The legend of Danny Way.

THE SANDS OF TIME ARE FICKLE. In skateboarding, heroes come arid go like played-out shoes. Through the years, names of legends like Logan, Olson, Peters, Alva, and Hosoi are memorable for their stamps on their eras. Danny Way's stamp on the '90s will never be forgotten, and his path will go unattacked. Where is he going in skateboarding now? Mega.

Dear ladies and gentlemen,

Danny Hay.

NOT DANNY'S BROTHER DAMON--NO WAY, Danny Way. Way back when a skateboard was rollerskates nailed to a two-by-four, no one would have jumped out of a helicopter. No one would now, either. For what? That's not safe or legal! Plus people have a hard time thinking on their own, including myself. Because of Danny pushing the envelope, well, let's just say when you think of Tony and come up short on power, Danny fills that for sure. You know he'll get it done. He's got enough Dan Sturt experience to kick the dog shit out of whoever would like dog shit kicked out of 'em. Danny's full on his way when it comes to breaking any social circles and records. So, when you think of who's done the most for skateboarding, don't, 'cause that's for Tony. Danny can do whatever it takes. You try going to Canada and getting some French pig's butthole and tits sewn surgically into your kneecap, and then you try the barrel roll. Danny's fucking great and if you can read this, I love you.--Jason Jessee

You've been pro for 13 years now...

...Fourteen.

What gives you the drive to still kill yourself everyday?

Fourteen.

Eighty-nine? Hawaii?

Yeah. Fourteen.

Ollie to fakie?

Ollie to fakie.

OK, well, that's not the answer.

I have nothing better to be doing I guess. Skateboarding is it. I've already committed to it.

You've already committed to skateboarding?

I've already made my commitment. It's a life-long commitment.

That's the way skateboarding is.

That's right. The people that I grew up looking up to, that's the kind of thing that was imbedded into my head that it's definitely a life-long commitment.

If it isn't you're just fooling yourself.

Yeah. You're just wasting your time.

Who are those people that you first looked up to?

Well, my all-time favorite is of course Christian Hosoi. I grew up looking up to Gator too, I lived in San Diego--Linda Vista, California--and Gator was from the town right next door. But anyways, we all grew up skating at--he was a bit older than me, but I grew up skating at Del Mar Skate Ranch watching guys like Gator. I'd see Hosoi there occasionally, but watching Gator, I'd say, they're kind of on the same level in a lot of ways.

Gator's line selection was incredible. He'd get speed out of things and you're like, where are you coming from with it?

People didn't realize--maybe people did, but I think Gator was ahead of his time.

Disasters off three-inches of nose.

He was the guy that had all the tricks, but he also had all the style.

How did you react when vert died?

It was painful in the fact that there was nowhere to skate vert. I grew up skating the street as a kid; most of my buddies that I grew up skating with all became street skaters and some of them became pro street skaters, It wasn't like some new thing, where I had to go down there with something that I hadn't already been doing for a few years before the transition really happened. I probably started street skating in 1986 or 1987, right when the hazard plants and the ho-hos and shit were coming in. Then it kind of took off. I was lucky to have a bunch of friends that were into it so I was always around it. So it was a little easier for me to get into.

You weren't as big as you are now.

I was a little skinny kid.

What's it going to take to make vert more popular again?

Obviously for some people who watch TV, they might respect vert skating, but they're not the people out there buying vert products or boards or whatever else makes it possible to make it a career for somebody, or a sport. I don't know what it's going to take. There's a lot of people out there who are just uneducated about what's fun to do on a skateboard because they haven't had the opportunity to experience it. I just hope that people wake up a little bit and look beyond what they're used to doing or seeing. Everyone's on the same path in a lot of ways, and there's got to be some people out there who are going to get bored or they're going to get curious to whatever else is available. Hopefully that'll motivate some people to try and skate vert, but it's easier for me to talk about it like that. Maybe other people don't have the same view I have on it; definitely by far I would say it's the funnest part of skateboarding that I've ever experienced. It's pretty cool to not have to push around, but to be able t o generate your own speed by pumping.

When you first learn that, it's one of the best feelings.

Yeah. And like I said, it's hard for people to relate because they've never experienced it. But I would like to see more people give it a shot. They don't really know what they're missing.

If people get through getting slammed all the time, it can open a lot of doors.

Exactly. I just hope there are some guys that influence the kids out there that, we'll just throw a name out there...even Stevie Williams. Whoever goes out there and throws in a vert shot here or there. They're all capable of doing something but I feel like it's obviously the pros that influence the kids, that's what the kids are going to want to do, and right now they're being influenced to want to skate street and skate ledges.

