Stevie Williams interview
HUCK meets the Dirty Ghetto Kid pro skater who grew up.
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For someone who crossed the Atlantic the day before, Stevie Williams seems remarkably awake. He shrugs off any suggestion of fatigue as he coolly surveys the basement of Slam City Skates in Covent Garden, London. It has just been decked out as a concept store by his shoe sponsor Supra and it's what he has been flown over here on this wet February weekend to promote. “It’s tight,” he mutters to himself between sips of the large coffee in his hand.
Wearing a big black hoodie, a baseball hat perched backwards on his cleanly-shaven head and a number of tattoos creeping out on his hands and neck, the 31-year-old skater looks every bit of the ‘dirty ghetto kid’ persona that he has traded on for the last decade.
The thing is though, Stevie is very much an embodiment of modern day entrepreneurial success. Having started DGK Skateboards back when he was just 20-years-old, he now sits as co-owner of distribution company The Kayo Corp from his headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Not bad for a street kid from Philadelphia who honed his laid-back, technical skating on the ledges of the city’s legendary Love Park.
“I’m a hustler, man. I can’t sit still, I’m a Sagittarius I just see shit and go for it,” he sayswith a soft – almost hypnotic – fluency, that often seems to contradict his bold, self-assured words. “I have two beautiful kids and they keep me motivated and inspired to do everything that I set myself out to do. I have more to live for than just myself and skateboarding.”
There’s something quite heartening about talking to Stevie. Not just his obvious unruffled cool, but they way that he maturely acknowledges his responsibilities to both his family and the roster of skaters who exist under the Kayo Corp banner. But despite saying that his favourite time as watching cartoons with his kids, he hasn’t given up the skate life for middle-aged comfort just yet. In fact, he’s currently dropping classic, thugged-out edits from his new, private skate park called Da Playground.
“It’s crazy because I’m in the park and I’ve achieved what I’ve dreamed of but then I get skaters block when everything is there at my disposal,” he says of this 15000 sq ft, graffiti-daubed facility. “I like going to a spot and knowing what I want to do before the security guard comes and kicks us off. But having unlimited access to a ledge is kinda like ‘what do I do?’”
For someone who readily describes himself as a “leader”, “role model” and “mentor”, he has got to have a few heroes himself?
“Michael Jordan, Jay-Z and Floyd Mayweather,” he reels them off without hesitation. “It takes a lot of skill and heart to accomplish the things you want to set yourself up for. I model myself to those kind of guys, they have a life basking in glory. So if I get a chance to meet them, I’ll talk to them and let them know why I respect them. I’m happy with that, whether they respect me or not.”
Check out more from Stevie Williams via Da Playground website.
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Stevie Williams interview (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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