2001
Posted: October 15th, 2008

The year was 2001. The mag was picking up steam, the kids were taking over and then in September - kablooey! Good thing something like that could never happen again!


The year started in Tampa with a Black Label am road trip after they put all those new kids on. Here’s Ricky Espinosa with a back tail. He was cool.


Mark Appleyard is still amazing, but back then he was at the age where he wanted to annihilate every spot he came across. Spot nerds will remember these as the smallest ten-stair rails in the history of ‘boarding. Capped.


Svitak has a large selection of his childhood punk rock and metal T-shirts that he’s been wearing for the last 15 years. This smith grind is in a Dead Milkmen shirt, but he’s also been known to don a tattered T from the unpopular thrash-metal band, Prong. When these shirts are finally deemed unwearable (and that will only be after they’ve been altered into sleeveless ‘vert’ shirts first,) I suspect he’ll have his grandmother sew them into a commemorative quilt.


Alex ‘Trainwreck’ Gall battles some poorly-placed flashes on a kinked nose slide. This was when everyone was koo-koo about lighting shit up all the time. Nowadays, the cops are wise to that, too, at least around here.


Bill Marks on the rail from Willy’s sunglass ad. He looks like he could use a tan.


Can you believe Ed rode for Rusty? Seems really weird, right?


This is a ‘Check Out’ style portrait I always warn people to avoid - i.e. sweaty dude, panting, right after he landed the trick. In this case it seems more appropriate, as Don had just ollied El Toro. Too bad we called him ‘Dan Nguyen’ in the caption. Sorry, homie.


This was on my first trip to Barcelona with the Flip team. It was so weird that Enrique was from there, yet had to travel all the way to the United States to skate plastic tables to get sponsored. Globalization fixed that, dog.


Holy shit, Forrest Kirby REGULAR crooked grinds the El Cajon courthouse double set ledge! We’re both from Texas, home of Ken Fillion and all those assholes I went to high school with.


An outtake from Wes Lott’s mildly-controversial cover.


Ok, so this is when I first got the square camera - setting off a photographic love affair that continues to this day. I think this was one of the first photos I shot with it that turned out sort of okay. JT Aultz, front blunt at his alma mater.


When he first came onto the scene I tried to get people excited about calling Greg Lutzka - ‘The Polish Muska.’ Nobody was into it.


I did, however, give Fabrizio his nickname, ‘The Breeze’ mostly because his nickname from Brazil (notorious for their slanderous nicknames,) was ‘Frog Face.’ I’m not claiming ‘The Breeze’ was great or anything, but it was infinitely more flattering than ‘Frog Face.’


This spot is smack in the middle of Orange County. Nobody skates it, however, because they arrest you. Back in 2001 me and Matt Ball didn’t give a fuck. We were like a couple of GG Allins, in there. You shoulda seen us!