What happened to the kids you started skating with?

[cherry]

One of them became a rep for a snowboard brand. Pretty rad I remember the 32 bus pulling up to his house when we were kids.

Most of them have kids and don’t skate anymore.

One of them is a “vintage” reseller and probably makes more than me but that shit irks me save the nice stuff for people who actually can’t afford new clothes

[Chavo]

UPS driver, barista, insurance rep, gang/murdered, gang/jail, drug trafficking/jail, VP brokerage firm, Army lifer/UPS driver, retail, contractor/fraudster, Army Warrant Officer (retired), and petty thief/car washer. Only the stockbroker and chief warrant officer attended college and both moved to affluent neighborhoods during high school.

[Juan Valdez]

Just doing a general survey here.  Do any of them still skate regularly or at all?  Prison?  Drugs?

Small group of like 5 for me.  One of them still skates a little, but is all into Qanon type shit.  I think two of them are tweakers and one's currently in prison.  The dude who taught me to ollie is always in and out of prison too, probably addiction related.

One of my old friends will take profile pictures with his skateboard, but hasn't actually skated in years.  Always tries to talk to me like we were serious business back in the day.  He makes a lot of comments like, "do kids even skate street anymore!?!??".

Surprisingly most of the guys I grew up skating with did pretty well. With the exception of one who committed suicide, the others are now an officer of the law, a railroad worker who was a photographer and had photos posted in transworld, a lab technician, and a musician.


After reading some of the other posts I realized how lucky I was with the guys I grew up skating with.

[sle_epy]

Very interesting thread, brings me back to my youth. Insane how many of you report that at least one got 'distracted' by drugs. Same happened to the best guy from our crew. He cleaned his mess up afaik but doesnt skate anymore. My brother pretty much stopped when I got better than him no joke. Others lost interest as most of us moved away. My oldest friend is a lawyer and skates from time to time when we see each other. I am sure we would skate a lot if we lived in the same city again.

I feel like every mid sized city has this story about a handful of guys. Sometimes it's true that they could have "made it". My question, is does it happen at the same rate in places that never really got consistent industry attention until not so long ago?

Like in the midwest etc. It seems like in the early to mid 2000s there were a lot of good skaters who just didn't get any industry attention because of their location prior to social media (as far as I've been told).

I can see dedicating yourself to it for 15 years, becoming totally disillusioned Bec all you'll ever be is a home town hero, and getting into some bad coping mechanisms if you're addiction prone. Would be cool to see some sort of doc deep dive on the era that this was more of a thing(is there one out there?).