Slam city jam 2002ish I was 14 and met Ryan Smith. At the time I was really stoked on his skating and went up to him to get my board signed. You could tell he really didn't want to talk to me and just grabbed the board to sign it. I told him how stoked I was on mystery or something like that and he muttered a half assed thanks while looking in the distance. He then finally looks at me and asks if I want to buy his deck. I said sure and gave him 40 bucks. He gave me the deck then quickly walked away towards whatever was in the distance. I felt kind of shitty, he clearly just wanted to make a quick buck for beer money or something. On the bright side it was my fist 8 inch deck which got me stoked on wider boards so I was able to move past the tiny board trend sooner then my friends.
Same year I see rodney mullen chilling with his back against the fence and I get his attention to sign my board. He gives me a big smile and motions to toss it over. I'm telling him how he's my favourite skater and all that (I grew up on rodney mullen vs daewon) and I'm fanning out. He tosses it back over with the same huge smile and I'm continuing to talk to him. He just keeps looking at me with the same unchanging smile but never says a word back. He hasn't said anything the whole time, we're still just looking at eachother akwardly, so I say something along the lines of, "well...see you later" and I just walk off feeling confused. The conclusion in my 14 year old mind was that Rodney Mullen was in fact deaf and I didn't know, I had never seen any interviews of him or anthing. The way he just kept smiling and not reacting at all to what I said was the same way my friends deaf mom looked when I went to her house. I probably went a good 5 years thinking he had a disability of some sort. I hear him talk endlessly in interviews now so I have now idea what it was all about, maybe he couldn't hear me over the park noise? We were literally a meter apart and it wasn't that loud. Either way it was really confusing at the time.