wand grau malen
translator: joseph genireviewer: morton bast (music) (music ends) (applause) so, that's what i've done with my life. (laughter) thank you. as a kid, i grew up on a farm in florida, and i did what most little kids do.
i played a little baseball,did a few other things like that, but i always had the senseof being an outsider, and it wasn't until i sawpictures in the magazines that a couple other guys skate, i thought, "wow, that's for me," you know? because there was no coachstanding directly over you, and these guys,they were just being themselves. there was no opponentdirectly across from you. and i loved that sense,so i started skating
when i was about 10 years old, in 1977, and when i did,i picked it up pretty quickly. in fact, here's some footagefrom about 1984. it wasn't until 79i won my first amateur championship, and then, by 81, i was 14,and i won my first world championship, which was amazing to me, and in a very real sense,that was the first real victory i had. oh, watch this. this is a casper slide,where the board's upside down.
mental note on that one. and this one here? an ollie. so, as she mentioned,that is overstated for sure, but that's why they called methe godfather of modern street skating. here's some images of that. now, i was about halfwaythrough my pro career in, i would say, the mid-'80s. freestyle itself -- we developedall these flat ground tricks, as you saw,
but there was evolvinga new kind of skateboarding, where guys were taking it to the streets,and they were using that ollie, like i showed you. they were using it to get uponto stuff like bleachers and handrails and over stairwellsand all kinds of cool stuff. so it was evolving upwards. in fact, when someone tells youthey're a skater today, they pretty much mean a street skater, because freestyle, it took aboutfive years for it to die,
and at that stage, i'd been a "champion"champion for 11 years, which -- phew! and suddenly, it was over for me,that's it -- it was gone. they took my pro model off the shelf, which was essentiallypronouncing you dead, publicly. that's how you make your money, you know? you have a signature boardand wheels and shoes and clothes. i had all that stuff, and it's gone. the crazy thing was, there wasa really liberating sense about it,
because i no longer had to protectmy record as a champion. "champion," again. champion sounds so goofy,but it's what it was, right? what drew me toskateboarding, the freedom, was now restored,where i could just create things, because that's where the joywas for me, always, was creating new stuff. the other thing that i hadwas a deep well of tricks to draw from that were rootedin these flat ground tricks.
stuff the normal guys were doingwas very much different. so, as humbling and rotten as it was — and believe me, it was rotten. i would go to skate spots,and i was already "famous guy," right? and everyone thought i was good, but in this new terrain, i was horrible. so people would go,"oh, what happened to mullen?" so, humbling as it was, i began again. here are some tricks that i startedto bring to that new terrain.
and again, there's this undergirdinglayer of influence of freestyle -- oh, that one? that's, like, the hardestthing i've ever done. ok, look at that, it's a darkslide. see how it's sliding on the backside? those are super fun,and, actually, not that hard. you know, at the very rootof that, see, caspers, see how you throw it? simple as that, right? no biggie.
and your front foot,the way it grabs it -- i'd seen someone slideon the back of the board like that, and i was like, "how can i get it over?" because that had not yet been done. and then it dawned on me,and here's part of what i'm saying. i had an infrastructure.i had this deep layer, where it was like, oh my gosh,it's just your foot. it's just the wayyou throw your board over. just let the ledge do that, and it's easy,
and the next thing you know,there's 20 more tricks based out of the variations. so that's the kind of thing --here, check this out, here's another way,and i won't overdo this. a little indulgent, i understand. there's something called a primo slide. it is the funnest trick ever to do. it's like skimboarding. and this one, look how it slidessideways, every which way?
ok, so when you're skating,and you take a fall, the board slips that way or that way;it's kind of predictable. this? it goes every which way --it's like a cartoon, the falls, and that's what i love the most about it. it's so much fun to do. in fact, when i started doing them,i remember, because i got hurt. i had to get a knee surgery, right? so there were a couple of weekswhere i couldn't skate at all. it would give out on me,and i would watch the guys,
i'd go to this warehousewhere a lot of the guys were skating, my friends, and i was like, "i've got to do something new,i want to do something new. i want to start fresh." and so the night before my surgery,i'd watched, and i was like, "how am i going to do this?" so i ran up, and i jumped on my board, and i cavemanned, and i flipped it down, and i remember thinking,i landed so light-footed, thinking,
if my knee gives, they'll just havemore work to do in the morning. and so, when it was the crazy thing. i don't know how manyof you guys have had surgery, but -- you are so helpless, right? you're on this gurneyand you're watching the ceiling go by, every time, it's always that, and right when they're puttingthe mask on you before you go to sleep, all i was thinking is,"man, when i wake up and i get better, the first thing i'm going to dois film that trick."
