DUTY NOW FOR THE FUTURE: JASON SPEER

4 DOWN INC.
INTERVIEW WITH JASON SPEER
INTERVIEW AND INTRODUCTION BY JIM MURPHY
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JASON SPEER

Texas is the reason… With the recent explosion in concrete skateparks, it’s interesting to see how the remaining wood skatepark craftsmen are keeping their businesses afloat. Speers is a hardcore by-product of wood skate structure production, and skating and partying with likes of Dave Duncan, and grinding it out on the road with Jack Murphy and the road crew for the Gravity Games. Learning to build roundwall of wood isn’t easy, but Speers learned from the best, and has created a crew that has turned wood bowl construction into a sculptural art form. Jason’s company goes from coast to coast working to put on demos or working on bowls out East. Jason’s Four Down crew will travel to wherever the next wood project takes ’em.

“GROWING UP IN TEXAS MADE ME TOUGH. IT MADE ME SKATE LIKE A MAN AND LOVE SKATEBOARDING.”

Where you born and raised?
I was born in 1971 in Fontana, CA. I was an Army brat, so I traveled around the country, but I ended up in Oklahoma for most of my life.

What year did you end up in Oklahoma?
I was in Oklahoma around ’77.

When did you get into skateboarding?
We did a short stint in Colorado and that’s where I got my first skateboard. I was probably five or six years old. I remember my cousin and I getting this board and bombing down the hill until we hit the bottom and slammed, and got up and did it again. Once that happened, it was all about skateboarding.

Where did you live in Oklahoma?
Lawton, Oklahoma.

Did you have concrete parks to skate?
No, there was nothing going on there. There were a couple of ditches, driveways, and parking lots. There were some decent ditches. Every day after school, we’d hit it. There were about 15 of us in the whole city that skated. We’d all meet there and skate until dark.

Were you tuned in to what was going on in the outside world with skateboarding?
In the late ’80s, I started seeing the magazines and watching videos. We took lots of trips down to Texas. In ’89, I was supposed to graduate, but I ended up quitting school and moving to Dallas to pursue my skateboarding career.

Did you skate the Phillips Park?
I lived there for many years.

Tell us about the Texas scene.
I have the most respect for those guys. They taught me everything. Growing up in Texas made me tough. It made me skate like a man and love skateboarding.

Who were you sessioning with?
Mike Crum and Chris Gentry had just turned pro. They were only 16 years old then. Of course, Jeff Phillips and Craig Johnson were there. Dan Wilkes was there a little bit. Tom Groholski was there. It was all the heavy hitters. The Houston guys would come through. Those were the real skaters.

Were you skating and building shit?
I’d built a few ramps in Oklahoma. We went through three or four different vert ramps from ’85-’88. In Texas, there were nine of us that lived in an apartment in Arlington. I don’t think any of us worked.

Was that the apartment with Dan Tag and Bernie O’Dowd?
There you go. We skated and stayed up all night. We woke up in the afternoon and tried to find some food and then we’d go to the skatepark until midnight. We’d get some forties and then we’d go downtown and stay up all night.

You went to the Deep Ellum and partied?
We were partying with the stars every single night, and then we’d make the long trek back to Arlington.

Do you have any memorable party nights from the Texas days?
There was a lot of stuff going on back then. There are a lot of faded memories.

You have to party like a rock star, every once in a while.
We all do, but some guys don’t make it out of that, unfortunately. Things got pretty bad down there.

Did you split after Phillips took his life?
I took off right before that. I went back to Oklahoma and went to college. It was already bad down there, and after Jeff died, I don’t think anyone skated for a while. That whole scene kind of died away for a while.

So your building experience started from building halfpipes in Oklahoma, just trying to have something to skate, right?
We were just making it happen. My dad always worked with his hands, and he had a ton of tools. I wanted a ramp, so my dad said, “Go for it”. Through trial and error, we figured out how to do it. It wasn’t until ’88 that I saw the “Chicago Blowout” video with that time-lapse footage of the construction of a vert ramp with Paul Schmitt and Tim Payne. I remember watching that thing in slow motion for hours. I was seeing the way the ramp was cut. I was like, “That’s how you do it.” I have to give props to Dave Duncan, Tim Payne and Paul Schmitt. They were the real pioneers.

Definitely. After you left Dallas and went back to Oklahoma, were you still stoked on skateboarding?
Always. I just thought I should go back to school and learn something.

