Summer 2024

When I make stuff for Jumbo, it all has some kind of meaning for me. I don’t see a design and go “aww ya, siq dood.”
There’s has to be some sort of significance.

The gator wheel / shirt was something I wanted to make because it’s a part of where I’m from. It’s area specific. I like bringing that kind of style to some of the things that I make.

The hubs for skating have always been California, New York City and parts of Europe. I don’t think they’d naturally find inspiration for something like an alligator design. There wouldn’t be any relevance outside of… “aww ya, siq dood.”

Haha.

I remember as a child my dad would take me fishing in a flat bottom boat at this pond on the land behind our house. Sometimes there was an alligator in the water.
Which is fine, they’re probably not going to hurt you. But as a child, it was a little scary.
The point is, I was around it.
I’m purposely far removed from it now, living in the city, but I still want to pay respect to it.

Making a Heath product was on my mind since day one.

Since I started the project, Heath has perfectly encapsulated what I want to showcase.

The vibe, the fun, the banter, the chaos of skating. There wasn’t really any competing for it, do the biggest rail of all time. Try a quadruple backflip. A 900 kindgrind. It wouldn’t have mattered, because that’s not the point.

Heath haaaates it when I say “pro wheel.”

It’s a habit, that’s just how I talk about signature products.
Since he hates it so much, sometimes I really dial it in and say stuff like, “when your PROFESSIONAL SKATING WHEEL drops we can blah blah blah.”

It’s hilarious, it’s wonderful. It makes my day.

None of us are actually pro (well, maybe Andrew).

But some of the people I’ve always loved watching were never pro. You don’t have to be good to be great.

I think there’s a lot of different ways to be “pro.”
Being good at tricks is just one facet of many other things that I think are important.
Approachability, being a good person, having a unique personality and style, etc.

So it was already a done deal from day one.

Since it was going to be his wheel, Heath had full reigns on what he wanted to do.

Armadillo comics was the inspiration for it. Here’s a quick summary I found from the web about it:

“Influential early underground comic produced by Texas artist Jim Franklin, which led to the adoption of the armadillo as a symbol of the Austin counterculture.”

Josh Castillo has been the creator behind all of our designs. I think he did a super good job of taking all of the elements from this and putting them on the wheel.

Bonus points for having another very region-specific animal on it.

The inspiration for even wanting to do a write up like this was started by the Wolfman tee.

I was looking at it, very proudly, after I pulled it out of the box for the first time.
Not proud of myself for making it, but proud of what it represented.

I thought to myself, “It’s a bummer that no one knows what this means to me and a few of my friends.”

So here we are… I’m writing a post about it, haha.

The wolfman logo was done by Jay Guerink.

Jay has made a lot of videos and his work was one of the main driving factors in why I wanted to move to Austin in the first place back around 2010.

It was a big inspiration to me in general as far as how he showcased skating.

Above is the outro to “Self.”
It was an hour long look into the what skating was like from 2004 to 2009, ish.
Watching it back now, 15 years later, it definitely feels different. It’s a time capsule of an era that won’t ever exist like that again.

I think the blading community as a whole is a bit more soft nowadays because the average age of our participants is older.
Heck, even I watch that video above now and think “…. that’s a LOT of partying.”

It was! But that’s how it is when you’re that age.

The point is, that video was a big inspiration to me.
It wasn’t just the shenanigans, the living room boxing, the skating… There was an overall vibe to the group of people featured. There was an energy from that crew. It was more than just meeting up at the skatepark on a Tuesday.

There was style, real friendship, there was life to that scene.

Eventually I was able to move and meet all of these people. It turns out, I wasn’t the only one that had that same goal. A few other people had moved to town around that time. If you watch Jumbo, you’ll know who they are.

It was everything I had imagined.

Somehow everyone only worked 10 hours a week and could still pay rent and afford to go out. Skating every day. Working on projects.

Some of those projects were filmed by my friend Jay and he had made a small run of shirts and given them out to us. They were the wolfman shirts.

It was a cool gift, hand made.

We all had one.
When I see that image, I have flashbacks to that era.

It’s an image that reminds me of an entire decade. It reminds me of a hundred different friends. Some still here, some now gone.
The good times and the bad.

It’s really cool to bring it back.

Jays early work inspired a lot of moves I’ve made in my life. Where I wanted to live, how I viewed skating, how I want to portray it..

I look at the re-release of this shirt as special.

These past few years have felt like the old times again (not nearly as unhealthy though).

It’s fitting to bring it back one more time.