure that George and Stacy were drawing that much. But nobody among my friends at Powell begrudged them their situation at all. We all had steady reliable incomes doing jobs we knew we could continue to succeed at.
The riders had to compete for the creds that would help them sell their boards, and they were doing something physically very dangerous. A major injury could happen at any moment, and up and coming talented younger competitors were getting harder to beat, and for those and innumerable unforeseen reasons, that record high royalty check they got last month might be their lifetime highpoint, the beginning of a downhill slide to has-been. What pressure. It was obvious that their fame and glory came with an uncertain future and great risks on many levels. Two of our professional skaters, Tony Hawk in vert contests, and Rodney Mullen in freestyle, were unbeatable for years, their competitors only shooting for second place. For each of them, that fact took a lot of the fun of it.
So I wouldn't recommend being a pro skater. It's hard work, with uncertain payoff. For a skater, it was probably a better deal to be a worker bee in the Powell beehive in Santa Barbara. Maybe the best deal of all was JW's deal; son of a bee in the Powell beehive. Access all areas. No reasonable person at Powell begrudged our pros' paychecks at all. Heck, no, those guys were risking it all, more power to them.
Our Carpinteria brigade had been limited to scenes around our local area. Our skate safari adventures had been bumped up a level as we had gotten to know Chris Iverson, the core of Powell-Peralta's R & D. It wasn't long before Chris was joining in on our skate safaris, he knew all the cool ditches and parking lots, and as we ranged farther and farther south, he was able to gain us entry into some places we could never have gotten to.
Since I no longer needed a pickup truck to make my livelihood, I traded it for a dark blue Dodge station wagon we called "Midnight". Super dependable slant six engine; easy to work on, it was our bus to all these skate adventures. I was the driver, a scout, and the photographer. The early trips took us to the San Fernando Valley, to known locations of ditches and banks; an abandoned house with an empty swimming pool in Sepulveda, and on east out toward San Bernardino to Mt Baldy Dam.
The destination was a big spillway that had a very skate-able full pipe coming out of the base of the dam. It was about 20 feet in diameter. You had to cross a wide dry river bed and climb through some fences to get down into the big rectangular drainage channel, then walk maybe 75 yards up to the full pipe.
One particular day we were up there, Johnny, Ves, George Totten, Chris Iverson and I. I was sitting there changing the film in my camera, when "SMACK !!! WHIZZzzzzzzz." Something hit the side of my knee and buzzed off. It really hurt. I pulled down my Levi's to get a look and there was a growing welt on my left leg, just above the knee. It was starting to look like a small jelly donut on the side of my leg, puffed up with a bloody spot in the middle. We had seen some kids with a .22 rifle out plinking when we were crossing the riverbed. We started shouting for them to stop shooting, and after awhile they poked their heads over the fence above the full pipe and said they were "Sorry, oops and good-bye."
You know, sometimes I think I'm too easy going. It wasn't until we were sitting in a restaurant in Uplands a few hours later that I felt any anger toward those kids. If that had hit me or someone else in the side of the head or the eyeball, it would have been a far more serious event. It wasn't, and I had just laughed it off. Now, my swollen jelly donut throbbing, I realized; the normal reaction would have been to get mad. Too much of a Buddhist by this time to sweat the small stuff.
Looking through the photographs of that day, there was an odd phrase in the graffiti on the wall: "Slug Gone Bad." Yup.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
The Bones Brigade odyssey as portrayed in Animal Chin was just for fun. These summer tours had some sense of that, but these guys were working; working really hard.
I got to see them over an extended period of time, earning their keep. Back in Santa Barbara, you might think that there would be people working at the Powell manufacturing facilities who would resent the kind of money the professional riders were making. At this time, Tony Hawk was making over $100,000 a year, mostly from getting a cut of those hawk skull logo decks sold. I'm not sure that George and Stacy were drawing that much. But nobody among my friends at Powell begrudged them their situation at all. We all had steady reliable incomes doing jobs we knew we could continue to succeed at.
The riders had to compete for the creds that would help them sell their boards, and they were doing something physically very dangerous. A major injury could happen at any moment, and up and coming talented younger competitors were getting harder to beat, and for those and innumerable unforeseen reasons, that record high royalty check they got last month might be their lifetime highpoint, the beginning of a downhill slide to has-been. What pressure. It was obvious that their fame and glory came with an uncertain future and great risks on many levels. Two of our professional skaters, Tony Hawk in vert contests, and Rodney Mullen in freestyle, were unbeatable for years, their competitors only shooting for second place. For each of them, that fact took a lot of the fun of it.
So I wouldn't recommend being a pro skater. It's hard work, with uncertain payoff. For a skater, it was probably a better deal to be a worker bee in the Powell beehive in Santa Barbara. Maybe the best deal of all was JW's deal; son of a bee in the Powell beehive. Access all areas. No reasonable person at Powell begrudged our pros' paychecks at all. Heck, no, those guys were risking it all, more power to them.
Our Carpinteria brigade had been limited to scenes around our local area. Our skate safari adventures had been bumped up a level as we had gotten to know Chris Iverson, the core of Powell-Peralta's R & D. It wasn't long before Chris was joining in on our skate safaris, he knew all the cool ditches and parking lots, and as we ranged farther and farther south, he was able to gain us entry into some places we could never have gotten to.
Since I no longer needed a pickup truck to make my livelihood, I traded it for a dark blue Dodge station wagon we called "Midnight". Super dependable slant six engine; easy to work on, it was our bus to all these skate adventures. I was the driver, a scout, and the photographer. The early trips took us to the San Fernando Valley, to known locations of ditches and banks; an abandoned house with an empty swimming pool in Sepulveda, and on east out toward San Bernardino to Mt Baldy Dam.
The destination was a big spillway that had a very skate-able full pipe coming out of the base of the dam. It was about 20 feet in diameter. You had to cross a wide dry river bed and climb through some fences to get down into the big rectangular drainage channel, then walk maybe 75 yards up to the full pipe.
One particular day we were up there, Johnny, Ves, George Totten, Chris Iverson and I. I was sitting there changing the film in my camera, when "SMACK !!! WHIZZzzzzzzz." Something hit the side of my knee and buzzed off. It really hurt. I pulled down my Levi's to get a look and there was a growing welt on my left leg, just above the knee. It was starting to look like a small jelly donut on the side of my leg, puffed up with a bloody spot in the middle. We had seen some kids with a .22 rifle out plinking when we were crossing the riverbed. We started shouting for them to stop shooting, and after awhile they poked their heads over the fence above the full pipe and said they were "Sorry, oops and good-bye."
You know, sometimes I think I'm too easy going. It wasn't until we were sitting in a restaurant in Uplands a few hours later that I felt any anger toward those kids. If that had hit me or someone else in the side of the head or the eyeball, it would have been a far more serious event. It wasn't, and I had just laughed it off. Now, my swollen jelly donut throbbing, I realized; the normal reaction would have been to get mad. Too much of a Buddhist by this time to sweat the small stuff.
Looking through the photographs of that day, there was an odd phrase in the graffiti on the wall: "Slug Gone Bad." Yup.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com