sk8er boi
My Dad and the Skater of the Year
I don’t really get things for myself, and I never get things for my “inner child,” but when that $100 Amazon gift card from my funcle hit my account with the message “spend it on something stupid,” I knew it was time: this Christmas, at age 29, I bought a skateboard.
As tweens, you and I detested skating, despite its punk-rock-adjacent culture and inherent danger. You hated it because it was for poseurs, more about the fashion than the activity — but I had deeper issues. See, I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I grew up with a Sk8er Dad.
He came by it honestly — he grew up bombing hills and wiping out hard back in the ‘70s — but that didn’t really matter to me. It was still embarrassing. There are plenty of hobbies where you can elegantly age into being an elder statesman, but street skating is not one of them. It feels too adolescent — the desire to risk your life for momentum is the kind of fantasy that can only emerge from a teenage mind, like taking a tank to the town square or stopping time in homeroom class. Skating is specifically made for those who are young and dumb enough to think themselves invincible, and when you see your dad do it, it turns him into the teenager and you into the worried parent.
But now that I’m closer to 30 than 13 — more worried parent than teenager — I feel a growing desire to get a board and full send down the biggest stair I can find. It’s thanks in no small part to Chris Joslin.
Skater of the Year
“Chris Joslin is 29,” reads a recent post in the reddit board r/OldSkaters, “Is the future prosperous and filled with longevity?”
Despite his geriatric status (for skateboarders, at least), earlier this year, Joslin achieved one of the most legendarily “impossible” tricks in skating: he became the first person to 360-flip El Toro, an infamous 20-stair behemoth in Lake Forest, California, that has been a mainstay of daredevil skaters for decades. Thrasher Magazine’s recent video “MY WAR: Chris Joslin vs El Toro” chronicles his years-long journey to overcome the staircase and land one of the single craziest tricks of all time.
The video documents Joslin’s initial attempts at the trick in 2016, still fresh-faced and full of early-20s bravado (and with that classic greasy skater flow haircut), surrounded by skating legends and friends like Atiba Jefferson and Ryan Lopez. Over the course of an afternoon, Joslin tries the trick twelve times — building up unbelievable speed at the top of the staircase, flinging himself and the board down a gap the size of a building, and then, inevitably, crashing to the ground and busting his ass. Joslin’s a pro, and all of his falls, even the bad ones, are taken well, but each failure is punctuated by a scream, a pure, frustrated, guttural howl. He ends the first session in failure.
A few months later, Joslin returns to the stairs. Once again, he screams his way through failure after failure.
Until the eleventh try. Joslin flies through the air and miraculously lands at the bottom of the stairs, still rolling, about to accomplish his dream — when the board malfunctions. He doesn’t stick the landing.
It might have counted. For most people, it would be enough. But it wasn’t for him. He tried twice more in that session before giving up, the bruises and momentum having taken a toll on his body.
He was so close. But it wasn’t enough.
Pain Don’t Hurt
If you’re someone (like me) who mostly consumes skating passively, either as a thing you do in a video game or a thing you watch other people do in real life, it can be easy to forget how much hard, physical effort goes into even a simple trick. When it comes to a 20-stair jump, you’re looking at the kind of forces that the average human body just isn’t made to withstand.
A helpful reddit user called /u/revdudeson, a self-professed non-skater, did a little back-of-the-napkin math on El Toro in order to understand the kind of forces that went into jumping the most infamous stair set.
A vertical fall of 13.73 feet.
A horizontal leap of 17.42 feet.
The speed of impact at 19.88 miles per hour.
If you’re into joules, that’s nearly 3000 joules of energy transferred into the feet, legs, ass, and gonads every single time you hit the ground. Being a good skater — a great skater — is all about taking immense shock to your body over and over and over again and trying as hard as you can to make it look cool. When you watch a skater like Chris Joslin, even when he lands hard and yells out loud, it’s easy to forget just how much this shit can hurt.
But not when you grow up with a Sk8er Dad.
The summer you moved away for good, my family rented a small cabin near an idyllic state park called Chippokes for a weeklong getaway. It was the kind of thing that was fun for parents and misery for kids — no wifi, no AC, no appliances, and miles away from any distraction. We were certainly going to be bored. So Dad brought his skateboard.
A big paved hill separated the cabins from the community center and pool on the other side of town. You can see where this is going.
With nothing else to do, my father (age 44 at that point), decided to bomb the hill helmetless, the same way he conquered ramps and empty pools and Italian hills as a teenager, while the rest of us watched and waited from the car.
