Hella Nation - Evan Wright [20]
“It’s OK, Jim.” Reynolds pushes Greco away. “Get off of me. Just sit in your seat.”
JIM GRECO GREW UP in a crumbling Italian neighborhood in West Haven, Connecticut. “There were mom-and-pop stores,” Greco says of his hometown, “and old Italian guys playing cards and gambling on tables in front.”
His parents divorced when he was young. His mother is a waitress, and his father, Jimmy Senior, is a machine-tool operator. “Jim was definitely a kid who grew up on the corner,” says Jimmy Senior. “He was wise to the street, but he wasn’t a bad kid. He was a phenomenal shortstop in the Little League. We wanted him to play ball and go to college.”
“I liked baseball,” says Greco. “But when I was eleven, I started seeing these crazy-looking punker kids skating around, and that looked like fun.”
He bought his first skateboard for ten dollars and, he says, his life changed almost immediately. He quit the baseball team and informed his father that he was going to be a professional skateboarder. Jimmy Senior didn’t even know what skateboarding was. When his son took him to the park to show him, Jimmy Senior says he couldn’t bear to look: “A father can’t watch his son do something dangerous like that. I thought he was going to kill himself.”
Jimmy says he gave his boy the best possible advice a father can offer. “Son, you’re never going to make it. You should give up now.”
“From that point on,” Greco says, “I lived, slept, dreamt, ate, shit skateboarding.” He pored over magazines at a local skateboard shop and fixated on one pro skater in particular. “Randy Colvin fucked shit up,” Greco says. “He was one of the first three motherfuckers to skate handrail.” He threw himself into learning Colvin’s style. “I spent seven hours a day skating a piece-of-shit curb outside my house learning to grind like he did on those rails.”
He started to learn his own tricks, and used his father’s video camera to make tapes of himself performing them, sending them out to teams as well as shoe and clothing manufacturers. At fourteen, he skated in a demo in upstate New York. A year later, he caught the attention of Tony Hawk, who invited him to spend the summer skating with his famous Birdhouse team at demos around California and the Southwest.
Andrew Reynolds, turning sixteen and already a three-year veteran of Birdhouse, was in the car when they picked Greco up at the airport. “Jim was already doing that thing of making up his own words,” says Reynolds, “and we couldn’t understand what he was saying half the time.”
What struck Reynolds was Greco’s total lack of respect for Tony Hawk: “Tony was the boss to all of us.” Except for Greco. “We’d go into restaurants, and Jim would sit across from Tony, with his feet up, shooting his mouth off, acting like Joe Pesci in GoodFellas.”
But Greco was a good enough skateboarder that Hawk invited him back to California to skate full-time for Birdhouse after he finished high school. “I got my diploma,” says Greco. “But as a result of some problems with the school, I had to finish my classes at home.” Greco does not elaborate. “If it hadn’t been for skateboarding,” he says, “I would probably have ended up doing something drug-related: taking drugs or selling drugs. But skateboarding showed me I had a future.”
As soon as he turned eighteen, Greco moved to Huntington Beach, California, where Tony Hawk’s Birdhouse team is based. An hour south of Los Angeles, Huntington Beach has been a locus for the skateboarding business since it first sprang up as an offshoot of surfing. Where surfing is bound with the utopian vision of California—a pastime for popular boys destined to get the prettiest girls—skateboarding became a refuge for misfits and social rejects escaping dystopian realities.
Skateboarding hit its first blip of popularity in the early 1960s, but it didn’t come into its own as a sport until the mid-1970s, when a surfer named Frank Nasworthy revolutionized boards with the introduction of Cadillac brand polyurethane wheels (earlier skateboards