Lance Mountain Gives Me Stickers

Here’s yet another one of those stories where I had a brush with greatness. When I started skating, Lance Mountain was one of the most popular skateboarders around. If Tony Hawk was the up-and-comer ala Paul Rodriguez then Lance was Eric Koston.

You’d think that growing up in Southern California I would have been meeting pros all the time and would be over it, but I wasn’t. In 9th grade meeting a pro seemed as unlikely an occurence to me as it would have been to someone in North Dakota.

So one day I’m skating home from school along Camino Real in Arcadia, and this car pulls alongside me going the same way. Some guy yells at me and I kind of ignore him but look out of the corner of my eye, cause maybe he wasn’t really yelling at me, maybe he was calling to somebody else or something and I didn’t want to look like an idiot.

But I see that he is calling to me, so I look over and what do you know, it’s Lance Mountain, and he’s yelling at me. Lucky for me I didn’t just stand there gaping, I ran up to the car and begged him to sponsor me and take me to live with him. Nah, I went over to the car and he just handed me a bunch of stickers. For all he knew I didn’t even recognize him. I don’t know if I even stammered a weak “thanks” before he drove off.

One of those stickers was the first one he did where Lance Jr. would do drawings as a kid and Lance would make them all artsy. It’s still stuck on my drafting/drawing desk at my parents’ house to this very day.

I got to meet Lance a few other times. Once I was skating my favorite curb at Camino Grove Elementary School and then Ben Schroeder and I think Eric Nash showed up. I had already met these guys before so they weren’t as much of celebrities anymore. Lance drives into the parking lot with a silver Vespa with about 50 lights on it and his board stuck behind the seat.

He gets his board out and rides around and then did a nice backside nosegrind on the curb. That was about it. I was trying to impress him by doing tricks on a big rock, but he didn’t seem to notice and well…I’m not on The Firm, so that pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?

Another time I was skating at the medical center up on Duarte Road with my best friend Matt and Lance showed up with Ray Barbee and some guy who worked for The Firm. This time I was skating a lot better, doing switch backside 180 heelflips and kickflips like nobody’s business, but I still didn’t attract any attention. Ray was trying to do 360 kickflip noseslides on a curb that’s about four inches tall but he couldn’t come close. That’s about all I remember. That’s probably the closest I ever came to getting sponsored, and it wasn’t close at all, so if I didn’t say it all before, that says the rest of it.