(copied from IFFS forum)
(article appeared in Big Brother, 2000?)

Freestyle 
By dave carnie 

Where I grew up in Cupertino, Near San Jose, we had one of the biggest vert ramps in Northern 
California during the mid-‘80s. The sessions in the woods on “The Mush Ramp” as it was known, 
were huge. Every big name pro at the time skated the ramp at least once, and the regulars included
Steve Caballero, Rob “the Barn” Roskopp, Jeff Kendall, Bod Boyle, Steve Douglas, Corey O’Brien, 
Ffej, etc. We were really lucky to get to skate with the best skaters at the time. Curiosly,
though, the guy whose land the ramp was on, My friend Thomas chose to confine himself to a small
patch of concrete in his driveway and hop around on his freestyle board like it was a pogo stick.
 
I could never understand the allure of freestyle. To me, it was nothing more than an annoying 
section in every skateboard video that I had to fast-forward through. It wasn’t really skating.
Kind of like fingerboarding. It was for squares. They were the nerds of skateboarding, but just
like in the movie Revenge of the Nerds, It’s the nerds who have the last laugh. Not only do a 
small gaggle of freestylers own a major chunk of the current skateboard industry, but their
solitary tinkering created the entrée portion of todays menu of tricks. Thus the story of 
freestyle is a mixture of revulsion and awe. 

Before the discovery of vert and the thrill of weightlessness, skateboarders enjoyed simply
spinning around on flat ground. Hang tens, wheelies, handstands and 360s were as exciting as 
it got until pools and parks came on the scene. Some, however, clung to the flat like a drunk
with the spins, insisting that it was still a challenging and interesting area to explore on 
a skateboard. These were the freestylers, and before the daffied their way down the long,
flat road right out of skateboard town, they enjoyed a small amount of popularity. There were
always a couple of pictures in the mags, maybe a small part in a video and a contest here and
there, but freestyle died around 1990 because, like a mime exploring the insides of his invisible
prison, the freestyler didn’t appear to be doing anything. They turned the skateboard into a 
Rubik’s cube and made it a puzzle that they would sit one place for hours trying to figure out.
They were like mathematicians who wouldn’t leave the chalkboard until the problem was solved.
That kind of patience and discipline doesn’t appeal to your average teen and, thus made it very
difficult to market. Only a small group really cared about it. Yet, despite its unpopularity,
the freestyler saw his small patch of concrete as a battleground with limitless possibilities. 
To deal with the challenges that the flat ground presented, the freestylers developed elaborate
techniques that, even then, looked pretty darn silly. Their curious little board, for instance,
were meticulously designed and set up for skating in place, Though their boards weren’t 
accesserized any less than your average vert “bumper car” board of the day, their attention to 
detail went much deeper than their equipment. I visited Rodney Mullen, the undisputed king of 
freestyle, to talk with him about some of the freestyler’s habits. 

When I walked into his office at Dwindle Distribution, he greeted me, laughed silently
and rubbed his hands together like a fly before heartily taking mine. I’ve always thought
of Rodney as kind of a nerd, and he really is kind of a nerd, but after hanging out with him
for a dday, I was forced to admit he’s a really fascinating weirdo. He’s got that kind of 
intense mad professor quality about him that draws you to him and makes you want to ask, 
“Just what the fuck is going on up there?” 

The most fascinating, or appaling, thing I learned about freestyle was how anal retentive 
these guys were. Rodney readily admits to being rather tedious when it comes to freestyle 
but swears there were others who were worse. He had a very rigorous practice schedule, for 
instance, that for a skateboarder seems completely foreign. I mean, one of the reasons I skate
is because there’s no practice, but Rodney would religiously skate for two hours every weekday
and five on weekends. 

Each practice session was performed alone and followed a rigid agenda. It started out with a 
20-minute warm up where “consistency didn’t matter.” The warm up was then followed by similar 
length slots of time dedicated to “drilling tricks” and runnig through the “routine” (they
weren’t called runs in freestyle). Each section of practice was timed on his Casio wristwatch,
even the water breaks, to the second. Rodney says he still finds himself checking his watch 
while skating. At the end of the day, the results of each session would be logged in a journal.
He would note foot placement, rate his consistancy, jot down new trick ideas and give the 
practice an overall grade. 

“There was a German guy, though, that outdid me,” Rodney said about his extensive note taking,
“He would make graphs of the weather every day in his journal.” (Read the next sentence with
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voise) “The dark weather here in Munich lends my a sinister quality 
that I will never be able to duplicate in California.” 

When I was a kid and played hockey, we had to share our time with figure skaters, and as I sat
talking to Rodney, I realized that there were a lot of similarities between freestyle and 
figure skating. They both practice a routine that is choreographed to music and spend a lot of 
time trying to get each move just right. They also both glide around like fruitcakes, spinning
in one place, striking effeminate poses while wearing funny clothes. The freestylers costume,
by the way, was a touchy subject, and I was never able to get much of a response out of anyone
about why they dressed the way they did. 