Well it's partly because it's so accessible, Danny. You know that.

Yeah, it depends where you're at in the world. But if you've got a vert ramp near your house it's not like you have to drive around looking for a spot, and you're not going to get kicked out. If it's there it's there. There are a lot of people that don't use them even though they are there. But they'd rather sit around and drive in their car all day and get kicked out and deal with that crap.

Because skateboarding is very humbling. A lot of people want to be involved in skating but they don't really want to take the hits.

Skateboarding has always had its trend cycles of what's cool and what's not. And obviously street skating is more accessible and I don't think people would have ever thought that street skating would get to the level that it's at now, as far as popularity goes. But hopefully that cycle will come around again and people will start to wake up.

I wish people looked at it more like I look at it-it's not street, it's not vert, it's not anything. It's called a skateboard, and we all ride one. It's not like you differentiate the terrain you ride. I know that there are a lot of people out there who can relate to what I'm saying, but there're a lot of people who don't. And it doesn't make sense to me to put so much effort, time, and commitment into something but not experience it to the fullest.

That's a good paint. I like that. When you skate the big jump stuff, how often can you do that? What's the body preparation?

That new ramp that we built, I only skated it for a month.

Do you do it once a month? Do you skate it every three days?

Not everyday About three days on, three days off, 'cause I get too beat up.

Everyday for a month?

You get really worked, right?

Yeah. I mean, towards the end it started to get a little easier. I was able to fall and knew what to expect. But the first few gos I got ripped, man.

It looks kind of like snowboarding, but it's not.

Yeah. Obviously the tricks are similar to snowboarding tricks.

But they don't have the heelflip 360. They've got bindings.,

They can't do anything with the board, obviously. But a lot of the stuff I did over that gap felt somewhat--I'll just say I was used to some of the motions 'cause I used to snowboard a lot and some of those tricks I'd done on my snowboard already, and over bigger gaps where you had to learn to spin slowly. Some of those tricks were a little easier for me just because I had that snowboard experience.

When you go out there to skate is there anybody you could call up and say, "Hey, come out and skate with me." Or is it a solo mission?

No, I like skating with other people. It's just like any kind of skating, I'm sure everyone knows that they feed off of their friends or the people that they are around. And it works the same way with that; it's just that I don't have too many friends that are ready to go there. There have been a couple guys that have been skating up there: Jason Ellis and Jake Brown.

They can get some on it?

Yeah. Ellis threw down some stuff the other day and it just blew me away. I couldn't believe it. And Jake, he just doesn't care.

He goes so high.

He's got a great attitude right now. The way he thinks is kinda similar to what I'm thinking. Like, if there's an opportunity to do something that you haven't done before, then you've got to take advantage of it.

Did you ever do The Loop?

I've never had the chance to do The Loop.

When you think of how skating is portrayed in the mass media do you think that it's gone off-kilter?

People have let their guard down in trying to keep the picture of the sport out in the mainstream. Sometimes people get enticed by money and get lured into certain things that don't necessarily portray skateboarding to the mainstream in the best way. But there aren't a lot of opportunities that come along like that so people just jump on it, and it's enticing because these deals don't happen everyday. So these people get excited when they do come along and they take the money. I'm not trying to say that it's wrong, but for my own personal self-esteem and morals... I'm not saying I would never do anything in the mainstream, but I wouldn't do it unless I had the opportunity to control how it came out and looked.

The creative end of it?

Yeah. To me that's displaying who you are to the whole world.

That's what we've been fighting against for so long.

Yeah. I know what my skateboard beliefs are, and that's been the soul of me. I mean, I'm content with where I'm at and how much money I make doing what I do. If I had the opportunity to do some of these things and I didn't have that creative control, and I was offered a lot of money to do it, I wouldn't do it because--like I said before, skateboarding is a life-long commitment. When I'm 50-years-old I want to be a part of skateboarding. I don't just want to be some dude that blows myself out and then people forget about me in 10 years. It's not about taking advantage of those opportunities. It's about controlling what's happening, and making sure people get to see skateboarding and perceive it in the way that we all know it. That's important to me.

Like you said, it's a life-long commitment. You wake up in the morning and who's the first person you look at? Yourself.

People might think we're psychos to be that committed, but I don't know; it's been a part of me my whole life.

With DC you guys have wakeboarding and snowboarding and all that stuff; is skateboarding the main focus of DC?

