SKD Project

My mother tells me that I've always been athletic. She put me in a gymnastics class soon after I learned to walk. As I got older I remember sports becoming somewhat of an addiction. With every sport I attempted, I wanted to learn to be the best I could be. The first day I rode my new skateboard across the basketball court, I immediately wanted to go faster. My friends and I would set up sticks to ollie over and soon graduated to jumping each other’s boards. The next thing you know, we were building our own ramps to get us that much higher and farther. We jumped trash cans piled high and far. I remember letting my mother's station wagon roll down the driveway into the street so I could pull my newest jump ramp up to it. I was the talk of the town after I made a method air over that little Datsun, but something inside my fourteen-year-old head still wasn't satisfied. There's always been this itching inside me. I've always been curious. How far can you go? One fine autumn day in October 1999 in Michigan, I got the chance to find out.

12 years of skateboarding later, and here I was back to building my own ramps to send me faster, higher and farther. Somehow, I had convinced my team manager at Swatch to give me the money it would cost to construct my dream ramp. Thanks to weeks of planning and the help of my father and his friend Charlie, whose land we used, we were ready to go. Tim Payne and I started cutting transitions in the rain on the first day while the rest of his crew started putting up the scaffolding. Three days later, we stood in front of an Evel Kneivel / snowboard-style jump ramp. It had roll-ins at 25 and 28 feet onto a 55-degree slope with giant transitions up to the jump. The lip of the kicker was 10 feet high, as was the landing ramp which could be rolled back to change the distance of the gap. The first night, I rolled in on the 25-footer and was happy to report that it worked. It sent me a good 20 feet. But as usual, I wanted to go farther. After trying the 28-footer I decided we had underestimated the size of the roll-in. I was going to need more speed.

By mid-morning the next day, Tim and his crew had added an extension to the highest roll-in that brought it up to about 36 feet. Because of time and money we had decided to leave the new roll-in at just four feet wide. This made for one of the most nerve racking roll-ins of my life. We pulled out the landing ramp and much to my delight, I was sent about 47 feet.

I played on the new roll-in for a while and managed a few tricks including a 30-foot kick flip indy and a 360 at about 42 feet. The first day on my dream ramp was coming to an end and as usual, I felt like I could still go farther.
Within a half hour Tim and his crew had tacked on another extension. Because we were running out of daylight, there was no time to make a roll-in. That, and the fact that nobody liked working with a skill saw on top of what was now 41 feet high and swaying in the wind so much we had to tie guide lines down to the ground. This meant that I now had to overcome the scariest tail drop of my life in order to hit the jump. Somewhere along the way I'd got it in my head that I could go 50 feet. If this drop-in couldn't get me there, I didn't know what could.

Just like I tell all the kids at camp when they're learning to drop in, I tried not to think about it. I knew I could do it. It was just a drop-in, only it took longer. We had parked four trucks in between the ramps just for effect, but from up here they looked like matchbox cars. I looked down at my friends and family who had come all this way to help me take a shot at my dream. I couldn't let them down. I couldn't let myself down. I clicked my tail out over my four foot runway and tried to line it up in the middle as best I could. I took a deep breath as if it might be my last and dropped in. It was all I could do to keep my legs from giving out when I hit the transition at the bottom of the kicker. I pulled back a somewhat snowboard-esque method air and landed halfway down the landing ramp.

The final measurement came in at 52'10". It's hard to describe the feeling of being in the air for that long. All I can say is that it was one of the best feelings I've ever had from riding my skateboard. I was glad to have gotten the chance to ride the ramp I'd always dreamed about. The funny thing is, even now, that itch hasn't stopped. Just as when I was a kid, I still wonder if I could go faster, farther. Maybe I always will.

NOTE: Since this jump, Andy set his second world record for the long distance jump measuring 56'10 3/4"