Levi Hawken, the Bomb, according to Liverpool Street

All photos: Damien Nikora Styling: Cy Hermann

Levi Hawken, he of 'Nek Minnit' fame has more to offer than a catch phrase, he's a role model for the challenged and challengers, in many senses of the word: Levi has spent his life overcoming obstacles. Physically, due to ectodermal dysplasia, figuratively, as a leading NZ skateboarder, and most recently, unwanted fame as the ‘Nek Minnit guy’. Grant Fell and Rachael Churchward get the lowdown on hill bombing, teaching kids the right way to skate and the inextricable nature of association...

Grant Fell and Rachael Churchward: Hi Levi, let’s start at the beginning. Where were you born and where did you grow up? Levi Hawken: I was born in Auckland, in Glenn Innes. I was home birthed, I was born onto a piece of black tarpaulin, with Pink Floyd playing, I think! (laughs) RC: We know your sister Vanessa actually… LH: She broke the arm off my teddy bear while I was being born so my teddy bear when I was growing up only ever had one arm. GF: Did you always live in G.I? LH: No, we moved to the country, up into the Waitakeres and then moved to Herne Bay, which was a great place to grow up back in the 70s and 80s… GF: It was quite different back then for sure, Ponsonby had lots of Samoan and island residents. LH: Yeah, it was like Grey Lynn was 15 or 20 years ago, there was like a ripple effect, people kept moving out and out into the suburbs. GF: And then everyone from Parnell moved in! LH: There is still the odd old Samoan woman living in Herne Bay. I spoke to one old Samoan woman who lived in my old street. She went away on holiday and gave her sons the money to paint her house. Her house was pink, she liked it because she said it matched the flowers that she grew. When she came back they had painted it grey, it was like the last house in the street to go grey! RC: I remember seeing you skating around when you were really young. When did you get into skating? LH: I always wanted a skateboard, but when you are a kid, you want a skateboard, you want a BMX bike, you know. I think when I began learning a few tricks, linking it together, I must have been about ten. We had to skate in the city because there wasn’t really any skate parks or anything. Street skating was coming in so it was all about that anyway. I’d take some money that Mum gave me, skate into town and then catch the bus to the top of town, because all of the skate shops were up town. We’d hang out there, and then skate down again, that’s what we did all day, caught the bus back up and skated down. GF: I was the same when I was about 14, we’d catch the bus into town, skate the K Road car park and all around that area, then skate downtown, catch another bus across to Marlborough Park on the shore, skate that, bus back… LH: Yeah and it was about a lack of public transport. People say it is not good in Auckland now, but it is a lot better than it was then so skateboards were and still are my main mode of transport. It was about the mission, you know? When you were skating, you weren’t just going to a skatepark, you were going on a mission, we’d plan it out: “Ok, were are going to skate to here, we are going to skate that and then skate over to here and skate that…then, let’s skate to Green Lane Georgie Pie and get some dollar pies!” We’d see what we could find to skate on the way. It was about the adventure, discovering secret spots that no one else knew about. GF: Who were you skating with back then? LH: There have been so many. So many of them came…and then they went. I have just kept going with it the whole way through. It is going to be my thirty year anniversary of skating soon, this Christmas…RC: Awesome… LH: I had guys who I would look up to. They had cars and were a bit older. I was 12 or 13 and being driven around to skate spots with older guys, you know? You had to go hard though! GF: The number of times over the years I have seen you skating around town and you are always going hard, always just ripping it… RC: I remember sitting with Vanessa at Rosini’s in the early 90s and a couple of times you just skated up and kinda skated into the restaurant! (laughs) LH: I guess when you have no money and you wanted to get somewhere you just skated there, you know, Mummy wasn’t going to drive you there!  GF: When did you first get vert in a pool, or on a ramp? LH: Well that’s the thing, I have only really started skating bowls and ramps again in the last few years, after going almost 100% street through the 90’s, but it would have been Onehunga, or Piha…GF: The Piha ramp? LH: Yeah, but Onehunga was the first vert ramp I dropped in on, at 14...GF: You skated for a few teams, right? LH: I skated back then for the Blue Tile Lounge. GF: That’s one of the first places we met you actually… LH: Yeah…

