GONZ
INTERVIEW BY JAKE PHELPS PHOTOS BY BRYCE KANIGHTS
IN A HOT, DIRTY PARKING LOT at the
first Sacto street style contest in 1985, a
kid named Mark Gonzales introduced his
own brand of skating to the world. Over
the next ten years he went from a little
scrub to the king of modern street skating.
Gonz lives in a world that few could ever
comprehend. A Sharpie, an old Taperkick,
Baby Cujo, a telephone and a fax machine
are all he needs to get by.
What does skating mean to you, Mark?
It's something I do whenever I can. It's a way to have
fun, and whatever you want to do while you're rolling on
your board, whatever tricks, it's your decision. It's a good
way to express yourself, and it's fun.
Name some of your favorite skaters of all time.
Ray "Bones" Rodriguez, he was one of my first, Jay
Adams, all those guys from the old skateboard mags,
just seeing them. Looking at the magazines is what made
me want to skateboard.
Where did you grow up?
In Southgate, with my mom, my brother and my sister.
How did you save up money to get boards?
Me and my friends used to go to the Suregrip factory
and look in the trash, and we'd find like old wheels, hard-
ware and griptape. Then we found out about Variflex,
that they sold seconds for cheap, like fifteen dollars for a
deck, and so we used to get boards there.
You'd go there with, say, forty dollars, and you'd
say, "What can I get for this money?"
Yeah. We mostly did it just to ride, but then when skat-
ing was starting to get popular again, I used to go down
there and pick up boards
and set them up and then sell them as com
pletes. Like I'd buy a board for thirty dollars
and sell it for like sixty or eighty. It was cool
because sometimes when I'd be taking the
bus there, I'd see something that I'd want to
skate, like at the bus stop. Sometimes I'd be
waiting to transfer, then skate off and end up
halfway down the block, and I'd look back,
and the bus had already come and left. So,
I always ended up being out late and away
from my house for hours.
And your mom thought you were out
selling drugs?
Yeah, because I started making all kinds of
money selling the completes. One week, I
sold like four completes, and the dude down
at Variflex, his name was Mondo, he was
super-nice, and sometimes he'd sell me a
bunch of shit for real cheap, and then some-
times I'd make like two hundred and some-
thing bucks. When you're little, that's a lot of
money. So then I took my mom, and my
brother and sister out to eat, and I paid for
it, and she said, "Marky, where are you get-
ting all of
SKATEBARDINE HAS
BECOME RELIGIOS
FOR
this money? Are you selling drugs?" And I
told her no, but she didn't believe me, but I
was never selling drugs.
You told me that out in front of your
house, because you couldn't ride vert,
you'd ollie to pivot and pose lien airs.
Oh, yeah, totally. Me and Paul Nichol did
that for hours. We used to ollie to pivot,
like maybe ollie to backside pivot and then
grab like an Indy and hold it, and say, "Yeah,
Indy air." We would act like they were airs.
So then what made you try ollie to pivot
on benches?
Well, my friend Paul ollied to pivot on a
bench before me. He was bad. But we liked
vert too. But since we couldn't skate vert, we
would always street skate.
Then eventually street skating took over
vert skating, how did that happen?
Well, they had the street contest up in San
Francisco, and then when I looked in the
mags, I said, "Well, fuck, that's what I do
already. I'm
always doing that, jamming down the streets,
popping ollies and shit. This is the type of skating
I do all the time." Then I said, "I've got to enter a
contest," and then when I saw Tommy at Venice
when I first got sponsored, I was just doing every
trick I knew how to do just because I was stoked
street skating, this is what I do anyway.
What did they call you at Spidey's ramp?
They called me Slam Man because I slammed
all the time. But you've got to slam. If you're try-
ing to do something, they ain't gonna be crisp
and clean, you're going to hurt yourself. If you're
training to do something, there's going to be
some defeat. Anything great takes hard work. If
you try to do it, you're going to get hurt. You've
got to land and you've got to go for it. That's
what it's about, skating. The conquering it by try-
ing and keep trying. You hit your head, you feel
dizzy, well, sit down for an hour, maybe don't
skate that day, wait till tomorrow, come back and
do it, but don't let it make you afraid to do it any-
more, because you're going to fall, but you've got
to get up and keep trying. Just because I had a
different approach at learning than them, they
just called me Slam Man. I was always slamming.
It didn't matter to me, though.
Explain the science of the Gonz and how it
pertains to wiping out.
It has to do with being rough since I was little,
playing football. I mean, I don't care, I'm not
rough like a roughneck. Just playing football and
playing with your friends, BMXing, eating shit.
What did you think of people that could do
like twenty-five trick runs, was that some-
thing you aspired to do?
No, not at all. The only things that I liked were
shit like Caballero doing that frontside invert over
the channel at Joe Lopes' ramp. Like that's insane
to me. But just mostly the photographs, because
there really wasn't that much video back then.
What made you want to ride vert?
Well, vertical skating was the main thing at
the skateparks when I first learned. It was more
carving and shit like that. But you have to learn it
CENTU
HILL
2250 SKATEBOARDER
all, if you can't ride vert, you're not getting
the whole picture, what's all going on. But if
you can do vert and street and go fast down
a street, swerve in and out of traffic, ollie up
curbs, allie down curbs, avoid pedestrians,
if you can do that, then you've got a good
clue of what skating's about. If you can ride
vert and do a pivot, a rock n' roll and do
grinds, then you know what skating's about.
If you can only street skate and do a heelflip
or a nollie noseslide, then you're not even
touching skating, the true feeling of all the
aspects of it. You've got to know the feeling
of being able to ride all types of terrain.
When you came up here, you had a 33"
Sims Taperkick. How does that ride?
I just want to get a piece of it all because
it's all skating. Now, I like to try to get to the
soul of it. I like to cruise, I like high jumping
a lot. To me, that's fun. It might sound kind
of dorky, but I just like all of the aspects of
skating, like every inch of it.
Do you think that the magazines fucked
up skating to the point where the kids
just want to make the heelflip to fakie?
No, because when I was little and I was
learning how to skateboard, the only thing
that I wanted to do was just backside airs. I
wanted to do high backside airs like Billy
Ruff and like Lester Kasai. So maybe when I
went to Spidey's ramp and stuff, I was just
Clockwise from top left: Shorty can't fade the
"Chaka." Stale service above the Widowmaker
in Oakland. The HP ramp in San Francisco caught
a glimpse of a vintage beanplant in '86. Mark
knows spots in LA that nobody has ever seen.
Big ollie floater over some real purty flowers.
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