I'm proud that I was able to use my recognition to, maybe, raise the awareness of skateboarding and help grow it, and to help fund public skateparks. That's the legacy, just trying to grow the entire sport.
I played team sports, but I never felt like I fitted in that well, so this allowed me to be part of a community but to do it in my own way.
I think that there's a sense of self-reliance that exists in skateboarding that kids can take to their daily lives. I think there's also a sense of creativity and community-based goals - in skating, even though it is an individual pursuit, a lot of things that you learn are things that you borrow and expand from other people's ideas. I call skating a combined evolution - it's individual, it's artistic, but at the time, there is a communal push to keep doing your thing. And a sense of camaraderie in that.
I never imagined getting to do what I love for a living and having so many people appreciate it. There was only one other skater in my high school and we were the lowest form of cool. Our classmates couldn't figure out why we liked such a loser sport, or why we hadn't grown out of it yet.
I think skateboarding is better now in terms of the amount of facilities and the amount of support young skaters have - including encouragement from their parents. There was definitely an element to it when I was younger that was exclusive and kind of rebellious because most parents didn't want their kids skating. They thought it was a bad influence.
If you look at the success of snowboarding in the Winter Games and how that's brought a more youthful edge to the Olympics in general, they don't have that with the Summer Games. They don't have anything that's drawing in a younger viewership. To be honest, I think they need skateboarding more than we need them. Skateboarding's popularity is solidified for the most part in a lot of countries.
There were so many things associated with it in terms of music and fashion, and a different way of thinking that, for me, skateboarding represented so much of what I wanted to do with my life at an early age.