What did you study?
Architecture. I went to school for a few years and studied CAD, but I got bored real quick. Then I ended up in Winter Park, CO, up in the hills.

What year was this?
It was’92. My stepsister needed her car driven up there, so I volunteered. I was driving around one day, and picked up a hitchhiker who turned me onto a job, so I stayed the winter. I’d never had ridden a snowboard before. Those idiot snowboarders talked me into getting on the mountain. I tried that for about two months, and then I jumped off a cliff that was a little too big for me and blew my knee out. I’ve cursed snowboarding ever since then. It was fun though. Then I went back to Oklahoma and had some knee surgery. After that, I split to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Why did you go to Albuquerque?
We were driving back to Durango, Colorado and we stopped in Albuquerque and skated. That’s where I met Abe. There was a great group of guys out there. I ended up living there for about five years. Albuquerque had the ditches, a brand new vert ramp and brand new mini ramps. It was a tight group of guys, and it still is. It’s a fun place to skate, so I spent five years there. That was good times.

What were you doing for work?
I needed money, so I started cooking at this little Mexican restaurant right next to the skate shop. I became the manager after about six months. I was skating constantly, but I loved working. Then there were a couple of churches in town that wanted a skatepark built to lure the kids in to church. I thought that was a good idea, so I built a couple of halfpipes and ramps for them. Then I built some street courses for contests and kept it going. After five years, I was bored. I was ready for a change.

Did you already have your own company?
No, I was just building ramps on the side. This guy was paying me $10 an hour to go smash my fingers. I loved skateboarding and building, so it was fun. There’s a great skate scene in Albuquerque. When you built a new ramp, kids flocked from everywhere.

Did you have a backyard pool scene there?
We had some top-secret pools going, and there were few permission pools, but we had the best ditches in the world.

Tell us about those ditches.
We had miles and miles of perfect tranny ditches. You just pump until your legs burn out. You go all the way to the bottom and walk back to the top and do it again.

What about the Indian School Ditch?
The best time is the Indian School at midnight during a full moon with a couple of bottles of whiskey. Bomb that shit in the middle of the night. That’s going to turn you into a man. You try to get all the way down and hope you don’t run over anything. You try to stay off the cracks, but you never know what’s going to happen, especially after a bottle of whiskey. Me and my boys, Beatle and Ryan EP were out there.

So then you got burnt on Albuquerque?
I was ready to make a change, so I packed up my stuff and drove to California. I slept on Jeremy Henderson’s couch for a week at his brother’s house in Newport. He turned me onto a job that was going on up at Kevin Rucks’ place, the Grand Prix Skatepark. That’s where I ran into Ed Reategui, Clint Deaton and Robbie Hayes.

Were they were working with Jack Murphy?
They were working with Duncan at the time. They had just done the first Vans Skatepark at the Block. I walked into that group of guys, and it took me two years to get their respect. They thought I was just some farm boy from Oklahoma. Eddie and Clint Deaton gave me hell for about two years. Then I was working a job a few years later with Jack Murphy, and Reategui shot himself right through his wrist with a nail gun.

Oh, no.
We’re out there building this street course for the kids at a family fun park. It had go-karts and bumper cars. Eddie was just screaming and screaming and all these kids were looking at us. The nail was sticking out of the back of his arm so far. I tugged on it and tugged on it and it wasn’t coming out. I grabbed his arm one more time and just yanked that thing out. He was my buddy after that.

What was it like working on a crew?
Up until that point, I was still cutting trannys with a jigsaw. They’d pull out the skill saws and cut those trannys, and my jaw dropped to the ground. It was a great group of guys. They knew their shit. It all went back to watching that Vision video “Chicago Blowout”. Those ramps were being built exactly the same, ten years later, so I knew what to do. I wasn’t afraid to get hurt or bloody or to sweat. I just wanted to build fun skateboard ramps and then skate the shit out of them once they were done.

Did you build any bowls during that stint?
No, those guys took off for Virginia to build the Vans Skatepark. I just remember calling them every single day and saying, “Get me in.” Then they got behind schedule, so they called me in. We built a little boomerang-shaped ramp. It had a little bit of roundwall in it. Dave Duncan was there on that job. That was my first time working with Duncan.

What was that like?
Learning how to party with Duncan was a key part of it. It didn’t matter how good you were at work. It was about how late you could stay out and drink and still make it to work on time. That was a prerequisite.

