B
Seq: At Andy's ramp in o-town, the
Ox. jumps into the mini with a quick
frontside invert to rail.
Above: The Cancer pool gets socked
in the eye with a stinker grab in
the corner pocket.
Right: The man rules Palo Alto.
Pete Collpitts is the nicest
guy in the world: soft-spoken,
humble, open-minded. Somewhere.
inside of Pete Collpitts, though,
there dwells an animal, a
skateboarding monster known as
the Ox. The Ox is a raging
bull: fierce, furious, brutal,
powerful, and relentless. As
with any significant experience,
the effect of the Ox's skating
cannot be communicated through
words alone. Neither can it
effectively be captured and
transmitted through the crys-
talline distillation of still
photography. "Caught clean" is
not part of this dialogue.
Stories of the Ox had reached my
ears long before we first met. I
just thought (rather typically),
"Yeah, I'll belive it when I see
it." Yeah, well, it's fucking
unbeliveable. A large part of
the frightening beauty of Pete's
skateboarding is the relentless
nature of his attack. Me, I'm
happy to make my tricks, to try
to put them
together in a
line. Ox will
take a trick,
wrestle it
to the
ground,
and brutally pummel it into sub-
mission. Try to imagine yourself
hucking a stinkbug frontside
air, carve it out, now lock it
into a Smith grind. Extend that
grind by muscling it up into a
frontside 50/50. Now you have a
choice. You can either grab the
rail and air back in at speed,
or muscle it back down into a
frontside Smith until you stop,
grab the nose and tail and yank
it back in. That's a set-up
trick for the Ox. Probably for a
backside boneless or something.
You can't imagine it. He doesn't
think twice.
PETE
THE
Words by
Curtis Hsiang
Photos by
Luke Ogden