Darryl Grogan's section from his own, mid-1990's video, Synopsis. Check out the ollie impossible variations. For any of you who don't skate, an ollie impossible is a trick where you pop the board off the ground, and then flip it end over end, and land back on it. In the early 1980's just a couple of years after the ollie itself was invented on vert, and then on flat ground, everyone thought this trick was impossible. Until Rodney Mullen started playing around with the idea, that is.
This blog post was inspired by a video that popped up on my YouTube feed a few days ago. For 3-4 years now, I've been blogging about this crazy long recession that I think is going to really shake up life for pretty much everyone. The main wave of that recession is finally here. I was tired of writing about what I saw happening in the coming months and years. So, a couple months ago, I started a new blog called The Spot Finder, just to do something completely different, to get my mind away from economics and the future. I started putting together blog posts about BMX and skate spots, since many are now legendary, and have their own stories to tell. Doing that blog, I started getting a lot of really cool videos showing up on my YouTube feed. One of those inspired this post.
This video, "The Best Impossible Ever Done" by Metro Skateboarding, shows his take on the five best skaters doing ollie impossibles. I immediately knew there were a couple of things missing. First of all, he didn't mention that Rodney Mullen invented the ollie inpossible way back in 1983. Here's a clip of Rodney from 1983, the year he invented the ollie impossible. While he doesn't do an impossible in this clip, there's a still photo of him doing an impossible at 1:58 in the clip. To really put the the ollie impossible in perspective, Rodney had just invented the flat ground ollie, which became the single most foundational trick in street skating, in 1981, two years before the impossible. Rodney went on to be one of the most influential, and talented, skateboarders of all time, as you can see here, and here.
The other thing I noticed missing from that "Best Impossibles" video was Darryl Grogan. Who? You may be asking. I'm writing this post to tell you about an amazing skateboarder many of you, have never heard of. In the late 1980's, I was a local BMX freestyler at the Huntington Beach Pier, sessioning there most every weekend with BMX freestylers Mike Sarrail, Randy Lawrence, and freestyle skaters Pierre Andre', Don Brown, Hans Lingren, Jeremy Ramey, and whatever BMXers or skaters wandered by on any given day. One night, Mike and I were driving by Pay-n-Play, a place right by Huntington High School. There were indoor raquet ball courts, and two smooth, well lit, basketball courts out front. Both freestyle skaters and street skaters practiced there at night, sometimes, in the late 80's and 90's. So Mike and I were driving by ,and we saw a freestyle skater with a headband, and thought it was German freestyle skater Per Welinder, so we went over to say "Hi". It turned out to be another really talented freestyle skateboarder we'd never met, Darryl Grogan.
Darryl came up in the late 1980's, and was giving Rodney a run for his money in the freestyle contests of the late 80's, until the freestyle contest scene ended. So we met Darryl, talked ot him a bit, and went on our way. This was probably in late 1988 or early 1989, I think. Sometime later, Darryl showed up at the pier now and then, and I got to know him a bit better.
Much later, one day when my bike was broke, I took my skateboard to the pier to skate. While I was a hardcore, if mediocre, BMX freestyler, I hung out with skaters all the time, and skated little bit, and knew a handful of freestyle tricks, like shove-its, some footwork, and stationary finger flips.
Darryl Grogan was the only one there at the time. Before long, Darryl was showing me the basics of how to do an ollie impossible, which he excelled at. He told me to put my back foot right behind the trucks on the tail of the board, and turn my toes inward a bit. Then he showed me how to jump, and do the scoop to get the board to flip end over end. So I started trying that, and Darryl went back to practicing whatever he was working on. A hour later, I was getting the flip part, and started trying to land ollie impossibles on the my board. I gave up seriously trying them soon after, but would try them every once in a while.
About three or four years later, I did actually land 4 or 5 ollie impossibles on the flatbottom of our mini ramp at the P.O.W. House, in Westminster. It took a while, but Darryl's tips helped me get that trick eventually, though I never landed them again after that one day. For that reason, in my mind, I tied ollie impossibles to Darryl.