[Laughs.] Duncan is a tough one to beat in that respect.
He’s definitely tough. I learned a lot in those three weeks in Virginia.

You were just doing wood?
Originally, I thought I was going to get hooked up with Carje and do concrete, but I started working with Duncan. Jack Murphy was on that job as well. Right after that, Duncan took me to another job in Mt. Hood, Oregon at the High Cascade Snowboard Camp. That was my first real roundwall experience.

What was that like for you?
That was truly amazing. It was Duncan and me with a couple of locals working out of a two-car garage with a blizzard going on outside. Duncan explained the math that was involved. He explained the compound miters, and how the templates had to be perfect. He had me write it all down because he wanted to keep it in his files. Then we built five corners. It was a boomerang-shaped bowl.

Was it as complex as you thought it would be to build roundwall?
The hardest thing was sheeting it. Any carpenter can frame the thing and make it look good. When it comes down to sheeting, you have to get every one of those sheets nice and tight on every rib. You don’t want to feel anything when you ride it. The first time, we sheeted it the wrong way. The pieces were too big. Then we re-cut it. Before then, I was like, “I’m a skateboarder. I can ride anything. It can be bumpy. It can be shitty. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to ride it.” Then I realized that I had the opportunity to make the thing perfect. I learned to slow down, take my time and make it right.

That’s how Duncan works. He’s like, “Let’s do it right. Let’s make it perfect.”
Duncan is notorious for that. He’ll scream at you all day long if you don’t do it right. He’s like, “Tighten up those seams. Let’s get it right.” He comes from a construction background. He was framing houses before he started building ramps. He’s got his way of doing things. He’s not always right, but the finished product is always right.

[Laughs.]
It’s good for me. It’s just making me better.

Where did you go after Mt. Hood?
That’s when we started doing all the Vans Skateparks. We did eight parks in two years. It was “go time”. Out of 365 days that year, I was on the road for 330 days.

As a skateboarder, were you stoked to be building rad skateparks?
Absolutely. If you love skateboarding and you build skateparks, you’ve got the best job in the world. That’s how we all felt. After two years of building Vans parks, I realized that it wasn’t all fun and games. It was big business. We did 24-hour shifts and we just loved it. We loved skateboarding and we had the skateboarder mindset. We were going to get it done. We were not going to fail. That’s the same attitude that my guys have to this day. That’s what I love about working with skateboarders.

For two years, you were building concrete parks in places that didn’t have them. Were you interacting with the locals and getting a sense of how stoked they were to be getting a skatepark?
Absolutely. We made friends for life in every town we went. That goes back to the family of skateboarding around the world. When I’d walk into these huge 30,000-40,000 foot skateparks, it was amazing. I’d never seen anything like it before. I was still baffled that I was getting paid to build skateparks. We were in Novi, Michigan, outside of Detroit. People were like, “What it this place?” We had a really good time. It was very fulfilling. We were getting to give something back to the kids. We’d been traveling around the country and skating for years, and then we got to give kids that opportunity by giving them a skatepark. They could get the idea that there was more stuff out there to skate and then start to travel.

They didn’t care about paying to skate?
At that point, there wasn’t anything else to skate. Those skateparks were like heaven. What’s ten bucks to go to heaven for two hours? Now you have a million concrete parks around the country and they’re all free. They’re trying to give the kids a nice safe place to go.

Jack Murphy was doing the X Games?
Yeah, he started with the X Games and then went on to the Gravity Games. That’s when I jumped on with him, the second year of the Gravity Games.

What’s it like to work with corporations like that?
We just put our heads down and worked. The smoke, whistles and lights didn’t even faze us. We were just building a skatepark on an asphalt parking lot. We had a blast. We went into every town like we were the hottest shit in the world. We were the skatepark builders. We didn’t even think about the pros that were coming in that the people really wanted to see.

You guys just partied and worked?
Yeah, and with those kinds of gigs, we got to experiment. Dave Leather was another guy we worked with. He’s a great carpenter, a little bit mental, but a great guy. He had a million ideas, and we got to try them out at other people’s expense.

On a job like that where you’re building a street course and you decide you want a bowled corner, did that have to get approved by the World Cup people or someone like that?
No, we’d sit with Duncan and come up with a design. Then we’d modify it and run it back by Duncan for final approval. On-site, when no one was around, we’d try stuff. We’d experiment a little bit. Some things worked. Some things didn’t.

