Tripping Over my Own Feet
by Rodney Mullen
Rodney Mullen’s fröhliche Wissenschaft
Introduction by PETER MAGUIRE
“What makes us heroic? Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
After capturing his first world freestyle skateboard title at the age of 14, Rodney Mullen began the longest winning streak in the history of skateboarding.
Although he successfully defended his title 35 out of 36 times, today he considers these victories “tainted” because he played safe in order to win. “The media told the world of my greatness,” Mullen explained, “while I felt like a fraud. I was cowardice wearing a crown.”
While competing as a pro, Mullen also studied organic chemistry, high level mathematics, and chemical engineering at the University of Florida. He left school his senior year and became partners with his former rival and fellow polymath, Steve Rocco, in what would later become World Industries.
The skateboarder-owned skateboard company roiled what had become a staid, corporate industry because it spoke bluntly and directly to its end users through Rocco’s controversial magazine Big Brother. After they sold 70% of World Industries in 1998 for $30 million dollars, he turned his attention to more intellectual pursuits and emersed himself in the world of open source computer operating systems. Inspired by the determination and creativity of hackers, Mullen noticed similarities between the way hackers wrote code and how skateboarders created new tricks because both were rooted in trial and error.
By the early 2000s, walking, much less skateboarding, had become increasingly difficult for Rodney Mullen due to the calcified scar tissue that was now wrapped around his femur and pelvis. Unable to meet his skateboarding expectations and feeling diminished, he largely dropped out of skateboarding. After doctors told him that the only way they could possibly repair his hip was with a very violent and uncertain surgery that involved winching the fused bones apart and breaking them, Mullen decided to heal himself with the same single-minded determination that had made him a skateboarding champion.
Using knife handles, screwdrivers, and other hand tools, Rodney Mullen began the incredibly painful process of breaking up the fascia and scar tissue that was crippling him. He would contort himself around fire hydrants and shopping cart racks to create the leverage necessary to break his scar tissue apart, “I had to physically put enough pressure on myself to break my own bone. I did that for an enormous amount of hours.” This nightly regimen was so painful that twice, police officers heard his screams, and approached him to see if he needed help. “After about 1500 hours of that I’m getting to know what’s me and what’s not me in terms of the scar tissue,” said Mullen, “and you pull and you pull and you pull and it breaks like dried gum.” Slowly, the scar tissue began to break apart and he could feel his range of motion increasing.
Late one night in 2010, while hanging from the wheel well of his truck and pulling on the frame, Rodney Mullen suddenly heard and felt an “echoing, palpable, visceral sense of a tree breaking inside of me. I’d broken a dozen bones or so, fingers, toes, ribs, collar bones, they’re like pencils, this is like a tree branch.” A wave of fear, adrenaline and nausea washed over him and afterwards he found himself lying on his garage floor, screaming, face covered in snot and tears, wondering, “What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?’” The scar tissue and some of the bone had finally broken apart and when Mullen stood up, he realized, “Oh my gosh! It’s no longer a stick shift, it was a ball and socket! It works! It works!” Not only could he now run, but after more than seven years of immobility, he could skateboard again.
That night, something changed inside Rodney Mullen. The years he spent breaking his body apart forced him to “unravel” his asymmetrical skateboarding stance. During his professional career, he had always skateboarded with his left foot forward (regular foot), but now, he wanted total ambidexterity. “And so it's not just doing everything switch, because everybody does whatever switch,” said Mullen, “It's to have no stance at a physical level.”
By 2010, Mullen was applying his intuitive knowledge about skateboarding and overcoming physical obstacles to the larger fields of creativity, flow states, concentration, resilience and innovation. After his speeches "How Context Shapes Content," "On Getting Up Again," and “Build on a Bedrock of Failure,” a much larger audience, outside of skateboarding, discovered Mullen.
Very quickly, the once painfully shy skateboarder became one of the tech industry’s favorite speakers. He also engaged in more active roles as a consultant at a USC research lab that was building virtual reality systems, advised Adobe on a project about creativity, and helped the Smithsonian with a project on the history of skateboarding. In 2019, Rodney Mullen was named “director’s fellow” at MIT’s media lab and studied how creativity and innovation can positively affect society.