and indeed i did, it was the very firstthing i filmed, which was awesome. i told you a little bitabout the evolution of the tricks. consider that content, in a sense. what we do as street skaters is,you have these tricks -- say i'm working on darkslides, or a primo, that you guys know this stuff now. what you do is, you cruisearound the same streets that you've seen a hundred times, but suddenly, becauseyou already have something
in this fixed domain of this target,it's like, what will match this trick? how can i expand, how can the context, how can the environment changethe very nature of what i do? so you drive and drive and drive,and, actually i've got to admit, just because i was strugglingwith this because i'm here, but i'll just say it,is, i cannot tell you, not only to be here in front of you, but what a privilege it isto be at us campus, because i have been escorted offof this campus so many times.
so let me give you another exampleof how context shapes content. this is a place not that far from here,it's a rotten neighborhood. your first consideration is,am i going to get beat up? you go out and -- see this wall? it's fairly mellow, and it's beckoningto do bank tricks, right? but there's this other aspectof it for wheelies, so check this out. there's a few tricks, again, how environment changesthe nature of your tricks.
freestyle oriented,manual down -- wheelie down. watch, this one? oh, i love this,it's like surfing, this one, the way you catch it. this one, a little sketchygoing backwards, and watch the back foot. oops -- mental note right there. again, we'll get back to that. here, back foot, back foot.
ok, up there? that was called a 360 flip. notice how the board flippedand spun this way, both axes. and another exampleof how the context changed, and the creative processfor me and for most skaters, is, you go, you get out of the car,you check for security, you check for stuff. it's funny, you get to knowtheir rhythms, you know, the guys that cruise around --
skateboarding is sucha humbling thing, man. no matter how good you are,you've still got to deal with -- so you hit this wall, and when i hit it, the first thing you dois you fall forward, and i'm like, all right, all right. as you adjust ... you punch it up,and then when i would do that, it was throwing my shoulder this way ... which as i was doing it, i was like,"oh wow, that's begging for a 360 flip,"
because that's howyou load up for a 360 flip. and so this is what i wantto emphasize that, as you can imagine, all of these tricks are madeof submovements, executive motor functions, more granular to the degreeto which i can't quite tell you, but one thing i do know is, every trick is made of combining twoor three or four or five movements. and so, as i'm going up,these things are floating around, and you have to sort oflet the cognitive mind rest back,
pull it back a little bit, and let your intuition goas you feel these things. and these submovementsare kind of floating around, and as the wall hits you,they connect themselves to an extent, and that's when the cognitive mind:"oh, 360 flip, i'm going to make that." so that's how that worksto me, the creative process, the process itself, of street skating. so, next -- oh, mind you ... those are the community.
these are some of the bestskaters in the world. these are my friends --oh my gosh, they're such good people. and the beauty of skateboarding is that, no one guy is the best. in fact, i know this is rotten to say,they're my friends, but a couple of them actually don't lookthat comfortable on their board. what makes them great is the degreeto which they use their skateboarding to individuate themselves. every single one of these guys,you look at them,
you can see a silhouetteof them, and you realize, "oh, that's him,that's haslam, that's koston, there's these guys, these are the guys." and skaters, i thinkthey tend to be outsiders who seek a sense of belonging, but belonging on their own terms. and real respect is givenby how much we take what other guys do, these basic tricks, 360 flips,we take that, we make it our own, and then we contributeback to the community
the inner way that edifiesthe community itself. the greater the contribution, the more we expressand form our individuality, which is so important to a lot of uswho feel like rejects to begin with. the summation of that gives us something we could neverachieve as an individual. i should say this. there's some sort of beautiful symmetry that the degree to whichwe connect to a community
is in proportion to our individuality, which we are expressing by what we do. next, these guys, very similar communitythat's extremely conducive to innovation. notice a couple of these shotsfrom the police department. but it is quite similar,i mean, what is it to hack, right? it's knowing a technology so wellthat you can manipulate it and steer it to do thingsit was never intended to do, right? and they're not all bad.
