A NO TRESPASSING SIGN hangs on a chain in front of Rob Dyrdek’s Hollywood Hills home like a blunter, more imposing version of a velvet rope. As I approach, Dyrdek happens to be on his way down the front stairs that lead to the street He squints, cocks his head, and looks me in the eye with mistrust until I ntroduce myself, then extends his bling- ringed hand, and leads me into the garage.
“Some kid came here the other day with his parents, and rang the doorbell for like 45 minutes until I came down,” he says. “I had to say to his parents, ‘What kind of parent lets their kid ring someone’s doorbell for 45 minutes?”‘ Hence the new sign. Since Rob and Big, the reality show starring Dyrdek and his bodyguard Christopher Boykin a.k.a. “Big Black” premiered on MTV two years ago, the house-the show’s primal set-As become a destination for fans. Dyrdek has now finished with the show (“I’ve never been so happy in my life,” he says about having shot the final episode a few weeks ago) and is moving on to a new project for which he has a little more enthusiasm: designing and building a network of skate spots around Los Angeles.
We walk upstairs, past the entryway with the billiards table and the ATM machine (yes, an Atm machine to the upper level with the pool “he bottom of which is painted with frescos of Dyrdek and Big as Greek Gods) and into the kitchen with the fridge full A Muster energy drinks (one of Dyrdek’s numerous sponsors). Here, Meat, Dyrdek’s feisty omnivorous bulldog, has his teeth sunk firmly into a beach towel.
Dyrdek’s phone won’t stop ringing. “I gotta take this fuckin’ call it’s fuckin’ Fox,” he says, putting in his earpiece and heading to the backyard to talk about a new television show. When he returns, he shows me some of the renderings of the sites on his digital camera. Speaking excitedly, in a series of rapid-fire monologues like a guy whose lips can barely move fast enough to keep up with his breakneck-speed brain, he lays out his plan. “In the past I built this giant $700,000 plaza, “he begins, referring to the legendary skate park he built in his hometown of Kettering, Ohio. “I designed that plaza myself, to the millimeter. It took three years, and the problem was it goes through all this red tape and community meetings and council meetings and it has to go out to bid…” So Dyrdek realized there might be fewer headaches in trying to develop a network of small skate plazas all over the city.
As part of his presentation to the city council, Dyrdek brought in a four-foot high basketball hoop with a bent rim and twisted backboard and rhetorically posited if one could play basketball on it. The answer was, of course, ‘yes.’ “But is this the way basketball’s meant to be played?” Dyrdek asked them. “No,” came the response, “it isn’t.” Surprisingly, the city was immediately responsive to Dyrdek’s idea.
“It’s been a dream come true,” says Dyrdek. “As soon as I made contact with the one main dude, and he sat down with all the architects and city planners, he said `We have 400 parks, and we’ll do a spot in every single one.”‘ Dyrdek’s goal is to build a skate spot in each of L.A.’s 15 districts, enabling him to essentially create one giant skateboarding network in Los Angeles. Southern California is the epicenter of the entire skateboarding business,” he says. “All the money, all the pros, everything; and yet no one is doing anything. All they do is worry about their sales… nobody cares about the fact that skateboarding is just so fucked. You got shit like the X Games and the Mountain Dew tour and all this shit that has nothing to do with skateboarding, and you have all these people building these shit skate parks-concrete eyesores with fences around ‘em.”
Skateboarding evolved from backyard pools, to ramps and ultimately, skate parks, which were shut down because of insurance liabilities. As the skate parks disappeared, kids went to the streets and the urban environment became the standard by which skateboarding was judged. The insurance laws have changed now that skateboarding, as of 1997, has been designated a “hazardous recreational activity,” offering cities some immunity from lawsuits. Since then, skate parks have started cropping up again. In the meantime, locations that have become legendary skate spots throughout the city have been skate-proofed with knobs soldered to handrails, giant planters placed in annoying places, and cops and security guards posted on watch.
“The cities realized that skateboarding is huge and so they build these shitty concrete bowls,” says Dyrdek, “and in the streets they come down harder on the kids saying `Look, you have this now.’ How do you explain that’s not what we skate? That’s not what skateboarding is anymore.”
For Dyrdek and the 10 million street skaters in the U.S., accessing urban skate spots has become more and more difficult.”It used to be like, Los Angeles was this vast lake and everyone could come and drink and drink and drink,” he says, metaphorically. “Anywhere you went there were spots to skate, and now, it’s basically a dry desert with a handful of muddy water holes. This is all that’s left so we have to drink the muddy water because all the clean water’s gone: There’s nowhere left to go.”
Now, in order to skate, kids have to sneak in, avoid security guards and cameras, break off the soldered-on knobs and go guerilla. “These two marble benches at the Department of Water and Power building downtown are one of the most popular places in the city,” he says. “It’s just two marble benches in a row, but they are world¬renowned because they are so perfect. You gotta go through this pathway, that’s all surrounded by water and the security system is in the front so you gotta sneak around the side past them and hope they don’t see you and then try to skate for as long as you can. And it’s just two marble benches-that’s it; but it’s one of the most famous spots in the world.”
If Dyrdek can recreate something like those two marble benches in one of his city¬ordained locales, he says, “It will be one of the most filmed and sought after skate spots in the world. That’s how simple it is.” Then, I ask the question that apparently many have before me, much to Dyrdek’s disapproval: Isn’t breaking in and getting chased by cops and security guards part of the appeal? “No-it’s not!” he groans. “Everyone that doesn’t know anything about skateboarding is always like, `Isn’t that half the allure?’ No! We’re not doing it because it’s fun; we’re doing it because there’s no legal place to do what we do. Our only option is to sneak in. If you put those same benches in a field somewhere on a slab of concrete we wouldn’t have to break in. We don’t like the fact that we have nowhere to skate, like ‘Oooh we’re outlaws.’ It’s about skateboarding.”
Dyrdek argues that the loss of these locations is genuinely hurting the sport. “There are these skate landmarks where if you go and do a trick on them, you’re in the game. There’s a 16-stair and a 10-stair at a business on Wilshire, and if you want to come up you come to the streets of L.A. You go to that rail and do a trick that’s never been done, people take notice. But now those spots that people built their reputations and careers on are isappearing-they don’t exist anymore. Everything is skate-proof.” He himself is fairly pragmatic about the situation, and though he still goes out on weekends and jumps fences to skate (“I still run from cops to this day,” he says) he understands the businesses’ points of view as well. “A kid’s flying down a 16-stair handrail in front of your business-it’s not the safest or the coolest thing.”
While the skate-spot network may seem less ambitious than the Kettering park project, Dyrdek thinks it has the possibility of changing the sport entirely, which explains his passion and dedication. “I’m not making any money here,” he says, noting that the first proposed location-a $100,000 installation in Lafayette Park at Wilshire and Rampart-will be donated by his own foundation. “This isn’t for money. This is for my sport. I have plenty of money and I have a million other projects where I’m going to make my money from. I’m using my celebrity to try to bring awareness and make a change-a permanent change in the sport. It’s going to be the case study model for the future of the sport for every city in the world.” Considering how much his ambition is matched by
his enthusiasm, I suspect Rob Dyrdek might be right.
