180 Thrasherwasn’t ready to appreciate skateboarding in all of it’s complexity.
You obviously had all of these other things you wanted to do
outside of skateboarding, but do you think you were scared
that you wouldn’t reach the full potential that you would’ve
liked to and therefore it might have been a subconscious way
of retreating or did you truly lose interest?
I think there were not enough amazing examples of people who do
really amazing interesting things with their skating and careers for
me to envision something that was that complex, something that was
worth going for. At this time I was 20 and I had done so much shit I
wanted to do for the entirety of my life, I couldn’t imagine anything
else really. I could imagine doing the same things, except adding in a
kickflip in five years time or going to different parts of the world.
It didn’t seem there were any other forms of excitement other than
what I had experienced at the time. I’d seen other people’s careers
and I’ve seen them repeat themselves. I wanted more intrigue.
Do you find that in the more recent years, it has become
something you could achieve or have you accepted that’s how
it’s going to be? What’s your take on it now?
It’s somewhere in between those two. The shitty part is, no, I haven’t.
I’ll repeat myself and—fuck it—it’s what I’m going to do. However,
I’ve reached another realm and I’m a different type of skater than
I’d ever imagined. I was really ambitious about studying literature,
going into academia and getting a masters up until the last semester
where I realized it would be a good thing for me to take a year off
to use my thesis work to apply to a master’s program. The way the
applications are, you have to finish your application before you finish
your thesis. I had already passed that application date but then I
realized I was going to fall back into skating this year. There was no
other way about it. I felt like I was being pushed out of the university
and back into skateboarding by society and all the powers that govern
that kind of thing.
Is that something that you didn’t want?
At the time I did not. As for now, that’s kind of hard for me to answer.
I like where I’m at right now. I’m super happy to be here but I wanted
to stay at school then and I really didn’t want to be pushed out. I
wanted both paths—but that’s anybody. I ended up just trying to
make the best of it—restructure my ideas about what it means to be
a skater and to put other key thoughts at the forefront of my mind. As
a skater, I do think of the career I’m leading and how things are going
to look. I film every day and it adds every day to the building blocks
of a career. When I was 20, the thing I was thinking about when I
was skating was a certain idea of perfection that led to those ideas
of, I’m going to do exactly what I want to do, what I’ve always dreamed
of in terms of tricks and video parts, then I won’t repeat myself. People
repeat themselves and, to me, that is imperfect. It’s a lesser form of
what they’ve already done. I’m going to put out these video parts and
be done with them. That was the ideal of perfection that was in my
mind. After I graduated and got back into skating, I’ve got to do some
restructuring. I have to look at the way I look at skateboarding as a
whole, that maybe I should try to judge less. In school, there were
some philosophers that I saw that could give me a solid foundation
of thought in the way I wanted to approach these ideas. I also took
examples from skaters such as Busenitz, someone who thinks way
less about it than someone like me at the time—thinks less but skates
more. I tried to have those kinds of people constantly in my thoughts
and whenever I would go skating, I would constantly just step on my
board instead of thinking about why I was doing it.
TAKETOMO