GF: There used to be a lot of parties in their yard with a fire going, DJs like Roger Perry and DLT. LH: They were cool. There was Kitty, who became Madame Kitty! She was doing fashion shows, she was the one who put skate fashion in with everything else. At 14 she had me writing raps and we’d go into the studio at the top of Symonds Street… GF: Incubator! LH: We actually recorded a rap song together. GF: I remember it! We were pretty tied into that studio through the Headless Chickens; Anthony, Angus and Gordon, who built the studio, were all part of that band. LH: The fashion shows were crazy. There was one where two people came out at the end, naked, except for a pair of Airwalks each…the line that went with that was something like: “Airwalks, all you need..” (laughs). They were loose fashion shows and I was like 14, I didn’t drink or anything so it was an eye opener for me. Everyone would get blind drunk… GF: I remember, sort of… LH: They had this wall ramp at the end of the catwalk but everyone that was skating was like really drunk and they were flying up and hitting the ceiling! I was trying to avoid all this craziness while performing my rap, busting tricks tripping on naked models, it was pretty loose…I worked in the shop for a while before they put me on the team. I was always there, putting in work and then eventually they put me on the team. It was all about repping them, I wasn’t till I got fourth in the open division at the national skate champs, but I was only 15, they finally let me be official…GF: It was a cool scene that Blue Tile Lounge; it was fashion, it was skating, a clothing range, t-shirts, parties with great DJs.. RC: The early nineties was a very vibrant time, we were looking at a bunch of Face mags the other day from that time, amazing stuff happening, new trains of thought…GF: A very conscious time…after that you kinda moved into the Cheapskates scene from memory? LH: Yeah, Kitty got so busy doing so many different things. The store got bigger and bigger, they were doing really well but then she opened up a snowboard store as well…GF: That was next door… LH: Yeah, then she turned it into a bodyboard shop and things kind of fell apart…so I went to Cheapskates. Like I said, people came and people went and I just kept moving on. Back then who was skating, who was shredding? It was people like Morri and Chris Schofield and those guys. They were repping The New Deal, a new skate company that came from Paul Schmitt of Schmitt Stix, he engineered the best wood, his boards are still debatably the best you can get, the double kicks, they were at the forefront of all that. I rolled with whoever was at the forefront, just like you guys probably roll with whoever is at the front of fashion, you know? RC: Yeah… LH: The fashion too, around that time, there were a lot of graphics coming in, graffiti characters…GF: The 90s were really the golden age of street fashion; Mooks, Stussy, Mossimo…it was all pretty organic, though…now it is just big business...LH: It got even crazier too, with brands like World Industries…skateboarding had died and then came back from the flames…GF: Again! LH: Yeah…sort of how like Hip Hop died and then came back from the flames with NWA. Skating was the same it came back as a monster… GF: You have probably been through two or three cycles of skating by now? LH: Yeah, I have...

GF: What about Boom? LH: I was with Boom from the start, they came at the start of another wave and skating was suddenly really trendy again. There was that thing in Pavement around then…GF: And brands like Huffer were starting, Chey Ataria was the new breed… LH: Yeah, Chey kinda came through out of the ashes of Boom really and Started ABC, Now his company is DEF…I rode for Boom for about 15 years..RC: Did you work for them as well, in terms of their fashion? LH: Yeah, from when I was a kid I’d make my own jeans. I used to get my Mum’s sewing machine because you couldn’t get baggy enough jeans and cool colours back then so I started making my own…it made sense as I had a passion for design, art and graffiti. I got thrown in the deep end at Boom after Kennedy Poynter left, I got thrown in there with literally no experience and did six months of designing and then got fully involved. GF: What were you designing? Jeans, t-shirt, hoodies etc? LH: Yeah, well I learnt to use a computer, Illustrator etc. Back then you’d get a pair of jeans that you liked and spec them up, I didn’t grade them, I didn’t make the samples and there was always price point considerations. I realized after a while that I wasn’t going to be able to (afford to) put the sort of labeling and detail on the jeans that I wanted, or get the quality fabrics. I got to the point where it was like: “Why bother trying to make these chinos, when I can just go and buy a pair of Dickies, and they are the best at that, especially the old American ones…so it was a realization that I wasn’t really going to be able to design what I wanted. In a fashion sense I am all about the origins of streetwear; work wear, military clothes, and then it started getting a bit cheesy, everything had skulls on it, patterned prints, a print here and a print there and I just wanted classic, you know? If I am going to wear a pair of distressed jeans, I am going to distress them myself! I was also into rugged stuff that would age well, like oilskin jackets…so yeah, I kinda got out