We don't have wakeboarding. Let's just get that straight. DC, obviously, skateboarding is the foundation of everything that goes on there. Everything stems out from what skateboarding brings to the table. Skateboarding is why DC is a company and we'll never forget that; although, yeah, we're going to obviously do as much as we can as a company and to succeed as a business, so we cater to these other sports like snowboarding and motorcross and surfing. But at the same time, it all stems down to the roots, and that's skateboarding. We all know that, we'll never forget that. You lose that and you lose everything. You lose that and you lose your soul. Then you might as well just jump out in front of the semi driving down the street.

As a father of two kids now...boys?

Two boys.

Names?

Tavin and Ryden.

Do you push them in any way, or as a father do you just want them to do what they like?

I'm sure they're going to decide what they're going to do on their own. My whole thing is, I want to give them as much opportunity with the things that I think they would like to do in the future, give them those resources or the tools in order to pursue. If it's a skateboard or a motorcycle or if it's a BMX, I don't give a shit--it's whatever it is. It's fine with me and there's been no pressure about skateboarding or with any of the stuff I've put in front of them. I've just been making sure that they know the tools are there if they want to use them. My oldest son Ryden, he's just turning five. He just started really skateboarding, and we've had skateboards sitting around since he was born. And I ride with him on the ramp all the time. He knows how to ride a skateboard, but he really didn't pick the thing up on his own and want to actually go skate down the driveway by himself until just a couple months ago. He just started picking the board up. Now he'll go outside and he's out there by himself skating ar ound the driveway. But he's been into riding motorcross. I got him on a motorcycle at three. It doesn't really matter to me, like I said.

My goal is to give them what tools they need so that they can live the life that I live, instead of having to do it some other way. If they can take something at that young of an age and do something with it and not have to work a nine-to-five job, or whatever the issue is, then I want to make sure I put that out there for them. And if they decide they want to work a nine-to-five job or live a different life, that's their deal too.

When you look back on all the people who were there through your life, people and skaters that didn't make it, does that trip you out? 'Cause I look back on my life and people I knew that were great skaters just faded it. How do you burn so bright and then say fuck it?

Man, skateboarding's a vicious world. It seems like there's a lot of opportunity in skateboarding, but it's not as much as people think There's only so much to go around and there are so many people that are doing it, there're only so many people that are good at it. It's easy to get caught up in, and once all this stuff starts coming together it seems a lot easier. Nowadays it's so easy for someone to want to take you out. There are a lot of guys that I've grown up with through the generations of skateboarding that I've been involved with that I've seen come and go. With a lot of them, it's not ability--there might have been just a little bit of time where they weren't focused and that's all it took for somebody else to come in and take over. But that's just the reality of what we're doing here. It sucks because I do have a lot of friends that are having some hard times, and I think they're some of the best skaters in the world. But it's such a battlefield; there's no time for sleep, man.

But you have to be on point; it's like not checking your bolts. Before you drop down that big shoomer you check your bolts, right?

Oh, yeah. I've been setting a new one up every session just for the satisfaction of knowing it's brand new.

How much does one of those big ramps cost? It must cost like 100 grand.

Yeah, this last one was probably around 100 grand.

Does it just sit there waiting for someone? Like when you were a kid, if you heard about it, could you just go up there on Desert Mountain and try and get some?

No. It's at the Point X skate camp and they've got pretty tight reigns there. Yeah, the kids are allowed to play around on it and I'm more than willing to invite anyone who wants to come skate it. Any other skateboarders that would like to experience it, I'd more than welcome them down.

Come on down. When you think about vert now, and you think Bucky Lasek and Andy Mac--it kinda looks like they're rollerblading. There's some weird style to it.

You know what it is, well, I don't want to get into this discussion about...

...Other people.

We'll just say it like this: What position they're put in and what they have to do to achieve--it's not about the way that Bucky really skates, or Andy. If you got Bucky outside of the contest circuit for a little while and watched him skate, Bucky's a very gnarly skateboarder. In my eyes he's put in a position where he has to go compete on that side, and that's how he makes a living. All the guys that do that, it has kind of pushed them into a position where they have to skate a certain style now 'cause there's a standard that's been set. And if they want to be the guy that wins the contest or they want to be number one, then they have to really commit to that direction. I don't think it's necessarily what Bucky wants to be doing or what Andy wants to be doing, or whoever else is doing it, It's what they have to be doing to make a career out of it.

That's an awkward position.

It sucks because I know that those guys probably feel the same way about it. Like I said, that's what's in front of them as far as their opportunity to make a career out of their skateboarding. Contests are an important part of skateboarding right now, because there isn't a lot of popularity amongst the kids that are into... ...Nobody's coming up.

