Rodney Mullen on getting up again

"What we do is fall."
- Skateboarding pioneer and legend Rodney Mullen

The first time I ever rode a skateboard was at my new neighbors' house shortly after my family moved to Laurel Street in Willard, Ohio in 1976.  I was nine.  This kid Jeff pulled out a thing called a skateboard he said his dad made for him.  It was flat, the shape of a small ironing board, and made from pressed aluminum.  There was no grip tape.  The edges were bent over with some nice craftsmanship.  It had steel roller skate wheels mounted on the bottom.  Jeff set it on these flat rocks that formed a broken walkway to their front door.  He skated across the bumpy rocks easily.  He asked it I wanted to try.  I pushed off, went about a foot, the front wheels crabbed in a crack, and I fell hard on my knee.  It hurt like hell.  I got up and said, "Skateboarding is dumb."  I never intended to do it again.

A year later, after saving my measly allowance (after candy purchases) for nine months, I bought my first skateboard, a green, plastic Scamp board.  I've been skating on and off ever since 1977.  In 1986, a decade later Rodney Mullen taught me how to do pressure flip style kickflips, the non-ollie original version.  I landed the first few on his board on night at The Spot at the Redondo Beach Pier.

But I wound up being a much more serious BMX guy.  I got into it in 1982, raced a while, and then freestyle became my thing for the next 20+ years.  The only reason I don't ride every day now is my weight gained while taxi driving and my lack of a bike at the moment.  I'm working on both of those, and I'll session again in a few months or so.

In 1984, I was out in the street in front of my best friend Darrin's house one night.  I was trying to learn can-can brake endos.  It's a simple trick.  I had been doing curb endos and brake endos for a few weeks at that point.  But taking my left foot off and stretching it over the top tube to the opposite direction just didn't work.  I just couldn't get the coordination down.  At one point, I pushed my leg over while balancing on the front wheel. somehow the bike slipped out form under me, and my feet kicked sideways up in the air.  I was only a couple of feet off the ground, but I landed with my right hip bone hitting the end of the pedal with all my weight behind it.  It was not a bad bail, it just hurt like hell.  I rolled off the bike cussing.  "That's it," I said, "Fuck this freestyle crap.  I QUIT!"

I slowly stood up and hobbled around, whining about the pain in my hip.  For about fifteen minutes, I gave up BMX freestyle forever.  After sitting down for a while, though, I decided to give it another try.  I got back on my bike, and finally pulled off a few decent can-can brake endos.  That's the last time I can remember actually "quitting" riding. Right now I don't ride for the reasons a mentioned, but I haven't quit.  I'm on a hiatus.  I'll ride again.  Giving up riding for good is incomprehensible at this point.
In the years after that night I "quit" because of hip pain, I went on to ride with most of the best riders of the 80's and early 90's at some point.  I wrote or had photos published in 7 BMX magazines.  I've published 40+ zines.  I produced and/or edited 15 bike, skate, and snowboard videos.  I've worked on the crew of over 300 episodes of a dozen different TV shows.  All of those things happened because I first got into BMX freestyle.  None of those things would have ever happened if I had actually given up riding that night in 1984 when I landed on my hip trying a pretty easy trick. One of the many things I've learned from bike riding and skating is that when you fall, you get back up.  Simple to say.  Hard to do on many occasions.  But after a while, it becomes a habit.  After a much longer while, it simply becomes a part of who you are.

I've had a lot of really crazy stuff happen in my life.  You know, little things like getting hit by a Jeep while riding my mountain bike, having a top MMA fighter try to throw me out of my taxi because I wouldn't run over the guy who he just had a bar fight with, or the time I was homeless and a young mountain lion crashed into my campsite.  You know, those weird little things we all deal with from time to time.  By the time those things happened, getting back up and trying again was just my nature.  It wasn't easy, especially through some of the homeless days in Cali and 18 hour long days driving drunk idiots in my taxi.  But I kept going.  Rodney Mullen kept going when his hip locked up.  I watched Tony Hawk try that 900 11 times in 1999 at the X-Games.  He got back up an landed it.  Danny Way at the beginning of the video above.  Mat Hoffman for the last 25 or 30 years.  Some, like me, dealt with weird situations.  Guys like Danny, and Mat, and Tony and many many others dealt with debilitating injuries and unfathomable physical pain.

