In Transition
Dropping in with VETERAN pro skater Andy MacDonald
FTER 20 YEARS OF ABUSING IT, professional skateboarder Andy MacDonald put so many scuffs and dings and scratches on his five-foot-eight, 165-pound frame that he finally wore out most of its parts.
“You do it enough and all the tendons and ligaments get stretched out, and eventually you gotta get them tightened up,” he grins matter-of-factly. “I had to go in for the 500,000-mile tune-up.”
At 32, however, the eight-time World Cup of Skateboarding champ’s trade-in value is still pretty high.
Aside from continuing to clean house at contest after contest, he’s launched his own line of skateboards and gear, penned an autobiography, toured as a motivational speaker (including an opening gig for Bill Clinton) and had video game characters based on him.
MacDonald joins other legendary skaters, BMXers and motocrossers in a romp through 25 cities across America on Tony Hawk’s Boom Boom HuckJam Tour, the first traveling national arena tour to headline athletes from all three sports. MacDonald and Tony Hawk lead the tour’s dream team, which includes a cornucopia of decorated professional athletes, including skaters Lincoln Ueda and Sergie Ventura, BMXers Mat Hoffman and Dennis McCoy and freestyle motocrossers Drake McElroy and Brian Deegan, to name a few.
In its third year, HuckJam incorporates a million-dollar serpentine of ramps, loops and kickers that sends the athletes soaring from one end of an arena to the other – often times inverted – in a circus-like spectacle of freak acrobatics. New to the set this year, an extended 30-foot roll-in will allow the athletes to drop in at high speeds, launch entirely over the set’s centerpiece – a massive vert ramp –and pull some of the sickest tricks ever seen in these sports. “That’s part of the challenge with the HuckJam Tour,” MacDonald explains from his San Diego home after a long day of practice.
“Every year we need to one-up ourselves.” He’s been with HuckJam since its inception in 2003 and knows just how difficult it is to trump your-self when you’ve already trumped yourself countless times, not to mention the laws of physics. But this year, MacDonald and crew push the performance envelope once more. And in addition to extended ramps, bigger air and better stunts, HuckJam also throws in some pyrotechnics for good measure.
“You know, lights and mirrors,” MacDonald laughs. “It’s all lights and mirrors anyway. And just to make it that much more appealing to watch, there’s a little fire. Just throw in a little fire and it’s all good.”
A tour of this magnitude shows extreme sports at their most accessible ever; skateboarding has grown enormously over the past few years in a way that no one would have predicted – especially not MacDonald, who started skating in the mid ’80s and witnessed the sport’s snail-paced growth into the ’90s (he didn’t turn pro until 1994, the same year skateboarding at large went legit with Don Bostick’s founding of World Cup Skateboarding).
Now, thanks to events like HuckJam and X Games and an atomic-sized explosion of media attention, squeaky-clean Tony Hawk rivals Michael Jordan for mom’s favorite role model. Now skateboarding is seen as a bona fide sport. Now skaters are seen as real athletes – eons away from the bum delinquent street punk rap they used to suffer. That doesn’t necessarily mean skateboarding will land an Olympic slot any time soon. In fact, that’s a hot issue of debate, drawing rhetoric from every angle in what’s become a multidirectional tug-of-war between purists, advocates, athletes and national and international organizations. At this point in the sport’s popularity, however, it’s questionable whether skateboarding needs the Olympics more than the Olympics need skateboarding.
“I think it would just go a long way as far as legitimizing our sport – it’s already in the mainstream – but legitimizing it in such a way that we’d start to get treated more like the athletes in other sports,” MacDonald argues, specifically citing the difficulties in obtaining health insurance for pro skaters. “Not only that, it would make our sport more accessible. As an Olympic sport, you get all the sponsorship money to help develop your sport, meaning we get to build more skateparks so there are more places to [skate].” Olympics or not, cameras or not – even HuckJam or not – ”No matter how big skateboarding gets,”
MacDonald smiles, “there will always be those core kids who go and find a backyard pool to skate because they love skating.”