Their ensembles were simple, yet they were deeply upsetting to everything that was considered
cool about skateboarding. My theory is that since the majority of the freestyle population 
seemed to come from Europe, they adopted that continents varied styles. Their bright t-shirts 
are no doubt directly influenced by the attire found on the slopes of the Swiss Alps where blond
men with white headbands in pink jumpsuits, grippnig green poles with yellow gloves, dart down 
the slopes with their identically dressed wives following close behind. Their influences were
broad, however,, because the tiny little shorts they wore were obviously a tribute to the elderly,
overweight German men who wear nothing but grape smugglers while sunbathing on the shores of 
Danube. Walking around in public in a small, bright shirt tucked into a pair of Daisy Dukes is 
very unsettling to a man. Don’t be surprised if you see me sporting this outfit in the future. 
Even more impressive are the knee high St. Pauly girl socks, often stuffed to the brim with 
soccer shin pads. The whole rig was of course, topped off with the mandatory sweatband that lent
them the look of the European tennis star. (Rumor has it that a Per Welinder sweatband sold for
$500 on eBay.) My favorite freestyle accessory, though, were the pennies they ingeniously taped
to the end of their fingers. 

Not all freestylers were cut like dorks though. Don Brown, former English freestyler, insisted
that I call Per Holkenekt, the reputed bad boy of freestyle. When I called Per though, it was
very early in Sweden, and he was hungover in a tent somewhere in the woods and unable to put 
together a complete sentence. I’m sorry I didn’t accept his invitation to call back later, but
I found the first phone call to be all I needed. Per Holkenekt is still the bad boy of freestyle.
 
Shooting the photos of Rodney was quite an experience. Rick and I tentavely asked, for fear of 
offending him, if, maybe, he could, kind of, do some, like sort of, old-school freestyle tricks
for the article? “Oh, yeah.” He said with the same enthusiasm he’d had all day, “I can still 
do all that stuff. It hasn’t left me,” and no it hadn’t. 

When asked what I wanted for a photo, I suggested some sort of 50/50 variation where you stand
on the truck with one foot under the nose and kind of kickflip out of it.. “Like this” he asked.
Bam he makes it first try. “Uh yeah,” I said. “or I can do this,” and he whips himself into a 
casper, spins, flips out of it, lands solidly on the rail, kicks out of that and rolls away. 
“Or do you want something like this”: He takes a short push, grabs the nose and spins, a rolling
540 fingerflip. “Uh, that was pretty cool.” It was amazing He made every thing first try. And 
it was just on his regular street board. His precision and board control drove me crazy. I kept
trying to just stand on the rail and flip out of it, but couldn’t. It made me want to cut my 
hair and shave. 

Skating with Rodney is a rare privilege these days. I imagine it always has been, Freestylers
have always tended to lead a monastic existence, skating alone in their basement, in an empty 
parking lot or tennis court, anywhere far from people. I always enjoy the energy that comes 
from a session, but as Per Welinder explained, “You don’t have to be confined to a ramp. You 
don’t have to listen to your friend go, ‘Lets go here today’ as a freestyler, you were on your 
own for the most part.” 

As gay as freestyle seems on the surface , theres’ something romantic about the solitude of the
whole act which reminds me of why I got into skating in the first place: because it feels good.
You temporarily abandon everything everything and just skateboard. The feeling one gets from 
just being on the board is ineffable (ah, ineffable—you don’t know how long I’ve been waiting 
to use that word), and you can’t get it from someone else and It can’t be captured on film. 
I should mention that although their reticence is admirable in our starstruck society, its been
suggested that the real reason why they skated alone wasn’t because of some Zen-like devotion 
to skateboarding, but because they were afraid someone was going to steal their new tricks. Like
someone was going to be peeking around the corner. Apparently freestylers had really big egos. 
The reason skating with Rodney is so rare now, though, is because he’s so busy runnig the A-team.
IN fact, whats really weird is that you can’t skate with any of the top freestylers, because 
they’re too busy running the industry: Steve Rocco, who had the first pro freestyle board, 
along with Frank Messman own Dwindle Distribution (Deca, Blind, City Stars, etc); Rodney run
the A-team; Per Welinder is part owner of Birdhouse; Don Brown and Pierre Andre own Sole 
Technologies (Emerica, Es, etc); Reggie Barnes runs Eastern Board Supplies; Kevin Harris does
Ultimate Skateboards in Canada; Urban Supplies in Europe is owned by Christian Seewaldt and
Jorg Ludwig; Jean Marc Vaisette is behind V7 Distribution; and Per Holdenekt, once a distributor,
now owns a skateshop in Sweden. The biggest companies and distributors of skateboard products 
are all owned by freestylers. Is there some sort of freestyle conspiracy? I asked Don Brown
why he thought freestylers were such good businessmen, and he said, “I think it’s because we 
were such nerds and didn’t get involved with girls or drugs.” I think it’s because they spent
so much time upside down doing handstands that their brains had a better supply of oxygen, 
thus helping them think clearer. 

Their ability to think, along with their dedication, might also be why freestyle is the biggest
influence upon modern skating, both vert and street. Tech skating dominates today. Flip tricks
are nearly mandatory in every pro’s repertoire, and it’s because of those skinny little dorks 
on the tiny boards. They’re the reason why the level of skating is so amazing right now. They’re
the reason why skating is booming right now. 

When I asked Per Welinder what he remembers as the best thing about freestyle, he said, “I think
of freestyle as being completely on my own, waking up in the morning, going to a huge parking 
lot somewhere sweeping it clean, and then riding for hours with no one in site. That was cool”
 
I dare you to do the same thing, Just once, all by yourself and without your dumb little buddies,
take your board, skate to an abandoned, flat area and just skate around by yourself. Just skate.
Wear a headband if you need to. Who knows, you may even invent a really cool trick that will 
change the face of skateboarding forever. 

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