Why do so many people from the action sports world go on to be talented and successful in so many other ways after the actual sports?  Because, like Rodney says above, "Falling is what we do."  So is getting back up. 

At 14:22 in the clip below, Mat Hoffman tries a trick and bails.  Then he gets up and tries again...

Mind baffling TED Talk by Skateboarder Rodney Mullen

It just occurred to me that I might be the only homeless person who's had a published interview with a person who's done a TED Talk years later.  My life is filled with obscure things like that.  Actually, Rodney has done several TED Talks.  Groups of super intelligent, high achieving techies, scientists, business people and others show up in rooms like this and willingly spend 18 minutes of their precious time to listen to a skateboarder.  Why?  Because Rodney is well known as one of the most innovative people in action sports, not to mention the whole world.

Yes, I know Rodney kind of jumps around in this talk, and comes across like a somewhat scatter-brained genius.  That's because he is a somewhat scatter-brained genius.  It's a little hard to follow.  But he brakes down skateboard tricks into little groups of movements.  Once you learn a basic group of movements, a trick, then you can either add variations to that trick, or take that trick to an entirely new type of terrain.  In doing this, skaters (and other action sports people) continually innovate, and add to the collective base of tricks.  The community respects these contributions (mostly), and those contributions then live on long past the time you came up with them, and continue to evolve.

I first met Rodney in August of 1986, at a place we called The Spot, just north of the Redondo Beach Pier in California.  I had just started a new job at Wizard Publications, a BMX magazine publisher, and my new co-worker and roommate Lew said, "You gotta meet this skateboarder Rodney, he's amazing."  Lew and I went to The Spot to practice our flatland BMX freestyle tricks on a good sized brick area.  After we'd been there for a couple hours, Rodney rode up on this rickety, old, black beach cruiser bike he called Agnes.  Where we would just start practicing our tricks, Rodney prepared to skate.  He taped his fingers, checked over his board, and stretched.  It was the first time I met a skateboarder who actually trained.  Then he did some basic, but still hard, tricks to warm up.  Then he skated, alone, for two or three hours.

At one point, he stopped to take a break, and Lew and I rode over to say "hi."  Rodney was staying with then washed up skater Steve Rocco for a few weeks.  Lew introduced me, and we talked for a few minutes.  Rodney was kind of quiet, really down to Earth, and obviously really smart.  After meeting him that first night, I started hanging out after I was done sessioning, and watch Rodney skate.  We started talking, and hit it off.  So I got to know him over those three weeks or so, and then later that fall when stayed at Rocco's for another month.

FREESTYLIN' magazine, where Lew and I worked, was covering skateboarding at the time, as well as BMX freestyle.  So I got the chance to do a short interview with Rodney, and he even got a photo on the cover of that issue (below).  BMX freestyle and skateboarding drew a weird crowd of people who generally felt like outsiders to "normal" life.  Some of those guys were the total crazy daredevil types.  But hanging out with Rodney, I found it was possible to read big books, be smart, and still be part of the BMX/skate world.  The more introverted, intellectual skaters and bikes often invented technically hard tricks.  Those tricks were often taken to bigger and crazier version by other riders and skaters.  That's where the community aspect of action sports, which Rodney speaks of at the end of this talk, comes into play.  No one person in these "sports" is "The Best," and everyone can contribute to the scene.  You can read my 1986 interview with Rodney Mullen.  I couldn't get that to load today.  If you can, it's in the skate section of the magazine near the middle.