Tom Penny Changed The Game So Shut Up Already

11.01.04

This blog has started off as being too grad-school-nerdy so I’ma bring it down to a level I’m more comfortable at.



So, last week, I was checking my man Brendan BringEm’s and Joey Blanco’s wonderful weekly Sunday night jump-off Soul Travelin’ and I walked in and saw some dude that looked mighty familiar. The fact that he was surrounded by a group of skateboarders might’ve tipped me off (after all, skateboarders are the biggest fucking group of “yes men” star-worshippers that I’ve ever seen), but you never know these days. So, I tapped my buddy Ricky on the shoulder and asked him: “Ayo, is that Tom Penny?”

Now, I haven’t really skateboarded in years and don’t plan on skateboarding very much in the future, but from the ages of like 13-20, I was pretty much a fucking pathetic skateboard nerd. All I ever did was watch skateboard videos and talk about skateboarding and talk about skateboard videos and talk about watching skateboard videos talking about skateboarding and, of course, skateboard. During the heyday of my skateboard career (which is highlighted by a magical 24-hour period where I could switchfrontsideflip and nolliebacksideflip everytime… and then, never again) no one was as legendary as Sir Tom Penny.

I don’t remember exactly what year it was that he was killing shit but I think it was around ’94 or ’95. All those European Flip dudes came over to the states on a bit of a tour and vowed to destroy everything in their path. Well, they pretty much did, but nobody killed shit like Penny.

In those days, you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing the Penny-lore: how he was always high (on coke, weed, meth, whatever) or how his teeth were all fucked up (he IS British, after all) or how he just switchflipped a building or whatever the fuck it was. The fact of the matter, dudes were talking about this dude and gossiping about this dude and wanting to see every single thing this dude did. He basically turned a whole generation of skateboarding men and boys into gossiping little girls who wanted to know everything about him. But for good reason. Dude is a fucking God.

I mean, he stole the show in both 411 #9 and #10 (I think those are the right issues). Of course, he didn’t actually have any actual “parts” in those videos. He just had commercial clips.

There was the one Etnies ad where he kickflipped and frontside flipped down something like 10 stairs and over a rail drenched in his signature “I don’t give a fuck how hard this shit is, it’s fucking easy for me because I’m the fucking king and I can kickflip over fucking anything and look so fucking good doing it and you’ll watch it in slow motion over and over and over and over” style. The slow motion roar of approval from the camera man is pretty fucking on point. Then there was the TSA ad where he did some ramp-gap-ramp insanity: first, easily floating a massive kickflip over the 10 foot wide gap and then busting an insanely big 360 flip over the same gap… except this time there was a chair placed on top of the ramp he was supposed to land on. Well, he cleared the chair and the ramp with relative ease and stomped the tre flip smoothly on the flat. Stupid hot.

His part in Etnies Hi-Five is so ridiculous I’m not even going to talk about it.

And of course, the legendary switchfrontsideflip over the Carlsbad Gap in the Flip Industry section of 411 #11 was unheard of. Not to mention the “switchflip, switch-ollie, switch-180, 3-stair kickflip, tweaked-backside 5-0 down an 8 stair rail” line.

Basically, dude was out of control.

What pisses me off though is that I’m still friends with a lot of skateboarders and they resent the fact that hella dudes’ favorite skater is still Penny even though he’s really not a shadow of his former self. But, to me, the longevity of his popularity is quite simple: this motherfucker changed the game.

Before Tom Penny, nobody skated like him. After Tom Penny, everyone wanted to skate like him… like it or not. He made everything that came prior to him look obsolete. “Oh, you’re kickflipping 8 stairs? Well, you better make that shit look fucking good or it fucking sucks.” Or, to put it in terms a hip-hop nerd might appreciate: Tom Penny is basically the Rakim of skateboarding. Sure, you had your Tony Hawks and your Eric Kostons and your Rodney Mullens and your Kareem Campbells and your Mike Carrolls. Dudes like them were always leading the pack and will be in the skateboard hall of fame (once its resurrected at what’s left of either EMB or Love Park). But, none of those dudes really really changed the trajectory of modern skateboarding as dramatically as Tom Penny did.

And, I think what Sir Penny did that is still a pretty important lesson is his insistence that what you were doing wasn’t shit if it didn’t look good. “Sports” like skateboarding go through spurts and cycles of progression. Dudes are always going to be doing bigger and harder stuff (until people start trying to ollie like 50 stairs and just fucking die), but Penny will most likely always be “the best” because of his suggestion that style is paramount in skateboarding. But Penny helped us realize that skateboarding is something more of an art than it is a sport. Penny reminded us that the aesthetics of skateboarding are at least AS IMPORTANT AS (if not more so then) the actual tricks themselves.

Or, to reiterate the running theme of this stupid blog: Penny insisted that even in skateboarding the “how” (style) was at least as important as the “what” (the actual trick).

The ending of the story is this: I found out that it was Tom Penny at Loie’s that Sunday night at Soul Traveling. I guess I’m pretty stoked I got to see him… even if he was just sitting around drinking, being jocked by a bunch of grown men.

-e