Was there ever an instance where you’d build a little corner in this street course with some pool block?
We might have done something like that. Half of the skaters were like, “Great.” Half were like, “That’s not street skating.” You can’t please everybody. At first, Duncan was doing all the design, and then we got some pros involved. That turned into a huge mess. Being in an office with ten pro skaters trying to design something was absolutely impossible. I’d just sit there and listen. We’ve tried to put some of those ideas in place over the years.

Did you make the street courses bigger to be more entertaining since it’s on TV?
The courses were big because they tried to include skateboarding and BMX on the same course. They wanted manual pads and big tranny sections for the bikers, so they had to be that much bigger. We had these street courses with these big tranny 13-foot walls and the street skaters were like, “This doesn’t make sense. Why is this here?” They didn’t see the big picture, so we did some roundwall to blend stuff in. We got to experiment with elliptical corners and escalated corners for the bike courses.

Are the bikers picky like skaters as far as vert/tranny ratios?
Well, back then, we had two ramps. We had the 10′ and 2′ and the 9 1/2′ and 1 1/2′ for the bikes. Then we had the 10’3” 1’9”. Then the skate ramps got bigger and the bike ramps stayed the same. After a conversation with Dennis McCoy and Dave Mirra, they decided to try the ramps. Some of them hated it and some of them loved it. Then they all got used to it and wanted it bigger. Now we’re at 13′, going to 13′ 6”. They learned how to ride it and now they want to go higher.

When did you decide to split and do your own company?
When Jack started doing more events, we wanted to build custom skateparks. We were tired of sitting in the parking lot. We wanted to build custom ramps and roundwall. The jobs that he was doing just didn’t let us do that. Right before the Michigan Vans Park, I took on a side job in Texas, building up the Skatepark of Austin with the 69 bowl.

Did you have your own company then?
No, I was working with the guys that worked with Jack Murphy, like Brad Baxter and Abe Towery. We picked up some locals like Mike Kelly. We spent about a month down there building that bowl. The park had a bi-level floor. They had pulled down the wall, which was three feet taller, which made for a cool street course. It was a perfect opportunity to build a waterfall.

Were the locals stoked on the bowl?
They were. They were getting an incredible bowl, and they were only supposed to be getting a 24-foot wide mini ramp. That was all that the owner, Jamie Curtis, could afford. Then we got down there and saw an opportunity to build this huge wooden bowl. I was like, “Don’t worry about it, Jamie. You can pay me later. We have to do this for Texas. I have to do it for my friends.”

Had you ever built a bowl before then?
We’d built a bowl, but we’d never built a compound waterfall like that before. Brad Baxter and I were sitting there late at night on the computer trying to figure out how to make it work mathematically. It took a little trial and error, but we figured it out. We also figured out some secret formulas.

It’s tricky. Where the waterfall meets the hips, you have some crazy cuts.
You do. Some guys will just over cut those blocks and go back in and sand them down. You can chip away to make it perfect, but there’s math involved. It’s a process.

Is that where your CAD experience comes into play?
That helps me out a lot in designing roundwall.

Now you’re building the 69 bowl?
Yeah, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. It turned out 88 feet long.

What were the kids thinking?
“Where’s the street course?”

What would you say?
I’d say, “Kid, go learn.”

What did they do then?
They were kind of pissed, but once they learned how to pump the corners, they started feeling the freedom of skateboarding. They learned how to skate it. Kids aren’t just skating street anymore. They’re starting to skate the concrete parks and pump that roundwall. They’re learning tricks. They’re skating like we did as kids. They’re into everything. That was my gift to Texas. That was also the beginning of our specializing in roundwall. Now I’m like, “Let’s get another one. Let’s find another person that wants to build one of these.”

Were you still doing the Gravity Games?
Yeah, and then a few years later, we were doing the Vans Triple Crown events and a lot of bike stuff. Then I got fed up one summer. I said, “Jack, I’m done.” I just didn’t want to do that type of stuff anymore. It was time to do something on my own, and it was tough.

You couldn’t rely on the guaranteed paycheck. You had to get your own work.
Yeah, I had a nice little apartment down by the beach in California with my wife, and I quit my job. At the same time, I gave up my crew for the summer. After I told Jack that I was leaving, the guys wanted to go too, but I didn’t want to screw him over like that. It was the contest season. I was like, “You guys go do it. I’ll figure something out and see you at the end of the summer.” It was a tough one. We had a few gigs here and there. Nothing fancy.