of that..RC: You were also into doing graffiti art from quite early on… LH: Yeah, I got into graffiti art, plus I was doing quite a lot of prints. I did prints for Moneyshot, ABC, a few other brands. I had been with Frank Edwards (Cheapskates) for 15 years and he is like a total legend, he is a true old school industry type…GF: Frank is probably THE legend of NZ skateboarding… LH: Yeah, and as much as I love him, it’s hard working for an ideas man when you are supposed to be the ideas man! (laughs). So then I spent quite a bit of time going backwards and forwards between NZ and Australia…GF: You do seem to have a multitude of arenas that you have moved around in, places you have come and gone from… LH: I get so confused! Everything overlaps so much and there are often so many things going on in my world at different times, overlapping as well. I was in Melbourne on and off, from ’94 to 2006. GF: Why Melbourne, why did you originally go there? LH: When I went there in ’94, it was a skate paradise. It was a marble and stone wonderland, nothing had been ‘anti-skated’, nothing had been capped. It is also a great place to party. RC: It’s a very creative place too…GF: Let’s talk more about your graffiti art, what sort of level did you get to with that? LH: The crew that I was with, we were sort of…ratbags, I guess. But some of us were dedicated to the art hard. The inclination with graffiti writers like anything is to copy the leaders and what the latest trend is so I started out by doing that but then, whatever the trend was, my mate Kenz and I would sit down and draw out what we were going to do and then look at it and then think; “Nah, it looks too much like Merkster, it’s too clean, we need to change it…let’s make it, say messy with drips.” People would say: “It needs to be 3D,” so I would say, “well I’m going to put a little drop shadow on it and that’s all you are going to get.” Then I kinda got to the point when all the nice paints came out, and it wasn’t the same, that culture of…who could find the good paint, and get the paint for free…” RC: It became commercialized. GF: You are a hard out believer in counter-culture, aren’t you Levi…you are legit…did people start offering you money to do burners for commercial purposes? LH: Yeah, sometimes, but I was terrible at it and it was horrible for me to be honest. They wanted it a certain way, they expected you to do it a certain way.. GF: Like painting their logo into the work type thing… LH: Yeah, and they wanted that mainstream style. I started going off spray paint as a medium. There were lots of things I didn’t like about it. The smell and the wastage, Plus I started getting RSI in my right hand which made it quite hard to actually paint for a long period of time, which you need to do on big pieces. I figured that was a sign (laughs). RC: It strikes me that you are one of those people that can do commercial stuff for clients, kind of just shut up and do it to get paid but you absolutely have to have a creative outlet to bring out what is inside you, or you move on… LH: Totally. I like to try something, learn what i want and move on. I even did a lot of posters in 2001-2002, that a lot of people would not have known was me. GF: Painted posters, screen-printed? LH: More printed, photocopied. We had this big photocopier at Boom and I would think, “Wow! No one keeps tabs on that!” (laughs) I was working out ways to piece things together to make big images, people probably looked at those pieces and wouldn’t have even understood what they were. I didn’t really even know what I was doing with it, I just did what I felt. I’d create a weird alien font outline with a dude doing Tai Chi through it. I also did these posters that said, “I love tags” because in Melbourne there was a war between poster artists or street artists and taggers so I thought there was irony, in the battle, so I did posters that said “I love tags”. Then everyone at art school was doing street art, stencils, and I was like…GF: You never went to art school did you? LH: Nah. I had friends there, the closest was when I did a hill bombing video that my friend Joseph Griffin filmed,it was for his final year at Elim. So I feel like my art has been…GF: Repped in art school? LH: Yeah, it was displayed there…(laughs). So everyone in the graffiti scene was using the same paint, the same colours, so I started working out ways to get house paint and started using a brush. I really liked some of the pastels and the earthy tones – I mixed those up with brighter colours. RC: So you were painting large wall pieces with brushes? LH: It meant that I could go really big and do outlines with spray paint and fill it in with cheap house paint without wearing out my hand. I did a 50 metre wall in Dunedin. GF: You have spent a fair bit of time down in Dunedin, correct? LH: I originally went down to Dunedin to hold my Hilloween skate jam down there. I’d always wanted to do a halloween hill bomb down there as they have the best hills…GF: The Hilloween skate jam, is that something you have done quite a few times? LH: I have done five of them now. RC: