Jeff Grosso interview
HUCK talks to the veteran pro skater about the raw realities of being a 'legend'.
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At 43-years-old, Jeff Grosso is proving that its never too late to have a second chance at your skate career. Despite being a promising star of the 1980s with parts in such seminal skate flicks as Future Primitive and Streets on Fire, Grosso dropped out of the limelight in the early 1990s in a haze of drink and drugs. But he never left skateboarding behind...
And so, this year saw Grosso get hooked up with a pro model deck on Anti Hero Skateboards alongside long-time sponsor Vans giving him his own shoe and a makeshift web series, Grosso's Loveletters to Skateboarding. Although not having gone anywhere, Grosso very much is 'back'.
In an extended version of the interview from the HUCK#027 feature, we talk to Grosso about this revival and what it means to be a middle-aged 'legend'.
HUCK: How did your hook up with Anti Hero come about?
Jeff Grosso: I went on a trip with [Darren] Navarrette then I gave Julian Stranger [Anti Hero founder] a call and thought he would laugh at me, but he didn’t laugh. That’s how that went down. I had been thinking about quitting Black Label for a while for personal reasons so I thought I would just shoot at the mountain top and maybe land a little bit lower. Anti Hero was the no-brainer thing to try and do. They said they were stoked but they would have to take a team vote. It took a little while to get hold of everybody but everybody voted ‘yes’ and I was in. It was back in November. It took a while to get the boards out.
Having your own pro model deck technically makes you a pro skater. Do you think of yourself as a pro skater?
Sorta, kinda, no, not really. Yes from the way that if you have sponsors, there are certain things that are expected of you depending on who you are, how you skate and who you ride for, but that’s entirely up to the individual on how they see their so-called career. Being an old dude, nobody really expects much from me. I just have to skate. They like you to go enter these old man contests but if you do or if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world – it doesn’t make or break you. At the end of the day, it's a job so if they say they want you to do this web show or enter this contest, do these demos or go on these tours, you pretty much got to go do that or they’ll stop paying you. If you don’t take any money, ride for fun or don’t care about getting any cash, then there’s a thousand ways to do it. There’s no set way to be a pro skateboarder: everybody has their own little hustle.
What’s your main job?
I work for a skin care line: high end, spar-quality skin care products. I’m the production manager: I make sure the right goo gets in the right bottle with the right label. I’ve done it going on seven years.
On the Vans site, you are listed as ‘legend’ alongside the liks of Steve Caballero, Tony Alva and Christian Hosoi. How do you feel about that tag?
At the end of the day, whatever. The world likes to put things in boxes: everything has to be catagorised so they makes this geriatric division and put me, Tony Alva, Cabellero, Hosoi so they call all be like, ‘look, here’s our old guys’. It’s just a way for the corporate entity to figure out a way to sell itself, to utilise what thye have at their disposal. You have this huge, diverse team that’s laying out there, everyone from me to Ray Barbee to Curren Caples to Chris Pfanner: they are all over the board. Every generation is pretty much locked down. It’s like ‘how do we use all these different generations to sell shoes?’. Hopefully the goal is to get a little history lesson out of it, pay a little respect to the people that came before and therefore win some street cred in the process. That’s kind of marketing 101 deal. But I’m stoked, you know, whatever you guys want to call me. You want to put me in the asshole category, I’m fine with it! [laughs]. I’m just stoked to be there.
So you are just taking this career ‘revival’ as it comes then?
Yeah, I never thought that skateboarding would come calling again. I just ride skateboards, that’s what I do. The fact that people are stoked on it and want to give me opportunities to make a little extra dough and have a little bit more fun and go to some different places, I’m fucking stoked, yeah! Bring it on. It does come with a certain set of responsiblities that can be overwhelming at times. I wasn’t very good at being a pro skateboarder when I was a kid and that stuff doesn’t just go away. I have a tendency to get freaked out about the whole thing. Whether people want to say it’s a coming back or a revival or any of these little tag words, I’ve always been here, I haven’t gone anywhere. It’s just all of a sudden now there is an audience, a group of people paying attention that weren’t paying attention before, they were busy doing other things. I’m super grateful for it. It helps me get my house done and keeps my wife happy! I’m happy.
