He's bad for the sport.
On a gloomy Saturday morning in June, at a strip mall in LA's San Fernando Valley, pro street skater Eric Koston arrives at a skate-BMX demo at the behest of one of his many sponsors, T-Mobile. A portion of the parking lot has been cordoned off, and a makeshift obstacle course has been assembled, complete with platforms, rails, jumps and a 10-foot quarterpipe. A crowd of 75 or so parents, kids and other prospective cell-phone customers has gathered to watch. After a 15-minute aerial acrobatics session by three BMXers, skateboarder/emcee Jason Ellis grabs the microphone: "Let's hear it for Eric Koston!" he barks, as Koston, 28, pushes onto the course.
As soon as he begins riding, it's clear why Koston is bad for his sport.
Of all the varieties of skateboarding-street, vert, park, pools-street is the rawest and most fundamental. Street skaters shun vert ramps and skate parks, preferring to roll their art on natural urban terrain: curbs, benches, steps, handrails. To skate street, all you need is body and board. Koston's problem is not that he's a bad skater. Quite the contrary. He is regularly described as a phenom, a genius. "Ever since I first saw Koston," says skate vet Danny Way, "I knew he was the number one most gifted skater in the world." At some point over the past five years, in fact, Koston has won nearly every major contest. That includes four medals in Street and Park events at the X Games, with a chance for more when the Games hit his hometown of LA in mid-August. He also has a prestigious Reader's Choice Award (voted in 2001 by readers of Transworld Skateboarding magazine) sitting on a shelf at his house.
No, Koston is bad for skateboarding because, says ESPN's X Games host Sal Masekela, "He makes the illest, scariest s- look like butter." Translation: he's too good. Watch Koston pop tricks, and you're wowed not by the difficulty of moves that any pro skater would describe as ridiculously intricate, but by his style, all loose and smooth, as if the bones in his six-foot, 160-pound body have been removed. He does not grimace or strain or fall. He doesn't even sweat. It's all too easy.
Yet the strip-mall crowd isn't feeling Koston's vibe. Yes, the jaws of a dozen or so hard-core skate fans hang down to their knees, but most of the assembled miss the subtlety and difficulty of flipping a board, stopping it midrotation, then landing and rolling away. Too smooth.
Onlookers know Koston is cool because they've been told that his ballet on wheels is radical. But mainstream skate fans demand big air off big jumps, because to them big means difficult, big means dangerous. So when Ellis calls for airtime, Koston obligingly skates to the top of the quarterpipe. He drops in to build speed, hits a ramp that launches him over a BMX obstacle called a tabletop and grabs his board while he's 10 feet above the ground. The move is one of Koston's simplest of the day, but the spectators cheer their loudest. The fans are happy. Koston is happy.
"He has more talent than any street skater ever," Ellis says later. "But fame hasn't gotten to him. He knows who he is. Just a skater. Just a guy."
He's good for his sport.
So it's 1991, and this ratty 16-year-old with bushy hair is poked awake by the San Diego sun to a grumbling stomach and a sleeping crowd. He's staying in a big house-four bedrooms, three baths-but it's home to the H-Street Skate Team, which means a dozen skaters and hangers-on are crammed in and camped out. The kid maneuvers over the bodies and out the door, heading around the corner for a 7-Eleven breakfast of two chili dogs and a Big Gulp. He'll do laundry tomorrow and enter a contest with the rest of H-Street this Saturday, his first with the team. Until then, he skates. The good life? Standing there, wiping chili off his chin, the kid thinks that nothing could be better.
But how does a 16-year-old end up flopping, skating and eating chili dogs for breakfast? The ride starts in 1975 in his mom's native Thailand, then moves to San Bernardino within a year. Dad splits when the kid is four, leaving older brother Chris, sister Eileen and mom Wanida. A couple of years later, Bob Koston comes along, marries Mom. It isn't easy but Bob is all right, and the kid takes the name Koston as his own.
Then, at age 11, the kid sees his 15-year-old brother skating. Chris is cool, and everyone else is skating, so the kid jumps on a hand-me-down Mark Gonzales signature ride. He and some pals push as far as they can on their boards and still get back for dinner. It's fun and, more than that, free: no courts, refs, teammates or scores. Plus, the kid can move on that board, better than most, and he teaches himself a new trick almost every day. Bob and Wanida like skating at first, like how it keeps their boy out of trouble. But then the board becomes trouble, because nothing-not school, not family, not friends-can keep their son off the thing. Finally, the kid gets an offer to skate for H-Street, which means a small monthly salary, some gear, a promise for the future. So he drops a bombshell: he's cutting out, taking his 10th-grade education and heading to San Diego, where he can eat chili dogs for breakfast and skate until the sun sets. And yeah, there's some good in that, since the ratty kid drops out of school to ride a skateboard because he loves skating, not because a bidding war lured him away. His parents are mad for a bit-Bob doesn't speak to him for a year-but, hey, school's not for everyone. He'll get his GED, okay?