What does it involve? LH: Everyone getting dressed up in Halloween costumes and having a skate. Usually you have a jam or whatever and then afterward go and bomb hills. In Dunedin there are a lot of hills. There is the Daggers crew down there and it’s all about bombing big hills for them…GF: Speaking of which I heard you’ve bombed Liverpool Street in Auckland. LH: I’ve done Liverpool Street three times, and every time I say I will never do it again. You can see it on You Tube: Levi Hawken, hill bombing. GF: Have you done that road in Dunedin, the so-called steepest street in the world? LH: I’ve looked at it. Every time I got close to trying it, people would talk me out of it. If I found out the world was going to end in maybe a day, that’s what I would want to do. You need motorcycle leathers and everything else. Once you are going a certain speed, it is like riding a motorcycle, it’s not how fast you are going, it is what you hit. GF: What other roads have you bombed? LH: Ahh..the Bullock Track…GF: Shit…LH: I used to really like Wakefield Street in Auckland City, it’s a double dipper but they have since put all this funny stuff at the bottom of the hill so you can’t really do it any more. If you got that one sweet, you could skate straight into Aotea Square going a million miles an hour and that would buzz everyone out, when you made an entrance like that! GF: What about the traffic?? LH: Well…I get really frustrated…it’s one of those things, being an outsider, striving for the next thing and moving on, you get frustrated by what’s going on around you and you want to break through it. To me, whenever I was frustrated, just skating through the city, bombing Queen Street through traffic through the cars and the buses, you risk everything. Coming up to a set of lights going 60 Ks on a skateboard and just having faith that the light is going to turn green – just at that moment that you get to it, you know? (laughs) And, it usually would, and bang, you’d overtake all of the cars and you are outta there. I don’t really do that now, it’s a bit hard with all of this weird fame…GF & RC: Let’s get onto that then, Nek Minnit? Pretty much instant fame…you popped the video up on You Tube…LH: I didn’t put the video on You Tube. It was off a skateboarding DVD that was filmed in Dunedin. I had two reasons for moving to Dunedin: I wanted to escape to be honest, go down to Dunedin and put my blinders on and do some paintings. I got a space, put my blinders on and started painting, I didn’t really even want anyone to see them. My other mission was to film, I wasn’t drinking or anything and I just wanted to film some skateboarding, so a friend of mine was shooting me for his skate video “South In Your Mouth” and just happened to film that clip. I used to just say ‘Nek Minnit” - a few of us did but not that many people knew about the saying…GF: It was just something that you and a few mates said… LH: Yeah, then the video came out, I had no idea…I didn’t really even know about You Tube, I had ideas: “Wow, you could get famous on this, you could promote things on You Tube…!” (laughs) But I didn’t even get a chance to think much about how I could use it…how I could use it to promote my next brand or whatever, it was just: “Pow!” Someone put that clip up…RC: When did you first know it had gone viral? LH: Someone showed me that it been posted on the Internet and I thought, “OK, cool, I will post it on my page as well.” I thought it was pretty funny and I was pretty proud of it, it was silly, but fun. I forgot about it and was seeing a girl at the time and someone totally random posted it on her page, then I checked it on You Tube and was like “Woaahh!” My hill bombing video was already quite big on You Tube – which is why I was thinking about how I could use You Tube – the hill bombing clip had by that stage about 130,000 views, which I thought was pretty cool, it had gone kind of viral. I was quite hyped on that and then…the Nek Minnit clip just started going up in views and kept on going up in crazy amounts. I didn’t really think about what it was going to mean, I sat back and watched it and laughed… GF: There are so many versions of it… LH: People have taken it and dropped it into things, put it back up.. GF: The Titanic version, the Once Were Warriors version; “Nek minnit, cook me some fucking eggs!” LH: It was originally put up as ‘Neg Minnit”, I’ve met that dude and then the next one was put up as Nek Minnit, the second guy copied the first guy and reposted it – so it was already stolen twice! (laughs) That original one got 2.8 million views before it got set to private. It was funny at first, but then it became quite stressful because it was like…like people were in control of me, they were controlling me. Then there were people making products, and these products, whether they knew it or not were connected to me…GF: Inextricably! LH: It wasn’t even that they were making money off me, it was that I was connected to it. So, some trashy t-shirt made in a sweat shop was connected to me…GF: Yeah, for sure, that’s an invasive feeling if nothing else…it