Kids flipping channels that catch vert on TV and go, "Whoa, that's exciting." That's the kind of people that guys on vert have been forced to cater to. That's where it's at. That's what I see.

What's the future for you? How many years you got left?

I'm not trying to put any time limit on my career at all.

You've been so battered and beaten up over the years.

You know I have, but at the same time every time I've been hurt I've rehabbed what I've hurt to the point that I felt like it's stronger than before. And at the same time, I've realized a lot about the rest of my body as far as taking care of myself and coming back from injuries. To tell you the truth, longevity-wise, there are probably not a lot of guys as beat-up as me now but are going to be more beat-up than me in the future, because I think I've learned a lot about how to deal with it and how to take care of myself. As I'm getting older, I feel like there are a lot of years ahead. Maybe when I was in my early 20s I was probably thinking when I turned 30 I was going to be old and shattered. I'm 29 and I'm telling you, I just feel like my body's up to a point--I don't know, you just get to a point where obviously you're still going to get hurt, but I'm at a point where I feel confident that I can do the stuff I've always dreamed about right now.

As you get older you get better at being yourself. You have to gauge yourself, where you want to be in the line-up. You want to be skating when your kids are old enough. You don't want to just crash and burn.

Yeah. Like I said, I hope that I can be in good enough shape when I'm 50 to go and do some of this shit. It's my fault too. It might take some serious training at 50 to be doing this shit, but if it's possible, I want to find out. I'm willing to go that far to find out. I'm already too far down this path not to go all the way There's no retirement claim on this guy's marketing program.

When vert kind of died, did you think you'd ever have to get a job? Were you scared?

I've always felt that there's enough stuff to do on a skateboard where if it's not vert, it'll be something else. But I don't really attach myself to saying, "Hey, I'm a vert guy." Sometimes it might look like I'm a vert guy; I like to spend a lot of time skating vert because it's fun. But you know, if I had to commit to skating street everyday because I couldn't feed my kids or something, then...

...You better get busy.

Yeah. I'm not really worried about what direction it goes. The only thing I really want to get across is that people don't get what they're missing out on. It sucks to be a skateboarder your whole life and never know what it feels like to do an air on your vert ramp or to be able to lock in a Smith grind half-way across the vert ramp with speed.

Whatever the thing is, it's just another level of experience with skateboarding. It's a shame that there are a lot of pro skateboarders that will retire as a pro skateboarder and never know what it feels like to do an air out of a vert ramp. I couldn't imagine being a pro skateboarder and not knowing how that would feel.

There are other people that would say, "Danny Way, he's a pro; he's never kickflipped 20 stairs." They could go that way too.

Yeah, but I'll go try to kickflip 20 stairs. I'm not saying I'm going to come through, but I've dropped down enough stairs to know what it's like. Believe me, if there's something out there that I haven't done on my skateboard, either I'll try to figure it out or I'll do it. For me, I just want to taste a little bit of it. I don't have to be number one at being the stair guy or handrail guy, but I'll at least have a little taste of it to respect what you're doing.

That's it.

That's it. I'm fried.

RELATED ARTICLE: Del Mar Is mostly what comes to mind when I think that far back. Learning how to do early grab frontside airs in the keyhole. I also used to love watching Gator skate. I was so amazed by his lines-tricks and style. I also remember the first pro contest I watched at Del Mar in 1984: the Hawk vs Hosoi battle. I saw a few of those contests in the keyhole where ever have of skateboarding. I was lucky to be able to see a lot of the building blocks of skating as it progressed to where it is now.

--Danny on What's your first memory of skateboarding? Thrasher #200, September 1997

Ever since I first watched footage of him in Brazil I was magnetized. So much power in such a little body (back then) that it made me believe it was possible to be small and rule it. Creativity flows through Danny's blood. I don't think skateboarding would be the same if Danny hadn't come along.

--Bob Burnquist

I say important because, in his own artful way, Danny embodies the true spirit of skateboarding, having proved that he's a dynamic force to behold every time he gets on his board; exciting to watch, and always innovative. Danny also represents a true champion in the sense that he's determined to overcome any challenges that he faces. It's obvious that he laughs in the face of injury and defeat--being more than competent and willing to be the best he can be and letting nothing stand in his way. Danny's a great inspiration for all skateboarders on all terrain. I could go on and on. A true legend!

Christian Hosai

--Salman Agah

Hosoi: attitude on the vert, lots of finesse and soul. I could easily say that Hosoi is my all-time favorite. He just has such unique flow and style that no one else has ever had.

--Danny on the greats. Thrasher #200, September 1997