Not that the life is without complications. That ratty kid is the new guy on H-Street, and his teammates think he's a joke. They razz him, talk jack behind his back, laugh at him. Then comes the day they compete in that contest. Says Tim Gavin, friend and former teammate: "He blew our minds." He's wrong for his sport.
Image is everything in the action world, which is why Koston is the last thing you'd want in a poster boy for skateboarding. Here's the norm: tattoos, piercings, baggy pants, some crazy, pimped-out car. Here's Koston: ink-free, no dangling jewelry, no visible piercings, white T-shirt and jeans that look like he tried them on before buying them. His ride? A 2003 white Cadillac DeVille DTS. "I'm on the road a lot," Koston says. "It's comfortable, like a couch."
If he got drunk and made a scene at contests, or dropped his pants in restaurants to grab headlines, Koston could ride that image to reality-show fame on MTV. But that's not his MO (although his 3,500-square-foot house in the Hollywood Hills was recently featured on MTV's Cribs). He is soft-spoken, patient and prompt, and he thinks before answering questions. He behaves like your cousin from Topeka. Okay, maybe not exactly. Your cousin doesn't play in a hoops league with Leonardo DiCaprio, or travel the globe, or design sneakers for his shoe sponsor, eS, or boost products ranging from skate wheels to Apple computers.
But if he were completely housebroken and polished, Koston would long ago have lost favor with the core. Those who know him say there are bits of grit beneath that smooth facade. In June, at Highland Grounds cafe near his house, friends Gavin, Hyme Herbert and twins Ako and Atiba Jefferson roast Koston during lunch. They describe him as an observer; quiet, "until he gets hammered and won't shut up," says Gavin. They'll tell you they never want to ride with Eric on La Cienega Boulevard at rush hour because he has the sorriest road rage in the history of cars.
Then there's Koston's obsession with the Lakers. "He's psycho," says Atiba. When the Lakers lost their last home game in the playoffs to the Spurs this spring, Atiba had to drive home because Koston said he might kill someone. And in a cruel twist, the Global Championships were held in San Antonio a few days after the Spurs eliminated LA. At first, Koston couldn't bring himself to go to "that town." His resolution? He wore his black Lakers jersey while skating in the park event. The result? A cascade of boos and the day's best run. He's right for his sport.
Do this. Get on a skateboard and try to pop it into the air. Stomp down with your back foot even as you ease up on your front leg, then lighten up on the back leg as board and you bounce into the air. Back so soon? Even this simplest of tricks-an ollie-takes weeks to learn. After mastering it, top skaters spend years perfecting ever more intricate tricks, such as the 360 flip, in which the skater ollies and spins the board 360* on both horizontal and vertical axes before catching it with his feet and landing. Incredibly, top skate pros can stomp all of those moves. So what makes Koston the best?
"Style," says Masekela. "Lots of people can make tricks look good, but they don't do it with Eric's reckless ease." Okay, but the quality of a skater's style is determined by his peers. Say the name Koston, and his peers talk:
Ellis: "Eric's got the moves of Iverson, the dunking power of Shaq, the passing ability of Payton."
Vert legend Tonk Hawk: "He has an effortlessness to his skating. He is flowing, consistent, and he goes big. He also does it because he loves to."
Watch Koston's flow in his latest skate video, Yeah Right! He jumps, gyrates, flips the board and lands as if the deck were connected to his feet with strings. His finale is astonishing-he rides toward a handrail, ollies, flips the board, positions it beneath his feet (all without hands), lands on his board on the rail, slides down and skates off as smooth as Charlie Parker playing a solo. The move is a 360 flip to frontside noseblunt slide down handrail, and even the grittiest pros will wear out the rewind marveling at the wizardry.
What makes Koston Koston? "I've tried to understand," says Atiba, a photographer who's spent endless hours shooting Koston. "Is it his feet? His head? His shoulders? What's the difference? Maybe he's just blessed."
Koston himself cannot explain it. He talks about spontaneity, the ability to free himself from limitations. He also talks about seeing the "canvas"-the curb or the rail-and seeing himself pulling off a trick. "Ever play Tetris? You start looking at things, saying, I can fit that into that!" The most stylish skaters don't work on style; style just happens. And Koston's style is a reflection of the man himself. No glare. Not trendy. No pretense. Asked if he's the best, he shrugs. Then: "I guess I'm alright."
He's the soul of his sport.
If Hawk is the mainstream's front man for skateboarding, Koston is the front man for the street, the core of the sport. He is a rebel, rebelling against a sport founded on rebellion. Yet no matter how many comps he wins, and no matter how much he's revered by peers, most skate fans will never appreciate Koston's magic. He's too easy. He's too smooth. He's too pure.
Back at the strip mall, as the crew breaks down the demo and the crowd leaves clutching T-shirts and stickers, a lone skater rides on the sidewalk. He pops up and down-simple ollies, simple kick-flips. It's Koston, the best street skater in the world. No audience, no cameras, just a skater and his board, skating. "It's what I like to do," he says.