SEAN
BEGINNINGS
When did you first start skating?
About seven-and-a-half years ago, in a suburb
of Washington DC.
How did you become interested in skating?
I used to hang-out after school at the local
Seven-Eleven, and I saw a bunch of kids who
were really rad at skating. I checked out a copy
of Thrasher and I got into the graphics of the
boards and thought, "Wow, those look rad, I'd
like to have one. So then I took it from there,
got myself a board and started hanging out with
the kids and skating.
Was your family pretty receptive to your new
found interest?
Yes because my dad had me into sports at the
time so I was always involved in activities at the
Boy's Club.
I heard you used to fight competitively.
Yeah I used to do that. My dad had me fight-
ing from the age of nine until I was fourteen. He
I was an athletics coordinator at the Boy's Club so
he had that going on and pushed me along.
What was it like in your formative years of
skateboarding?
It was really fun back then. I was just skating
with a lot of my friends from
around town like Wayne.
Cox, Steve Teagues, Myron Brown and Victor. I
really didn't know how far you could take skate-
boarding or that there were even pros for that
matter. It was just me having fun with it and stay-
ing out of trouble.
Who were your early influences?
The first skate magazine that I read was the
Thrasher with Mark Gonzales interview. So after
I read that, I became influenced by him since he
was doing really rad railslides before anyone
could really ollie up anything. All of the shots of
him at Embarcadero and the first Gonz ollie
were sick too.
Tweaking a lien (above) for the
halibut. Frontside nosegrind (right).
46 THRASHER
SHEFFEY
INTERVIEW
AND PHOTOS BY BRYCE
KANIGHTS