What jobs were you doing? Did you have demo jobs or skatepark jobs?
We had demo jobs, but no skatepark jobs. Duncan handed me a couple of jobs here and there. That was the year I hooked up with Zumiez and started doing the Couch Tour. It’s a street course event, with a mini ramp sometimes. The first year, we did six stops across the country and back.

Who was on that crew?
It was Mike Barnes, Nathan Delong, Ben Schaub, and some hippy from Oceanside named Blackie. I brought Don Fisher on that one, too.

Look out! At that point, you had your own company and you were doing business directly with Zumiez?
Yeah, I incorporated the company as Four Down, Incorporated. Four wheels down. Then I got the insurance. That was another learning experience.

How do you deal with all the responsibility?
I get a kick out of it. I love skateboarding. I love building ramps. Skateboarding and running a business is the same kind of thing. It’s about conquering something.

Did you see the whole evolution of city skatepark building coming?
I had done one municipal job before that in Oklahoma. Working with the city was the biggest pain in the ass ever. It took the fun out of doing what I wanted to do, so I vowed never to work with a city again.

Is it profitable?
Yeah, it is. They nickel and dime you, but you put out the bid, so you’re actually nickeling and diming yourself trying to get the contract. It just wasn’t fun for me. There are a lot of guys out there that want private wooden parks. Those are the jobs that we’re looking for. Luckily, the last few years, we’ve been working full time. There were three or four months the first year where we couldn’t find any jobs. We’d do jobs at cost while we were waiting on another job to come up. We built a little left hand kidney in this guy’s backyard. From that job, we got the Volcom remodel job. Tim Payne went in there a few years ago and built a vert ramp with a little bowl on the deep side. We pulled it off the wall and bowled the whole thing in. We did another roundwall job up in Malibu, but the neighbor burnt it down before we finished, which was a bummer.

How did that happen?
I don’t know. I guess the neighbor was jealous or something. You know how those rich people are. If someone is having too much fun, they’re going to get bummed. We built this incredible right hand kidney, but before we got the final layer on it, I got the call that it was up in flames. The fire marshal said it was arson. They questioned the neighbor across the street, but they couldn’t pin him. We went back and tore it all out and started over, and then the city and the Coastal Commission got involved, and red-flagged us. That was the end of that job.

After all that labor, did the guy pay you?
Yeah, he paid us. He tried to get his money back with his insurance company, but it didn’t happen. He lost about $30,000. It was a bummer. I still feel bad for him. You make some money, you buy a big house on the hill away from everybody, and you still can’t do what you want.

How was work looking in 2003?
It was bleak. There wasn’t much going on. We started doing local shop demos to pass the time.

Did you see kids in those areas being helped by those demos? Were the demos making the shop’s business grow?
The kids definitely have a good time. We’d go out there and build these fantastic street courses and the pros loved it. They had fun skating it. It has to help the store, because it’s promoting the store. The kids go home and tell everybody that they were at the store and the next time, more of their friends show up. My whole idea was that there were guys out there doing the demo set-ups with rinky-dinky portable ramp systems. I’ve skated with the pros and I wanted to give them something that they’d actually have fun skating. We definitely stepped up the California demo thing.

Are you doing demos for hardcore skate shop owners or big time skate shops?
It’s the big time guys around here. I’ve talked with the little guys, but they just can’t seem to get it together. It’s a matter of financing. It’s not even that much. For a couple of grand, you can get a nice street course and mini ramp. The hassle is jumping through the hoops with the city, getting the permits and finding out the regulations. Then you’re dealing with the landlords of the property. The small time guys are just not at that level. They’re still working with no computers at their shops. They have a cash register and they collect the money and that’s it. I try to give them as much knowledge as I can to help them out. That holds true with anyone that wants to build a skatepark. There was one guy in Oklahoma City, five years ago, that wanted to build a skatepark, so I went with him to check out buildings. It was a four-year process. I was basically holding this guy’s hand through the whole thing. We finally got a park built there last year.

