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Edison teen gains fame as streetstyler
When I was growing up in Edison, New Jersey, we, skateboarders, didn’t have skateparks or sanctioned skate spots. What we had was pavement, lots of it, and the challenge of eluding cops, jocks, store owners, burnouts, and hostile drivers. We didn’t let these obstacles hinder us. Instead, we took our quasi-urban environment: the walls behind grocery stores, the Rutgers College campus, and New Brunswick parking decks, and we made the best of it. In a community crowded with traffic jams, townhouses, industry, and malls, we considered the asphalt behind Acme prime open space.
I got my first skateboard on Christmas morning, 1984. Just a year and a half later, in June of 1986, a week before my sixteenth birthday, I was sponsored by Powell Peralta, the nation’s leading skateboard manufacturer, while attending a professional ramp competition at Mount Trashmore in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
That weekend, I joined the East Coast’s best street skaters in the Mount Trashmore parking lot for what felt like a casting call. It was a pivotal moment in skateboard history, where the focus shifted from the professionals on the ramp to the kids playing in the streets, of which I was one.