you can be a linux kernel hacker,make it more stable, right? more safe, more secure. you can be an ios hacker, make your iphone do stuffit wasn't supposed to. not authorized, but not illegal. and then, you've gotsome of these guys, right? what they do is very similarto our creative process. they connect disparate information, and they bring it together in a waythat a security analyst doesn't expect.
it doesn't make them good people, but it's at the heart of engineering, at the heart of a creative community,an innovative community, and the open source community,the basic ethos of it is, take what other people do,make it better, give it back so we all rise further. very similar communities, very similar. we have our edgier sides, too. it's funny, my dad was right.
these are my peers. but i respect what they do,and they respect what i do, because they can do things,it's amazing what they can do. in fact, one of them, he was ernst & young's entrepreneurof the year for san diego county, so they're not -- you never knowwho you're dealing with. we've all had some degree of fame. in fact, i've had so much successthat i strangely always feel unworthy of. i've had a patent, and that was cool,and we started a company,
and it grew, and it became the biggest, and then it went down,and then it became the biggest again, which is harder than the first time,and then we sold it, and then we sold it again. so i've had some success. and in the end, when you've hadall of these things, what is it that continues to drive you? as i mentioned, the knee stuffand these things, what is it that will punch you?
because it's not just the mind. what is it that will punch youand make you do something and bring it to another level,and when you've had it all, sometimes, guys, they die on the vinewith all of that talent, and one of the thingswe've had, all of us, is fame -- i think the best kind of fame,because you can take it off. i've been all around the world, and there will be a thousand kidscrying out your name, and it's such a weird,visceral experience.
it's like, it's disorienting. and you get in a car, and you drive away, and 10-minute drive, and you get out, and no one gives a rat's who you are. and it gives you that clarityof perspective of, man, i'm just me, and popularity, what does thatreally mean again? not much. it's peer respect that drives us. that's the one thingthat makes us do what we do.
i've had over a dozen bones,this guy, over, eight, 10 concussions, to the point where it's comedy, right? it is actually comedy, they mess with him. and this is something deeper. i think i was on tour when i was readingone of the feynman biographies. it was the red one or the blue one. and he made this statementthat was so profound to me. it was that the nobel prizewas the tombstone on all great work, and it resonated becausei had won 35 out of 36 contests
that i'd entered over 11 years,and it made me bananas. in fact, winningisn't the word, i won it once. the rest of the time,you're just defending, and you get into this,turtle posture, you know? where you're not doing --it usurped the joy of what i loved to do because i was no longer doing itto create and have fun, and when it died out from under me, that was one of the mostliberating things, because i could create.
and look, i understand thati am on the very edge of preachy, here. i'm not here to do that. it's just that i'm in frontof a very privileged audience. if you guys aren't alreadyleaders in your community, you probably will be,and if there's anything i can give you that will transcend what i've gottenfrom skateboarding, the only things of meaning,i think, and of permanence, it's not fame, it's not all these things. what it is, is that there'san intrinsic value in creating something
for the sake of creating it, and better than that,because i'm 46 years old, or i'll be 46, and how pathetic is thati'm still skateboarding, but there is -- there is this beauty in dropping itinto a community of your own making, and seeing it dispersed,and seeing younger, more talented, just different talent, take it to levelsyou can never imagine, because that lives on. so thank you for your time. kristina holly: i have a question for you.
so you've really reinvented yourselfin the past, from freestyle to street, and, i think it was about four years agoyou officially retired. is that it? what's next? rodney mullen: that's a good question.kg: something tells me it's not the end. rm: yeah. every time you thinkyou've chased something down, it's funny, no matter how good you are,and i know guys like this, it feels like you're polishinga turd, you know? and i thought, the only wayi can extend this is to change something infrastructural.
and so that's what i proceeded to do,through a long story, one of desperation, so if i do it,rather than talk about it, if i do it, you'll be the first to know. kg: all right, we won't ask you any more.rm: you'll get a text. kg: right, thank you, good job.rm: thank you. thank you.