Lance & Omar Unabridged

Conversation between Omar Salazar, Lance Mountain and Will Harmon – June 29, 2010.

Will Harmon: Lance, when you were Omar’s age, did you ever think you would still be skateboarding 20 years later?

Lance Mountain: I knew I was going to skate for as long as I can, but there is a difference between skating and being provided an avenue to go do it. I don’t think I thought there would still be an avenue provided for me to go do it.

WH: Had you or have you ever envisioned something else?

LM: Yes, of course. We grew up in a time where you did other things to make a living so you could go skateboarding. When I got married I was making $200 a month from skateboarding so obviously I did other things to make money. I’ve always done other things.

WH: As a veteran pro, would you give any advice to Omar, or other young pros?

LM: It’s different for everyone, but I think it’s good and healthy to pursue other things while skating. So it’s not like skateboarding, stop… now what do I do? I think that’s the best advice and I got that from Stacy Peralta. As a pro skateboarder you have tons of time and money to research things that you might want to do later. Otherwise you are just buying cars and burning your money and at the end of the day you have no money and no skill or desire to do anything except what you did on your leisure time.

WH: Omar, do you hope to be as active in skateboarding as Lance is, when you are his age?

OS: Absolutely, I hope so. I mean I know he’s hurting and I’m hurting too sometimes, but that’s just how skateboarding is. Football players are the same; you know they are going to be hurting after they’re done with football. Fighters too, wrestlers, I mean everyone’s going to be hurting. It’s all about how you take care of yourself. I’ve been hurt for a little while and I’ve recently started doing different things as far as keeping my body strong; things like riding a bike and exercises I never thought I’d have to do.

Actually, it’s pretty funny because me and Paul (Rodriguez) always laugh and joke about it. Probably the first tour we went on was like four or five years ago. We were skating all day and Reese (Forbes) says to me and Paul, “Man, you wait until you get to my age you’re going to be feeling it for sure!” And I remember me and Paul looked at each other and went “Nah, whatever, that’s just you!”

LM: I had the same conversation with Gonz once.

WH: Could you see yourself getting into anything else in the future, other than skateboarding?

OS: I’ve always been into films and how movies are made; I like theatre, I’ve always been into that. In high school when I was fifteen, I had knee surgery and the doctor said ‘you’re fucked! You’ll never skate again!’ So I didn’t really play any sports besides skating, and the closest thing that got me that edge was theatre. So I did theatre in high school because it was kind of scary to do and I knew if I was able to do it, I could get over a couple of barriers for myself. My dad took me to see Dracula, the play and it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen live.

When I did theatre, it was The Diary of Anne Frank and I was Peter. Everyone in high school knew me as the skater kid, so when I did the theatre thing all the theatre kids treated me like shit because they thought I was just some stoner skater kid who didn’t know anything. I thought that was funny and just ignored them. I memorised all my lines and when it came down to the day of the performance I didn’t forget any lines, and I’m not one to brag, but I felt like I did a better job. I felt like I put 110% into it and I really got into the character.

WH: I’m sure you both have been to the UK and London before. What were your thoughts about it over here, then and now? Any interesting stories?

LM: I’ve told this story a hundred times here before, but my dad was born in Lewisham. He was one of the kids that went to school during the bombing. His school was gone and his friends were killed and so he shipped off to New York. So I first came out here when I was eleven, and I’ve come back maybe twelve times at least. And you know, I came here for the first time skating in 1979 and I love it, it’s kind of nostalgic. I promised my son that I would bring him out here when he was ten and I still haven’t gotten around to it and he’s twenty-five now. I think he’s probably got a more romantic view of what it might be, so he doesn’t want to get let down. So he says he wants to come and stay a month, he wants to play music in the subways, he wants to do the whole thing.

OS: I think the first time I came over here was with Fred Gall and a few other people, which was really interesting. I actually skated that skatepark we went to today (Stockwell) and it was really fun, but now it seems they’ve made it better.  Yeah, you know, I really like this place, I love going to different countries and this place has amazing people. A lot of musicians I like are from here like The Beatles and shit.

But you know, one thing that has changed since last time I was over here; the pound is way stronger now. It fucks everything up for me.

LM: When I first came here a dollar would get you £2.50, that was in 1979. Back then the dollar was really strong.

OS: Wow! That’s when we were cool.

WH: How did both of you come about riding for Nike? Are there tremendous benefits riding for a multinational shoe company?

OS: I had gotten flowed shoes from a lot of different companies, but when Nike SBs came out, I was really excited about them, especially the EQs. The EQs were like a different type of shoe – a lot of people don’t like them because they’re kind of funky – but I liked them. I was really excited to see what was going on with Nike SB because I saw people like Donny Barley and Brian Anderson riding the shoes.

Around this time I went to Transworld and Eric Sentianin had a pair of the new Nikes by his desk. They happened to be my size and he let me have them. Then about a year later, I came back to Transworld and I’m skating the same EQs because they lasted a whole year!  Eric was astonished and said if I wanted some more then he would hook me up with Kevin Imamura. A week later I started talking to Kevin and that was it.