As a skater, Darryl was a super perfectionist, pretty typical among freestyle skaters. He talked a lot about "body mechanics," getting his body position just right to do whichever insanely hard trick he was learning at the time. Since I worked at Unreel Prductions, and had access to video equipment, he asked me to do a little promo video of him, to take to a contest in Europe. So I went out, this would be in 1989, and shot video of him at his favorite spots. Then he came down to Unreel a couple of times and I edited the clip on our "offline, S-VHS edit system. It was simple cuts editing, but Darryl was fascinated by the video making process. In the months after that, he would call me up once in a while and I'd go shoot some video of his later tricks and lines. So I got to know Darryl better in 1990-1991. At that time, he was one of the top few freestyle skaters in the world. There was talk that he might finally be the guy to beat Rodney Mullen in a contest, which hadn't happened in 6 or 8 years at that point. Then the recession happened, and they stopped having freestyle skating contests.
While shooting footage, Darryl and I would talk about how we learned new tricks, me on bikes, him on his board. For me, talking my head into believing I could actually land a trick was usually the mian issue. For Darryl, body position, body mechanics, was the main issue. He would talk about, "OK, I put my foot at a 45 degree angle, and my shoulder down at this angle, and..." He would keep playing with body position until he got if figured out, and then he'd pull things that were ridiculously hard. Back then, 1989-90-91, he was doing ollie impossibles to cross foot landings, and he'd STOMP them. I remember one night, he was doing some impossible variation, and he kept landing in a nosewheelie... by accident. Yeah, impossible to nosewheelie, by accident, in about 1990. He didn't even realize he was doing it. I told him, and he thought about it. A couple weeks later he called me to go shoot some video, and told me he was doing impossibles to nosewheelies, on purpose. His level of control was just freakin' insane.
That year, Unreel got shut down, and I moved to the main Vision building to work, things were going downhill at Vision, and for skateboarding in general. I quit Unreel that summer, and started doing freelance work. At some point, Darryl and I headed off in our separate ways, and I didn't run into him for 3 or 4 years. Then, in the mid 90's, I went into a skate shop for some bushings or something, and there was a video playing. I asked who's video it was, then the guy at the shop said, Darryl Grogan's video. I looked him up and got back in touch. In the years when we'd been doing different things, I wound up working as a crew guy on TV shows in the summers, and Darryl went to film school and was becoming a real cinematographer, shooting actual film, not video. He started doing skate videos, shooting on a film, which only a few people, mostly Stacy Peralta and Don Hoffman at Unreel, had done.
With skateboarding, and the rise of street skating in the early 90's, Darryl had taken his freestyle tricks to a street board, and was doing some super technical combos and lines. The video at the top of this post is one of those segments, as is this one. There are a couple of Darryl's tricks that I think just should NOT be humanly possible. One of those is the handstand with hands on the sides of the board, rolling forwards, to the hand flip out. The other one is an ollie impossible to one foot landing. If you ever want to go to the hosptial for a couple of weeks, try impossibles to one foot landings. There are a dozen ways you could wreck yourself missing that trick. Those are not possible. But Darryl would stomp them.
Once again, I wrote a big long post for one basic reason. If you talk about the skaters doing the best ollie impossibles in the history of skateboarding, Darryl Grogan has to be on that list. Now you know.
If you want to learn ollie impossibles yourself, here's Daryl's how-to video, linked below. After he gave me tips on doing impossibles, he went back to lining his back foot straight, not toes pointed inward, like initially told me. Here are the links to four of his videos, all shot on film and produced by Darryl, in the 1990's. If you're a 90's era skater, you'll recognize several of the skaters in his videos.
Since those days, Darryl has gone on to make his living as a cinematographer, filmmaker, and Handi-cam operator. Here's some of Darryl's film work from recent years. There are a lot of action sports people who have found work in the TV world, Darryl's been doing high quality work, behind the scenes for over 20 years now.
Synopsis (1995?)
Cold Sweat (1996)
Live Animation (1997)
Time Lapse (1998)
Yes, Darryl still wears the "fisherman's hat" as I used to call it. It's just his style.
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