must be surreal for you to some extent? LH: It is and when you think about it, back in the day, people who were famous were usually also rich but with my situation, everyone just expects me to be sweet with it, almost like, “Oh! You are lucky, you’re famous!” Yeah, right. I’m lucky because I have lost all of my privacy? RC: And you are not rich.. LH: Yeah, that’s the thing really…it’s lucky I am not very materialistic. I don’t think a lot of people respect the concept of privacy. Everywhere I go I have to say hello to every person that says “Nek minnit” to me…GF: Do you try to say “Kia Ora” to everyone who says that to you? LH: I try to be nice and I try to be good but it’s hard. Then sometimes I feel like a whole lot of people are just trying to make money out of me and whenever I say, in any way, “Hey, this has got to stop!” a whole lot of people start to attack you with things like, “You didn’t make up the saying!” It’s not that, I know that I didn’t make the saying up, of course I didn’t. But, I am connected to it, totally, and everything about it…RC: For sure, as Grant said, inextricably…LH: It has been a really hard year, since it happened, it has been just over a year now…GF: A roller coaster - good thing you know how to ride such things out! LH: I have also tried to do as much as I can to do good things with it, too. I’ve had a lot of people pushing and pulling me, “You should do this, you should do that, come with me, we can do this together.” I’ve had a quite a few bad experiences already. I own the trademarks in NZ now but it has been so hard to control, so out of control. I do a lot of work with kids, a lot of talking to kids and one of the things I talk to them about is You Tube, the Internet and privacy. I tell them to be careful… One of the biggest things I have learnt over the past year is that people who have got money, have the systems in place to make more money, but if you don’t have money, you try and trademark something. People love to give me advice on Facebook for example: “Oh, why don’t you just trademark it, only costs $120.” GF: A lot more than that…LH: A lot more for the legal fees and everything else, and then if anyone does anything, you have to sue them. I’m glad I own the trademarks now, not so that I can do something with them, but so no one else can do anything with them, which will be connected to me. For me it is not about trying to get rich, it is about protection, protecting myself… RC: Fair enough too! GF: Levi, I think you have handled it all really well. I can totally understand what it must be like, but not really!! (laughs), RC: It’s funny, people have asked me to be on TV programmes, they say it will be really good for you, be really good for your career… LH: It will be great ‘exposure’! RC: Yeah, people will know who you are! I don’t want everyone to know who I am and on top of that the people who matter to me, in my industry, will lose respect for me. I have no desire to be famous, I have a desire to be here, working on Black Magazine…LH: I’ve learned a lot of lessons, about being interviewed on radio, about going on TV, doing anything with anyone in that way because they end up owning the content. My You Tube account has one video on it, the original Nek Minnit video because I figured, well everyone else seems to have a copy of it, I may as well have one too, but yeah, I don’t own anything. I own some trademarks…GF: Have people tried to sponsor you as the Nek Minnit guy? LH: Yes, but it is hard to negotiate something like that, something that no one is really an expert at. They say, “You are not Tony Hawk, so you are not the best skateboarder in the world, you are not a famous actor, you’ve gone viral – it’s going to be over soon – we’ll just give you some stuff…” GF: Just not money. They are not seeing you anyway, who you are, and all of the other sweet things you do or have done. LH: People say it is going to blow over, but it is not going to blow over. It’s lodged, it’s not your average viral video…GF: It is Kiwi parlance now, it’s like “Choice” or even “Sweet as”, it is in the New Zealand psyche… LH: There are people in Australia who think it is an Australian saying now (adopts Ocker accent) “Nah mate, eets not a Kiwi saying, it’s Australian, we invented it.” (laughs) RC: Like pavlova! LH: I’m scared to go to Australia now…GF: Has this whole thing fine-tuned your bullshit meter? LH: Yeah, people that used to mock me, people I would see at a casting or something now come up to me and try to buy me drinks and stuff. It has actually made it harder for me to remember who people are, I meet so many people now, I look at someone and know their faces but…I feel like my mind is totally overloaded! RC: Do people try and tell you what to do with your fame? LH: All the time. People say that I have to do something with it now, before it finishes and I am like, “No! There is no limit on life, there’s no rush…” Things that are genuine and real, never date. RC: You just need to focus on yourself, your art and the good things in life. LH: Sometimes it does all become too much, then I just go skating. I