You had issues with drinking and drugs when you were younger. A few other skateboarders who have been down that path like Tony Alva and Christian Hosoi have tried to right their wrongs with charity work and things. Is that something you’ve wanted to do?
Yeah but I don’t shop it like that. I mean whatever, I did what I did, I am what I am. I tried to live an appropriate life. I’m not a role model and I don’t have any answers. You know what I mean? I’m not fucking Jim Jones and not fucking Svengali. I don’t profess to know anything. But you know, if somebody is hurting and they come up to me and they want to talk about something they are going through, I’m open to try to help. It’s not something I shop around. I’m not a born again Christian, I’m not professing to know anything. I don’t have answers, I don’t have God’s ear or whatever wackiness is going on out there [laughs]. I’m just a dude who is trying to make his way and stay alive one day at a time. And hopefully make my life count for something. I do have people who have come up to me a said, ‘hey, you have really helped me out’. That’s an incredibly good feeling. I’m stoked that my mistakes somehow helped them get on some sort of path or whatever. At the end of the day, you hope it counts for something though right? All that idiocy, that stupidity. […] It’s great that they do it and it’s their beliefs, being out there trying to help people and I’m definitely not quiet about it, I don’t shy away from it but I would hope I wouldn’t go out there and promote and push it. That’s for other people. More power to them. I think what Tony Alva and Christian Hosoi [are] doing is great. It’s just not my thing. I know where both of them are coming from and I think its fantastic for them. For me, I’m a little bit more low key about it.
Pool skating seems to have a lot more respect nowadays. Is that something you recognise?
I mean it was gone forever and then in the late 1990s and early 2000s, skateparks started to make a come back and there were city parks. Skateboard parks were gone and along with skateboard parks comes transitions and pools. All of a sudden pools are lying around and so skateboarders are going to use what’s around them – ledges, pools or whatever. A skateboarder would ride a tree if that was all there was. Early/mid 1990s, there was a lot of cliques and factions going on in skateboarding. If you didn’t skate a certain way, then you were fucking lame. That’s not the case anymore. Everyone appreciates all types of skateboarding now. You can’t huck yourself down a 12-set into your thirties. You’ve got a small window to go be a rail jockey. After that, you’re down. If you still want to skateboard, what can you do? You are going to find other ways to skateboard. Be it riding mini ramps, pools, or maybe all of a sudden you are a ditch guy or a ledge guy. That’s the thing about skateboarding, people are constantly reinventing themselves and adding on to what it is about them that makes them rad skateboarders. It’s an interpretative thing. I think it’s great that people are interested in it as much as they are but I also thinks that it is a dangerous thing. In skateboarding as a whole, we never learn from our mistakes. It’s like ‘oh, this is how we killed [skateboarding] last time, so let’s do that again.’ You think you should have learned how it worked out last time.
If you were in charge of 'the industry', how would you do things differently?
I think the competitive aspect of skateboarding is pretty much a wash. They should pretty much just do away with it. Let competitions be for those other sports. And why do we want skateboarding to be a sport in the first place? Can somebody answer me that? Didn’t we all get into it because the only person we were competiting with were ourselves? Was that part of the magic in the first place? Now it is about the Street League and Maloof Money Cup: Who gives a fuck? We all know who the best people in the world are, do we really need to compete over it? And the best people in the world aren’t necessarily the best competitors. So what are we doing? Why are we going back down that same old tired path and didn’t it get us in to trouble last time? Shouldn’t somebody be steering this boat? But whatever, I’m just some 43-year-old fat old dude. I like to ride pools and I’ll do it as long as I can. And if someone wants to give me some money for that and send me on a trip then I’m all for it. I’ll smile and I’ll try to do a good job and put on a show for the people who come to see it.
Check out the full feature in HUCK#027, out now.
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Jeff Grosso interview (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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