As far as benefits, yes, I get to go to Niketown once a month and bring my friends to get some shoes and stuff. It’s a really rad company to be on and I feel really lucky and fortunate to be on a team with Lance and everyone else and just to skate for Nike because they let me do what I want. They are a big company, but it’s not like they are throwing money at us or anything crazy like that.

WH: How about you, Lance?

LM: I think I’ve got a different take on Nike than your (Omar’s) generation, because all the guys I grew up looking up to wore Blazers. They wore Blazers in the seventies and then for a little period in the eighties we got Jordans from Nike, just because it was really slow and no skate shoe companies were really sponsoring anybody. So I already had the history of liking Nikes.

Realistically, I asked them if I could ride for them. My friends had worked at Savier and they had all moved in there (Nike SB), so I just went in and asked them. I think it was the best thing I’ve ever done in my skateboarding life. I’ve never done something like that; it was just out of the blue. And for me it’s the first time I really haven’t had to do anything else to get by and make a living in skateboarding. They’ve obviously been the best sponsor I’ve ever had and as big as they are, as corporate as they are, they are the ones who said: ‘Hey, you tell us what you wanna do and we’ll provide a way for you to do it.’

We grew up having to do whatever we had to do to make a living, whether it was doing demos in the snow or – I was just telling this story the other day actually – going to Italy to do a TV show with Tony Hawk and four hacky-sackers, a chainsaw juggler and a roller-skating team! So it’s a blessing at my age to finally be on a team that says: ‘What do you like doing? What do you want to present to the world?’ Instead of: ‘Can you go to a demo in Ecuador on a quarterpipe.’

WH: Getting older inevitably brings new aches and pains to the body from skateboarding; do you have any special tips for keeping your body in shape, or do you stick to certain terrain? Or has your skating changed a lot over the years?

LM: Skating has changed a lot; we spent so long getting to where we were because a lot of it was being invented. Now that it’s invented it’s an older – you can maybe say sport – but back then it wasn’t a sport.  Now it’s like ‘here is what you do and you can get there in a year.’ So these guys are beating their bodies to a higher level, right off the bat. It’s hard to explain; I skated for fifteen years before the ollie was invented. So two years after skating, I’m not flying down fifteen stairs you know; we had a long learning curve.

When you are a teenager you want to get hurt, you love it. But when you get older your brain thinks one way, but your body just won’t go there, no matter what. You end up skating wiser.

I’ve already seen it with the younger guys; they have already adapted to skate differently. They are adapting their skating to last. Fifteen stairs to a kid is getting to be normal. And I think nothing’s wrong with the dude that wants to go balls out like a normal athlete and just have four years and then can’t skate again, it’s all respectable – all different types of skating. I mean the game of S.K.A.T.E. – perfecting the game of S.K.A.T.E. – you can do it forever, the injury level is pretty low there.

WH: S.K.A.T.E. seems like such a big thing in skating now, and it wasn’t like that fifteen years ago, or even ten years ago.

LM: Yeah, I trip out on that. I like it because it’s the basics of skating, the pure core, but it’s also like the game of S.K.A.T.E. is weird to me. My point of view probably sounds really negative and wrong to most kids only because there are lots of aspects to skateboarding. Skateboarding when I was growing up was so much about figuring it out, coming out with new stuff, going here and doing that and now it’s almost gotten to a point where there are set rules and you can call someone out and decide who is the best, clearly. That is weird to me. It was different for us, our time in skateboarding was all so new, it was about exploring and coming up with things and being creative, and now that it has all been figured out, it’s less about being creative and more about being precise and athletic.

But what really changed skateboarding in my opinion was money. The eighties guys would still be doing it if there was an avenue to do it back then. When they turned eighteen, nineteen, twenty they went and got jobs. The guys that were fifteen and sixteen kept doing it; they could last till they were twenty or twenty-one and make just enough money. And then the nineties came and washed all of us out. A few of us stayed in and figured out a way to make a living and still stay involved in skating, but the nineties guys are the ones who had the next-longest career. They could survive through the whole thing because they were really young and they started to make some decent money too. And now that there is so much money involved, I think these understand that they have to cross-train and take vitamins; it’s a sport. If they are going to win these contests they have to find a way to keep on top.

OS: I never thought I would be doing what I do with the rubber bands and stretching for my foot, but it’s like a lot of people say skateboarding’s not a sport, but you have to be athletic to do it.

LM: I think there is an aspect to it that is sport. But it is broader than all the other sports because… say you got tennis, and here’s the rules, there are guys that are the best at it, and there are guys who are pretty good and there are guys who want to do it as a pastime because they are not good enough, but those are the rules. You don’t see a lot of people going to the tennis court and making up a new game, but still using that court. Skateboarding still has that and always will. Whether you get to the top or not, the premise of the game is do what you want, and none of the other sports have that.

