• Right: Bronto
boardslidin' bravado.
> Below: All or nothin'
in downtown SD.
guy's uniform, you were definitely going to get
attention whether you liked it or not.
What is your dad like?
He's a really conservative and hard-working
man. He's an electrical engineer and he works at
a nuclear plant; he's one of the bosses. He's really
intelligent; he went through a lot of school.
How did your parents respond when you
became a skateboarding addict?
They were supportive. My mom would help me
out with money for skateboards when she could.
My dad always wanted to see me work for every
single thing I ever got. He wanted to see me mow
lawns for skateboards; he didn't want to see me
get anything for free. But when all you want to do
is skateboard you don't have time to mow lawns.
I did mow lawns, and I did work, but I didn't want
to unless I had to. There are certain principles that
my dad supported and if something didn't follow
those, he wasn't highly supportive of it. I can
understand that; he just wanted to teach me right
and wrong. Not that skateboarding was wrong, but
he didn't agree with playing all day when you turn
14 or 15 and not working to get the things you
want to buy for yourself. They never went to my
contests or anything as a kid, though; when I was
probably 15 I started traveling a little, going to
contests around the area, like in Pensacola or
Panama City, Florida. Anywhere that had contests
I would go. It was fun. I knew people from the area
and I'd go skate around.
Were you the best kid in your town?
If I was, that's not saying a whole lot. There were
only about six skaters in my town. Growing up, the
older kids were always better than me, but a lot of
them either stopped skating or hurt themselves.
Maybe I was, maybe I wasn't. I probably sure
thought I was.
Did you finish high school?
No.
What was your high school like?
Predominantly your redneck Alabama high
school. Lots of jocks. Ninth and tenth grade were
pretty rough; I always got made fun of
because I skated. There were only two real
skaters in the school and maybe four others
who kind of skated or had skateboards or
drifted in and out of it. We were definitely
detention and in-school suspensions. I had
already had a few in-school suspensions,
and if you got in trouble after you had
those, you just got suspended. We had a
substitute teacher in one of our vocational
"My friends were going to
outnumbered. I was kind of a
loner, but I made friends who
were into things that could relate
to the things I was into.
of the principal, who told me that the sub-
stitute said I did it, and that it was assault
and battery or something. I said I didn't do
it, and I told him to ask people in the class,
but I guess not enough people vouched for
me so they determined that I was going to
be suspended, and I would've failed. I
school all day and I was skating"
courses, and someone tripped him, and he
When did you decide you weren't going fell on his chest. He swore that I did it, even
back to school?
I was always in a little bit of trouble. I
wanted to make the most out of school so
I always had a lot of fun. When I had fun it
was at someone else's expense usually, and
it could have been a teacher or a student,
so I went in and out of trouble, getting
though I didn't, and I wouldn't tell him who
did it. They told me they were going to sus-
pend me for five or eight days or some-
thing, and I would've failed that year and
had to start over another year. I already had
my eyes on California, and that summer I
really wanted to go. I went and sat in front
would've had to come back to the rotten
redneck school for one more year.
How old were you?
I turned seventeen two weeks before I quit.
So what happened?
They suspended me. I wasn't eighteen yet
and I couldn't formally quit on my own, so I
had to have my mom sign me out. She obvi-
ously didn't want me to do what I was doing,
Daniel Harold Sturt 1999
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