Ron Allen Growing young
Original H-Street ripper Ron Allen is still riding harder than ever. Respect.
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I’m scared of getting old. I mean, shit, isn’t everyone? It’s something I’ve always feared. Not so much because I won’t be able to be at the cusp of what’s cool or be able to make love with teenage vigour or eat as much cheese as I want and not have to worry about having a stroke. I worry about getting old in fear that I will no longer be able to physically ride a skateboard. I know I have a long way to go, but the past twenty-eight years have gone so fast, the next twenty-eight are bound to shoot by.
But when I think about Ron Allen, living legend, OG H-Street member and now a forty-four-year-old pro skater and company owner, I’m confident that ‘forever rolling’ isn’t just some shitty T-shirt proverb.
California’s Ron Allen has been skating for over three decades. He made his way into the spotlight after his full part in the seminal H-Street video classic, Shakle Me Not, where he broke street skating boundaries with chest-high nose picks and lofty, super stylish ollies. After H-Street, Allen lent his talents to a list of board companies like Life, Fun, American Dream and Heeterz, taking ownership duties in the latter three.
His involvement in some of skateboarding’s most seminal moments is impressive, but what’s most impressive is that Ron Allen’s actually still doing it. “I love skateboarding. And I don’t care if I’m going to wake up and get paid for it or not, ‘cause I’ve done it for less and that doesn’t matter. What matters mostly is that it’s so fun,” he says.
Recently, Oakland’s Clean Skateshop approached Allen about having some of his artwork on display. The result was a super-successful showcase of Ron’s career entitled Twenty Years Of Ron Allen. “I held onto all this stuff from all the different years and from all the different riders. I have so much stuff, like a McDonald’s napkin that I drew on for one of John Reeves’ graphics,” says Allen. “I loved doing the companies so much that it was really hard to let go of some of that stuff because of the riders and the people that I knew.”
Today nothing much has changed. Ron has resurrected the board company American Dream, and has started a second board brand, Energy. Aside from his ownership duties, he’s riding for Satori Wheels and is in the process of developing his own signature line of sneakers for Osiris. If that wasn't enough, he continues to work in conjunction with various California cities, travelling to parks and teaching skateboarding to young kids. “I kind of give kids the opportunity to hear from somebody who’s been doing it for a while and help out and get them stoked on skateboarding,” he says.
By the sounds of it, Ron is just as psyched on skating as he’s ever been: “I don’t have a hundred tries in me, now I got maybe twenty, but now I’m more determined than ever to make it,” he says about landing that next trick.
Ride on, Ron.
This story originally appeared in Huck #006.
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Ron Allen (text) by Jay Riggio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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