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Edison teen gains fame as streetstyler

The Home News—Sunday, September 7, 1986

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.

Surrounded by a company of technically sound and polished street skaters—my style was erratic, expressive. While others tried to put themselves across—I put every ounce of my being into every trick. It was apparent to many industry insiders that I wasn’t from Dogtown, and that I didn’t surf. Coming from the Northeast, I was more B-Boy than Z-Boy—I didn’t fit in, and they didn’t know what to make of me. However, skateboard legend, filmmaker, and talent scout for the Bones Brigade, Stacy Peralta did. He saw something in me, believed in me, and asked me to join the team on the spot.