After you build a park like the Austin Skatepark, do you have an ongoing relationship with the park owners where you stay in touch with them?
Absolutely. You pick and choose whom you want to work with and those guys are the guys you want to be friends with as well. You meet a person and you know right off the bat whether or not you see eye-to-eye. It’s like Jamie Curtis at the Skatepark of Austin. He’s a born and bred skateboarder, and I wanted to help him out. He’s in contact with me now about tearing the whole skatepark down and moving it when his lease is up this year. As far as the relationship goes, after the skatepark is built if there’s something wrong with it, we’ll go back and change it for cost. If it’s something that we did wrong, we’ll fix it. All of our parks have a one-year warrantee. If they start falling apart, we’ll fix it at our expense, but that never happens. I’ve never had a ramp fall over, thank God.

That’s good.
We’re trying to make skateboarding better. In order to do that, you have to give them what they need.

I remember talking to Abe and Merk about the park up in Burlington for Burton. Burton wanted a wooden bowl and those guys were pushing for pool coping. What’s that like when you’re trying to talk to a client and they want a mini ramp and you think they should have a bowl?
You have to educate them. You have to say, “Okay guys. You want to spend ‘x’ amount of dollars building a ramp, but you want something that will be good for years to come. I can build you a 40-foot wide mini ramp, but I’ll guarantee the kids are going to get bored of it. Let’s turn it into some roundwall. Let’s make it a little bit harder to skate. Give the kids a reason to come back and learn and progress.” You have to educate them. Once they see that, then you go back and talk to them about putting pool coping in it. With Burlington, they were like, “Oh, no. We can’t do that.”

What is the rationale for people like that not wanting pool coping?
It’s more of an idea that concrete is not what they’re used to. It’s harder to skate. That’s the mindset of these people. They’re street skaters. Then you’ve got your mini ramp street skaters that want a 4-6 foot tall mini ramp. That’s all they want to skate. We’re proposing a bowl with an 8 1/2 foot deep end with pool coping. To them, that’s ridiculous. They’re like, “We’re never going to ride that. No way. Don’t even waste your time.” You have to say, “Look guys, I was a kid once. I looked at pool coping and thought it was crazy, but it’s all about progression. You can only do so many nollie flips on the flat ground and then you’ve got to start doing backside smith grinds. Then you’ve got to get that coping to bark and metal coping doesn’t bark like pool coping.” It took days to convince them. It wasn’t just me talking either. Abe Towery was out there doing what he does. Then you hear about CW and Mike Lowerie secretly talking to one of the guys in charge at Burton. I don’t know what went down in that conversation, but, miraculously, the next day there was an “Okay” on the pool coping.

[Laughs.] Did someone get threatened?
I don’t know what was said. I don’t know if anyone was threatened. I don’t know anything, but they got pool coping. They buttered up that pool coping so good that it grinds better than the steel coping.

It’s so slick, it doesn’t even feel like pool coping.
You were there. You know. They buttered it up. That was the deal. Let us put the pool coping in there and we’ll make it so you can skate it. CW did a great job on that.

Did anyone from Burton contact you and say, “You were right. Thanks.”
Yeah, we got a couple of those calls. We got a call saying that we should have done the whole bowl with pool coping. There’s another group of guys that we educated. Now they know. The spring thaw is going to happen and there is going to be a huge session out there. We’ll all be up there for it.

How do you convince people that wood will be durable through hardcore winters?
It’s just like a house. If you build it right, it’s going to last. In Burlington, we used pressure-treated plywood, galvanized nails and stainless steel screws and Ramp Armor. I think that thing will hold up just fine. We’ve done some outdoor parks that have lasted for years and years.

How many people are on your crew now?
We’ve got Mike Barnes. He’s been with me the longest. It’s Mike Barnes, Joe Flores, Abe Towery, CW, Mike Lowerie, Mike Kelly and Chris Peck.

Do you see the skatepark demand peaking out at any certain point?
No, I don’t.

What is your duty now for the future?
My duty now for the future is to make things better. If I can build a better bowl or ramp, I’m going to do it. I want to make kids happy. I want to give them the experiences that I had growing up. I just want to keep this thing rolling. If I can build another park that I can skate, then I’ve done exactly what I wanted to do. It’s all about skateboarding.

That’s all you need to say. It’s as simple as that. Is there anyone you want to thank?
I want to thank my wife for being there for me and supporting my dreams. I want to thank my crew. I’m only as good as the guys on my crew. Those guys are the best. They love what they do and they take a lot of pride in their work, and it shows. I want to thank Dave Duncan and Jack Murphy. Thanks to everybody else that wants to be a part of this business and this lifestyle. This is our reality of skateboarding. I want to thank all the skateboarders in the world, even the street skaters. I’m all right with them, too.

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