if i am being totally honest it was jamie thomas - a combination of THPS being my gateway and my first proper skate buddy being a total zero-head. he showed me dying to live first (which had just come out) and we worked backwards to welcome to hell, through misled youth and thrill of it all - so JT had last part in the first four full videos i ever saw.
first video i owned myself was menikmati, though it was already a couple of years old at the time.
i went to the skateshop to buy 'sorry' - accompanied by my mum, lol - and it turned out to be about three times the price i'd anticipated having never bought a skate video before. she, understandably, regened on getting it for me. the dude in the shop, watching me visibly suffering at being so close yet so far from obtaining the holy grail, told us to come back tomorrow and he'd give me some of his old videos for free.
we did so and he gave me menikmati, waiting for the world and FSU. aside from me banging on about it all the time, that guy's generosity was my parents' first taste of the wider world of skateboarding so -fortunately for me - they always saw skaters through the 'community-minded-hobbyists' lense rather than the 'drop out and spend every day stoned at the park' lense.
i was on the look out for a new, non-THPS skater to be my fave so people would know how 'core' and knowledgeable i was. at that age, two years is a really long time, so menikmati already seemed ancient. the fact penny's footage was mostly an extra 4-5 years older still made it seem like this mysterious relic from a long lost era, so I adopted him as my fave thinking i'd made a super-original, out there choice. like those kids who get really into led zep or hendrix thinking it makes them superior to their more modern-minded peers. again, lol.
the first video that i got that was actually new was 'yeah, right'. i added gino as my joint fave because a) his part was amazing but also b) i hadn't really heard people talk about him and c) like tom penny, he had a super cool name.
so yeah, for a few years i was walking around telling people my two favourite skaters were tom and gino, as if i was some maverick skate connoisseur for liking these incredibly overlooked gems of skaters.
it was quite a while before i found out, they were literally the two most cliche, middle-of-the-road picks in the entire world.
mj, bastien, mccrank, rattray and senn were also up there early on.
for what it's worth, penny is still my fave.
Topic: First Favorite Skater (Read 7692 times)