I remember knowing with absolute certainty that things would go wrong. “He’s gonna crash,” I told my siblings as we waited in the car. “Watch. He’s gonna crash.”
He gave a single push down the hill and started picking up speed immediately, the kind of speed that focuses you and intensifies your momentum and balance, and quickly he was disappearing down the hill, arms out and balancing, focused, momentum personified, the true Sk8er Dad.
He almost made it. He was so close to rolling away scot-free, hollering at the bottom of the hill, celebrating. Almost.
But at the end, at top speed, he hit something. And from the top of the hill, we saw him wobble, and teeter, and then fall, head slamming into the pavement all at once.
I don’t really want to get into all the details, but they’re impossible to forget: the first time hearing my Mom actually scream in shock, the paramedics arriving in the ambulance and giving birthday cake ice cream to my crying sister, the night spent at a friend of a friend’s house, reading my horrible summer reading assignment (A Separate Peace, the worst book of all time) in an attempt to distract myself, both from the injury and from the feeling that I had made it happen.
I did make it happen. It was my fault. By saying “he’s gonna crash” out loud, I had manifested it. By telling him he shouldn’t do it, I made him do it. By trying to be the parent, I made him the teenager, even though I was 14 and he was 44.
When we got home, we chalked the trip up to one of our many, many, many vacation failures. I announced a household moratorium on skateboarding.
Not that I wanted to do it anyway. Shit was for poseurs.
Sk8er Boi
The middle portion of MY WAR: Chris Joslin vs El Toro is, practically speaking, a training montage (you could easily fit “Push it to the Limit” over the footage of Joslin working intense weights and calisthenics). Joslin spent the nine years between his initial attempt at conquering El Toro and his most recent push building and rebuilding himself, not necessarily with the stairs in mind, he says, but as a part of maturing in general.
Joslin got sober and got shredded. He swapped his lackadaisical “flow” cut with a sharp, seamlessly buzzed skull. And while he had his first daughter, not long before his previous failed attempt at El Toro, over the time gap, he grew into an active, focused father of two children. Joslin became a Sk8er Dad, no matter how embarrassing it was.
And then, with his wife and children in attendance — not just his skating contemporaries — the geriatric 29-year-old made his last attempt at greatness.
He fails at first, as is typical. But instead of shouting with frustration after every slam and mistimed jump, the way he did in his previous attempt, Joslin instead rolls out of each failed attempt with an almost Zen-like sense of calm and focus. This portion of the video is almost anti-suspenseful: with that look in his eyes and his family in the crowd, there is absolutely no chance that he will leave without completing his trick.
He narrates his last attempt as a blackout, the experience of nothingness in his mind. It is just the pavement, the wheels, the board, himself, the long flight (13.73 feet down and 17.42 feet across, according to reddit), and the destination.
And finally….
It’s perfect. Joslin lands it. And as he does, he rolls forward, almost unconscious, before the reality hits him. He points a finger in his chest, determined, and states plainly: “I just treflipped El Toro.”
It takes a moment to process, before it turns into a howl of joy.
“I JUST FUCKING TREFLIPPED EL TORO!”
Joslin embraces his wife and his kids, whose faces glow with a moment of pure pride in their Sk8er Dad.
“You did it!” his kids beam, arms around their father.
For Joslin’s kids, watching their dad fly wasn’t an embarrassing misplacement of youth, or a moment pregnant with disaster, but an expression of something he had been working towards for his entire life. Sometimes, the only way to become truly good at something is to keep at it even after you’ve outgrown it, even after it hurts you, even after all of the peers around you have dropped out and you become the archetypal “old skater” still pushing in a crowd of teenagers.
Now, I’m not under the impression that if I had a better attitude, my dad would have been able to treflip El Toro, or even make it down that hill at Chippokes without crashing. But as a 29-year-old, I can’t help but feel a twinge of regret when it comes to the household moratorium on skating I enforced 15 years ago. I was so terrified of the prospect of harm, injury, and death, that I didn’t give myself permission to view the skateboard as something fun, something you can improve at, even at 29, even at 44, even at 65.
I don’t expect my dad to join me in my newly refound skateboard interest. He’s older now, and besides, he’s spent the intervening time getting much better at his other interests — whether cooking, editing, or playing Football Manager. But I hope he knows that every time I bring my lame white ass to Maria Hernandez Park to skate around the cool teenagers — wearing full protective gear, of course — I’m doing it because I want to be like him. I might not be a Sk8er Dad just yet, but I can be (as Ms. Lavigne says) a Sk8er Boi.
Best thing you've written. Grrrr
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