just skate and skate. Sometimes kids at skateparks might think I’m antisocial, I’ll have my iPod on be skating hard with my blinders on. I’m not being antisocial, I’m just escaping…GF: Do people yell out “Nek Minnit” to you all the time? LH: All the time, driving past: “Nek Minnit!” Because I am so…accessible…which makes it so easy. I don’t drive around in a limo with tinted windows, it is just me on my board, on the street. I skate everywhere and that is what I love doing. RC: You might have to start skating in a gorilla suit so no one knows it’s you! (laughs) LH: I’m into that sort of freaky stuff actually, that’s why I love Halloween…I pride myself on that. GF: Have there been good things come out of this too? LH: Oh, yeah, I have met some good people, I have had partnerships, like with Mr Vintage doing t-shirts, they have been great. GF: You did a song with Manthyng down in Dunners…LH: Yeah, a song with Manthyng which was received in a lot of different ways, there was already a song out by some pop group who tried to make a one hit wonder, they released a song – the original Nek Minnit song! (laughs) I had to wonder how it could be the original Nek Minnit song if they didn’t even contact me and I am not in it! You know? I don’t care, though, their Nek Minnit song is terrible, autotune, it was so ‘now’ and commercial. The idea with Stanley Manthyng was to do something that was more retro and a bit of a joke on me, that’s what what I am about… Here have another laugh! GF: Old school rapping styles… LH: …old 90s Hip Hop…we had a great time doing it, the lyrics are really cheesy…it wasn’t about making any money. Actually, I got my first royalties off it the other day. I got thirty-nine cents! (laughs). I think the down side of the Internet is that the value has been taken out of a lot of things. Every can just take what they want and give you away. One thing I have tried to do with my ‘fame’ is to promote causes I believe in…GF: Which causes..? LH: Like what has been happening in Israel. I lived with a woman, you’d like her Rach, her name is Tina and she was Michael Franti’s personal assistant and she made this doco on a tour of the Middle East with Michael. She came back and I heard first-hand from her what it was like over there, that was back in 2006. Again, being a public figure, though, if you post your views online, people attack you so much more than they would have before. There are people out there who use spin, not to argue a point with you, but to make a discussion so long-winded and complicated that any discussion there was just becomes confused…GF: Yes, Internegativity! Talk us through the work you do with Youthtown and the kids you help.. LH: I’ve always wanted to do stuff in the community, help people, do good things. It started when I got involved with the council and they were doing the rebuild of Victoria Park, I was on the skaters board for that. Then, when I went down to Dunedin, that place always gets the crumbs, while the big cities get cake…GF: Do you know Sam Robertson down there, he has been involved in a some of that stuff? LH: Yeah, that is who I moved in with when I went down there. Trash Skates is one of my favourite brands, it is the real shit, an attitude more than a brand. So anyway, I was involved with the councils and coming across this attitude of…this vibe that social architecture wasn’t something that mattered, that if you lay down a lot of rough ground, it’s great for cars, but what about the more social areas where kids are supposed to be playing. So I got more and more involved in organizing events…GF: Did those events lead to the Youthtown skate school you do?
LH: Yes, we did an event called ‘Create and Skate’ down there where we created a lot of objects and then skated on them. I painted them all grey and we put a stencil on it saying, “grey is the new street art,” because everything was painted grey in Auckland for the Rugby World Cup. I’ve always MC-ed skate events and run comps so I ran one for Youthtown and one thing I have always wanted to do is teach kids how to skate. I want them to learn a quality way of skating, to think for themselves about how they skate… RC: And in doing so, encourage kids to think for them selves? LH: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So now I do that every Tuesday afternoon, it’s really cool, I’ve done a few terms and I love it. There are the natural ones, the ones who just pick it up like that (snaps fingers), there are the ones that can kind of do it but they are frustrated and then there are the really unco ones who I kinda feel sorry for - but they often have other qualities, that’s the way life deals it to you, you know? You have your gifts and the rest is perseverance, I know because I am one of those people. People used to tease me, I wasn’t really that good at skateboarding and i pushed with my front foot, they teased me and it pushed me to be better. I’m still not the best skater around but I have learnt to skate in a different way.
RC: You have learned to do everything in a different way! GF: And that’s what we love about Levi Hawken…