During the summer of 2021, I spent a memorable night with Rodney Mullen and his wife, Lori, at Steve Rocco’s Malibu home. We talked late into the night about the Thirty Years War, the modern nation state, the concept of sovereignty, and many other things. While the autodidact impressed me with the breadth and depth of his knowledge of history, nothing impressed me more than his serenity, humility, and above all, generosity. What I remember most about that evening was not the lively conversations. Instead, it was the ninety minutes Mullen spent teaching my then fourteen-year-old son, the finer points of the “Godzilla Flip.” After my son landed the move, on the third try, a surprised Mullen asked my son if he “had ever done that before.” When he said no, his teacher beamed with pride and said, “You’re a natural, that is great!” At that moment, I realized that Rodney Mullen’s relationship with skateboarding is nothing less than a modern example of Friedrich Nietzche’s “happy or gay science” (die fröhliche Wissenschaft).
Tripping Over My Own Feet
by Rodney Mullen
I spent my earliest years in a budding residential community in Florida where new roads and construction lazily crept into creek-filled woods. My mother was a piano prodigy who entered college as a kid and eventually taught science. Though light in spirit, and small in both stature and voice, her emotions poured forth as Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff thundered from her piano when tensions would sometimes arise. Yet no matter what the circumstance, she exuded a quiet strength, anchored by her personal faith. My father is a complex man: Squadron leader for the elite force entrusted to drop the atomic bomb. His iron will was certified. From the boxing ring, to dentistry, and his family, he led his life accordingly. A success by every metric, he was feared even more than respected due to his widely known temper and its abruptly physical ends. Even a mundane comment could trigger a fight, yet his charisma and ability to add value to whatever he touched kept him ahead.
As for me, I was a shy kid, so pigeon-toed that I tripped the moment I lost focus when walking. This embarrassed my father to no end when we walked together in public. I had to wear boots tied at the heels when I slept, in a futile effort to correct it. Plagued by nightmares of having to hop out of a burning house and more, my father installed an intercom so they could calm me down without getting out of bed. In no uncertain terms, I was not the son he’d wanted and I blamed myself. Though dutiful and compliant, that sense grew into adulthood.
From Never to my First Board
To my father’s point, he did his best to make me better. So, when the neighborhood stoner let me ride his board one day and I came home wanting one, he made it crystal clear “that no son of his would grow up to be a bum!” While I knew the risk of asking twice, my mom recognized that somehow the minutes I spent on that board lit something within me that only grew over time. Finally, she gave me the nod to ask again.
Late one New Year’s Eve.
And to my father’s credit, he sensed it, too. After a series of stipulations on when I’d quit, he allowed it— closing with a hard truth. My neighbor, Greg, played basketball constantly. I would often watch him play from my window into the night. Knowing this, my father explained, “No matter how hard Greg works, he’s too short to make it. You’ll be the same: you’re not built for this, either.” All I could do was thank him. Then I went up to my room and stared out the window at Greg’s basketball hoop in palpitating stillness, overtaken by a sense that this meant something more than I could know.
Day One, World Titles, and Tour Life
I got my first board on New Year’s Day, 1977. To this day, rolling around on my patio is my most vivid, early memory. Excitement seeped into my being as I bobbled and teetered, comedically falling in and out of balance. Then suddenly I was lit up by electric fear as I felt time stretch and recoil for the first time, and then hit the ground in a pile of laughter. This raw, budding connection with movement, along with the endless possibilities of what I could do on this simple board with wheels, lifted my sense of being out of my head and into my whole body. For the first time, I understood what my mom had in her piano, and though I’d never play masterpieces, I now had a voice. Within months, people took notice: first my stoner mentor, then the local surf shop who entered me in a contest— my first trophy. Over the next couple of years, I stop counting them. By age 13, the most elite team (Stacy Peralta’s Bones Brigade) took notice. Meanwhile, pressure was mounting after we moved to a farm in the middle of nowhere.
One summer day, Stacy— my hero— got my number, called our home, and asked me to come to California to compete as a pro for a world title. I can still hear my mom’s voice, begging my father to allow me to have this last fling. When she acknowledged that this would be the end, he relented. I practiced every day as though it were my last and this never left me. In hindsight, the quirks of fate altered the course of my life. Not only did they lead to that first world title, but also the throttled desperation I skated with and engaged opportunities. I defended that title 35 of 36 times over the next decade under the stabilizing mentorship of Stacy Peralta and hippie wizard, Barry Zaritzky. Meanwhile, tour life exploded: Hotels, tour vans, and so many planes that half the time, I didn’t know where they were going to land— except for home. Ill-prepared for the public eye, I receded inward. I took to skating deeper into the wee hours and sneaking off into the night because the real progress happened when I was alone. This, too, has never left me.