Skateboarding needs all types of skating to remain healthy. It needs those dudes who are very goal-oriented, aggressive and pushing the limit in a contest, it needs that. But it’s not necessarily those guys’ job to bring other things into it. That’s why Stacy (Peralta) put me on the team, they had Tony Hawk, they had Rodney Mullen and they knew: ‘we need to round this whole thing out!’ And that’s honestly why I got popular, I was on the team with the best dudes, but I was the guy that the average skateboarders could relate to. Because the average skateboarder cannot relate to the best dude, they can only be inspired by the best dude. It’s like Bob (Burnquist) on the Mega Ramp, people constantly say: ‘that’s not skateboarding!’ Of course it’s skateboarding. It might not be tapping into what kids want to do or understand, but skateboarding needs that high level to be inspiring. It might not be inspiring for the people who are trying to compete against them, but I guarantee you it inspires the younger kids.

WH: You’ve both had acclaimed video parts in the last couple of years (Extremely Sorry and Mindfield) What do you like/dislike about each others parts?

OS: I thought his part in the Flip video was amazing! I told him, I was like man, that’s the best I’ve ever seen him skate. The hippie jump through the stairs was just fucking amazing. And I told him I’m really proud to have him as a teammate.

LM: As far as Omar is concerned, I know there are guys that are technically good and are amazing and can probably be considered the best or whatever that means in skateboarding, but I get inspired and turned on and it makes me want to skate when I see energy. Pumping, flowing energy is what inspires me because that’s what I grew up on; I didn’t grow up on mathematical skating. So his (Omar’s) part where he has power and energy and passion, I was like ‘yeah!’

WH: Omar, in addition to Paul Rodriguez and your good friend Stefan (Janoski), how does it feel to be one of the few athletes to have a signature shoe on Nike along-side such greats such as Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan?

OS: First of all it’s an honour! I can’t believe it happened and I’m still really thankful. But I do feel a lot of pressure, because my shoe just came out and I’ve been hurt for a while. Sometimes if I have a bad day, I can’t sleep. I sit there and think: ‘how can I do more?’

WH: What did you do to your foot?

OS: I played some kid in S.K.A.T.E. because he wanted to beat me, and I landed primo and tore my ligament right here. So I have a torn ligament right now.

LM: I was wrong! I said you couldn’t get hurt skating flat!

OS: Yes, so lately that has been the hardest thing because I haven’t been skating as aggressively as I would like to. I’ve been doing a lot of training. Four times a week I have this guy that helps me with my foot and my knees, all my joints. It’s all rubber bands and running in place.

WH: Do you think skateboarding will turn into more of a sport with personal trainers and whatnot?

OS: I think so. I mean it’s stupid – I never thought I’d be doing this cross-training shit – but at the same time Danny Way’s got a dude (a personal trainer). I know Paul (Rodriguez) has got a guy too. I mean he does contests all the time and you’ve got to be ready. When I do the training, it’s not like: ‘yeah, I want to get buff, or cut, or have a six-pack or whatever.’ The one thing I get from an hour of stupid running in place is that when I’m done I feel good, it makes me feel happy and it’s like I’m getting my body ready to eat shit! I’ll be able to get up quicker.

LM: Skateboarding is pretty young compared to the other things. And I think it’s pretty obvious that this type of stuff is already going on, whether people know it or not. The real question is, will skateboarding ever change so that the only people who ever get sponsored are those guys? Will that other dude still be sponsored in the future, or will it only be the cross-training mathematical skater?

WH: Lance, do you have any particular memories during the late eighties tours to the UK, specifically the one in Public Domain? Do you realise how much of an impact those tours had on the skate scene over here at the time?

LM: Yeah, I know that we had an impact on skateboarding. Stacy (Peralta) and those guys were the first to take skateboarding across the world and because of that, when he wasn’t a pro skateboarder anymore he was constantly like ‘I’m doing this for skateboarding and you guys – to do it better than the guys that provided for me to do it.’ We knew it would have an impact, bringing skateboarding to the world, but that being said, in the late eighties I was so over doing the same routine.

I grew up skating pools and bowls and stuff, and to be put onto a vert ramp, I was on that same boat that the creativeness, and the figuring it out, and doing something new was all gone for me. Most of the stuff I brought to skateboarding was kind of like a tweak on what was there, whereas Tony (Hawk) was always into the next type of progression. So when it came to vert ramps – and we were riding the same thing back to back for five years – I was done. I was like, ‘I got nothing.’ Tony could come up with new maneuvers but there was nothing there for me. It was a rough period for me, the end of the eighties. But my era was before that; you know when I felt good about my skating.

I think that’s why I still do it and I still love it is because I’ve never felt like I’ve arrived, thank you and goodnight! It’s a weird way to look at skateboarding, because you never arrive. There is always someone right after you that learned what you did and they are doing it better and faster.

So from the beginning, I realised that the act of being a pro skateboarder is to inspire others and try to get them to fall in love with it. And if they do, they’ll remember that you were the dude that brought that to them. I think it’s actually harder to be the technically better dude, because as soon as you are technically better there is someone else and you are forgotten. So I used that to my advantage since I was a kid.