“Godfather of Street Skating” and Finding Meaning
My father saw my success as proof that skaters offered no competition and maintained his threat to end it all for my own good. While this drama subsided once I left home, I had an embedded sense of futility and longed for meaning. I’d given away or trashed every last trophy, while skating evolved. In order to adapt, I had to abandon most of what defined me in order to start over. Worse, basic skills had to be unlearned then relearned— which looked terrible. Yet by embracing this loss and translating my focus to win to my meditative practice in the quiet of the night, I honed old skills, and coupled them with new ones. This paved the way to my best years in skating.
This new form of street skating and the rise in prominence of its subculture restarted the touring cycle. Add to this the advent of video. This allowed us to spend months compiling dozens of the best we had to offer into video parts that defined who we were better than contests ever could. This set the primacy of expression over performance, which is what drove me to skating in the first place. Over the next 20 years, I built companies with friends and helped bring up new generations, who not only took the tricks I created to new levels, but branched out with companies out of our own that allowed them to continue to thrive and give back to their communities.
Winding Down and Breaking Free
After 30+ years of all the hours and falls, so much scar tissue had formed that a doctor likened it to what he usually saw in front-end car collision victims when their femurs slam into their pelvises and explode. There’s a surgery to fix it. They put you to sleep, tie you to what sounded like a boat winch, and crank. It’s messy, dangerous, and usually limited to smaller joints like fingers and elbows, since they can’t control all that breaks. So, Doc gave me a pointy tool to loosen up the fascia, and left me to my own devices. Skating had taught me how to dissolve into myself, feeling the movements, and dimming the pain. So I turned inward to discern what was scar tissue and how to pry it apart. Long story short, I spent thousands of medievally brutal hours over the next seven years tearing apart the adhesions that fused my femur to my hip. All I wanted to do was avoid walking with a cane. Instead, I not only skated again, but opened another door that gave me access to tricks that could hardly be named. In the process of breaking my bones free, I broke an assumption buried deep into our nomenclature. Today, even with this new freedom, I’m at peace with the ebb of my slowing body because I know that I made the most of whatever talent and strength I was given. Moreover, my awareness of the intangibles engrained along the way continues to grow. The ability to dissolve into wherever my focus lay is what undergirded it all.
Learned of Significance and Belonging
After defending my world title for more than a decade, I can safely say that winning can feel indistinguishable from losing if it’s done just to protect a record. Fear of losing and falling short of others’ expectations usurped its meaning. Yet what never waned was the voice and connection to others that skateboarding gave me. The thousands of hours we spend learning one another's tricks distributes shared mappings which connect us in the same way that music does because it transcends language— yet even more deeply, because it’s physical. The more you become one with your board, the more expressive your skating becomes about who you are. This opens our eyes to see one another in ways others cannot, which is why my greatest honors have nothing to do with podiums and titles.
There are a bunch of foundations that reach out to athletes and big names to visit kids whose days are running short— usually from cancer. I’ve gotten about a dozen of these calls, which I do not deserve because nothing I did or do is noble. I roll around— at best— better than others. This churns in my gut before each visit. Yet nearly every time, some hospital door opens to a pale, bald little kid who leaps out of bed as the panicky nurse tries to unplug him from bleeping gadgets before something tears. Bounding and untethered, he jumps into my arms, melting my fear and turning it into laughter as we stare at one another. With rare exceptions, we begin with his favorite tricks, which somehow he can hardly believe we both had struggles learning. Then streams of the beautifully mundane eddy and flow, as if sweeping us into a river of all the simple things that connect us, not just as skaters, but as people: favorite pizza, bad movies, and ridiculous slams we’ve taken. As our allotted time wanes, grinning pauses emerge as we stare in stilled moments of mutual understanding— which is how they always end. I stay cool making my way out, then feel my eyes glassing over as I wave goodbye to his folks. Finally, drawing into myself on my way home, I savor every memory of the day in disbelief at the gifts this life has given me.